Children of Armenia by Michael Bobelian

Author:Michael Bobelian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legislating History

Maybe we can redeem ourselves a bit today by letting the world know that we do not always support the rich and the powerful and those with the most lobbyists. Sometimes we judge right from wrong.

—R OBERT DOLE

Ever since a shell ripped through his right shoulder in Italy during the waning days of World War II, Robert J. Dole was in search of a miracle that would turn him back to the man he was before he nearly lost his life. When he returned home in 1945 barely clinging onto life, doctors resorted to experimentation to try to save his wrecked body. He had shrunk to 122 pounds, lost an infected kidney, and suffered from a meteoric 108.7 degree fever at one point. His right arm hung lifelessly. After the war, the despondency of his spirit exceeded the physical damage suffered by his body. Two years of medical procedures ended in frustration. Dole’s body would never return to its prewar strength. Though still a young man, he was crushed by despair. “I was not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever,” he explained in his memoir. His uncle told him about a pioneer orthopedist in Chicago working with veterans; Dole jumped at the chance. There he met Dr. Hampar Kelikian—whom Dole would come to call “Dr. K”—an Armenian who had arrived in the United States in 1920. 1

At their first meeting, Kelikian sat the injured soldier down and administered what Dole later came to call “the verbal equivalent of a slap in the face.” He would never regain his body. He would never fulfill his ambitions of playing basketball or becoming a surgeon. There would be no miracle. As a man who had lost three sisters at Ottoman hands, Kelikian told Dole to focus not on what he had lost but on what he could do with what he had left. He told Dole to do what he himself had done in rebuilding his life after bearing the unbearable. Over the next seven years, the doctor conducted seven operations on the disabled veteran at no charge in which he managed to give Dole some movement in his right arm and shoulder. Dole never fully recovered—he never got the miracle he so desired—but the interaction became a life-changing event. “He inspired within me a new attitude, a new way of looking at my life, urging me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining about what had been lost,” Dole wrote in a memoir decades later. Kelikian could not give Dole his arm back, but he taught Dole how to empathize with others and he gave the future senator a new start on life, two traits that would carry the Kansas veteran from a small town to great heights. “‘Dr. K’ had an impact on my life second only to my family,” Dole said nearly a half century after meeting the physician. 2

Their relationship continued long after Kelikian finished operating on Dole.

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