He knows from the Depression how people lost everything, including a neighbor who first shot his own livestock, then himself. He knows how machine-gun bullets can rip through a body, blowing chunks of bone and muscle from his neck, arm, and shoulder. He knows what it's like to be paralyzed, his blood
seeping into the earth, believing his limbs were gone, left for dead — except for a medic who tended to him and marked a bloody M, for morphine, on his forehead.

Nobody, least of all Bob Dole, asked me to be his bodyguard. Yet I feel like throwing myself in front of the speeding train of public opinion, yelling "Wait a minute!"

I worked for Senator Dole in his Wichita, Kansas office from 1974 until
1984 — the last time I had contact with him. One of my duties was to pick him up at the airport whenever he arrived, whether it was in the dead of night or on a holiday weekend. I dreaded
those times. He would arrive from Washington tense as a prairie
rattler. He didn't want to chat. All he wanted was for you to do your
job, and do it right. Foul-ups aggravated Dole. He was a man determined to make every minute count — spurred no doubt by the memories of those bedridden post-war hospital years when he was told that he was dying.

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