Robert Dole

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, who died today at age 98, served in World War II as an officer of the 10th Mountain Division. He was almost left for dead on a battlefield in Italy — so badly wounded that he didn’t know whether he had arms. Yet he survived to stand for the presidency. He helped lead the Republicans to become the tribune of a strong foreign policy, the more supportive party on Israel, and the exemplar of supply-side economics in the post-Reagan years.

In 1990, the Forward newspaper’s first edition carried an editorial about Dole under the improbable headline, “Israel’s Next Leader.” The senator had just begun to emerge as a supportive voice on loan guarantees to help Israel take in Jews escaping the USSR. It was Dole who, as the prospects brightened for his chances to be the GOP nominee in 1996, introduced in Congress an early bill to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Dole saw the importance of making such a law happen, no matter the warnings of Menachem Begin that the question of Jerusalem could not be solved on Capitol Hill. Moving the embassy finally opened the way for a rash of peace agreements. In the 1990s, Dole, based on the work of economists Alvin Rabushka and Steve Hanke, also began agitating for Israel to pursue pro-growth free market economic reforms.

Dole comprehended — and went on to help both the Republican Party and Israel comprehend — how much more Israel’s economy would be able to produce and grow were it to shed its socialist trappings. In Israel, this issue would be seized by Benjamin Netanyahu, who, as finance minister, slashed individual and corporate taxes, liberalized the currency laws, and watched its debt-to-GDP rate plunge.

History mightn’t disclose her alternatives, but we’ve always thought that this period of his career epitomized where Dole really stood. In 1996, Dole picked, in Jack Kemp, the right running mate. Kemp was a hero of the supply-side movement. Yet, though the Kansan quit the Senate on principle to run for president, Dole became the first American to lose an election for president and vice president.

In our estimate, Dole’s service in World War II will come to be seen as a test bigger than any politics. He had been wounded so badly by shellfire in Italy that he would never fully recover. On the battlefield, he was given so much morphine that his buddies wrote — in his own blood — an “M” on his forehead. They feared that otherwise medics might accidentally give Dole an overdose of morphine.

That detail is in an online essay by Lee Seldin. The essay reckons that Dole was defeated in his quest for the presidency precisely because of World War II — “what he thought it meant, and what he didn’t see it meant to people of a later generation.” To Dole, Seldin’s essay records, the war taught “positive values: courage, self-sacrifice, respect for authority, dedication to a common goal.”

We like the way the Wall Street Journal put it this evening in suggesting that Dole “well represented the generation of Americans who won World War II, defeated Soviet Communism during the Cold War, and maintained a steady, constraining hand on government.” Our guess is that historians will judge him well as having lived out the 10th Mountain Division’s famed motto — “Climb to Glory.”

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Image: Dole in Emporia, Kansas. Detail of a photograph by Patricia DuBose Duncan, U.S. National Archives, via Wikipedia.


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