Archiver Fountain City Frequency

We start this season of Archiver in 1960 on the streets of Russell, Kansas right there on the plains about half-way between Kansas City and Denver.

It was a railroad town, an oil town but for our purposes, it’s Bob Dole’s town.

His first campaign for federal office featured four girls in homemade skirts called the Bob-O-Links singing on the streets of western Kansas. In between numbers they handed out Dole Pineapple juice.

“The thing that really strikes me about Dole is if you could somehow take the spirit of western Kansas, just kind of collect it up and make a person out of it, you would get Bob Dole,” says Michael Smith, a professor of political science at Emporia State University.

In our first episode we hear about his boyhood days in Russell, the World War II battle in Italy that grievously wounded Dole and how that shaped the rest of his life.

By 1960 Bob Dole had his sights on a much bigger political stage after his one term in the Kansas Legislature and five terms as Russell County attorney. There was a shake-up in the western Kansas political landscape starting in 1954 and by 1960 Dole saw his opening.

There was a bigger three-way fight for the Republican nomination for Congress from western Kansas that year. In the race with Dole was Keith Sebelius, future father-in-law of Kathleen, who would be elected the Democratic governor of Kansas in 2002 and someone who felt he was the heir-apparent.

He would finally win the seat eight years later. And Phillip J. Doyle a farmer and state senator.

Here’s how the Salina Journal described the last debate in its July 31st edition, just three days before the primary: “All played a game of catch with hot bricks as they strived for the electorate’s love, prejudice and votes in Tuesday’s primary.”

Purple prose? Sure. But accurate. Someone started a rumor that Doyle was dropping out before the primary. Sebelius charged Dole was in the pocket of big oil. Dole called the charges a sham. In the end, Dole squeaked by Sibelius by 982 votes.

In the general Dole breezed by his democratic opponent with 60 percent of the vote. Dole entered the House in 1961 with guns blazing. 

When Bob Dole was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives in 1961 it didn’t take the freshman congressman from western Kansas long to attack the Democrats. He opposed almost everything the new Kennedy Administration wanted.

In March, 1961 he voted against extending unemployment benefits and Democrats in Kansas immediately labeled him a reactionary. But he also latched onto a controversy involving a Texas con man called Billy Sol Estes. So big was the scandal that a minor rock star named Jesse Lee Turner even wrote a ballad about Billy Sol.

Here’s how the New York Times led Billy Sol’s obit on May 14th, 2013: “Billie Sol Estes, a fast-talking Texas swindler who made millions, went to prison and captivated America for years with mind-boggling agricultural scams, payoffs to politicians and bizarre tales of covered-up killings and White House conspiracies…was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Granbury, Tex. He died in his sleep and was found in his recliner.”

If you’re an ambitious freshman congressman, who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

Dole also opposed the Peace Corp and after he was reelection in 1962, he opposed federal funding to expand college classrooms. The Salina Journal on August 16th, 1963 labeled him the “Kansas Againster.”

The 1964 election was a disaster for Republicans. Lyndon Johnson crushed Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater with 61% of the vote. Goldwater only carried six states. It was the biggest landslide since Franklin Roosevelt crushed Kansas Gov. Alf Landon in 1936. But, out in western Kansas, Bob Dole was bucking the trend as he sought another term in the House.

Even though he was doing better than most Republicans, Dole was still in a very close race with a relatively unknown Democrat named Bill Bork.

How close was it? So close that Dole barely won his home county of Russell and lost nearby Saline County. In the end, he was reelected 51 to 49 percent, a margin of about five-thousand votes in the 58 county 1st District.

Dole was now a bit of a rising star in the GOP. After surviving the LBJ landslide, he had a lot of agitating to do against Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs. To a group of young Republicans in Wichita he warned LBJ’s plan would make “America the land of plenty, owe plenty, tax plenty and spend plenty.” He called it, the “Great Anxiety.” You can almost hear him saying it on a late night talk show. But he was conflicted by part of the civil rights act of 1966.

While he voted yes on voting rights in 1965 he voted no on fair housing in 1966, suggesting it violated people’s property rights. If the 1964 campaign was a nail bitter for the man from Russell, the 1966 campaign was a cake walk. He beat a woman named Berniece Henkle from Great Bend, the wife of former Kansas Lt. Governor Joseph Henkle, with almost 70 percent of the vote. Now, Dole could seriously think about his next political move.

After Bob Dole’s victory in 1966 many political observers believe he started to move toward the middle.

Hunger became an issue that Dole got deeply involved in. CBS showed the documentary “Hunger in America” on May 21, 1968 and it helped profoundly change how the U-S government dealt with hunger. It would also help solidify Bob Dole’s moderation.

No longer the Kansas Againster, as the Salina Journal called him, but rather he was becoming more of a statesman. President Johnson would dispatch Dole as part of a four-member, bipartisan congressional delegation to India to see what the U.S. could be to mitigate a famine that was killing thousands.

“It’s hard not to give away the Capitol when you see people starving,” Dole told the Wichita Eagle when he returned. But even before his trip to India, Dole had been thinking about hunger.

At the end of 1965 Dole proposed the Bread and Butter Corp, an idea that would send Americans abroad to help developing countries with agriculture. So the man from Russell moved to the middle and got himself elected to the Senate in 1968.

In an editorial after the election, the Topeka Daily Capital said Kansas chose well, that Dole had a winning personality and a devotion to duty. But his next election would be the toughest of Dole’s congressional career.

In his first run for Senate in 1968, Bob Dole had no trouble winning. He crushed Gov. William Avery in the Republican primary with 68% of the vote and in the general election he beat Democrat William I. Robinson with 60%.

It probably didn’t hurt that Tonight Show regular and Kansas City jazz singer Marilyn Maye sang his campaign jingle, a far cry from the Bob-O-Links in Russell. But Dole’s reelection in 1974 with Congressman Bill Roy from Topeka was a political knife fight.

In 1971 President Richard Nixon appointed Dole Republican National Committee chairman. Then there was Watergate, and in the ’74 campaign Democrats wanted to know what Dole knew about the break in. It would dog him the entire campaign. Especially when the national columnist Jack Anderson reported on June 1st that the Dole campaign hired famous Nixon, and later Trump, dirty trickster Roger Stone.

In a statement five days later, the Dole campaign accused Roy of leaking the Stone hiring to Anderson. He said Anderson and a group of liberal writers were engaged in a number of dirty tricks aimed at Senator Dole. Stone was fired.

The polls showed Dole trailing Roy. But it was the Kansas State Fair debate that changed Dole’s fortunes in politics forever. The debate was supposed to focus exclusively on agriculture. But with just a few minutes left, Dole accused Roy, an obstetrician and lawyer, of favoring abortion on demand.

Roy said no such a thing in the debate but the accusation stuck and Dole, barely, was reelected.