By Bob McDonald

Twelve years ago today, the United States Senate confirmed me as the eighth secretary of Veterans Affairs. The vote was 97 to 0, a rare moment of full agreement in a city that rarely agrees on anything. I have always taken meaning from that date, because July 29 belongs as well to someone who spent a lifetime turning disagreement into shared purpose. Today, Elizabeth Dole turns 90.

Long before I had the honor of knowing her, Senator Dole had already redefined what public service could look like. She was the first woman to serve as secretary of Transportation, which also made her the first woman to lead a branch of the armed forces, the Coast Guard. Her push for seat belts, air bags and a drinking age of 21 is credited with saving nearly 500,000 lives. She later led the Department of Labor, holding Cabinet posts under two presidents, and there she made workplaces safer and fought to protect young workers. She was the first woman North Carolina elected to the Senate. And she was the first woman to lead the American Red Cross since Clara Barton founded it, where she overhauled how the nation’s blood supply is collected, tested and distributed to make it safer to give and to receive. Any one of these would define a career. She treated each as a place to begin.

But the firsts are not what I admire most. What sets Senator Dole apart is how she carried them. She never mistook the person across the table for an enemy. She looked for what she shared with them and built from there. She was proof that civility is not weakness and that kindness is not the opposite of results; often it is the shortest path to them.

I watched that conviction take its most personal form after her husband, former Senator Bob Dole, spent 11 months recovering at Walter Reed. Sitting beside him, she noticed the others in those hallways: the spouses, parents and children managing medications and battling bureaucracies with no title and no support. In 2012 she founded the Elizabeth Dole Foundation to bring them into the light and gave them a name, Hidden Heroes. Today 14.3 million Americans care for a wounded, ill or injured service member or veteran, and because of her, caregivers who were once invisible are now seen by policymakers, employers, health care systems and communities.

When I led the VA, I watched her turn that recognition into policy the way she did everything, by refusing to let a good idea belong to only one party. Her patience was rewarded last year, when the bipartisan Dole Act was signed into law. It raised the VA’s share of home care costs from 65 percent to 100 percent, expanded mental health support for family caregivers and stands as the most significant veterans law in decades. It bears her name because it was built by her method: find the common ground, then do the work.

We could use more of that method now. Our country is not short on conviction. What we too often forget is how much more we have in common than what divides us. Elizabeth Dole never has. She believes our best days are still ahead, but only if we are willing to sit down with one another, speak constructively and, above all, listen to the other side well enough to understand where it is coming from. That is how a nation does right by the people who sacrifice for it, and how it moves forward.

That is the example Washington needs most, and so do the voters who send people here. Elizabeth Dole has shown that you can hold firm convictions and still treat those who disagree with you as fellow Americans, not obstacles. If this city and this country follow her lead, sitting down, speaking plainly and listening closely, there is little we cannot accomplish together. After decades of that example, the least the rest of us can do is live up to it.