Kansas University junior Will Hartenstein greets former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole during an open house at the Dole Institute of Politics in 2014.

For those interested in history and politics, a bounty of information related to former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole and his times in the corridors of power is now just a click away.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, the institute announced Tuesday it has assembled the oral histories of more than 70 people, such as former President George H.W. Bush and Vice President Walter Mondale, talking about Dole.

The material, available online at dolearchives.ku.edu/oralhistory, sweeps through some of the major political decisions of much of the last half of the 20th century.

Many of those interviewed tell about how Dole, a senator from Kansas, had been at the center of producing compromises among varied and seemingly intractable interests.

Bush, who fought a bruising campaign in 1988 against Dole for the Republican Party presidential nomination, then relied on Dole for help in Congress pass the resolution calling for war against Iraq, the Americans with Disability Act, and the 1990 budget agreement with Democrats.

“There’s a great misunderstanding in politics that if you run against somebody, people think you’re going to be enemies. That’s not the case at all,” Bush said in the 2007 interview.

He said Dole was idealistic, had strong convictions, but was also pragmatic. “He wanted to accomplish things in the United States Senate for our country,” he said.

“When Senator Dole was a congressional leader, there was an emphasis on getting work done,” Dole Institute Director Bill Lacy said. “They saved Social Security, passed the ADA and balanced the budget, among other accomplishments, and did so, on a bipartisan basis. The atmosphere of collaboration is a far cry from the partisan gridlock of today’s Congress.” he said.

Dole served in Congress for 36 years and is the longest-serving Republican leader in the history of the Senate. Dole was the 1996 GOP nominee for president and President Gerald Ford’s vice presidential candidate in 1976.

The Oral History Project started in 2002 and was made possible with support from the Andreas Family Foundation.

Full audio, video, indexed and keyword searchable transcripts, as well as audio podcasts, are available online.

The 72 interviews were conducted between 2007-2009 by historians Richard Norton Smith and Brien R. Williams. Smith, the first director of the Dole Institute and former head of six presidential libraries, is currently a scholar-in-residence at George Mason University, Washington, D.C.

Forty-three additional interviews collected between 2002-2004 will be released online at an upcoming date. These interviews document Dole’s private persona and his political evolution.