While Johnathan Yardley, book reviewer for the Washington Post has every right to savage Bob Dole's, "One Soldier's Story" as a book - it appears to me that he went more than a step further so as to be sure and savage the old soldier, as well.
Bob Dole has spent the nearly nine years since his not entirely voluntary retirement from political office busily, even frantically, cashing in. ... He did so many commercials it was difficult to keep track: ... the overall impression was of someone turning a public career into a springboard for private gain in ways that brought no credit to that career, or to the many Americans who placed their faith in Dole.
Now he's come forth with a book, the product of many ghostly hands. "One Soldier's Story" is an account of Dole's boyhood in Kansas during the 1920s and the Depression, his service in World War II, the terrible wounds he suffered in combat in the European war's final weeks and his long, hard, determined and courageous recovery. To say that it is a familiar story is understatement; during nearly half a century in politics, Dole and his acolytes told it over and over and over again, not so much ennobling Dole as trivializing a very human and very powerful story. Precisely what is served by telling it once again in book form is difficult to determine.
... In truth, Dole's story can be said to "represent" only the stories of soldiers who were traumatically wounded yet managed, through their own steadfastness and the selfless help of others, to achieve some measure of healing. Dole's phrasing, though, suggests that he is trying to climb aboard the highly lucrative "Greatest Generation" bandwagon, putting himself forth as its emblematic and heroic figure.
What makes this undertaking even harder to accept as anything but another raid on the money tree is that Dole told pretty much the same story (except for some previously unpublished letters he sent home from training camp and the front), in "Unlimited Partners: Our American Story," ...
A man who has spent six decades asking "Why me? Why did it happen?" would have to be a saint to avoid anger and self-pity, and Dole is no saint. Unfortunately, there is evidence of this in the closing pages, in which Dole pats himself on the back for his role in placing the World War II Memorial in the middle of the Mall. With regard to an organization called Save the Mall, which fought hard and fair against the memorial, Dole says: "We already saved it once. . . . We saved it and everything else in World War II."
Not merely is that breathtakingly self-righteous, it also condescends to a group of serious, public-spirited citizens and shows little but contempt for what one would expect a Great Plains conservative to hold dear: the right of Americans to hold and express differing points of view. The ways in which Dole engineered the World War II Memorial did him little credit. Unfortunately the principal effect of the final pages of "One Soldier's Story" is merely to remind us of this, bringing to an unfortunate end a book that would best have gone unwritten.
In my opinion Yardley sums up his entire review with his last five words.
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