Bob Dole came home wounded from Italy and became a master of the Senate

A pen. That is the first thing to know about Bob Dole in the Senate. He carried a pen in his right hand, held tight, because the arm beneath it did not work and he did not want people shaking it by accident. Imagine the face of every freshman senator who stuck out a hand, watched the Majority Leader of the United States Senate gently decline, and slowly understood what he was looking at. Most of what you need to know about the man is in that small gesture: a disability, handled with dry humor, in service of getting on with the job.

He is remembered for the 1996 campaign he lost, which is a little like remembering Babe Ruth for the strikeouts. The better question is what he did in the room where legislation is made, because that is where conservatives win or lose. Dole was a legislator's legislator. He knew the rules, he counted votes and he understood that in a body of 100 people the person who knows the procedure usually beats the person who gives the loudest speech.

April 14, 1945

Robert Joseph Dole was born in 1923 in Russell, Kansas, a small town on the plains. When the Second World War came he joined the Army and was sent to Italy with the 10th Mountain Division. On April 14, 1945, in the hills near Castel d'Aiano, in the last weeks of the war in Europe, he was hit by German fire while trying to help a wounded radioman. The wound shattered his shoulder and damaged his spine. He spent years recovering. He lost the use of his right arm, and the hand never worked normally again. He had been a strong young athlete, and he came home to a different life.

I want to be careful not to put fiction on a real man's suffering, so I will stick to what is on the record: the date, the place, the wound and the long recovery. What came after is also a matter of record. He studied law, went into local politics and spent the rest of his life in public service. In later years, when he spoke about disability, the point was the same one: people with disabilities want to work, and the country is stronger when they can.

The long climb

Here is the career in order.

1. Kansas House of Representatives, 1951 to 1953.
2. County attorney of Russell County, 1953 to 1961.
3. U.S. House of Representatives, 1961 to 1969.
4. U.S. Senate, 1969 to 1996, elected from Kansas.
5. Chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1971 to 1973, during the Nixon years.
6. The vice presidential nominee in 1976, on the ticket with Gerald Ford.
7. Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, from 1981 to 1985, and again briefly in 1995 and 1996.
8. Senate Majority Leader, from 1985 to 1987, and again from 1995 to June 1996. In between he was the Minority Leader.
9. Republican nominee for President in 1996.

He resigned from the Senate on June 11, 1996, to run full time. That is a lot of rungs on a ladder, and you will notice that he spent the great majority of them in Congress. It matters. A Senate leader is a different animal from a governor or a talk-show host. The job is to find a majority, hold it together and bring it to a vote.

The method

How did a conservative from Kansas, often in the minority, get so much done? A few habits, which I will list as rules because they apply to anyone in a legislature or a town council.

Rule one: learn the rules. The Senate's procedures, from unanimous consent to cloture, determine what can happen. A member who knows them can slow a bill, speed it up or rewrite it. Why the Filibuster Is the Best Friend a Minority Party Ever Had shows what the rules look like from the weaker side.

Rule two: count. Dole was famous for knowing where every senator stood. A leader who guesses is a leader who loses.

Rule three: make a deal with the person across the aisle when the deal is good. He worked with Democrats on food programs (including a partnership with George McGovern in the 1970s on food stamp legislation) and on many other bills. He believed the opposition party was the opposition, not the enemy.

Rule four: be funny. Dole's dry wit disarmed rivals. A man who can laugh at his own situation is hard to demonize.

Conservatives sometimes sneer at this approach. They say a Majority Leader should fight, not fix. That is the right instinct for a campaign and the wrong one for a Senate. The Constitution gives each chamber a veto over the other, and the President has his own. You cannot govern without compromise unless one party has overwhelming majorities, and that has been rare. Dole understood this better than most.

A worked example: the math a leader carries in his head

Let me show you the kind of arithmetic that made Dole effective, using a hypothetical Senate so we do not get lost in real tallies. Under the Senate's cloture rule, ending a filibuster on an ordinary bill takes 60 of the 100 senators. So how many does it take to block? One hundred minus 60 is 40, which means that 41 senators can stop a bill. Now picture a Majority Leader whose party holds 54 seats. He is six short of 60. He needs at least six senators from the other side, or he has to change the bill until six of them can vote yes. Every sentence in the bill is now a bargaining chip.

That is the world Dole lived in. A leader in that position has three options: give a speech and lose, shut down the process and lose more slowly, or find the six. The third option is dull, undramatic and the only one that produces a signed law. It is also why the best majority leaders are better at listening than at talking. When the other side says what it cannot accept, it is telling you where the votes are.

There is a mirror image for the minority leader, which Dole was from 1987 to 1995. With 41 senators you cannot pass anything, but you can stop almost everything, and a smart minority leader learns to use that power to improve bills rather than just block them. What the Minority Party in Congress Can Still Do When It Doesn't Run the Floor lays out the tools.

The 1996 campaign

By the time Dole won the nomination in 1996 he was 73 and had spent most of his adult life in the Capitol. He left the Senate in June to campaign full time, which was an unusual gesture; most senators run for President while keeping their seats. He picked Kemp in August. The campaign built its economic case on a 15 percent across-the-board income tax cut, and Dole argued that government was taking too much from the paychecks of working people.

Several things stood against him. The incumbent President was a skilled campaigner running in a period of peace. Ross Perot was on the ballot again, as the Reform Party's nominee, drawing votes from the same voters Republicans needed. And the party had just gone through the shutdown fights of 1995 and 1996, which Dole, as Majority Leader, had tried to manage and end. You can read about them in The 1995 and 1996 Government Shutdowns in Dated Steps and the Lessons Learned. A man who spent a year trying to keep the government open ended up carrying the political cost of a shutdown he had not wanted.

The point is not to excuse the loss. The point is that the best legislator in the party was not necessarily the best candidate that year, and the two skills are different. Voters watching a campaign want a story. Senators passing a bill want a text. Dole lived in the second world. That is not a flaw in the man; it is an observation about the job.

The steelman: Dole the tax raiser

Let me be fair to the people on the right who were never happy with Dole. His critics argue that in the early 1980s, as chairman of the Finance Committee, he helped pass tax increases to close deficits after the large 1981 cuts. The 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act is the usual example: it raised revenues by tightening rules and cutting back some of the breaks that had been enacted a year earlier. Supply-siders, including the people profiled in Jack Kemp argued that growth could win the war on poverty, disliked it. They held that revenue increases kill growth.

The Dole defense is that he was a deficit hawk, that the 1981 law's spending cuts did not materialize on the schedule promised and that someone had to reconcile the books. You may agree or disagree. The fair statement is that Dole considered balanced budgets a conservative obligation and was willing to adjust revenue to get there. A purist can disagree. But a purist who wants to win elections has to look at how many conservatives accepted the same bargain at the time, including the President who signed the law. That is also why A Balanced Budget Is a Moral Argument Before It Is an Accounting One and Why Spending Restraint Keeps Losing in Washington, Whoever Is in Charge belong together on your reading list.

Saving Social Security, 1983

The most important bipartisan deal of his career came in 1983. The Social Security trust fund was running toward a cliff. Reagan and Congress created a National Commission on Social Security Reform, chaired by Alan Greenspan, with members chosen by both parties and the White House. Dole served on it.

The commission reached a compromise package in January 1983. It included raising the retirement age gradually (over the following decades), covering new federal employees, taxing a portion of benefits for higher-income recipients and speeding up scheduled payroll-tax increases. Congress passed the legislation and Reagan signed it on April 20, 1983. It bought the system decades of solvency.

Notice the shape of the deal. Nobody got everything. The conservatives accepted tax increases. The liberals accepted a higher retirement age and benefit taxation. Both sides then had to defend the result, which is the difference between a compromise and a surrender. If you want to know how Social Security works and why the problem returns, How Social Security works and the promise built into its 1935 design and Social Security's repair options laid side by side in one table go into the details.

The Americans with Disabilities Act

Dole had a personal stake in disability law, and he used his position. In 1990 he was the Republican leader in the Senate, and he worked with Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, a Democrat, and with the administration of President George H. W. Bush to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. Bush signed the law on July 26, 1990.

The ADA bars discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, public services and public accommodations. Conservative groups have argued over the cost to small businesses, and a fair conservative will admit the compliance burden is real. But the principle, that a person who can do the job should not be shut out of it because of a wheelchair or a hearing aid, is a classic individual-rights idea. It turns on the capability of the person, not on a government program. When you hear someone say the law is un-conservative, ask what, exactly, is un-conservative about letting a qualified worker work.

Other parts of the record are worth noting briefly. In 1982 Dole helped broker the compromise that extended the Voting Rights Act. As a legislator he understood that you do not win a contest by showing up with a speech. You win by drafting the language that 60 senators will vote for.

1996 and after

In 1996 Dole won the Republican nomination, chose Jack Kemp as his running mate and campaigned on an across-the-board tax cut. President Bill Clinton won re-election. Dole's loss was decisive. A lesser man would have retired in bitterness. Dole went on to other work. He chaired the effort to build the National World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington, alongside businessman Fred Smith, helping raise the money and the profile of a project that had languished. The memorial was dedicated on May 29, 2004.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1997, a gesture of respect from the man who beat him, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2018. He died on December 5, 2021.

What Republicans should learn

Allow me to boil it down to verdicts.

Verdict one: governing is a craft. The movement needs people who can give speeches and people who can count to 51 or 60. Dole was the second kind, and he was indispensable.

Verdict two: compromise is not the same as surrender. The 1983 Social Security agreement and the ADA were negotiated deals in which Republicans got real concessions. The test is what the other side gave up.

Verdict three: you can disagree with a man's tax votes and still respect the way he served. The honest conservative position holds both thoughts.

Verdict four: character carries weight. A leader who carries his wounds with humor and without self-pity is the opposite of the kind of politician the public distrusts.

There is a counterargument that Dole's style was a recipe for losing. Voters in 1996 wanted passion, not process. Perhaps. But the question is what you want from a legislative leader. If you want sparks, hire a talk-show host. If you want a signed bill, hire a master of the Senate. Everett Dirksen and the Republican votes that broke the 1964 filibuster tells the story of an earlier Republican leader who understood the same thing.

The bottom line

• Learn how your legislature actually works; the person who knows the rules beats the person who just has the volume.
• Judge a leader by what got signed into law, and by what the other side gave up to get it.
• Be willing to admit where a hero of yours went wrong, as many conservatives did about the 1982 tax bill, and still honor the rest of the record.
• If a family member or neighbor has a disability, ask what the ADA actually requires of you before you assume the worst.
• Visit the World War II Memorial if you can, and read the Congress.gov summaries of the 1983 and 1990 laws before you argue about them.