The Washington Post
April 12, 2005 Tuesday
Final Edition
Bob Dole’s 60-Year War
by Jonathan Yardley
ONE SOLDIER’S STORY
A Memoir
By Bob Dole
HarperCollins. 287 pp. $25.95
Bob Dole has spent the nearly nine years since his not entirely
voluntary retirement from political office busily, even frantically,
cashing in. What seemed like only minutes after his defeat by Bill
Clinton in the 1996 presidential election, Dole rushed off in any
direction where a dollar beckoned. He did so many commercials it was
difficult to keep track: Visa, Target, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pepsi, Air
France and, most notoriously, Viagra. Never mind that at least some
of his haul was donated to charity; the overall impression was of
someone turning a public career into a springboard for private gain
in ways that brought no credit to that career, or to the many
Americans who placed their faith in Dole.
Now he’s come forth with a book, the product of many ghostly hands.
“One Soldier’s Story” is an account of Dole’s boyhood in Kansas
during the 1920s and the Depression, his service in World War II, the
terrible wounds he suffered in combat in the European war’s final
weeks and his long, hard, determined and courageous recovery. To say
that it is a familiar story is understatement; during nearly half a
century in politics, Dole and his acolytes told it over and over and
over again, not so much ennobling Dole as trivializing a very human
and very powerful story.
Precisely what is served by telling it once again in book form is
difficult to determine. Certainly it is self-serving for Dole to
thank his publisher “for recognizing that my story represents an
entire generation of heroes who endured World War II, and for seeing
the need to pass on a legacy to the next generation.” In truth,
Dole’s story can be said to “represent” only the stories of soldiers
who were traumatically wounded yet managed, through their own
steadfastness and the selfless help of others, to achieve some
measure of healing. Dole’s phrasing, though, suggests that he is
trying to climb aboard the highly lucrative “Greatest Generation”
bandwagon, putting himself forth as its emblematic and heroic figure.
What makes this undertaking even harder to accept as anything but
another raid on the money tree is that Dole told pretty much the same
story (except for some previously unpublished letters he sent home
from training camp and the front), in “Unlimited Partners: Our
American Story,” written with his wife, Elizabeth Dole, with the
helping hand of Richard Norton Smith, who also “provided enormous
editorial assistance as well as his unique perspectives on my story”
in the production of the new book. The collaboration with Elizabeth
Dole was originally published in 1988, as part of Dole’s effort to
secure a Republican presidential nomination, and revised subsequently
to include the story of the 1996 campaign.
All of which makes “One Soldier’s Story” a difficult book to review.
To raise objections to the motives apparently behind it and its flat,
assembly-line prose doubtless will be taken in some quarters as an
attempt to belittle what happened to Dole and how he overcame it.
Nothing of the sort is intended. As one who finds much to admire in
Dole’s political career and who voted for him in 1996, I am inclined
to wink at his lapses in taste, judgment and rhetoric — of which,
alas, there have been a good many over the years. But even after
every benefit of the doubt is extended to Dole, “One Soldier’s Story”
has little to recommend it.
You know the story. In April 1945, the newly minted second lieutenant
(a “90-Day Wonder,” as those young, green officers were called) was
hit by a “mortar round, exploding shell, or machine gun blast —
whatever it was, I’ll never know” — in action in the Italian
Apennine Mountains. “I didn’t know it at the time, but whatever it
was that hit me had ripped apart my shoulder, breaking my collarbone
and my right arm, smashing down into my vertebrae, and damaging my
spinal cord.” It is a miracle that Dole survived the several hours
before medics reached him, then the excruciating trip to a hospital,
then the transatlantic flight, then the years of treatment, surgery
and therapy.
Even told for the umpteenth time, the story retains its power. “On
the morning of April 14, 1945, I could raise my right hand high in
the air and motion the men in my platoon to follow me. It’s been more
than sixty years since that morning, and I’ve not raised my right
hand over my head since.” And, after seeing himself for the first
time in a mirror, a sight that “horrified” him: “It’s been more than
sixty years since I first saw that image in the bathroom mirror. In
the past sixty years, I’ve glanced at my full body in a mirror less
than half a dozen times. Except to shave and comb my hair, I still
avoid looking in mirrors. After showering in the morning, the first
thing I do is put on a T-shirt. I don’t need any more reminders.”
Dole is quick to acknowledge those who helped him and is generous in
his thanks. His entire family pitched in, but the “unconditional
love” of his mother was crucial. Many doctors counseled and operated
on him; the most important was “Dr. K,” Hampar Kelikian, “an Armenian
refugee who . . . understood the horrors of war all too well” and who
“inspired within me a new attitude, a new way of looking at my life,
urging me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it,
rather than complaining about what had been lost and could never be
repaired.” Many nurses attended him as well, by far the most
important being Phyllis Holden, whom he married in 1948; she “refused
to treat me as a cripple; she knew that the best way I could be happy
was to do things for myself.”
Dole went back to college, then to law school and soon enough into
politics. He thinks that he’d have done much the same had he returned
from the war unscathed, but that seems unlikely. The war was the
shaping experience of his life, and everything that followed it must
be seen in that light. This includes his lifelong sympathy for others
who have suffered, as well as the conflict that often surfaced during
his political career between this sympathy and his belief in
individual self-reliance unencumbered by governmental assistance.
As has been remarked elsewhere, it also no doubt helps explain the
bitterness and meanness he cannot always control. A man who has spent
six decades asking “Why me? Why did it happen?” would have to be a
saint to avoid anger and self-pity, and Dole is no saint.
Unfortunately, there is evidence of this in the closing pages, in
which Dole pats himself on the back for his role in placing the World
War II Memorial in the middle of the Mall. With regard to an
organization called Save the Mall, which fought hard and fair against
the memorial, Dole says: “We already saved it once. . . . We saved it
and everything else in World War II.” Not merely is that
breathtakingly self-righteous, it also condescends to a group of
serious, public-spirited citizens and shows little but contempt for
what one would expect a Great Plains conservative to hold dear: the
right of Americans to hold and express differing points of view.
The ways in which Dole engineered the World War II Memorial did him
little credit. Unfortunately the principal effect of the final pages
of “One Soldier’s Story” is merely to remind us of this, bringing to
an unfortunate end a book that would best have gone unwritten.