Dole Institute of Politics: A Kansas Giant's Legacy

Robert Joseph Dole was born in Russell, Kansas, in nineteen twenty-three, grew up in the Dust Bowl Depression, and enlisted after Pearl Harbor. Serving with the Tenth Mountain Division in Italy in nineteen forty-five, he was struck by German machine-gun fire and shrapnel that permanently disabled his right arm. He returned to Kansas, studied law, and began a political career that ran from the Kansas statehouse to the United States Senate, where he served twenty-seven years and led the majority twice.

He was Gerald Ford's running mate in nineteen seventy-six and the Republican presidential nominee in nineteen ninety-six. After that campaign, the University of Kansas approached Dole about housing his papers, and what grew from that conversation became this building: an eleven-million-dollar nonpartisan forum for civic engagement, archives, and political debate, opened in two thousand three on the Lawrence campus.