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Statement for Dinner Honoring Robert Dole:
Alice Arshalooys Kelikian, New York City, 29 September 1990

Although my father's friendship with Bob Dole began back in 1947, when he first saw the senator as a patient, my own recollections of Dole and my Dad date from 1969. That autumn my parents both went to Dole's hometown of Russell to appear on a "This is your life" rendition of the Congressman's career. I was young at the time, a teenager from Chicago, and North-central Kansas seemed a remote and somewhat foreign place to me. I found it especially difficult to comprehend how an immigrant from western Armenia could have had much of an impact on the life of a legislator from the very heartland of America. But I had never lived through a war, and I had yet to understand the basis of their bond.

My father Hamparzoum Kelikian came to Chicago in 1920. He belonged to a generation of immigrants at home both in America and in the Old Country, but at peace really with neither. Although he often kept his worlds as an orthopedic surgeon and an Armenian patriarch separate, there were times when those two realities would intersect. I suspect one such moment was when my father met Bob Dole, known around our house as "my handsome Captain." Dad recognized in Dole the qualities he liked best about the United States: his new patient personsified the humility, hard work, and determination that my father so associated with the American way of life. But there was more. In this wounded young veteran, my father also saw a bit of his own brother. Dole had fallen victim to an exploding shell on an Italian battlefield not far from where my uncle Siragan had been killed in action. It was the commonality of war, then, that first brought the soldier from Russell and the surgeon from Hadjin together.

Their bond as friends endured, as did Senator Dole's commitment to causes dear to my father's heart. When Dad died in 1983, the Senator eulogized him in Congress. In his statement he said that his doctor had taught him that those who claim to serve the public







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must be healers as well. After the December 1988 earthquake, I remember feeling relieved that my father had at least been spared the sight of his homeland yet again in misery and devastation. But of course his absence also meant that my father did not witness Bob and Elizabeth visiting Leninakan and Spitak. He never saw them trying to get American aid for Armenian relief. He died before the Senate debate on commemorating the start of the genocide. How touched my father would have been to realize that his friend from Kansas considered Armenians throughout the world as part of his community. How pleased my father would have been to know that the Senator attempted to set straight the historical record on the atrocities suffered under Ottoman rule, during which three of his own sisters were burned in a church. How moved my father would have been to watch his Captain speak on the Senate floor about the deaths and the deportations that were the torment of his soul. On behalf of my mother, my brother Armen, my sister Virginia, but especially on behalf of my father, I thank you Senator for all your efforts on Senate Resolution 212.

Earlier this year I traveled to Armenia around the time of the 75th anniversary of the genocide. A Dutch journalist had arranged to go to the Nakhichevan border with an Armenian Fedayee fighter, and my friend Levon Ter Petrosyan sent me along as well. After visiting the frontier, we had dinner with three other partisans in the Ararat plain. A report came on Armenian television about Resolution 212, and in silence we all watched it. Later, our guide Armen explained that the legislator who had spearheaded the campaign in the United States to commemorate the genocide had had an Armenian physician after the last world war. "Isn't that amazing," he remarked. Yes, I answered, that is amazing. I know I speak for all of my family when I say that I cannot have imagined a more compelling way to have remembered my father. Our debt of gratitude to you Senator is great.

Thank you.