[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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