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Credit…Ron Edmonds/Associated Press
The Senate chamber was packed when Senator Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas and the majority leader, delivered his farewell address on June 11, 1996. Mr. Dole was leaving to run for president. His colleagues had just named a sunny Capitol balcony in his honor, and his usual dry wit was in rare form.
“I appreciate very much the resolution just passed — will it be in big letters or neon?” he asked as the chamber erupted in laughter. “I know it can’t have any political advertising on it, but to just have the name out there in lights for the next few months might be helpful.”
Across the country in Los Angeles, Mr. Dole’s opponent, President Bill Clinton, was already hitting the campaign trail. He urged an audience to wish the departing senator well, saying, “I think we ought to give him a hand.” The New York Times described it as “a rare moment of truce.”
Rare though it may have been, those were surely different times in Washington. As lawmakers and President Biden, himself a former senator, gathered in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday to bid a final farewell to Mr. Dole, they were honoring a man whom they regarded as decent and thoughtful — but who also left a lasting imprint on the Capitol by working across the aisle.
Mr. Dole walked the halls of Congress for 35 years — eight as a House member and 27 as a senator — earning a reputation as a deal-maker and an institutionalist who guarded the Senate’s traditions. He was partisan; he endorsed Donald J. Trump when Mr. Trump locked up the Republican nomination for president in 2016, and he called for the party to unite around the future president.
But during his tenure in Washington, Mr. Dole was also a legislator in the truest sense, and he left behind a body of work that affects the lives of ordinary Americans to this day.
He partnered with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, to rescue Social Security in 1983. At the time, Mr. Moynihan later recalled, others “were talking about scrapping the system, making it voluntary or welfare-based.”
In 1990, Mr. Dole, working closely with Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, helped push through the Americans With Disabilities Act, the landmark law that, among other things, required public buildings to be made accessible to people with disabilities. Mr. Dole, who was grievously injured during World War II, lived with a disability himself; he lost the use of his right hand and had limited use of his left hand.
Given that Mr. Dole was from Kansas, farmers knew that they could count on him. But his understanding of agriculture — and his experience as a child of the Great Depression — led him to reach past the needs of farmers and address the crisis of hunger in America.
Together with Senator George S. McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat who was one of the Senate’s most liberal members, Mr. Dole revamped the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps. He also helped expand the school lunch program and create a program aimed at improving the nutrition of low-income women and their young children.
Today, more than 30 million children in the United States are fed by the school lunch program, according to the World Food Program USA, a nonprofit. On Veterans Day, just weeks before Mr. Dole died, the group honored him as one of “History’s Hunger Heroes.”
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who served with Mr. Dole, summed up his colleague in a single sentence: “He looked for ways to get things to work, and he sought out people on both sides of the aisle to try to get things to work.”
On the day Mr. Dole left the Senate in 1996, Democrats joined in the long tribute to him. “He will cast a long shadow as he goes,” said Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.
