Sunday, December 5th, 2021
Fought against Clinton
Former US politician Bob Dole is dead
Bob Dole has been one of the defining figures in US politics for decades. He has served in the Senate for Kansas for more than a quarter of a century. For a long time he leads the Republicans. His ambitions for the White House, pursued for over two decades, were unsuccessful. Now he died very old.
The US politician and former presidential candidate Bob Dole is dead. He died at the age of 98, as the Elizabeth Dole Foundation – his wife’s foundation – announced. Dole sat for Kansas in the Senate for about a quarter of a century and was majority leader twice. Even in the period without a Senate majority, he led the Republicans – in total he was at their head for eleven years. Dole has “loyally served the United States of America for 79 years,” said the family foundation. At the Washington Capitol, flags were raised at half-mast in mourning for Dole.
Dole moved into the House of Representatives in 1961 and the Senate for Kansas in 1968 – and was re-elected four times. He had been pursuing his ambitions to move into the White House since the 1970s, but never succeeded. The culmination of the unsuccessful endeavors was the 1996 defeat by incumbent Bill Clinton. Already in 1976 he had failed at the side of Gerald Ford as his potential vice against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Later on, he was repeatedly left behind in the party’s internal primaries.
Together with the Republican minority leader in the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, he tried successfully from 1993 to prevent the policies of the new President Clinton. The Republican opposition also fell victim to the health care reform that Clinton was seeking.
Robert Joseph Dole was born in Kansas in 1923. Seriously wounded in Italy during World War II, he was treated in a hospital for more than three years. His right arm remained almost paralyzed. In its obituary, the New York Times wrote that he could not shake hands and only hold a pen in his fist. Because he was unable to cut meat with a knife, he skipped many political dinners and stayed at home.
In 1975 the law graduate married Elizabeth Dole, who was later Secretary of Transportation under Ronald Reagan and Secretary of Labor under George Bush. As Minister of Transport, she is said to have legally introduced the third brake light in car rear windows – the so-called Dole light.