Sen. Bob Dole had just lost the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton, a pummeling the Kansan and World War II veteran saw coming long before the Tuesday result made it official.
Dole’s speechwriter knew there was one line that had to remain in the Republican nominee’s concession speech despite his objections. So, Kerry Tymchuk, the longtime political staffer who’d worked as Dole’s speech writer while he was the Senate Majority Leader and on the campaign trail, defied his boss for the first time.
“What’s he going to do, fire me?” Tymchuk thought before reinserting a crossed-out anecdote about what Dole would do after the bruising defeat that ended his presidential dreams. The line recalled an answer Dole had given to a reporter in 1951 after entering political life in Kansas.
“I’m going to sit back and watch for a few days and then I’ll stand up for what I think is right,” the speech reads, citing the 1951 quote. It continued: “And any of you who wonder what my plans may be in the future, I’m going to sit back for a few days, then I’m going to start standing up for what I think is right for America and right for you.”
The lines, Tymchuk said, brought down the partisan crowd of Republicans who turned out to hear Dole’s concession speech.
Dole died Sunday at the age of 98. Tymchuk, Dole’s longtime aide who is now the executive director of the Oregon Historical Society and has kept a professional relationship and friendship with the Dole family, said the line embodied what Dole set out to accomplish after leaving public office.
Dole was the key player in pushing the World War II monument forward, raising the money to put it on the National Mall after being appointed to chair the monument committee by his former rival, Clinton.
Tymchuk described Dole, who was born just before the Great Depression, as “the greatest member of the Greatest Generation.”
Dole was a senator for nearly three decades, chaired the Republican National Convention and ran for president three times. Tymchuk said he’ll remember Dole as “an institutionalist” who believed in making Congress work and getting things done.
He considered President Joe Biden, another Senate stalwart, a close friend. Dole’s proudest legislative accomplishments were bipartisan moves like passing the Americans with Disabilities Act and bailing out Social Security.
Tymchuk had the rare experience of working for both Bob and Elizabeth Dole, his second wife who he married in 1972. She was twice a cabinet secretary and was a one-term Republican senator from North Carolina.
At the end of 1990, Tymchuk was looking for a new gig after working for Elizabeth Dole as her speech writer while she was Secretary of Labor. That’s when Tymchuk got a call from Bob Dole’s office offering him a speech writing position. He subsequently took a call from Elizabeth Dole, who was under the impression Tymchuk would continue to work for her in her new post at the Red Cross, where she worked for years as the international agency’s president.
Tymchuk kept working for Elizabeth Dole on a contract basis while simultaneously working for Bob Dole as a speechwriter and legal counsel.
Tymchuk said he sometimes felt like an intermediary between the Washington power couple, likening his duties at times to a Walkie-talkie in the era before smart phones and instant communication.
“They didn’t go an hour without thinking of each other,” he said, “but they’d go a week without seeing each other.”
In retirement, Dole’s self-deprecating nature and quick wit came to national prominence. He appeared in a Pepsi ad with Britney Spears and was a pitchman for Viagra, the erectile dysfunction pill.
But he also made headlines as the only one of then-five Republican presidential nominees to endorse Donald Trump in 2016.
“He was a party man,” said Tymchuk, who changed his own party registration from Republican to not affiliated at that time.
Tymchuk said Dole’s wit and quick tongue were some of his most memorable qualities as a person and a lawmaker. That could be his best and worst quality. During his 1976 vice presidential campaign alongside Gerald Ford, Dole was roundly criticized as a “hatchet man” for in a debate saying Democrats had started all the wars of the 20th century.
Dole served as the Senate Majority Leader at the same time that Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Tymchuk said his boss wasn’t “particularly a fan” of Gingrich. He recalled one meeting where Dole pointed to a file cabinet and referred to drawer after drawer as Newt’s ideas before pointing to a tiny file before saying it contained “Newt’s good ideas.”
Dole’s personal story of surviving grievous wounds in World War II in the Italian theater are well chronicled, and Tymchuk said the Kansan had to summon “a phenomenal amount of will power” to live and work in such a public life.
Tymchuk recalled Dole’s close relationship with one of his surgeons, Armenian-American Hampar Kelikian, who Dole referred to as a second father and who quickly dispelled the young soldier’s dreams of making a full recovery. “You have to make the most of what you have,” Kelikian told Dole, a story that he’s shared through the years.
In 2001, Dole came to Portland State University to attend the annual Simon Benson award dinner, where he chatted with Tymchuk and a nurse who worked on Marquam Hill treating veterans. Before leaving town, Dole went to the hospital to walk the wards and see the veterans there, something Tymchuk said was always closest to his heart.
Tymchuk last saw the Doles before the pandemic in Washington D.C. Together, they did the customary jaunt from Dole’s residence at the Watergate complex to the World War II memorial, which Dole did every Saturday he could.
This June, Tymchuk worked with Dole for the final time to help him pen an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called “Lessons from a Bipartisan Era.”
Tymchuk said when he thinks back on his former boss and friend he’ll recall “how fortunate we were to have had him.”
— Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen