[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 141 (Monday, October 3, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
JERRY TINKER--A MAN WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, all of us in Congress who knew Jerry
Tinker and worked with him over the years continue to be saddened by
his sudden and untimely death last month. As staff director for many
years for the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration
and Refugee Affairs, Jerry dedicated his life to helping the world's
refugees. Wherever tragedy and disaster struck, Jerry was not far
behind, and his efforts and leadership brought help and hope to
literally millions of people throughout the world.
One of the most eloquent tributes to Jerry's unusual life and
extraordinary career appeared in the Boston Globe on September 25. This
tribute, by Eileen McNarama, captures the essence of Jerry's commitment
and his many achievements. I know it will be of interest to all of us
who knew Jerry and to many others in Congress as well, and I ask
unanimous consent that it may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the tribute was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Boston Globe, Sept. 25, 1994]
``A Man Who Made a Difference--Out of the Limelight, Jerry Tinker
Helped Save People's Lives''
(By Eileen McNamara)
Among the week's bold and urgent headlines about Haitian
juntas and American off-year elections, one might easily have
missed the brief item in The New York Times, noting the death
Sept. 16 of ``Jerry M. Tinker, 55, Senate Staff Official.''
It was sadly apt that his passing should occur as the
nation again wrestled with the nature and extent of its
obligation to refugees pouring off yet another strife-torn
patch of Earth. It was of such desperate dilemmas that Jerry
Tinker's life was made.
The obituary's short summary of his public biography--staff
director of the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee
Affairs, aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy--suggests the lot of
a political functionary, a career spent in the warrens of
Capitol Hill, in anonymous service to a more famous man.
But the larger truth was that in the quarter-century Jerry
Tinker toiled for the United States Congress, he worked,
however anonymously, less for the senior senator from
Massachusetts than for the dispossessed of the world.
His conscience, as much as his job, took him to Vietnam and
Cambodia, to Managua and San Salvador, to the border of
Pakistan and Afghanistan, to Mozambique and South Africa, to
Dhaka and Port-au-Prince. The stamps on his passport were
signposts to some of the world's most desolate corners, where
the refuse was human and the suffering relentless.
It is fashionable in this cynical era to portray those in
government as venal, self-serving leeches on the public dole.
Certainly, no-show jobs and patronage appointments are real
enough on Capitol Hill. And not a few of the 3,620 staffers
assigned to those ever-expanding congressional committees are
as devoted to serving their careers as their country.
``Some staffers on the Hill have as their whole purpose in
life keeping things stirred up,'' Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.)
said. ``They get up in the morning to screw Democrats or
screw Republicans. I know enough of them on both sides. They
are a blight on the body politic. But Jerry was another
breed.''
Tinker found his mission early, as a graduate student in
India. Once he had seen the misery in the slums of Clacutta,
his colleagues said, he insisted the rest of the world see
it, too.
``He believed so strongly in our actually seeking these
places,'' recalled Dick Day, who came to Washington ``for a
year'' 16 years ago to help out Simpson, his old Cody, Wyo.,
law buddy. He stayed on as Tinker's Republican counterpart on
the subcommittee staff. ``Jerry's feeling was that we
couldn't effectively make the case for aid to these places
without being there and bringing that sense of urgency back
to the Hill.
Simpson himself remembered Tinker and Day heading off to
Bangladesh or Thailand while ``other people around here only
wanted to go to Geneva.''
In his eulogy Tuesday in a suburban Washington church
packed with the nameless congressional staffers who do the
spade work of this democracy, Kennedy reminded the crowd of
the tan safari suit that constituted Tinker's entire
traveling wardrobe. ``The suit could stand up to day after
day of rugged wear in the Horn of Africa or the remotest
areas in Indochina.'' he said. ``Jerry liked to joke that
NASA had once approached him in search of a new fabric for
spacesuits for shuttle astronauts. The safari suit, like
Jerry, was comfortable in the most destitute refugee camps in
the world, and equally at home in the highest corridors of
power in Washington.''
As the chairmanship of the subcommittee shifted from
Kennedy to Simpson and back again, Tinker and Day forged a
friendship and helped foster an increasingly rare spirit of
bipartisanship on immigration and refugee matters, issues
potentially as divisive as crime and health care.
``Democrats often thought I was eating out of Al Simpson's
hand, and Republicans felt that Al was eating out of mine.
But both of us knew that Jerry was the master chef,'' Kennedy
said.
``He was not a zealot. He could bend. I trusted him
implicitly,'' Simpson said. ``How many Democratic staffers do
you think I say that about?''
Though his loyalty to Kennedy was fierce--he neither told
nor tolerated jokes at his boss' expense, according to
friends--Tinker was following a deeper imperative than
politics.
When a British television crew broadcast the first reports
out of Ethiopia of mass starvation in 1984, Tinker packed and
urged Kennedy to do so, too. Other Kennedy staffers exploited
the obvious public relations value of their boss being
photographed feeding starving children on Christmas morning;
Tinker harbored a broader policy goal. The United States was
not yet engaged in the famine crisis; Kennedy's presence
could make a difference.
On the outskirts of the refugee camp in Mekelle, the air
was acrid with the smoke of a thousand small campfires and
the stench of death. A shaken Tinker described the scene as
``vintage fifth century,'' but he did not indulge his
emotions. He took notes, instead. The vaccine for measles, a
disease claiming the lives of those children who managed
somehow to survive starvation, was arriving unrefrigerated
and therefore useless. Instead of fortified and processed
grain, donor nations were shipping whole grain, indigestible
for a population so weakened by famine conditions.
Antibiotics shipped ahead of food were of no use to infants
whose muscles were so wasted by malnutrition that there was
no tissue sufficient to receive an injection.
It was Tinker who led Kennedy away from network news crews
north to the border with Sudan, where his notebook again
recorded the failures of the relief effort. The first US
transport plane had carried water containers but no water,
tents but no food. At what he took to be a feeding center,
Tinker watched incredulously as relief workers distributed
6,000 pairs of purple trousers to the famished. And at an
especially desperate encampment at the base of the Tukl Baab
Mountains, Tinker found that some shortages were almost too
poignant to bear. As he watched the skeletal figures of
starving refugees scratching shallow graves for their loved
ones in the desert sand, he made a note: There were no
shovels to bury the dead.
The need is nothing if not more pressing than it was when
Jerry Tinker began his work 25 years ago. In the aftermath of
the Cold War, it sometimes seems the world is hemorrhaging
refugees. The International Rescue Committee, a voluntary
agency assisting the displaced worldwide, estimates that the
refugee population now exceeds 18 million.
In the Balkans, in Africa, in the former Soviet Union, in
Central America, in the Caribbean, hundreds of thousands of
anonymous victims of war and natural disaster cannot know how
much they will miss the anonymous man from Capitol Hill in
the drip-dry safari suit.
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