As he received an award from the World Food Program USA on Wednesday, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kansas, (seated) was surrounded by, from left, Vice President Joe Biden; Hunter Biden, who chairs the WFP USA board; his wife, former Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C.; his daughter Robin, and WFP USA President Richard Leach. (World Food Program USA)

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan., returned to Capitol Hill Wednesday to receive the World Food Program USA’s George McGovern Leadership award for his role in alleviating global hunger. He also learned that the 12-year-old award will be named after him as well as McGovern, the late Democratic senator from South Dakota and his party’s presidential candidate in 1972.

Vice President Joe Biden presented the award to Dole on behalf of WFP USA, a private sector group that works on hunger issues on behalf of the World Food Program, the United Nations agency that distributes food aid, and the State Department Office of Global Food Security.

WFP USA Chairman Hunter Biden noted that since his father was a senator, “I had the great fortune to grow up knowing Sen. Dole as a true hero and leader.”

Vice President Biden noted that McGovern and Dole had provided leadership on hunger issues before there was consensus, but that it was easier for McGovern as a liberal to deal with the issue than for Dole, a conservative.

“Bob, you got the living hell kicked out of you,” Biden said, for wanting to spend money on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children known as WIC.

In his acceptance remarks, Dole acknowledged that McGovern had led him to understand the hunger issue.

“I was a skeptic, but after being with McGovern for about three days I understood we had a real problem in America,” Dole said. He added that after McGovern lost his 1972 presidential campaign, the two of them had worked more on international hunger.

“I considered myself a traditional American conservative and he considered himself a liberal, but we did not talk about politics,” he said, but about girls in Africa not going to school and boys going to school but getting only one meal a day.

Dole also noted, “McGovern and I used to argue about Vietnam all day and then talk about food in the evening.”

While Dole and others recalled that there was more bipartisanship on hunger issues in the past, Dole also recalled that he and McGovern “knew there were budgetary limits” and that the people who testify before congressional committees always want more than Congress can deliver.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also appeared at the ceremony, adding a bicameral as well as bipartisan note to the event.

Dole credited WFP USA President Richard Leach for his leadership, and thanked Marshall Matz, the Washington lawyer who was general counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, for writing many speeches for McGovern and Dole.

Dole also credited former President Bill Clinton with establishing what has become the George McGovern-Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. The program has touched the lives of 22 million children in 41 countries since its inception, and has inspired leaders from both political parties to work together to end world hunger, WFP USA said.

At the ceremony, WFP USA announced the launch of The McGovern-Dole School Meals Fund to target countries where the UN World Food Program has existing school feeding programs and the ability to support needy, local farmers.

“By linking local food with a local school, The McGovern-Dole School Meals Fund enhances a local government’s capacity to assume management of this program over the long-term and provide a ‘double win’ that raises incomes of poor, hungry farm families and feeds children in school,” Leach said in a news release.

• The McGovern-Dole School Meals Fund