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.
