The plains where Bob Dole was born are so big that you can see things happen there, beautiful things – storms, clouds battling across a continent, vast changes in the light – while you are entirely alone. From this you learn to trust not confirmation and consensus but the simple truth. And when you have learned to do that, courage begins to come naturally, and soon it rolls in like the tide, and then it becomes the only way to live.
Though Bob Dole must be pushed by his staff or curious journalists to talk about the shattering of his body during the war, and the years, literally years, in veterans hospitals afterward, and though he has never been and will never be comfortable doing so, the long-time senator from the plains of Kansas has been so far down that, at least three times, he was about to be taken into the arms of God. And three times, at least, there was something that kept him alive. It was defiance, and it was faith, and it was pure courage.
I have seen him when his staff was speaking in voices like quavering reeds because the polls came in looking like death, and there he stood, unshaking and unshakable. I was alone with him when he decided to leave the Senate. What he did captured the imagination of the country because it was right and courageous; it was the kind of call a real president must make in conditions of danger and difficulty, and it was done with rare grace.
We were sitting in dazzling sun on the West Balcony of the Capitol. Senator Dole was looking out into the distance that beckons beyond the Potomac. He would forgo the security of his position in the Senate because a man who would be president must sacrifice his own interests and align his condition with that of the people he would lead. “If I’m going to run for president,” he said in his taciturn way, “I’m going to run for president,” and what was left unsaid but fully understood were the words “and do nothing else, and rely on nothing else, and give all, and risk all, as once I did before.”
Senator Dole has served us well, always unflinchingly. Though he is a master of politics and policy, he transcends them. Time and again he has subordinated his interests to ours. If he was not born to the presidency as his destiny, he was born to confound his destiny and earn the presidency, the hard way, against all odds. That, I believe, is the great story that has begun to unfold before us.
