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Kerry Remembers Former Senator Eagleton on Senate Floor Today Senator Kerry paid tribute to former Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton today from the Senate floor. Below are his remarks, as prepared. Missouri's own Harry Truman once said that "A politician is a man who understands government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for 10 years." And yet somehow, another son of Missouri, Senator Thomas Eagleton managed to be both a keen master of government and a statesman in his own lifetime, as well as a dear friend to many in this chamber. On Sunday, Tom passed away at age 77. Tom Eagleton was a man who radiated wit, warmth, and a brand of intellectual and moral seriousness that commanded your respect even as he won your affection. A Senator and a statesman, a humanitarian and a humorist, Tom left his indelible mark on the issues that mattered most to him. His proudest accomplishment was an Amendment to cut off funds for America's disastrous bombing of Cambodia. He was also a principal author of the Senate's War Powers Resolution, which sought to dramatically limit the President's ability to commit forces abroad without the consent of Congress. Ever true to his principles, Tom voted against the version reported by the conference committee, which he believed the Executive would ultimately exploit as a 60-day blank check to use armed force. Over President Nixon's veto, without Senator Eagleton's vote, the bill was passed. As usual, his concerns proved only too prescient. Senator Eagleton was a fierce and passionate critic of the Vietnam War and worked tirelessly to end that conflict. In a 1971 statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just three weeks after my own testimony there, he made an argument that resonates as clearly today as it did then: he spoke of the need to set a firm deadline for withdrawal. In an essay he wrote entitled "Whose Power is War Power," he quoted Justice Joseph Story: "In a republic, it should be difficult to make war and easy to make peace." And yet, he said, "In Vietnam, war came easy and peace comes hard." His words ring equally true of today's war in Iraq, a war he fervently opposed from the outset. Having worked closely with Tom, I can tell you that he was as decent and humble as he was passionate. I remember, when I first came to the Senate in 1984, Tom and I were unlikely seatmates-the two most recent additions to the Foreign Relations Committee. He wrote a letter to Senator Pell, the Committee Chair. If there was an opportunity for him to serve as ranking minority Democrat on a subcommittee, he said, "I would prefer to forgo in favor of Senator Kerry."
It was a magnanimous gesture that really blew me away. In a place where seniority counts, where prerogatives matter-sometimes far too much-it was extraordinary and rare to defer to a freshman Senator as he did. But that was Tom Eagleton.
And Tom's collegiality didn't stop at the aisle. One of Tom's great friends in the Senate was his Junior Senator from Missouri, Republican John Danforth. He championed John's nomination to become UN Ambassador, and the two cooperated on countless issues-most recently as ex-Senators co-chairing Missouri's Stem Cell Initiative to protect all forms of stem cell research allowed under federal law. They were friends for 40 years and colleagues in the Senate for 10, and they showed a spirit of bipartisan cooperation too often missing from today's politics.
On so many issues, Tom Eagleton was a trailblazer and a visionary. He helped to write the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, foundations of today's environmental protection regime.
He was among the few in the Senate to oppose the Reagan tax cuts "Once again, once again," he shouted in his famous baritone, "largesse to the rich!".
And as he left Washington twenty years ago, he sounded an early warning that there was too much money in politics. And he was a staunch critic of this Iraq war from the outset.
Tom blazed other trails as well. In 1956, he became the youngest Circuit Attorney in the history of Saint Louis, a record that still stands. And in 1960, when he ran for Missouri attorney general on the same ticket as another Catholic, John F. Kennedy, and held his ground when anti-Catholic bigots scrawled graffiti crosses over his campaign posters. Tom Eagleton never lost a Missouri election in his entire life.
Tom's pre-Senate career, like my own, took him from the Navy to the District Attorney's office to the Lieutenant Governorship. He was the youngest Lieutenant Governor in Missouri's history, and I empathized with his quip that Missouri's No. 2 spot was really only good for standing at the window and "watching the Missouri River flow by."
Tom Eagleton was a quick wit, but he was also a man fully committed to living by his conscience-whether it led him to take conservative positions on social issues or even to censure colleagues from his own side of the aisle after ethical lapses.
As the Senate debated ousting a Democratic Senator from New Jersey who had been convicted of bribery and conspiracy, Senator Eagleton was firm: "We should not perpetrate our own disgrace by asking him to remain." He loved justice. And it is fitting that the federal courthouse in downtown St. Louis now bears his name.
In 1968, his commitment to reform led him to challenge a sitting Democratic Senator whose record many believed was tarnished by corruption. After the race his defeated opponent said bitterly, "The man who builds a house on public service builds it of straw and on sand."
But Tom Eagleton proved that wrong.
He retired in 1987 with the love and admiration of millions in his home state of Missouri and across the county. When he announced in 1984 that he would not seek reelection to a fourth term, his statement was full of the same personal humility that had led him to hand over his seniority to a freshman Senator. He declared that "public offices should not be held in perpetuity" and added that he had enjoyed "a full and complete career."
As his fellow Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas said, Tom's "goal was never to be carried out of the Senate in a pine box. He chose his career in politics because he considered it the best place from which to promote justice, nobility, freedom and dignity."
When Tom announced that he would not seek reelection, the Kansas City Star summed up the legacy he was leaving behind:
"Senator Thomas F Eagleton is the kind of politician the system is supposed to produce but so rarely does. He has elevated the job of politics because he does not accept the conventional denigration of politics. He believes it is a noble profession, and in the hands of such as himself, it is exactly that."
In the two decades since he left the Senate, Tom never let go of his indefatigable sense of justice, his unique sense of humor, his taste for politics or his love of Missouri.
Once, when I appeared on Meet the Press a few years ago, Tom wrote me a handwritten note afterwards. He said that while I had "demolished" my Republican counterpart, I really "should have knocked his toupee off his head." Tom sent many of us personal notes over the years that made us laugh.
He was the point man for the effort that wooed the Rams football team from Los Angeles to Saint Louis, and even Tom was stunned by the affection football fans showed him on the streets of Saint Louis-- particularly after the Rams' Super Bowl victory in 2000.
And after a plane crash killed Mel Carnahan, the Missouri Democratic nominee for Senate in October 2000, it was Senator Eagleton who took the lead in knocking down spurious claims that it would be illegal to keep Carnahan's name on the November ballot.
In addition to his three books on politics, Tom wrote over 50 op-eds for his hometown newspaper after leaving the Senate at age 57. In the last of these, published November 3, 2005, Senator Eagleton was candid in his analysis of the current disaster in Iraq:
"Hubris is always the sword upon which the mighty have fallen," he wrote. And "from here on, any president will have to level with the American people before going to war."
Tom Eagleton loved the Senate. He loved this institution. He was an expert in its rules and procedures, and believed in its Constitutional power to make decisions of war and peace. In addition to his most famous book, War and Presidential Power: A Chronicle of Congressional Surrender, he also co-authored a textbook for high school students called Our Constitution and What It Means. But most of all, you could just see the pleasure he took simply from being here.
Tom also loved his family, his home state of Missouri, and the Saint Louis Cardinals. At one point, he even considered applying to become Commissioner of Major League Baseball, but decided he could not give up his Senate seat as long as Missouri had a Republican Governor to appoint his successor. Tom celebrated his 50-year anniversary in January with his wife Barbara, and together they raised two children, Terence and Christy, and three grandchildren. He was a family man. Speaking about the nightlife in his beloved home town of Saint Louis, Senator Eagleton once quipped, "We're like a raucous Des Moines."
Tom Eagleton never stopped giving. He gave his life to serving his state and his country. And then, when he died, he gave his body to Washington University for medical research.
Tom Eagleton lived a full and remarkable life, and we will miss him dearly. He died with no regrets: "My ambition," he said "since my senior year in high school, was to be a senator. Not everybody achieves their ambition."
Tom did more than that. He achieved his own ambitions and earned the love and enduring respect of millions. And along the way, he inspired so many of us. Not least of all the freshman Senator from Massachusetts who, twenty-years later, rises to pay tribute to the man who once gave up his seniority but never gave up his principles.
http://kerry.senate.gov/v3/cfm/record.cfm?id=270302 |
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