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    I Was Bob Dole's Press Secretary. This Is What I Learned From Him.

    Early in the 1996 race for the White House, the senior leadership of Bob Dole’s presidential campaign noticed something that troubled us: It seemed no matter how carefully we crafted his talking points, Senator Dole would go off script.Often way off script.So, we considered the possibilities: Maybe at 72 years of age, Mr. Dole’s eyesight was the problem. But when increasingly larger type didn’t have the desired effect, we decided somebody had to go to the Senate majority leader and raise the delicate question of whether he could see the words on the papers we handed to him.That somebody was me. As his press secretary, it was my unenviable task to ask a man who was first elected to Congress in 1960, the year I was born, if his eyes were giving out.Mr. Dole pondered my question for a moment and replied: “No, I can see just fine. I can’t hear worth a damn. But my eyes are fine.”Like a lot of things I’d hear him say across the year and the hundreds of thousands of miles I spent at his side as his campaign press secretary, it took me awhile to understand there was more in his answer than his trademark dry humor.Mr. Dole could hear perfectly well. It was we in his campaign team who had trouble listening.Over and over again, in speech after speech, he told his campaign he was going to say what he wanted. We thought that was a problem. Looking back, I think it was a treasure.See, Mr. Dole didn’t want to be packaged like a product or traffic in the staged outrage that today would be praised for generating attention, the currency of politics. It could be that his resistance to our demands to recite talking points or perform anger hurt his campaign. But if so, I now see that as an indictment of what politics was becoming in 1996 and what politics has become today.It’s in unscripted moments that politicians reveal the most about themselves. While many politicians show themselves to be cynical, cruel or inauthentic in those off-script moments, Mr. Dole instead revealed a rare empathy.For example, in 1996, Gov. Pete Wilson of California, a Republican, had won re-election two years prior with a tough law-and-order message, so we organized a trip to a jail in Los Angeles, with Mr. Wilson in tow, for a tour and a news conference.It was a perfectly staged opportunity for Mr. Dole to say something bashing the miserable offenders he had just seen in the lockup. Instead, his first comment was to wonder aloud whether some of the men in those cells had ever been touched by the hand of someone who loved them.Nobody had written that note of humanity for Mr. Dole. I’m not sure it was even picked up by the press. But it sprang from a compassion that he found hard to switch off for political purposes.The traditions of the Senate were also real for Mr. Dole and more important than cheap political theater.In 1995, President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Dr. Henry Foster for Surgeon General stirred anger among social conservatives. I urged Mr. Dole to personally reject and help defeat the nomination as a good way to score points going into the Republican primary season.Mr. Dole declined. The maneuver might have been good politics, he reasoned, but it would violate committee protocol and disrespect his fellow Kansan, Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum, who was presiding over the Foster hearings.He actually saw value in respecting the Senate as an institution. At the time, I thought that was funny. Since then, after witnessing the Senate trample on so many of its norms and traditions, it is clear that Mr. Dole had a point.Some of his other funny ideas caused him problems. In 1996, political humor that respects both opponents and voters had not yet disappeared. But it was losing ground to insult and abuse.Mr. Dole, arguably the greatest American practitioner of the laconic phrase since Calvin Coolidge, often found that his humor was lost on reporters a fraction of his age.Once, on the campaign plane, a reporter asked Mr. Dole a stock question: What was the one thing he wanted every voter to know about him?He could have answered like a politician and spouted a bumper sticker slogan or summoned a tear. Instead, he dismissed the silly question with a simple, “Beats me.”What followed, of course, were tin-eared stories about Mr. Dole lacking a sense of vision, written by reporters lacking a sense of humor.Yet, he didn’t take it personally. He rarely vilified a reporter for doing the job of reporting. Once almost left for dead on a battlefield in World War II, he had seen worse than a bad story or even a lost election.True, Mr. Dole lost in 1996 and he had no illusions about who would take the blame. The capsule summary of that campaign casts him as a weak candidate.But by then, American politics were already on the path to the polarized and poisonous place we occupy today. If Bob Dole’s authenticity and reluctance to engage in artifice or demonizing his opponents were weaknesses, does that say more about him or about what politics were becoming?Bob Dole was principled and even partisan, yes. But he leavened his fighting spirit with humility, humor and respect. If that made him weak, American politics would be stronger with more weakness.Nelson Warfield is a political media consultant who was national press secretary for Senator Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Bob Dole, Old Soldier and Stalwart of the Senate, Dies at 98

    Mr. Dole, a son of the Kansas prairie who was left for dead on a World War II battlefield, became one of the longest-serving Republican leaders.Bob Dole, the plain-spoken son of the prairie who overcame Dust Bowl deprivation in Kansas and grievous battle wounds in Italy to become the Senate majority leader and the last of the World War II generation to win his party’s nomination for president, died on Sunday. He was 98. His death was announced by the Elizabeth Dole Foundation.It did not say where he died. He had announced in February that he had Stage IV lung cancer and that he was beginning treatment.A Republican, Mr. Dole was one of the most durable political figures in the last decades of the last century. He was nominated for vice president in 1976 and then for president a full 20 years later. He spent a quarter-century in the Senate, where he was his party’s longest-serving leader until Mitch McConnell of Kentucky surpassed that record in June 2018.President Biden called Mr. Dole “an American statesman like few in our history. A war hero and among the greatest of the Greatest Generation.” He added, “To me, he was also a friend whom I could look to for trusted guidance, or a humorous line at just the right moment to settle frayed nerves.”As the old soldiers of World War II faded away, Mr. Dole, who had been a lieutenant in the Army’s storied 10th Mountain Division and was wounded so severely on a battlefield that he was left for dead, came to personify the resilience of his generation. In his post-political career, he devoted himself to raising money for the World War II Memorial in Washington and spent weekends there welcoming visiting veterans.In one of his last public appearances, in December 2018, he joined the line at the Capitol Rotunda where the body of former President George H.W. Bush, an erstwhile political rival and fellow veteran, lay in state. As an aide helped him up from his wheelchair, Mr. Dole, using his left hand because his right had been rendered useless by the war, saluted the flag-draped coffin of the last president to have served in World War II.Mr. Dole with President Richard M. Nixon in 1971. He was national Republican chairman at the time. Associated PressPolitically, Mr. Dole was a man for all seasons, surviving for more than three decades in his party’s upper echelons, even though he was sometimes at odds ideologically with other Republican leaders.He was national Republican chairman under President Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s; the running mate to President Gerald R. Ford in 1976; chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s; and presidential standard-bearer during Newt Gingrich’s “revolution” of the mid-1990s, when the Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years and upended the power dynamic on Capitol Hill.More recently, Mr. Dole, almost alone among his party’s old guard, endorsed Donald J. Trump for president in 2016, after his preferred candidates had fallen by the wayside. On the eve of his 93rd birthday, he was the only previous Republican presidential nominee to appear at the party’s convention in Cleveland, where Mr. Trump was nominated.Mr. Dole himself ran three times for the White House and finally won the nomination in 1996, only to lose to President Bill Clinton after a historically disastrous campaign. He had given up his secure post in the Senate to pursue the presidency, although, as he acknowledged, he was more suited to the Senate.As the Republican leader, he helped broker compromises that shaped much of the nation’s domestic and foreign policies.He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995. (Mr. Dole was not wild about the deployment either, but he long believed that a president, of either party, should be supported once he decided something as important as committing troops abroad.)A skilled legislative mechanic, Mr. Dole understood what every senator wanted and what each could live with, and he enjoyed the art of political bartering.He was so at home in the Senate’s marble corridors that during his last campaign, in 1996, he constantly had to remind voters that he was “not born in a blue suit” — Dole shorthand for saying that he had a life before arriving in Washington in 1961. In fact, he had been shaped profoundly by the twin experiences of growing up poor in Depression-era Kansas and enduring the shattering wounds of war.Young Bob, left, with his siblings in the backyard of their home in Russell, Kan.Dole family photo, via Associated PressWith dust storms blackening the skies of his tiny hometown, Russell, in north-central Kansas, and destroying the wheat economy, the Doles moved into the cramped basement of their home and rented out the upstairs to make ends meet.As for the war, it changed the course of Mr. Dole’s life. A star athlete who lettered in football, basketball and track and who was voted best looking in his class at Russell High School, he had planned to become a surgeon. Instead, he came home from the war in Europe in a body cast, mostly paralyzed.He spent 39 months convalescing, much of it in surgery — as a patient, not as the surgeon he had hoped to become. Instead, he became a lawyer and a politician, though his injuries kept him from many of the fundamental rituals of politics. His right hand was so damaged that he couldn’t shake hands, and he would clutch a pen in his fist to discourage people from trying. Unable to cut his meat with a knife, he tended to avoid political dinners and ate at home.Mr. Dole began his political career as a conservative and evolved into a pragmatist, even forging relationships with prominent liberals. With George S. McGovern of South Dakota, he expanded the food stamp program, and with Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, he made school lunches a federal entitlement. Kansas farmers applauded both efforts.He was such a good deal-maker that his own convictions were not always apparent. By the end of his long career, Mr. Dole had cast more than 12,000 votes, having stood on both sides of many issues.He opposed many of the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Avoiding budget deficits had been his North Star, given his hardscrabble youth. Sometimes he supported tax increases, which led Mr. Gingrich to brand him “the tax collector for the welfare state.” But in 1995, he tried to recast himself as a tax-cutter, memorably telling party leaders, “I’m willing to be another Ronald Reagan, if that’s what you want.” He then signed a pledge not to raise taxes as president, a pledge he had previously rejected.“It adds a certain poignancy,” Richard Norton Smith, the former director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009, “that he found himself chasing the caboose of movement conservatism at the height of his career.”Mr. Dole thrived as chairman of the Finance Committee, a powerful position that attracted big corporate donors often seeking favors. At one point he raised more money from special interests than any other senator. A particularly generous donor was Dwayne Andreas, chairman of Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agribusiness; over two decades, the company received millions of dollars in tax breaks and federal subsidies.“When these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government,” Mr. Dole bluntly told The Wall Street Journal, pinpointing why the system benefited wealthy interests over poor ones.His fellow Republican senators elected him their leader in both the majority and the minority for a combined 11 years, from 1985 to 1996.Mr. Dole in 1990 on the balcony adjacent to the Republican leader’s office at the Capitol. The balcony was later named for him.Michael Geissinger/Library of CongressHe conducted much of his bargaining with other senators on the balcony off the Republican leader’s office. When he left the Senate in 1996, his colleagues unanimously passed a resolution naming it the Robert J. Dole balcony. It overlooked the National Mall and the Washington Monument, affording him what he wistfully called “the second-best view in Washington.” Unofficially, the balcony was called “Dole Beach,” because he often escaped there to soak up the sun and refresh his perpetual tan.But away from Capitol Hill, Mr. Dole was a fish out of water. His insider skills as a tactician and deal closer did not translate to the presidential campaign trail.During the 1996 race, he was faulted as having no overarching vision — for his campaign or for the country. He chafed at handlers who tried to package him, and he never adapted to the scripted politics of the television age. During speeches, he often lapsed into legislative lingo and referred to himself in the third person. He was detached as a candidate, more wry commentator than engaged participant.“Stayed on message,” Mr. Dole congratulated himself in front of reporters after one campaign event, then went on to mock the process in which he was involved: “Every time I do that ‘reconnect the government to values’ stuff, I feel like a plumber.”After that final quest for the presidency, Mr. Dole became a lobbyist for the powerhouse international law firm Alston & Bird. Despite his standing as a well-connected Washington insider, he cultivated a new persona, one unexpected for a man of Mr. Dole’s dark visage and mordant wit: that of self-deprecating loser.“Playing up the image of the downtrodden also-ran was great fun,” he wrote in his 2005 book, “One Soldier’s Story: A Memoir.” He starred in Super Bowl commercials for Visa (“I just can’t win”) in 1997 and for Pepsi in 2001 and later made a cameo in a Pepsi ad featuring Britney Spears. He spoofed previous ads he had made for the male potency drug Viagra, for which he had become a spokesman after undergoing surgery for prostate cancer.“Once you lose,” he told The New York Times, “people like you.”It was a surprising turn for Mr. Dole, who was long linked in the public mind with the glowering Nixon. He had defended that beleaguered president so fiercely that one critic branded him Nixon’s “hatchet man,” a label that stuck.Mr. Dole, then Senate majority leader, at a news conference with House Speaker Newt Gingrich during budget negotiations in 1996.David Scull/The New York TimesLike Nixon, Mr. Dole had overcome struggles early in life. And like Nixon, he felt embittered toward people for whom he thought things came easy.“I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way,” he said when he announced he was leaving the Senate in 1996.His bitterness found an outlet in partisanship, which he often expressed in acerbic asides. It flared in public during a vice-presidential debate in 1976, when he blamed Democrats for all the wars of the 20th century, and again in 2004, when some fellow Vietnam veterans challenged the military record of Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Dole, who had received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with an oak leaf cluster, joined in, questioning whether Mr. Kerry had deserved his Purple Hearts.“Three Purple Hearts,” Mr. Dole said of Mr. Kerry, “and never bled that I know of.”Wounds and RecoveryRobert Joseph Dole was born in his parents’ house in Russell on July 22, 1923, the second of four children of Doran and Bina (Talbott) Dole. His mother was an expert seamstress and sold sewing machines; his father worked in a creamery and later ran a grain elevator.Mr. Dole enlisted in the Army Reserve during college and was called to active duty in 1943. On April 14, 1945, in the mountains of Italy outside the small town of Castel D’Aiano, about 65 miles north of Florence, the Germans began firing on his platoon. When he saw a fellow soldier fall, Mr. Dole went to pull him to safety. But as he scrambled away he was struck by flying metal. It blew apart his right shoulder and arm and broke several vertebrae in his neck and spine.His men dragged him back to a foxhole, where he lay crumpled in his blood-soaked uniform for nine hours before he was evacuated. He was just 21.It was a horrifying turn of events for one of Russell’s most promising young men. Unable to feed or care for himself, he feared he was doomed to a life of selling pencils on the street.Mr. Dole recovering from his war injuries in 1945. Flying metal had blown apart his right shoulder and arm and broke vertebrae in his neck and spine. Dole family photo, via Associated PressHe spent more than three years recovering and underwent at least seven operations. Back in Russell, he devised a homemade weight-and-pulley system to rebuild his strength. The townspeople rallied around him, pooling their nickels and dimes for his treatment.Russell was a speck on the flat Kansas prairie, but in the Dole biography it took on mythic significance. In his political campaigns, Russell was cast as the shaper of noble, small-town virtues and Mr. Dole as their personification.Remembering that period, and the generosity of his neighbors, often brought him to tears. In his first appearance with President Ford in Russell in 1976, with 10,000 well-wishers crammed into the downtown business district, he thanked the townspeople for their support after the war. Then he started to cry and couldn’t go on. The audience fell silent. Finally, Mr. Ford stood and began clapping, and the audience joined in.Regaining his composure, Mr. Dole said: “That was a long time ago.”And yet even in 1996, long after Russell and his recovery had become a staple of his origin story, he could hardly mention that period without choking up. When his image-makers wrote references to it in his prepared remarks, he would often skip over those passages or truncate them to avoid the inevitable tears.He could not avoid them on the final leg of his presidential campaign, however, by which time it was clear that he was going to lose. At a bowling alley in Des Moines, his friend Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator and Mr. Dole’s wingman in those last days on the road, delivered a spontaneous tribute to him.“This is the last crusade of a great warrior,” Mr. McCain told a small crowd over the clatter of falling bowling pins, “a member of a generation of Americans who went out and made the world safe for democracy so that we could have lives that were far better for ourselves and for our children.”Mr. Dole, standing nearby, wept.After the war, during his recuperation, he met Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist, and married her three months later, in 1948. He returned to college on the G.I. Bill. He already had credits from the University of Kansas, where he had studied pre-med. With Ms. Holden’s help, he earned a dual bachelor’s and law degree in 1952 at Washburn Municipal University (now Washburn University) in Topeka, Kan. They had a daughter, Robin, in 1954.Readjusting his aspirations from medicine to the law, Mr. Dole had to develop his mind, he said, because he could not use his hands. His life, he said, would be “an exercise in compensations.”Bob and Elizabeth Dole following their wedding  at the Washington National Cathedral in 1975.Dole family photo, via Associated PressRussell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.After a stint in the Legislature and as Russell County attorney, he won a House seat in Congress in 1960 and ascended to the Senate in 1968.The Nixon InfluenceNixon won the presidency that same year and became the driving political influence in Mr. Dole’s life. Mr. Dole saw them as soul mates. Both were self-made men, politically ambitious loners disaffected from their party’s elite Eastern establishment, Nixon hailing from California.Mr. Dole made a name for himself by zealously defending Nixon, particularly in the president’s continued prosecution of the Vietnam War and his controversial Supreme Court nominees. He could be so snarly, though, that Senator William B. Saxbe, Republican of Ohio, memorably derided him as Nixon’s “hatchet man” and said he was so disagreeable, “he couldn’t sell beer on a troop ship.”Even Nixon worried that Mr. Dole’s lust for the fight would undermine his effectiveness. In a memorandum made public years later, Nixon wrote that it was “important that we not let Dole destroy his usefulness by having him step up to every hard, fast one.”Mr. Dole had flown to Washington from Chicago aboard Air Force One in 1971 accompanying President Nixon and the first lady, Pat Nixon, along with members of Congress from Illinois: from left, Senator Charles H. Percy, Mr. Dole and Representatives Leslie C. Arends and John B. Anderson.Bob Daugherty/Associated PressNixon named him chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1971. It was a role Mr. Dole relished as he raked in political chits. The travel kept him far from home, and he and Phyllis divorced in 1972.Three years later he married Elizabeth Hanford, then a federal trade commissioner; she later became a cabinet secretary, president of the American Red Cross and a senator from North Carolina. They became one of Washington’s original power couples.Elizabeth Dole as well as Mr. Dole’s daughter, Robin Dole, survive him. His first wife, Phyllis Holden Macey, died in 2008. After Nixon won re-election in 1972 and the Watergate scandal was closing in, he dumped Mr. Dole as party chairman, saying the senator was too independent. But Mr. Dole remained loyal, so much so that he tried to shut down the live television coverage of the Watergate hearings.When Nixon died in 1994, Mr. Dole delivered a sentimental eulogy, sobbing as he described the disgraced former president as a “boy who heard train whistles in the night and dreamed of all the distant places that lay at the end of the track.”He also recalled Nixon’s advice that while failure was sad, “the greatest sadness is not to try and fail, but to fail to try.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he believed that Nixon, in his preparations for his own funeral, had a political motive in asking Mr. Dole to deliver the eulogy. Nixon, Mr. Smith said, expected that Mr. Dole would become emotional, and that his “authentic display of grief” would reveal Mr. Dole’s human side and perhaps help his presidential bid.‘Democrat Wars’Ford, who was Nixon’s vice president and successor as president, gave Mr. Dole his first shot at national office, choosing him as his running mate in 1976. Ford needed to shore up strength with conservatives and also hoped that the selection would appeal to voters in farm states. But Mr. Dole’s performance during the vice-presidential debate on Oct. 15, 1976, against Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic nominee, was so harsh that some analysts say it contributed to Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter.Mr. Dole, the vice presidential nominee, with President Gerald R. Ford at the close of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City.United Press InternationalIn response to a question about Ford’s 1974 pardon of Nixon, Mr. Dole veered off topic and in an inexplicable tangent said: “I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit.”A stunned Mr. Mondale said he could not believe that Mr. Dole would cast the war against Germany and Japan in partisan terms. Mr. Dole, he said, “has richly earned his reputation as hatchet man.” Even Republicans joined in the post-debate criticism, as did Mr. Dole himself.“I went for the jugular,” he said later. “My own.”The reaction was so negative that he sought out an image consultant and paid her to help him appear more likable.Still, he ran for president in 1980, a misbegotten venture that ended almost as soon as it began. He tried again in 1988 and won his party’s Iowa caucus, but couldn’t overcome Vice President Bush’s forces in New Hampshire, where Bush had the invaluable support of the governor, John Sununu, and ran a TV spot suggesting that Mr. Dole would raise taxes.The ad infuriated Mr. Dole, who snapped that Bush should “stop lying about my record.” The comment only reinforced the impression that Mr. Dole was too mean to be president.But by 1996 his party seemed incapable of denying him the nomination. At that point, President Clinton was popular, the nation was enjoying a period of peace and prosperity, and the strongest potential Republican contenders — Gen. Colin L. Powell among them — declined to run.Mr. Dole prevailed over a weak primary field that included Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Patrick Buchanan, a conservative broadcast journalist. But then Mr. Dole ran a terrible general election campaign, offering voters little rationale for denying Mr. Clinton a second term. At times, he made no pretense that he was even taking his task seriously.Bob and Elizabeth Dole after he won  the presidential nomination at the 1996 Republican convention in San Diego.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times“We’re trying to get good pictures,” he told reporters on his campaign plane the day after he quit the Senate to devote himself full time to running for president. “Don’t worry very much about what I say.”In 1995, Richard Ben Cramer, one of Mr. Dole’s biographers, asked him to name the first thing he might do in the White House.“Haven’t thought,” he replied in clipped Dole-speak, as quoted by Mr. Cramer.“If I get elected, at my age, you know,” he trailed off, revealing a paucity of plans for the presidency. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. It’s not an agenda. I’m just gonna serve my country.”His lack of preparation stood in stark contrast to his wife’s tendency to over prepare. Mrs. Dole delivered a polished star turn for her husband at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996. But her choreographed precision only highlighted how much her husband was winging it.“Watching Bob Dole campaign for the presidency,” the journalist Michael Kelly wrote in The New Yorker, “is a curious and dislocating experience, like showering clothed or eating naked.”Mr. Smith, the historian, said he was always puzzled about why Mr. Dole, who had sought the nomination for so long, seemed to take it so casually and “wasn’t willing to adapt himself to the changing media climate.” Mr. Smith concluded that this was a mark of Mr. Dole’s integrity. “He couldn’t jackknife himself into a persona that was fundamentally at odds with the real thing,” he said.In one of his last public appearances, in 2018, Mr. Dole saluted the coffin of George H.W. Bush, the last president to have served in World War II.Erin Schaff for The New York TimesOthers said his goal was not the presidency but winning the nomination — and proving he could rehabilitate himself politically just as he had physically.Mr. Dole won 41 percent of the popular vote, with Mr. Clinton taking 49 percent and Ross Perot, a Reform Party candidate, winning 8 percent. The magnitude of Mr. Dole’s loss was more evident in the electoral votes; he won just 159 to Mr. Clinton’s 379.In his memoir almost a decade later, Mr. Dole framed his crushing defeat in a way that would have made Nixon proud.“Losing means that at least you were in the race,” he wrote. “It means that when the whistle sounded, life did not find you watching from the sidelines.” More

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    Bob Dole Has Advanced Lung Cancer, He Says in Statement

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyBiden’s Immigration Plan Would Offer Path to Citizenship For MillionsBob Dole, Republicans’ 1996 presidential nominee, has advanced lung cancer.Feb. 18, 2021, 11:39 a.m. ETFeb. 18, 2021, 11:39 a.m. ETBob Dole paying his respects to former President George H.W. Bush at the Capitol in 2018. Mr. Dole represented Kansas in the Senate for more than 25 years.Credit…Erin Schaff for The New York TimesBob Dole, the former senator and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, announced on Thursday that he had advanced lung cancer.“Recently, I was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer,” Mr. Dole said in a statement. “My first treatment will begin on Monday. While I certainly have some hurdles ahead, I also know that I join millions of Americans who face significant health challenges of their own.”Mr. Dole, 97, represented Kansas in the Senate for more than 25 years, including 11 years as the chamber’s Republican leader. He gave up his position as majority leader to run for the White House in 1996, only to lose to President Bill Clinton by a large margin, 379 electoral votes to 159.He has faced health challenges for decades, starting with a battlefield injury during World War II, in which he served as an Army second lieutenant. He was hit by machine-gun fire, which almost killed him and permanently limited his use of his right arm. He went on to support the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, and later pushed for the United States to join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.Mr. Dole — the oldest living former presidential nominee or president, one year older than former President Jimmy Carter — disclosed his lung cancer diagnosis a day after the conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh died of the same disease.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Don Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDon Fowler, Democratic Co-Chairman Under Clinton, Dies at 85He and Christopher Dodd ran the party organization, raising record sums, expanding the voter and donor bases, and sometimes raising eyebrows.Don Fowler taking the oath as he appeared before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1997. He had a long career in South Carolina and national politics.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressDec. 17, 2020, 5:07 p.m. ETDon Fowler, a former co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a mainstay of South Carolina and national politics for decades, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. He was 85.Trav Robertson, the chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party, confirmed the death, at a hospital. Jaime Harrison, the associate chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Mr. Fowler had had leukemia.Mr. Fowler led the South Carolina party from 1971 to 1980 and was named by the national party to run the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, which launched Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts on an unsuccessful general election campaign against his Republican rival, Vice President George Bush.Mr. Fowler served as national chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1995 to 1997. He was picked by President Bill Clinton to run the party’s day-to-day operations in a power-sharing arrangement with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who was named general chairman.The two were credited with raising record-breaking sums for the party, deepening its pool of donors, expanding its army of volunteers and leading a successful voter-registration drive focusing on African-Americans, The Washington Post reported.Mr. Dodd, the more well known of the two, was largely the public face of the party leadership. But Mr. Fowler was thrust into the spotlight himself when he was accused of improperly trying to enlist the help of the C.I.A. in 1995 to aid a major donor to President Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.The donor, an oilman who had developed a relationship with the C.I.A. on previous ventures, was seeking to build a pipeline in Turkey and sought help from the White House.Testifying to a Senate committee, Mr. Fowler professed that he could not remember speaking to a C.I.A. agent who claimed that he had done precisely that. “I have in the middle of the night, high noon, late in the afternoon, early in the morning, every hour of the day, for months now searched my memory about conversations with the C.I.A.,” Mr. Fowler told the senators. “And I have no memory, no memory of any conversation with the C.I.A.”He was not charged with any wrongdoing.Mr. Fowler, center, with President Bill Clinton and the actor Alec Baldwin at a reception in Culver City, Calif., in 1996 during Mr. Clinton’s re-election campaign. The president had named Mr. Fowler co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.Credit…Joe Marquette/Associated PressMr. Fowler also found himself defending a plan to entice potential donors with a variety of perks in exchange for their dollars, including dinners with the Clintons, private meetings with administration officials, participation in “issue retreats” and “honored guest status” at the party’s 1996 convention in Chicago. In an editorial, The New York Times called the plan “seedy.”In 1996, Mr. Fowler successfully fought off a lawsuit by the fringe candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the fifth time. He filed the suit after Mr. Fowler had instructed state parties to disregard votes for him. Mr. Fowler had described Mr. LaRouche’s views as “explicitly racist and anti-Semitic” and had accused him of defrauding donors and voters. Mr. LaRouche was not, he said, “a bona fide Democrat.”Donald Lionel Fowler was born on Sept. 12, 1935, in Spartanburg, S.C. He earned a degree in psychology from Wofford College in Spartanburg, where he was a star basketball player; he was later inducted into its Hall of Fame. He received a master’s degree and a doctorate in political science from the University of Kentucky.While holding his political posts and running an advertising and public relations business in Columbia, he taught political science for five decades at the University of South Carolina and also at the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college.His first wife, Septima (Briggs) Fowler, with whom he had two children, died in 1997. In 2005, Mr. Fowler married Carol Khare. They had worked together at the Democratic National Committee and at his communications firm. Carol Fowler became chair of the state party in 2007.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.This year, the Fowlers’ home in the Five Points area of Columbia, the state capital, became a regular stop for many Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination in the run-up to the South Carolina primary in February. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Bill de Blasio were among those who showed up as dozens of people crowded into the Fowlers’ living room.Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, the House majority whip and a frequent guest lecturer in Mr. Fowler’s classes, told the South Carolina newspaper The State, “Don was always the connector, the one bringing political friends and, sometimes, enemies together.”The New York Times contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More