FILE - Republican presidential candidate Sen. Robert Dole R-Kan., gestures while making a speech in Washington, March 28, 1988. Dole, 98, died Sunday, Dec. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)

Bob Dole always made room for pie — or more accurately always had Lawrence resident Nelson Krueger find room for it.

Krueger, who served as Dole’s Kansas administrative assistant in the 1970s, did many things for the U.S. senator from Kansas, including driving Dole and his new wife, Elizabeth, to 23 wedding receptions throughout the state over a six-day period after their 1975 marriage.

“People who would know Sen. Dole would bring pie to him,” Krueger said Monday as he reminisced about Dole, who died on Sunday at the age of 98. “They would say ‘this is Bob’s favorite cherry pie, or this is his favorite whatever.’ My job was to figure out where to put all this stuff because you could never throw it away.”

That’s one of the key lessons Krueger learned from Dole: Never throw away a personal connection.

“He just had more people skills than anyone I ever met,” Krueger said.

Interviews with several other Lawrence residents who worked for or served under Dole during his 35 years in Congress and his multiple presidential campaigns, echoed that sentiment. Several of them noted the extensive national media coverage Dole’s death received on Sunday, more than 25 years after he left the Senate to lose the 1996 presidential election to Bill Clinton. There’s a reason for that, they said.

“I’m not a historian, but I think I can say he was probably the best legislator of his era,” said Scott Richardson, a Lawrence resident who worked for Dole as a deputy press secretary in the early 1980s. “He really knew how to get legislation passed.”

And he also knew how to do it with a certain style, said Scott Morgan, a Lawrence resident who worked with Dole in many capacities and eventually served as his chief counsel in his 1988 presidential campaign.

“He had a great common decency, and he produced really good copy,” Morgan said of Dole’s knack for gaining national attention. “He was entertaining, and that never hurts when it comes to being remembered.”

Indeed, Richardson said Dole had a sense of comedic timing that professional comedians would be envious of. Plus, he crafted bits — more complex than puns — that often led to the first 20 minutes of many of his traveling speeches coming off a bit like a stand-up routine.

“Then he would go into a serious discussion about legislation and where things stood,” Richardson said. “But the first 20 minutes would be really, really funny.”

That was a Dole dichotomy: He could be funny, but never had a problem being taken seriously.

“He was the smartest person I ever worked for,” Morgan said. “The quickest person I ever worked for, and he didn’t suffer fools very well.”

Multiple staff members said they never heard him utter a swear word, but he could gets his displeasure across in other ways. Krueger tells how he kept a photo that Dole gave him with a signature that said, “Nelson, you are doing a good job.'”

“He was not long on compliments,” Krueger said. “When I got that, man, I framed it.”

But Dole excelled at making connections inside the halls of Congress. Kim Wells, a Lawrence attorney who was a close adviser to Dole during his 1988 run for president and previously was a staff attorney for the senator, said Dole was a master of Congress and would have been a long-serving prime minister, if America had a parliamentary system of government, like that of Britain or others where the national leader is voted on by fellow lawmakers.

Of course, Dole did pretty well with Kansas voters too. He never lost an election in Kansas, dating all the way back to a 1950 contest for a seat in the Kansas Legislature. After a close 1974 race for U.S. Senate, where he won his first term by fewer than 14,000 votes, he won every election with more than 60% of the vote.

He put those people skills to use by helping Kansans get what they wanted from the federal government.

“No offense to the rest of the Kansas delegation, he got more done for Kansas than anybody else combined while he was doing ‘Meet the Press’ every other week,” Wells said.

Sometimes, those projects didn’t get much public attention. Krueger remembers one project he worked on for Dole involved a sterile Simmental bull. A Eureka rancher had spent good money buying a prized pure-bred bull from Canada only to find out it was sterile. He didn’t want his money back, but wanted another bull instead. But trade quotas at the time didn’t permit any more Canadian bulls to enter the country. Krueger worked on the project for weeks because Dole was smart enough to know a sterile bull can be a big issue in certain parts of Kansas.

The project reached its conclusion by Dole making a call to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, suggesting that he join Dole for a Fourth of July media event at the Montana/Canadian border, where the rancher was trying to take delivery of the bull.

“The secretary told the senator, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing on the Fourth of July, but I know it is not that,'” Krueger recalled. “‘Have your guy call my guy.'”

A new, better-performing bull ended up in Kansas, and Krueger — who years later ended up receiving a high-level, presidential appointment in the U.S. Department of Labor in the Reagan administration thanks to knowing Dole — witnessed another important Dole trait.

“He just knew the subtle things that made the pie taste sweeter,” Krueger said.

Both Richardson and Krueger said they recently received phone calls from Dole. Richardson about six weeks ago, and Krueger about three months ago. Both said Dole, dealing with stage 4 lung cancer at that time, was in good spirits and good form.

“He wanted to know the gossip,” Krueger said. “He was right in there pitching. Who is doing this and who is doing that. He still had his sense of humor.”

Krueger now labels his more than 50-minute conversation with Dole as a great gift. It had come after he sent Dole a note he had long meant to send.

“I told him you have hundreds of children you have imprinted as members of your staff,” Krueger said. “We just want to say thank you for taking time to let us grow.”