On Thursday, Bob Dole announced that he has Stage 4 lung cancer. He’s 97 years old. In 1945, he was horribly wounded by German machine gun fire while fighting up the boot of Italy.

As Lee Sandlin describes, when fellow soldiers saw the extent of his injuries, all they thought they could do was to “give him the largest dose of morphine they dared and write an ‘M’ for ‘morphine’ on his forehead in his own blood, so that nobody else who found him would give him a second, fatal dose.”

Dole was transported to the United States, where his recovery was slow, interrupted by blood clots and a life-threatening infection. After large doses of penicillin were not successful, he overcame the infection with the administration of streptomycin, which at the time was still an experimental drug. He remained despondent, “not ready to accept the fact that my life would be changed forever.” He was encouraged to see Hampar Kelikian, an orthopedist in Chicago who had been working with veterans returning from war. Although during their first meeting Kelikian told Dole that he would never be able to recover fully, the encounter changed Dole’s outlook on life, who years later wrote of Kelikian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, “Kelikian inspired me to focus on what I had left and what I could do with it, rather than complaining what had been lost.” Dr. K, as Dole later came to affectionately call him, operated on him seven times, free of charge, and had, in Dole’s words, “an impact on my life second only to my family.”

Dole never fully overcame his bitterness at being disfigured, but he definitely lived a full life. Married twice, he and his first wife had a daughter in 1954. He spent 36 years in Congress, serving eight years in the House and 28 in the Senate. Along the way, he was Gerald Ford’s running mate in the 1976 presidential election, a serious candidate for president in 1988, and the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. From 1985 to 1987, he was the Senate Majority Leader and served in that role again in 1995-96 before resigning to focus on his campaign against Bill Clinton.

For the last 23 years of his Senate career he served with Joe Biden. Of course, they were in different parties and on the opposite side of most political debates. Dole didn’t support the Obama-Biden ticket in either 2008 or 2012, and was alone among former presidents and presidential contenders in endorsing Donald Trump’s reelection against Biden in 2020.

But Biden didn’t let that history dissuade him from reaching out to Dole when he received news of his advanced illness.

U.S. President Joe Biden visited former Senator Bob Dole on Saturday, the White House said, two days after the Kansas Republican announced that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.

“He’s doing well,” Biden told reporters later on Saturday as he emerged from a church service. Prior to that, Biden paid a visit to the Watergate complex in Washington where the 97-year-old Dole lives.

In fact, the White House described Dole as “a good friend” of the president.

This is a nice illustration of what makes Biden stand out from other politicians. It reminded me that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina once said Biden is “as good a man as God ever created” and “the nicest person I think I’ve ever met in politics.”

It should go without saying that Donald Trump would not take time out of his weekend to talk to a dying Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi. I’d also not that Trump rarely attended church services, and certainly wouldn’t attend a service on Saturday. Biden is an actual practicing Christian, which makes it somewhat perplexing that so many Christians in this country prefer the golfer who only worships himself.

Be that as it may, visiting Dole was a beautiful gesture and a really refreshing break from the relentless toxicity of the partisan political battles in our country. Good leaders can make us better people if they set the right examples. I’ll try to remember this the next time I roll my eyes at Biden’s calls for unity.