Kansans, don’t miss this one. Bob Dole’s new memoir tells of a time and place familiar to many Kansas families. His first-person narrative of his early years during the Depression and the dust bowl days of Russell, Kansas, is at once our own collective story and also the story of a remarkable Kansas family whose integrity, determination, hard work, and generous ambition produced a great politician who has been a friend and an inspiration to many of us.

Having heard Dole was a good athlete, renowned basketball coach Phog Allen visited him at his first job at Dawson’s Drug Store to encourage him to attend the University of Kansas. Following that invitation, Dole went off to KU, where he joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity. The mood of the Kappa house and the nation was increasingly anxious, and Dole's college days were cut short after two delightful and fulfilling years; dreams of medical school were replaced by uncertainty as the twenty-year-old Dole, like many of his fraternity brothers, headed for service in World War II.

Most of us know about the successful move up through the military hierarchy placed Dole in the mountains of Italy, where he led troops into battle against the Germans and received critical injuries. His doctors offered no hope, but Dole defied their expectations to regain the use of his limbs through determination, faith, and grueling physical therapy. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Senator Dole’s sister had preserved hundreds of letters written back and forth between him and his parents during his college and war years. Incorporating those letters, his new book gains immediacy, attests to the intensely close relationship he shared with his parents in Kansas, and demonstrates how his formative years in Russell molded his character to lasting effect.

Dole reflects on his experiences so that we may learn what a young soldier might experience in any war. Visiting the bedside of a young man wounded in Iraq, he identifies with the perils of the man's situation, reflecting on how his faith helped him survive his own injuries:

“In the end, what gets people through a physical or emotional crisis is not new technology or medication. Those things can help, of course. But it’s faith that gives you the strength to endure —faith that won’t allow you to give up; faith that manifests itself in a ferocious determination to take the next step — the one that everyone else says is impossible.”

One Soldier’s Story is a book for generations and a testament to the
sustaining powers of courage, faith, and care packages of cookies and fudge from a Kansas home.

Review by Sarah Bagby, April 21, 2005
 

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