Posted on 12/06/2021 8:06:35 AM PST by Rummyfan
Bob Dole was a happy undergrad at the University of Kansas in 1942. “He didn’t want to go to war,” Richard Ben Cramer writes in chapter 5 of What It Takes: The Way to the White House, his doorstop “masterpiece” (as Jonathan Martin called it when Cramer died in 2013). Dole was happily “fooling around” on campus and at his fraternity, pursuing his studies, going out for football, baseball, and track. When he heard the footsteps of the draft board after him, however, he enlisted in the Army.
By the spring of 1944 he had risen to the rank of corporal and applied for officer training. He spent 90 days in Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning. He emerged just in time to fill a slot leading the Second Platoon in I Company of the 85th Mountain Regiment. Our troops were fighting it out with the Nazis in the brutal battle to take Italy, where Hitler had ordered “his generals there to fight to the last drop of blood.”
Dole was horribly wounded on April 14, 1945, as I Company sought to take Hill 913 in their zone when they ran into intense enemy fire raking a clearing they had to cross. Cramer provides a harrowing account of Dole’s injuries and recovery. Dole was on the verge of death when the Army asked his family’s permission to treat him with an experimental drug. “The Army had the only supply,” Cramer writes, “a thirty day dose for three patients.” Dole would be the third patient to take it.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
Awesome man.
I read the article, but what was the experimental drug they gave to him?
streptomycin
thank you
“Army asked his family’s permission to treat him with an experimental drug.”
Amazing isnt it? They ASKED his FAMILY.
Now days it is, YOU WILL TAKE THIS OR ELSE.
Should read about what he went through when he was wounded.
Streptomycin....
Kind of like Ivermectin only not as good.
God bless you, Bob Dole.
I shook his hand at the Republican National Convention in 1976, right after he was nominated for VP. He had to use his left hand because of what had happened in Italy—which, incidentally, occurred only two weeks before the war in Italy ended.
3-4 years ago we were at the WWII Memorial in DC to honor heroes from an Honor Flight and welcome them to their memorial.
As we left, Bob Dole was waiting outside to meet his brothers. I wanted to meet him but it was their day and not mine so I backed off.
He was the first politician I know promoting Viagra.
I don’t know if this was true or not but the story I heard was that one of his men got hit and was in an exposed position. Lt. Dole ran out to drag him back to safety when a sniper’s bullet cut him down, nearly killed him and left him without much use of his right arm for the rest of his life.
The father of a high school classmate of mine was on that Honor Flight to Washington. He was raised in Russell, Kansas and was a classmate of Dole’s. My classmate posted a picture of Dole meeting his old buddy.
When Dole was first in the Senate he was a fiery advocate and firmly supported Nixon, who the Dems hated. So, they hated Dole, too. Bear that in mind as you read the accolades from those hypocrites.
Also keep in mind that Dole was a Trump supporter.
Good point.
Ex-Governor Bill Avery was Dole’s 1968 Senate primary opponent.
They don’t make them like that anymore.
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