Kennedy name proposed for room
By J. Taylor Rushing - 09/10/09 06:10 PM ET
The Senate marked the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy on Thursday with a long day of floor speeches in his honor, punctuated by an effort to rename one of the most famous rooms on Capitol Hill after his fabled family.
Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a resolution renaming the Caucus Room in the 100-year-old Russell Senate Office Building as the Kennedy Caucus Room,
in honor of the three Kennedy brothers who served in the Senate. The move caught some Republicans by surprise, with some striking a noncommittal stance for now.
Opened in 1909,
the room is one of the most famous in the Capitol, having housed hearings into the Titanic sinking in 1912, the Teapot Dome scandal in 1923, belated hearings into the Pearl Harbor attack in 1946, the McCarthy hearings in 1954, the Watergate scandal in 1973, the Vietnam War in 1966, the Iran-Contra affair in 1987 and the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas in 1991.The late President John F. Kennedy announced his presidential candidacy in the room, and had his Senate office nearby from 1953 to 1960. The late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy also used the same caucus room for his own presidential candidacy announcement in 1968 even though his Senate office was in the adjacent Dirksen Senate Office Building.
The third-floor room is also just around the corner from Sen. Edward Kennedy’s own office suite, and was even the site of the successful healthcare bill vote this summer by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which Kennedy chaired at the time.
Dodd recalled the room’s long history as the site where “we have commemorated tragedy, celebrated triumph, and held some of the great American debates.”
“It is there that I propose we affix the Kennedy name, not just as a monument to the things that the three Senators Kennedy have done, but to the spirit of compassion and compromise, fierce advocacy and tender friendship that Teddy embodied perhaps more than any other Senator of our time,” Dodd said.
more...
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/58253-kennedy-tributes-include-effort-to-rename-room
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