President Biden hailed former senator Bob Dole as a “genuine hero,” praising his courage on the battlefield and integrity on Capitol Hill, as he spoke at an invitation-only memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. Former senators Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), and Dole’s daughter, Robin Dole, also spoke.
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Milley hails Dole as ‘an incredible example of a lifetime of selfless service to our nation’
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Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held up Dole’s sacrifices on behalf of his country, describing the senator as “an incredible example of a lifetime of selfless service to our nation.”
Milley detailed the injuries Dole suffered in World War II and told the crowd that when Dole “left the battlefields of Italy, his war was over, but his fight was really just beginning.”
“Why did Bob Dole have such a clear calling to serve?” Milley asked. “Why did he refuse to be stopped by the enemy? He did it for an idea — an idea that is America. … When others would have given up, Bob Dole never did. When others saw obstacles, he saw opportunity. He continually raised his hand, mangled as it was, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
After Milley spoke, Dole’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Robin touched a wreath in honor of the senator, and a trumpeter played “Taps.”
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Academy-award winning actor Hanks remembers Dole’s sacrifice and work to establish World War II Memorial
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Hanks celebrated Dole’s legacy at the World War II Memorial, a major installation that the late senator advocated for to honor the Americans who sacrificed their lives.
“Bob Dole called this a memorial to peace, so that all generations would remember that peace is achieved in shared labor, by shared sacrifice, by volunteering for the shared duty,” Hanks said Friday.
The Academy Award-winning actor worked with the former GOP presidential nominee to help raise money for the memorial after filming “Saving Private Ryan,” the award-winning 1998 movie about the Normandy invasion and a group of soldiers searching for a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action.
Hanks attended the memorial service for Dole, a decorated wounded veteran of World War II, and joined other notable attendees in praising the former senator.
Dole originally enrolled in the University of Kansas with the goal of becoming a doctor. But after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he signed up for military service and was eventually injured in a battle in Italy during the final days of the war.
Dole’s life a ‘flesh-and-blood monument to the values that we revere here,’ Savannah Guthrie says
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Savannah Guthrie, co-anchor of NBC’s “Today” show and the first speaker at the ceremony in front of the World War II memorial, described Dole’s life as “a flesh-and-blood monument to the values that we revere here.”
“We are all here this afternoon because Bob Dole stood for something. He stood for principle. He stood for dignity,” Guthrie said. “He stood for integrity. He stood for friendship. He stood for his country, that he fought and bled for.”
Guthrie added that “we met only a few years ago, and yet somehow, he and Mrs. Dole — Sen. Elizabeth — took me under their wing, embraced me and befriended me.”
1:40 p.m.
Paul Kane: How Dole came to the aid of Newt Gingrich — Dole lost the presidency to Bill Clinton in 1996 in the largest electoral college rout of the last eight presidential elections. Many Dole allies blamed another Republican for his incredibly poor showing: Newt Gingrich.Democrats decided early, back in the summer of 1995, that Dole was the front-runner and that they would do all they could to tie the Senate majority leader to the very unpopular House speaker Gingrich, who came to power earlier that year promising a revolution but instead sank into a quagmire over attempted cuts to Medicare.But Dole got the last word on his relationship with Gingrich. In the spring of 1997, the speaker got fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee for infractions related to a book deal and his teaching at a Georgia college.Gingrich, who had never made money in the private sector, had to pay from his own personal finances, not campaign funds. He did not have that kind of cash.Enter Dole. The former senator, who had already landed at a big law firm, gave a personal loan to his old rival, at 10 percent interest, spread over eight years, which totaled $643,000.“I wanted to help the Republicans and help Newt Gingrich get this behind him,” Dole told reporters outside his downtown office, according to The Post’s account that day.Gingrich was pushed out as speaker after the 1998 midterm elections and went on to become a millionaire. But for a few short years, he had to make payments to a man whose friends blame the unruly speaker for Dole’s 1996 loss.
Paul Kane, Senior congressional correspondent and columnist
‘I believe in the future of the United States of America,’ Dole wrote in a farewell letter, daughter says
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Robin Dole, Bob Dole’s daughter, shared a farewell letter he wrote with a staffer before passing.
“I make the final walk on my life’s journey. I do so without fear because I know that I will again not be walking alone. I know that God will be walking with me,” Bob Dole wrote. “I also confess that I’m a bit curious to learn if I am correct in thinking that heaven will look a lot like Kansas, and to see — like others who have gone before me — if I will still be able to vote in Chicago.”
“I do have one request to make of you,” Bob Dole continued. “Since it was dedicated in 2004, it has been my honor to go as often as I could to the World War II memorial here in Washington, D.C., to welcome and thank the World War II veterans and all veterans … Since I won’t be making that visit anymore, I hope that you will and that you will ask your children and grandchildren to visit veterans’ memorials across America and to never forget the sacrifice made not just by my generation, but by all those who wear the uniform of our country.”
“My final words are the exact ones that Dwight Eisenhower used … nearly seven decades ago: ‘I believe in the future of the United States of America,’ ” Bob Dole wrote.
“I will miss him so much. I think I will still talk to him every night,” Robin Dole said. “I love you, Dad. I promise you will never walk alone.”
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Robin Dole says her father was ‘a giver, not a taker’
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Robin Dole, Bob Dole’s daughter with his first wife, Phyllis, said her father was “a giver, not a taker.”
“He cared more about others than he did about himself,” she said. “He told me he set a personal goal to help at least one person every day of his life.”
“There is no one he helped more than me,” Robin Dole added. “He’s always been there for me through thick and through thin. … He always had my back, even when I made mistakes. And believe me, I made quite a few. He believed in giving second chances, and I know that firsthand. He was my rock.”
Robin Dole said her father also was an animal lover and was the first one to call her when her dog Cooper recently died.
“That support meant the world to me,” she said. “Soon, he began to encourage me to get another dog.”
Eventually, her father got her a puppy, and she named him JoJo, after her father’s middle name, Joseph.
Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle remembers Dole as ‘one of the very first people’ to welcome him to chamber
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Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) remembered Dole as “literally one of the very first people to reach out” and welcome him when he joined the Senate in 1987.
“As Will Rogers put it in one of Bob’s favorite sayings, ‘It’s great to be great, but it’s far greater to be human,’” Daschle said.
While many will remember the stories of Dole’s “amazing heroics and his recovery from injury in World War II,” Daschle said, there were also lesser-known stories of how Dole faced the world with humor, humanity and humility.
“Few know the Bob Dole who called a Florida dentist in 1993 to encourage him after losing his right arm and help him find a specialist to get a prosthetic arm,” Daschle said.
Dole, Daschle added, “taught me a lot when I became Senate leader, but the teaching didn’t end when I left the Senate.”
“When I lost my election in 2004, once again, Bob was one of the very first to offer me his guidance and his support,” he said. “He helped me find a speakers bureau. He encouraged me to join him at his law firm. That’s a decision I never regretted, in part because it gave me the opportunity to spend a lot more time with him.”
Former senator Pat Roberts credits Dole with making World War II Memorial possible
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Former senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) credited Dole with making the World War II Memorial a possibility.
“Without Bob Dole, there would not be a World War II Memorial,” the former lawmaker said Friday at Dole’s memorial service. “And again, with Bob’s help, we dedicated the Eisenhower Memorial.”
“Last year, Bob Dole understood that it was just not recognition that this greatest generation deserved,” Roberts added. “It was reflection and renewal, and it was for the greatest generation to inspire the next generation.”
After the World War II Memorial opened in 2004, Dole visited two or three times a week each summer, at times greeting other aging veterans and at other moments quietly standing by during their pilgrimages. Dole served under Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fellow Kansan, in World War II. A memorial honoring the former president is not far from the World War II Memorial.
Roberts called Dole Kansas’s “favorite son” and noted how the state shaped the late lawmaker’s worldview. In particular, the small-town values of his native Russell permeated the way in which he saw the world.
“Whether we were in Topeka, Abilene, Wichita or Dodge City, I saw Bob Dole connect with Kansans always on a personal level,” the former lawmaker said. “He would share with them this vision, this promise, and he would help them.”
Biden: ‘As long as we see each other not as enemies. ... Bob will be with us’
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As he finished eulogizing Dole, Biden urged Americans to live like his old friend did.
“As long as we see each other not as enemies, but as neighbors and colleagues, as long as we remember that we’re here not to tear down, but to build up. … As long as we remember that, Bob will be with us, always cracking a joke,” Biden said.
“Bob has taken his final journey,” the president added. “He’s sitting back now watching us. Now, it’s our job to start standing up for what’s right for America.”
“I salute you, my friend,” Biden concluded. “Your nation salutes you.”
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‘God, what courage Bob Dole had,’ Biden says
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Biden eulogized Dole as a man of courage, a “proud Republican” and a “master of the Senate” who “lived by a code of honor, and he meant it.”
In recounting Dole’s time in World War II, during which he was gravely injured, Biden said the late senator was “trying to help a fallen comrade” when enemy fire “shattered his body.”
“Bob would pass in and out of consciousness, dreaming of home as he lay bleeding in the foxhole for nearly nine hours,” Biden said. Dole, he said, went on to become a congressman, a senator, husband, father and colleague.
“A genuine hero, Bob Dole,” Biden said.
“Elizabeth, it’s been said that memory is the power to gather roses in winter,” Biden said to Dole’s widow. “Bob left you with 45 years’ worth of roses.”
Of their years spent in the Senate together, Biden said he and Dole “disagreed, but we were never disagreeable with one another.”
“He could be partisan, and that was fine,” Biden said. “Americans have been partisan since Jefferson and Hamilton squared off in George Washington’s Cabinet. But like them, Bob Dole was a patriot.”
“As Bob Dole himself wrote at the end of his life, and I quote him, ‘I cannot pretend that I have not been a loyal champion of my party, but I’ve always served my country best when I did so first and foremost, as an American,’ ” Biden added.
“God, I loved the guy,” the president said.
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‘Bob Dole was one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation,’ Washington National Cathedral dean says
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Washington National Cathedral Dean Randolph Hollerith hailed Dole’s life and legacy. He noted that Friday’s memorial comes “only five weeks after saying farewell to another icon in our nation, Colin Powell.”
“Bob Dole was one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation, a patriot who always placed country above partisanship,” Hollerith said. He added: “This, then, isn’t goodbye, because in God’s story, death never has the last word.”
Elizabeth Dole arrives at Washington National Cathedral, where many well-known figures wait
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The limousine carrying Elizabeth Dole, the widow of Bob Dole, pulled up to Washington National Cathedral, where she witnessed a brief arrival ceremony for his casket.
Inside the cathedral, many well-known figures in Washington were awaiting the start of the service, including former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Mike Pence. Pence shook hands with numerous others at the service ahead of its start.
Many current senators were also on hand, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who could be seen engaging in a spirited discussion before the arrival of Dole’s casket.
Congressional leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), soon arrived, taking seats in the same row.
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Tom Hanks, who has starred in several World War II movies, will honor Dole, a veteran of that war
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Tom Hanks is Hollywood’s go-to star for World War II movies, starring most famously in Steven Spielberg’s 1998 “Saving Private Ryan,” in which he played Capt. John Miller, tasked with rescuing a young soldier during the invasion of Normandy. The film, dubbed “the greatest war movie ever made” by The Washington Post, is among Hanks’s best.
Its story, in some ways, echoes Dole’s own. As a young officer in the war, Dole was injured in Italy during one of its last battles after a German shell shattered his shoulder and part of his spine. He waited for hours to be rescued, he later wrote in a memoir, lying flat on the ground in the rain, thinking about Kansas.
“It was like watching a movie of my entire life,” he wrote. Eventually, Dole was rescued and taken to a hospital, where weeks later he heard the war was over.
Most recently, Hanks starred in “Greyhound,” another World War II film, this time taking the role of a Navy captain leading a ship convoy to England. Hanks adapted the story from the novel “The Good Shepherd” by C.S. Forester, which is loosely based on actual events during the Battle of the Atlantic. The film was released in July of last year on Apple TV Plus, four months after Hanks became one of the first celebrities to contract covid-19.
“We didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to mirror the theme and the action of the movie,” Hanks told the Associated Press of that film. “This is just about yesterday, today and tomorrow.”
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Dole’s casket departs the Capitol en route to Washington National Cathedral
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Shortly after 10 a.m., Dole’s flag-draped casket was carried down the steps of the Capitol, where his body had been lying in state since Thursday, and placed in a waiting hearse.
The top four congressional leaders — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — observed the departure ceremony.
Former senator Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), Bob Dole’s widow, was escorted to a limousine that was part of the procession departing the Capitol.
The casket is now en route to Washington National Cathedral for a memorial service at which Biden, among others, are scheduled speak.
8:30 a.m.
Paul Kane: Dole’s humor often hit the mark — Bob Dole’s humor was dry, but it was also wickedly funny, often because his jokes spoke to a greater truth.Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in his tribute to Dole during Thursday’s service in the Capitol Rotunda, nodded to one of his most legendary gibes, one that sticks to this day.“Bob Dole and I never worked together in the Senate, but I was not spared from his famous ribbing. Don’t worry, Bob, it’s safe to be between me and the cameras today,” Schumer said Thursday.That referred to Dole’s remark back in 1995, in an interview with the Associated Press, taking a shot at the very ambitious member of the House representing Brooklyn at the time.“The most dangerous place is between him and a camera,” Dole said of Schumer.Like so many Dole digs, this one stuck. In 2015, Emily Heil of The Washington Post did some research and discovered at least 234 mentions of the phrase “most dangerous place” in proximity to “Schumer” in a search of Nexis’s records of news stories.Paul Kane, Senior congressional correspondent and columnist
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