Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole (R-Ks) Delivers Remarks at the National Press Club On the 60th Anniversary of the End of Wwii

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Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole (R-Ks) Delivers Remarks at the National Press Club On the 60th Anniversary of the End of Wwii

SENATOR DOLE DELIVERS REMARKS AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF WWII

SEPTEMBER 2, 2005

SPEAKER: FORMER U.S. SENATOR BOB DOLE (R-KS)

[*] DOLE: Well, Dick, thank you very much.

And I'm really proud to be up here with all these heroes at the head table. And how many out in the audience are World War II veterans? I wonder if you'd please stand.

Yes, see, we've got a lot of them around here.

(APPLAUSE)

Well, I've had the honor of being at this club, I think, a couple of times -- maybe three or four times -- and I've always appreciated it very much. And I particularly enjoy the questions part, so I'll try not to speak over the allotted 20 minutes.

And it seems -- I thought this meeting might be postponed or canceled because of the great tragedy in the South, in the Gulf area, but this, too, was a very important date, 60 years after the day the war officially ended.

Now, not many of us -- not even journalists -- can recall with precision where we were on a given day 60 years ago.

Yet for members of my generation, it's almost impossible to forget September 2nd, 1945. On that day, World War II officially ended. And I was preparing for my first extended leave from a different kind of war.

The doctors at Winter General Hospital outside Topeka, Kansas, had given me permission to spend two weeks in my home town of Russell. Five months after I was wounded on a hillside in northern Italy, I was barely ambulatory -- but that wasn't about to prevent my Russell homecoming.

In the meantime, history hadn't stopped for a banged-up second lieutenant. Like their Berlin counterparts, the warlords of Tokyo had finally bowed to the inevitable. And V-J Day meant that peace could return to the Pacific.

And so it came to pass, on a slate gray battleship floating in Tokyo Bay 60 years ago today that victors and vanquished gathered to formalize the end of history's deadliest war.

All eyes and the ears of a global radio audience were fixed on General Douglas MacArthur as he presided over a ceremony devoid of vengeance.

At its conclusion, the general s...

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