Rep. Dole Triumphs Over His War Ordeal

Wins House Election with Truman'Aiď'

BY WILLARD EDWARDS 
[Chicago Tribune Press Service] 

Washington, March 21- When Harry Truman went to Hutchinson, Kas., in October, 1962, Democrats of western Kansas hailed his arrival, and Republicans awaited his intervention in a hot congressional election with some apprehension.

When the former President left, the roles were reversed. Democrats were speeding his departure, hopeful that he would never return, and Republicans were pleading with him to stay.

"Please stick around for just one more day," Truman was begged by Rep. Robert Dole, the Republican candidate for Congress. His Democratic opponent, Rep. Floyd Breeding, was voicing that old political complaint:

Truman in True Form 

"I can defend myself against enemies, but God protect me from my friends."
"Give 'em Hell" Harry had been in sparkling form. He emphasized two points which sank deep into the consciousness of the 550,000 inhabitants of the first congressional district of Kansas.
"A vote for Breeding is a vote for the Kennedy administration program," he said.

Elaborates on Theme

There was no happier listener than Dole, the G. O. P. candidate, who had made this the major theme of his attack upon Breeding. For the remainder of the campaign, he was equipped to remark, "Don't take my word for it, Harry Truman says so."
Truman, who had once char-

[headshot of Bob Dole]
Rep. Dole

acterized farmers, who voted Republican, as "damn fools," elaborated on this theme in his support of the Democratic candidate. In a speech regretting that farmers thru the years had shown a lack of appreciation for federal paternalism costing billions of dollars, he wound up with this indictment:

"American farmers are the most ungrateful people in the world!"

When the campaign had started, Dole, the Republican, a freshman congressman, had been considered the underdog in the race with Breeding, the Democrat, a three-term incumbent. In the November election, ingratitude triumphed. Dole received 102,499 votes to 81,092 for Breeding.

Larger Than New York

The two congressmen had been thrown into conflict because Kansas lost a seat in the House as a result of reapportionment based on the 1960 census. In reducing six congressional districts to five, two combined to produce one giant western Kansas district, occupying more than 60 per cent of the state.

Dole now is the sole congressional representative of a 49,668-square-mile area in the geographic center of the United States. It is larger than the state of New York, which sends
41 representatives to Congress. Its rolling plains, where vast buffalo herds once roamed, produce one-eighth of the nation's wheat crop. Its 58 counties contain no great cities [Salina, the largest, has a population of 42,000], but western Kansas is witnessing a remarkable industrial growth in recent years, based upon huge underground stores of gas and oil.

Bob Dole, the spokesman for this vast expanse in the heartland of America, has been graduated, during his less than four years in the House, to the top ranks of a young Republican group which is revitalizing the minority party. He is tabbed by Rep. Charles A. Halleck, [Ind.], the G. O. P. leader, as a "comer."

He is 40 years old, of athletic build [6 feet, 1 inch; 182 pounds] a man of smiles and a quick wit who looks as if he had never had a care in the world. He has one unusual habit. As if by chance, when greeting visitors, he has a paper or some. thing else in his right hand, so he shakes hands with his left.

Heritage from Ordeal

The right arm and hand is a surgeon's product of transplanted bone and muscle. It is Dole's heritage from a hospital ordeal which lasted 39 months. He was encased in a plaster cast from knees to ears, both arms and both legs paralyzed, his neck veterbrae fractured and his spinal cord damaged. Physicians didn't think he would live, far less walk again.
The miracle of his almost complete physical recovery is only part of a story which is a testimonial to the survival of the human spirit under adversity.

He was a small town boy, born in 1923 in Russell, Kas., then a village of 3,000 of typical Kansas stock, pioneers from Ohio and Indiana, who had come west in the 1880's to wrest a living from the virgin soil. His father operated "a cream and egg station," and he worked, played, went to school, dreamed of becoming a football or basketball star. He also envisioned a career as a country doctor.

Waits on Tables

He was attending the University of Kansas as a pre-medical student, waiting on tables to help pay his way, earning his freshman numerals in basketball, football, and track, when the war came along to destroy his dreams as it did those of countless others. There was no false heroism about his enlistment ["The draft would have got me"].
After preliminary training in

[headshot of Hampar Kelikian]
Dr. Kelikian

the medical corps, he was selected as officer material. In December, 1944, he found himself in Italy as a second lieutenant and platoon leader with the 10th Mountain division. The push across the Po valley was about to begin.

His first wound on patrol, a grenade sliver in his leg, was "one of those things where they give you mercurochrome and a purple heart," but, a few days later, high explosive shell fragments riddled his body and left him lying for hours on the battlefield.

"It was sort of a long day," he recalled. He was 21 years old at the time.

Give Up Hope

There followed 39 months in hospitals in Italy, Africa, Florida, Kansas, and eventually Percy Jones General hospital, Battle Creek, Mich. It was there that a pretty young brunette from Concord, N. H., named Phyllis Holden became interested in him. She was a registered occupational therapist on the hospital staff, and when she inquired about Dole's chances, doctors told her he could not possibly live.

This medical verdict seemed sound when Dole, wasted down to 122 pounds from an original 194, still paralyzed in all limbs, developed blood clots in his lungs. He became a guinea pig for streptomyecin, then the newest wonder drug, one of four patients in the country receiving the medicine on a trial basis. It worked.

As Dole fought his way back, from bed to wheel chair to tentative first steps, he was assisted in the battle by the girl from Concord.

Uses Sense of Humor

"You get the impression, when you're paralyzed and immersed in plaster, that the other sex can't possibly be interested in you as a man," remarked Dole, with a grin. "But she seemed interested in me as a human being more than as some poor soul. I got over a feeling of being rather sorry for
myself thru her and also by seeing the plight of much worse cases than myself in the hospital.
"I was always something of a comedian as a kid, and I developed a sense of humor in that hospital. After a while, they were shifting me to wards where morale was low."

But he was still not a whole man. The army gave him a second purple heart, a bronze star with cluster for heroic achievement, and "a bedpan promotion" to captain, but it could not provide the specialized surgery needed to give him back his right arm.
"I heard of a Dr. H. Kelikian in Chicago who could perform miracles, and I was looking for a miracle," Dole said. "I still had ideas of playing football and basketball when I returned to college. I went to see him."

Has Place of Honor

A photograph of Dr. Kelikian hangs in a place of honor on Dole's congressional office wall. The physician, in a series of operations in Wesley hospital, Chicago, transplanted bone and muscle from the patient's leg to his shoulder and arm, wielded a magical scalpel on hand and fingers. The muscular right-hand handclasp, so important to politicians, still is beyond Dole's capacity, but that is virtually his only handicap.

"He wouldn't take a dime from me," Dole said of the physician. "He had lost a brother in the war. A tremendous man-a real character. You ought to be writing about him, not me."
In June, 1948, one month before his discharge from the army, Dole married the girl he had met in the hospital. He was not completely recovered ["If I had to stand too long, my legs began to tremble"]. But the ceremony was enlivened by a wire from Dr. Kelikian: "Hope that arm I fixed will be used lovingly."

He was 25 years old when he and his bride faced the task of reëntering civilian life, completing his education, and choosing a career.

Enters Law School

The medical profession was beyond him now. After a year at the University of Arizona, he transferred to Washburn university in Topeka, where he decided to study for a law degree. He could not take notes, but with the aid of a wire recorder in classes he was enabled to transcribe the recordings laboriously, with his left hand, at night. When he eventually was graduated, magna cum laude, in 1952, he had passed his examinations by dictating the answers to his wife, who sat beside him. She also helped him pay his way by working at the Topeka State hospital.

While still in law school, an interest in politics seized him, and at 26 he was elected to the Kansas legislature, the youngest member ever sent to that body from Russell county. After graduation from law school, he ran for county attorney and was elected to four successive two-year terms. The salary was $248 a month, a little less than the courthouse janitor's wages, but Dole used the post to establish a reputation and a basis for a political career.

He was ready for bigger things in 1960 when Rep. Wint Smith, a Republican veteran of 14 years in Congress, decided to retire. Politicians applauded his discretion. Smith had squeaked thru to a primary victory in 1958 by 51 votes and had defeated his Democratic opponent in the fall by only 233 votes.

Rival Has Prestige

In the spirited contest for the Republican nomination which followed, Dole defeated an opponent of prestige in the party organization by 987 votes. He went on to beat a Democratic opponent in November by more than 20,000 votes.

His reelection to a second term in 1962 marked his tenth political victory without defeat in primaries and elections.

His voting record is one of stout conservatism. He is against regimenting the farmer with mandatory programs. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman is still smarting from Dole's exposures in the Billie Sol Estes scandal. And as a representative of the largest wheat producing district in America, Dole did not hestitate to oppose wheat sales to Russia, altho Kansas is obviously interested in the sale of wheat.

Questions Terms of Deal

"Why were concessions not exacted from the Russians?" he asked. "Why preferential treatment to an enemy and windfalls to giant grain exporters? Why can't we be given the facts? What is there to hide?

"I would rather give our surpluses to a friend than sell them to an enemy. It is hardly consistent or fair to our children and grandchildren to fight communism with one hand and feed it with the other. I cannot and will not hedge on an issue so vital. The gamble is too greatmuch greater than my political future-for greed will not save the world, the farmer, administration apologists, me, or those seeking the easy way out."