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 and 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 they 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. Dole saw his opening.

There was a bitter 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.

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 claimed 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. Democrats in Kansas immediately labeled him a reactionary. 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 reelected 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, 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.

On August 20th, 1976 the new ticket of Gerald Ford and Bob Dole made their first campaign stop in Dole’s hometown of Russell, Kansas. It was the night before the two were nominated at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

It was also Bob Dole Day in Russell, 95 degrees with a 20-mile-an-hour wind that can make the plains feel like a convection oven. Still, a thousand people showed up to hear Dole and see Ford. Dole choked up as he spoke to the same people who helped pay for his rehab after wounds suffered on hill 914 in Italy during World War II. A “tearful homecoming” the Parsons Sun called it.

Everyone knew Ford picked a partisan running mate; Dole had been attacking Democrats since entering the House in 1961. But it was on October 15th, during the vice presidential debate, when he earned a nickname that would stick with him forever.

Dole called World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam “Democratic” wars. Jimmy Carter’s running mate, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale responded coolly, "Senator Dole has richly earned his reputation as a hatchet man.” Time Magazine said it was number one on its top ten list of veep debate moments. Two weeks later Carter and Mondale would beat Ford and Dole 50 to 48 percent.

Dole went right back to work on hunger, a deep passion for him. In the summer of 1977, the cash requirement for food stamps was eliminated as Dole worked with his long-time collaborator on hunger, Senator George McGovern, a Democrat from South Dakota.

Dole briefly flirted with a presidential run in 1980. But, in the year of Ronald Reagan, it didn’t last long. He was reelected that year with 64 percent of the vote, beating Republican-turned-Democrat John Simpson from Salina. Dole carried all 105 counties.

The GOP captured the Senate with Reagan at the top of the ticket and Dole became finance chairman and helped pass much of Reagan’s economic programs. Then Dole was elected Senate majority leader and became even a bigger deal.

He was headed toward another national campaign.

After losing as Gerald Ford’s 1976 vice presidential running mate, Dole made another run for the White House in 1988. It was a crowded GOP field that included Ronald Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush.

The campaign started well enough with Dole winning in Iowa. But Bush started running ads in New Hampshire saying Dole helped raise taxes, and he won the primary.

On TV that night, Dole ended up in the same segment with Bush and, when asked what message he had for the vice president, Dole snarled into the camera that Bush should “stop lying about my record.” Dole was done after Bush swept the south.

So Dole went back to the Senate. In 1990, he once again had a decision to make on civil rights. He voted against a civil rights bill, saying it did nothing but impose hiring quotas on American employers. Ten Republicans joined all the senate Democrats to pass the bill. Dole was joined by his Kansas colleague Nancy Kassabaum in opposition. The legislation was vetoed by President Bush and an override failed.

Dole was again easily reelected in 1992, beating Gloria O’Dell whose campaign slogan was “Gloria versus Goliath.” Dole won with 63 percent of the vote. Also elected that year, Bill Clinton as president. The national media dubbed Dole Dr. Gridlock and Dr. No.

All of this would set up the final campaign for the Man from Russell. On August 15th, 1996 in San Diego, California Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president. He dreamed and strived for this moment since he entered politics in 1950.

A CNN poll around Labor Day had Bill Clinton with 55 percent, Dole with 32 percent and Ross Perot, running as the Reform Party nominee, with six percent. On November 5th, 1996 Bill Clinton was reelected with 49 percent of the vote to Dole’s 41 percent and Perot’s eight percent. The New York Times called Dole’s campaign one of the most ineffectual in recent memory.

So what is Dole’s legacy? That’s in our last episode.

On November 8th, 1996 just three days after Bob Dole got pasted by Bill Clinton for president, he walked on stage at the Late Show with David Letterman to a standing ovation. There has never been a politician just as comfortable and formidable marking up legislation as they are on late night TV. He joked that he was making $200 for the appearance and it was the first work he’d had in sometime. While staff and reporters knew Dole was a very funny man, it was a side voters rarely saw.

After politics, Dole would do commercials for Viagra and Visa and those close to him would applaud his new found freedom to be funny. But Dole’s legacy is complicated, some would say tainted, by his endorsement, twice, of Donald Trump for president.

So how do I, a native Kansan who is quite partial to his home state, feel about Bob Dole, a politician who I covered and, in all honesty, voted for a couple of times? You can’t help but be proud of a small-town guy who rose to the top of the political world and accomplished so much.

You have to admire his actions as a platoon leader on Hill 914 in Italy, actions that grievously wounded a young man who as an older man would remember his struggles as he helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.

But I’m left to struggle with Dole's endorsement of Donald Trump. During election time, it’s clear the partisan politician ruled and the statesman took a back seat. Maybe nobody could have seen all of this turmoil coming. Or maybe it was just Dole being Dole. He joined the Republican team in 1950 and if that meant backing Nixon, Trump or whoever, well, that was Dole’s version of loyalty.

All I know for sure is that it’s very, very complicated.

KMBC radio was headquartered atop the swanky Pickwick Hotel in downtown Kansas City. The Pickwick was the place to stay for men doing business with the city and county. It was a favorite of Harry Truman when he was Presiding Judge of Jackson County. And while there were probably plenty of deals made by men in smoke-filled rooms, at KMBC they were thinking about and celebrating, women.

We kick off this season of Archiver on February 8th, 1941 at the Ivanhoe Temple in Kansas City. The Ivanhoe was home to much of the city’s musical talent but on Saturday nights it was home to the Brush Creek Follies which originated on KMBC in Kansas City.