[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 46 (Monday, April 25, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: April 25, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
 DEATH OF RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
                               OF AMERICA

  Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, I offer a privileged resolution (H. Res. 
411) and ask for its immediate consideration.
  The Clerk read the resolution, as follows:

                              H. Res. 411

       Resolved, That the House of Representatives has learned 
     with profound regret and sorrow of the death of Richard 
     Milhous Nixon, former President of the United States of 
     America.
       Resolved, That in recognition of the many virtues, public 
     and private, of one who served with distinction as 
     Representative, Senator, Vice President, and President, the 
     Speaker shall appoint committees of the House to join with 
     such Members of the Senate as may be designated, to attend 
     the funeral services of the former President.
       Resolved, That the House tenders its deep sympathy to the 
     members of the family of the former President in their sad 
     bereavement.
       Resolved, That the Sergeant at Arms of the House be 
     authorized and directed to take such steps as may be 
     necessary for carrying out of the provisions of these 
     resolutions, and that the necessary expenses in connection 
     therewith be paid out the contingent fund of the House.
       Resolved, That the Clerk communicate these resolutions to 
     the Senate and transmit a copy of the same to the family of 
     the former President.
       Resolved, That when the House adjourns today, it adjourn as 
     a further mark of respect to the memory of the former 
     President.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The minority leader, the gentleman from 
Illinois [Mr. Michel] is recognized for 1 hour.
  Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  (Mr. MICHEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his 
remarks.)
  Mr. MICHEL. Mr. Speaker, the death of President Richard Nixon is a 
great loss, especially to those fortunate enough to have personally 
known him, worked with him, and learned from him through the years. He 
was truly one of the last of the giants of the generation that helped 
to shape America's and the world's destiny after World War II.
  His grasp of the nuances and complexities of foreign affairs was 
unique in its mastery. No President in my lifetime ever had a better 
understanding of the Soviet Union and its leaders, and his bold move in 
establishing American relations with the People's Republic of China is 
one of the high spots in the entire history of American diplomacy.
  In 1949, the year I came to Washington as a congressional assistant, 
he had already established a national reputation, and it was in those 
days I first got to know him through my predecessor. And as the years 
passed, my wife Corinne and I got to know Pat and Dick Nixon well, and 
I knew I could always count on him for advice and counsel.
  Just a few weeks ago, before we made our most recent trip to the 
Soviet Union with the majority leader and Members of Congress, I talked 
to the former President by telephone to ask again for his thoughts and 
advice on who we ought to be seeing and what we ought to be doing.
  President Nixon's long career of public service was a unique mixture 
of triumph and tragedy, and the emotions he evoked among supporters and 
detractors alike were always intense. From the beginning of his public 
career he was at the center and often was the cause of political 
turmoil. His favorite political image was ``the man in the arena,'' the 
political activist fighting for what he deeply believes in, never 
giving up or giving in, and he never wished to stand on the sidelines 
and watch others carrying on the sometimes grand, sometimes petty 
battles of politics. It was this fighting spirit that so many Americans 
will remember about him long after the details of his long and exciting 
public life are forgotten.
  Mr. Speaker, our deepest sympathies go to his daughters and their 
families on the death of their father, coming so soon after that of 
that grand lady, Pat Nixon.
  Mr. Speaker, I am happy to yield such time as he may consume to my 
friend and colleague, the gentleman from Missouri [Mr. Emerson].

                              {time}  1210

  Mr. EMERSON. Mr. Speaker, Richard Nixon has departed this life.
  For a person of my age and vintage, but perhaps not uniquely so, the 
loss of him makes so very poignant the age through which we have lived. 
I first personally saw Richard Nixon in that most quintessential 
political experience noted in this century, the Whistle Stop Campaign. 
As a boy, 14 years of age, I was excused from school one bright October 
morning to go with my grandfather to Festus, MO, where the then-Vice 
Presidential candidate exhorted the onlookers in the interests of peace 
and prosperity as a part of the campaign of 1952. Richard Nixon was 
then, of course, Senator Nixon--the Vice Presidential nominee on the 
ticket with Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower. I last saw and had a word 
with former President Nixon at a luncheon in January hosted by Senator 
Bob Dole in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of President Nixon's 
first inauguration as President of the United States. That intervening 
period in which Richard Nixon has been such a preeminent player 
constitutes a most remarkable chapter in American history, and I feel 
very blessed to have been alive and to witness and to participate in 
this era.
  In the days and weeks ahead, much will be said about Richard Nixon; 
and at an appropriate time for formal eulogies, I will wish to say 
more. But in the immediate aftermath of his passing, I want to share 
several items that, to me, speak volumes about Richard Nixon.
  Theodore Roosevelt could not have had Richard Nixon in mind when 
speaking at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, he said:

       It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out 
     how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could 
     have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is 
     actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat 
     and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short 
     again and again, because there is no effort without error and 
     shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; 
     who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who 
     spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in 
     the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the 
     worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so 
     that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls 
     who know neither victory nor defeat.

  But, to my way of thinking, if ever a statement could sum up a man, 
Theodore Roosevelt's comments depicts the life of Richard Nixon.
  Second, in yesterday's edition of the Washington Post, Curt Smith, an 
author and former Saturday Evening Post senior editor and a 
speechwriter for President Bush, summed up so very well the Nixon that 
I and so many Americans found so appealing. I wish to share ``What 
Peoria Knew'' at this point in my remarks.

               [From the Washington Post, Apr. 24, 1994]

 What Peoria Knew--Washington Never Got Why We Middle Americans Loved 
                                 Nixon

                            (By Curt Smith)

       The town I grew up in--Caledonia, N.Y. (pop. 2,188)--had 
     one bar, six churches and no traffic lights. Its people had a 
     belief in work, God and family, a fondness for the familiar 
     and a reverence for everything American. We were for Richard 
     Nixon.
       Disdaining pluralistic ignorance, where the members of a 
     majority--mine, the Silent--felt outnumbered, we found it 
     natural to admire Nixon's hardscrabble roots and his 
     tenacity. ``No matter what you say,'' gibed Jimmy Carter in 
     1976, ``he was a leader.'' Better yet, he was our leader. As 
     for the ``trendies'' and ``beautiful people'' and 
     ``academics,'' he told me once, they ``couldn't even butter a 
     piece of toast.''
       In backing Nixon in places like Caledonia, we defended our 
     past and found what my parents and grandparents--like 
     millions, bullied by a liberal ruling class former 
     congressman John Anderson dubbed the ``Volvo and brie cheese 
     crowd''--had rarely known. A Voice.
       Meg Greenfield has written of the ``Nixon generation,'' and 
     not a day of my baby boom life has passed without Nixon at, 
     or near, the center. Aide Bryce Harlow likened him to a 
     bobbing cork. Only FDR ran as many times for national 
     office--five. More people voted for him for president than 
     any man in history. In post-World War II America, his history 
     was our history. Nixon `R' Us.
       For Nixon, for all those years, we felt nostalgia and even 
     love--something akin to a gentle protectiveness--for Pat's 
     cloth coats and the Nixon family, decent, much-wounded, and 
     as straight and resolute as they came. We saw him as brave 
     and vulnerable and thoughtful and sentimental. It was a view 
     so divorced from Washington's as to rival a dialogue of the 
     deaf. It stuns that he is gone.
       In 1967, I mailed a hand-written letter to the senior 
     partner at the Manhattan law firm of Nixon, Mitchell, Mudge 
     and Rose. I was an admirer, I said, and president of my 
     church's ecumenical fellowship. Our group would be in New 
     York in August, and was there the slightest chance I could 
     meet him, and if there was it would be grander than anything 
     I had known.
       In early April, I received an answer from Rosemary Woods, 
     his secretary. Nixon would be out of the country, writing for 
     Reader's Digest. However, schedules change, and would I call 
     upon arrival? I did, and was invited to Nixon's office at 20 
     Broad St., off Wall, a world and Weltanschauung from Upstate 
     New York. For half an hour we talked of sports and college. 
     Nixon suggested Cornell--``Thank God, the least of the 
     Ivies''--and the physic need to work your way through school.
       I still think fondly of how Nixon need not have met me, but 
     did, as a kindness. Later I was to find this typical not 
     of the Old nor New but Real Nixon--shy and solicitous. I 
     did not know this at the time. Instead, I joined Youth for 
     Nixon, learned politics in a mock convention and June 
     county primary--Milhous wins vs. Rockfeller--and gloried 
     when on Jan. 20, 1969, he took the oath of office, that 
     fall, I entered college. It was then, as America 
     entrenched itself in belligerence, that Nixon fused person 
     and president like no chief executive since FDR.
       It is hard for post-boomers to understand how early-1970s 
     America seemed at once alive, passionate and coming apart at 
     the seams, Upheaval embraced values and morality, civil 
     rights, feminism, drugs, whether police were pigs, love 
     should be free and grades abolished and America--as George 
     McGovern said--should ``come home.'' The University of 
     Pennsylvania avoided confrontation with student war 
     protesters by removing its American flags to storage. Jane 
     Fonda went to North Vietnam and thundered against ``those 
     blue-eyed murders--Nixon and the rest of those ethnocentric 
     American white male chauvinists.''
       On April 30, 1970, vowing that American would not be ``a 
     pitiful, helpless giant,'' Nixon announced the invasion of 
     Cambodia. Campuses exploded when four students were shot dead 
     at Kent State University and two at Jackson State College. 
     Radicals bombed university buildings as buses ringed the 
     White House to ward off protesters. It was a time of hawk vs. 
     dove, Maine Street vs. counterculture, hard hat vs. hippie. 
     Mayberry felt besieged.
       Nixon upheld it consciously, defianty--less through policy 
     than through personality. His programs were often moderate--
     liberal by Reagan-era standards. Welfare reform, revenue 
     sharing, the all-volunteer army, the Environmental Protection 
     Agency. Despite Vietnam, he engaged in diplomatic summitry, 
     and helped end the bipolar world. In February 1972 Nixon 
     ended decades of estrangement in the land of Shanghai and the 
     Forbidden City. Three months later, treking to Moscow, he 
     became the first U.S. president to visit the Soviet Union--
     joining Communist Party leader Leonid Brzhnev in the first 
     agreement of the nuclear age to limit strategic nuclear arms.
       Nixon loved foreign policy--global, conceptual. He was more 
     direct fighting America's cultural war. My generation loved 
     the amplified beat of rock. Said Nixon at a White House 
     dinner with Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, ``If the 
     music's square, it's because I like it square.'' Nixon liked 
     sports, hated cocktail parties, despised ``front-runners, the 
     social climbers,'' and thumbed his nose at the fashionable. 
     ``My family never had the wild, swinging times many trendies 
     think of,'' he told me. ``What we did have, of course, was a 
     lot of fun. I, for example, and depending on the season, 
     naturally, loved to sit down and belt out some Christmas 
     carols.''
       Middle America could see Nixon as Father Christmas and not 
     be deceived. That is why it could accept what a top aide, 
     Raymond Price, called Nixon's ``dark side''--the taped 
     Milhous of ``expletive deleted''--knowing that his good far 
     outran the bad. He wore the flag in his lapel pin, disdained 
     the idea that draft dodgers were ``idealistic. What they 
     wanted was to protect their ass,'' and grasped the Forgotten 
     American's joys, worries and confessions of the heart. 
     ``Farmers. Shopkeepers,'' a PBS documentary dubbed them. 
     ``People with an inbred respect for authority and unyielding 
     belief in the American Dream.'' Mocked by the maniac '60's, 
     they felt not bigotry but injured pride. Sharing it, Nixon 
     gave them what the Establishment withheld--a decent measure 
     of respect.
       Nixon's public lay among the ordered and traditional--
     ``good, law-abiding, tax-paying citizens''--not Eric 
     Goldman's ``MetroAmerican,'' privileged by lineage to rule. 
     Duty mattered. To them, Vietnam was a test of character--
     whether as America conceded the limits of its power, its 
     adversaries respected the power of its will. Too, religion. 
     Once, Nixon told Charles Colson, ``You know, I could be a 
     Catholic. I honestly could. It's beautiful to think about, 
     the fact that there is something you can really grab ahold 
     of, something real and meaningful.''
       Even Nixon's awkwardness played in Peoria. It was unslick, 
     endearing. Nearly four years ago, at the dedication of the 
     Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., George Bush told the 
     story of how one afternoon at an airport, Nixon heard a 
     little girl shouting ``How is Smokey the Bear?''--at that 
     time living in the Washington Zoo. Nixon smiled as the girl 
     kept repeating her question. Baffled, he turned to an aide 
     for translation. ``Smokey the Bear, Mr. President,'' he 
     whispered. ``Washington National Zoo.'' Triumphant, Nixon 
     walked over, took the girl's hand, and beamed, ``How do you 
     do Miss Bear?''
       Nixon's flaws, we saw as virtues. His virtues, critics saw 
     as sins. His solitude, they termed isolation; his reserve, 
     arrogance; his propriety, aloofness; his sentimentality, 
     corn. It was this--``This traumatic clash of cultures,'' Meg 
     Greenfield called it: a schism embodied by Nixon as Grant 
     Wood vs. the age's temporal fashion--that divided families, 
     legislators, above all, generations. As it lodged in the 
     White House, in a man who despised--and was despised by--
     America's hip, camp and pop art intelligentsia, it cemented 
     his rapport with America's great middle masses before helping 
     to bring about his fall.
       Ironically, Nixon had an intellectual's complexity. He 
     relished nuance, respected the writing craft, and wrote 10 
     books--many best-sellers. Once he told Ray Price, ``I am an 
     introvert in an extrovert's profession.'' Yet he became the 
     tribune of people who never read the New York Times. His goal 
     was a new cultural, even political, majority. He almost made 
     it. Instead, his triumphs were etched by photos in his office 
     that catapulted a visitor back in time: Nixon with Brezhnev; 
     Nixon with Sadat; Nixon speaking, waving, deplaning; Nixon in 
     Bejing; Nixon in a motorcade, with Pat, flinging high the V.
       When I left college in 1973, the shadow on those walls was 
     a president seeking to reshape the world--bold yet retiring, 
     believing that ``politics is poetry, not prose,'' When last I 
     saw him, in 1990 in Washington, he was frail, slightly 
     hunched, clad in a dark blue suit. He quizzed me about the 
     Bush administration and suggested that I run for Congress. 
     Respectfully, I declined. He was wary of raising taxes, 
     supportive of Bush in the Gulf, and proud of the woman whose 
     Secret Service code was ``Starlight''--his wife of 53 years.
       Pat Nixon overcame poverty and tragedy to become a mirror 
     of America's heart, and love. Is it coincidence that by 10 
     months his death followed hers? In March 1991, on the eve of 
     Mrs. Nixon's 79th birthday, I took to their New Jersey home a 
     giant card arrayed with photos of her life and signatures of 
     more than 200 White House staffers. Trying to unpack it, I 
     pled for patience:
       ``I'm the most unmechanical person you'll meet.'' 
     Playfully, she replied, ``No, you're not. Dick is.'' I had 
     never met Mrs. Nixon before. For two hours we spoke of 
     family, work and travel. It was like talking to your own 
     mother.
       Later, Nixon wrote to call it ``the most memorable birthday 
     card she has ever received.'' Asked once what word would be 
     engraved on his heart if it were opened after he died, he 
     said, simply ``Pat.''
       A favorite picture showed them on a bench, in San Clemente, 
     watching the Pacific. In it, her head rests on the shoulder 
     of the man who extolled freedom and security and, 
     campaigning, upheld ``peace without surrender'' and ``the 
     spiritual values of America'' and who each election, as 
     autumn dawned, communed with rallies in the rain--the most 
     remarkable American of our time.

  It would be very difficult to ever put Richard Nixon in context--if, 
indeed, he can be put in context--without relating him to the 
phenomenon of modern mass communication, television. Richard Nixon used 
and was used by this medium through the many stages of its development 
to this date; indeed, the relationship of Richard Nixon to television 
is one of the era's more notable relationships. Tom Shales, in today's 
Washington Post under the heading ``Nixon and TV: A Strange But 
Fascinating Fit,'' gives the subject good perspective. I include this 
article at this point in my remarks.

               [From the Washington Post, Apr. 25, 1994]

              Nixon and TV: A Strange But Fascinating Fit

                            (By Tom Shales)

       Television and Richard Nixon were always irresistibly drawn 
     to one another, not like a moth and a flame but like one 
     flame and another flame. From the beginning of his life as a 
     national figure, Nixon was on TV, and all over TV, and 
     throughout his very public career, he was never off it for 
     very long.
       On TV he could be mesmerizing, exasperating, galling, campy 
     and immensely entertaining. Curiously enough, he never quite 
     mastered the medium, but it never rally mastered him, either.
       It was kind of a draw.
       ``Richard Nixon defined the postwar era for America,'' Carl 
     Bernstein said on CNN yesterday, ``and he defined the 
     television era for America.'' Bernstein also said of his old 
     adversary, ``We've lost somebody who's been a part of our 
     life, and part of our family and there's no need to 
     mythologize.''
       Nixon was never what one could reasonably call a brilliant 
     communicator in a class with Ronald Reagan, or a media-savvy 
     smoothie a la Bill Clinton. He would try to tailor himself 
     for TV and to be tailored for it by the perceptologists and 
     the vidiot savants, but in the end it was always Richard 
     Nixon, but some synthetic composite, who came seeping 
     through.
       ``Tenacious'' is the world most often being used to 
     eulogize Richard Nixon. I prefer ``defiant.'' His defiance 
     was one of his saving graces, part of his makeup as a tragic 
     hero, and it was at the heart of his first major national TV 
     appearance, the ``Checkers speech'' of 1952, undertaken in 
     defiance of Republican Party bosses and even of beloved 
     national grandfather figure Dwight D. Eisenhower.
       When I was in college, kinescopes of the Checkers speech 
     would be shown at student film festivals or at midnight 
     screenings and people would laugh themselves goofy. Mostly we 
     were laughing at the technical primitivism of the broadcast, 
     and those strange slow pans over to a rigidly motionless Pat 
     Nixon, whom makeup and lighting conspired to turn into a 
     marble statute.
       But we were also laughing at the shameless transparency of 
     Nixon's message, the cloying appeals to sentiment, the mush 
     not only about the little dog Checkers but also about Pat's 
     Republican cloth coat. We could laugh and think ourselves 
     very smart, but there were two important facts to be 
     remembered: The speech was a genuinely gutsy gesture, and it 
     worked.
       In the decades ahead, Nixon would try to use television and 
     television would try to use him, and the relationship 
     remained a fascinating tug of war virtually until the end. 
     Even Nixon's wish that he not lie in state in the Capitol to 
     be observed by, among others, television cameras seems 
     something of a defiant gesture, a refusal to be the subject 
     of gawking or ogling in the hour of his final defeat.
       Nixon served up a bounty of great TV. His famous ``kitchen 
     debate'' with Nikita S. Khrushchev was one of his outright 
     television triumphs. His later debate against fellow 
     presidential candidate John F. Kennedy signaled a seminal 
     shift from substance to style in American political life and 
     began the era of telepolitics in earnest. Suddenly, how a 
     candidate came across on TV was all that really mattered.
       Jack Paar, who had played host to both John and Robert 
     Kennedy on his TV program, brought on Nixon one night in the 
     early `60s to chat and reminisce. This appearance may have 
     marked the first remaking of Richard Nixon; it showed him in 
     an uncharacteristically relaxed and convivial mood. Paar 
     induced him to play an original composition for piano, and 
     Nixon engagingly complied. It was as close to charming as he 
     ever got on the air.
       This restylization of the Nixon image reached its climax in 
     1968 when Nixon popped up in a cameo on NBC's top-rated Rowan 
     & Martin's Laugh-In'' to utter one of the show's recurring 
     mantras. His rendition of ``Sock it--to me?'' ranks as 
     probably the most important five-second appearance in the 
     history of political television.
       During the long unfolding of the Watergate scandal, we 
     watched as Nixon's defiance turned to defensive desperation. 
     Howard Baker said yesterday on ``This Week With David 
     Brinkley'' that he was certain Nixon knew nothing of the 
     Watergate burglary and that if he had just come clean 
     instantly and fired those responsible, ``maybe on 
     television,'' his presidency could have been saved.
       Perhaps there was something self-destructive in the Nixon 
     character that prevented him from doing that. Or perhaps even 
     the coverup can be seen as another act of defiance, a case of 
     Nixon saying ``I'll show them'' but this time spectacularly 
     failing to do so.
       Nixon sometimes seemed like the party guest whom no one 
     wants to talk to, who is consigned to a corner and shunned 
     but is determined to make his presence known. That he never 
     fit in with the Eastern power elite, that he always gave the 
     Harvard boys fits, were among the things about him that 
     remained endearing. He didn't go to the right school, he 
     didn't say the right things, he didn't have the right 
     pedigree. Richard Nixon was politically incorrect long before 
     political correctness was codified and became the law of the 
     land.
       Collectors of Nixon videobilia prize especially a piece of 
     tape never meant to be seen by the public. Prior to the TV 
     address in which he resigned the presidency in 1974, Nixon 
     clowned with members of the TV crew and his staff, and 
     someone turned on a video recorder. On the tape, he jokingly 
     tells the White House photographer that he doesn't want to be 
     caught ``pickin' my nose.''
       For me, one of the most unforgettable pieces of veritably 
     Shakespearean political theater ever seen on television came 
     the next day: Nixon's farewell to his troops in the East 
     Room, a rambling and nakedly emotional autobiography in which 
     the president called his mother ``a saint'' and told the 
     crowd: ``Always remember: Others may hate you, but those who 
     hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy 
     yourself.''
       His last visible act that day was that broad wave to the 
     crowd before boarding the helicopter that took him into 
     retirement. It was, yes, a defiant wave.
       In his post-presidential TV appearances, Nixon surrendered 
     some of whatever dignity remained. At times he came across 
     like a baggy-pants Willy Loman out peddling yet another new 
     revised version of himself and trying to salvage his place in 
     history. He appeared never, however, to mellow on his dislike 
     of the press; nor apparently did it of him.
       Reporting on Nixon's death Friday night, Dan Rather of CBS 
     News couldn't refrain from mentioning again and again that 
     Watergate involved ``criminal acts'' and from saying more 
     than once not only that Nixon resigned but that he resigned 
     ``in disgrace.'' Good grief. Give the man a break. He's dead.
       CBS News had prepared not a comprehensive biography of 
     Nixon but an arduously detailed recap of the Watergate 
     affair. They didn't have the class to leave him alone even 
     then.
       On the Brinkley show Sunday, Sam Donaldson pontificated 
     self-righteously about Nixon having done things ``not 
     permissible in American life'' but allowed as how Nixon was a 
     key figure in ``the modern use of television, or misuse of 
     television, by politicians.''
       Brinkley himself merely marveled in a temperate and 
     forgiving way at ``the incredible career of Richard Nixon'' 
     with all its ups and downs and said at the conclusion of the 
     program, ``It is hard to believe all of that really 
     happened.'' Indeed it is. And yet much of it happened before 
     our very eyes.
       Men and women of my generation all used to say that we 
     would love to have met John F. Kennedy. I would love to have 
     met him too, and was bowled over when he came to my staunchly 
     Republican Midwestern home town to campaign against Nixon in 
     1960. But I always wanted to meet the maddeningly engimatic 
     Richard Nixon too, and wanted to meet him more and more as 
     the years went on, and as he continued his struggle to remain 
     in the public eye.
       He was not the noblest Roman of them all, but he was surely 
     the most Nixonian Nixonian. Future generations will envy us 
     for having had Nixon to kick around, or at least they should. 
     At times like this, it is common to talk about legacies. 
     Nixon's is right there--right there on the videotape. And so, 
     forever, is Nixon.

  Finally, today, Mr. Speaker, I wish to offer my condolences to the 
wonderful family of Richard Nixon and to say thank you, Mr. President, 
for having been ``in the arena.''
  Mr. MICHEL. Madam Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman from 
Missouri for his very appropriate remarks on this particular occasion.
  Madam Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the 
distinguished gentleman from Mississippi [Mr. Montgomery], who likewise 
has been a long-time friend of the former President.
  Mr. MONTGOMERY. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman in the well [Mr. 
Michel] for yielding.
  Madam Speaker, we were close friends. I served 5\1/2\ years, as the 
gentleman in the well did, with President Nixon. I thought he was an 
excellent President. He certainly understood foreign policy, and he 
really understood this Government. He served in the Congress, he served 
as Vice President, and he served as President. Yes, he made some 
mistakes. We all make mistakes in life.
  What impressed me, after serving as President, he just did not 
disappear. He was out trying to help our country, and in any way he 
could, he did. He certainly had a great effect in later years on the 
actions taken over in Russia, after the Soviet Union had fallen, and we 
all give him credit for going to China and to the Soviet Union. He was 
the one that could do it and represent our Government with those 
nations. Finally, he brought the Vietnam war to a close, an unwinnable 
war that we all were concerned about.
  Madam Speaker, I therefore think it is appropriate that we have this 
resolution, and I thank the gentleman for bringing it forward.
  Mr. MICHEL. Madam Speaker, I move the previous question on the 
resolution.
  The resolution was agreed to.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

                          ____________________