[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 59 (Thursday, March 30, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S4906]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         SENATOR HOWELL HEFLIN

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, on October 28, 1919, the National 
Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, was passed by Congress 
over President Wilson's veto of the previous day. The act defined as 
intoxicating, any liquor containing at least one-half of one percent 
alcohol, and provided for enforcement of the provisions of the 
Eighteenth Amendment.
  This singular event was to usher in the colorful era of the 1920's, 
with its flapper girls, its bathtub gin, and its legendary mobster 
figures. In 1920, the U.S. Census recorded a population of 105,710,620. 
The center of the population was judged to be 8 miles south, south-east 
of Spencer, in Owen County, Indiana. In 1920, for the first time, the 
total number of farm residents dwindled to less than 50 percent. It was 
a very different world.
  This was the age into which, on June 19, 1921, Howell Heflin was 
born. The son of a Methodist minister, Senator Heflin is then, the 
child of a slower, more rural America--the kind of America into which I 
was born 4 years earlier--an era when there was always time to 
appreciate charm and wit in individuals and careful, considered, 
judgment in leaders.
  Will Rogers came to prominence in the 1920's. Radio flourished as an 
entertainment medium in the late 1920's and early 1930's. It was an era 
when events and ideas were savored, talked about, discussed on the 
front porch and over the Sunday supper table. The humor was more wry 
than malicious, and taking a day or two to think about something was 
considered the norm. Howell Heflin is a product of those times, and a 
product of the South and his beautiful home state of Alabama.
  His temperament is uniquely suited to the judiciary. He thinks about 
things carefully. Howell turns things over in his mind to see how they 
look from all sides. He speaks slowly. He measures his words, and he 
spices his statements with rich Southern tales and the folksy lore of 
Alabama.
  And Howell Heflin's life has been nearly as rich and varied as his 
mannerisms and his speech. He graduated from Birmingham-Southern 
College and the University of Alabama Law School in 1948. This was the 
beginning of Howell's fabulous legal career
 in Alabama. Howell Heflin went on to become President of the Alabama 
State Bar in 1966. He took the oath of Chief Justice of the Supreme 
Court of Alabama in 1971, and, in 1975, Judge Heflin was selected the 
most outstanding appellate judge in the United States. When Howell left 
the bench in 1977, there was no congestion and no backlog of cases in 
any of Alabama's courts, either trial or appellate. In 1978, Howell 
Heflin went on to cap an already notable career with election to the 
United States Senate.

  Now serving his third and final term in the Senate, Senator Heflin is 
surely one of the most beloved Members of this body. He is a man to be 
trusted. He will take on a difficult task and bring it to conclusion 
with honor. Howell Heflin will not rush to judgment. I have tried to 
get him to on a few occasions, but I could not get him to rush to 
judgment. He does not leap to conclusions, or bow to pressures. It was 
for those reasons that I, as majority leader, appointed him chairman of 
the Senate Ethics Committee, a job that is anything but coveted in this 
body, but which demands unusual qualities of character and honor. And 
Howell Heflin is an honorable man. I am sure he did not enjoy the task, 
but he was perfect for the job because he is impeccably honorable as 
few men are.
  Yet Howell Heflin is never pompous, never self-important, never 
ponderous or heavy with his viewpoints or pronouncements. He colors it 
all with his legendary humor, putting a light and artful touch on 
nearly everything with which he is involved. I have so wondered at the 
genesis of this delightful quality in Senator Heflin that I recently 
did a little background research on an uncle of Howell's, Senator 
Thomas J. Heflin, who served the State of Alabama in the U.S. Senate in 
the 1920's. I find that the delightful sense of humor appears to have 
genetic roots.
  I now read from volume II of my own history of the United States 
Senate. And I read from page 137. I read from the chapter on 
filibusters. There was a filibuster going on in 1922. It had to do with 
a bill which was being filibustered by certain Senators in late 
February.

       By late February, there was no longer any doubt that the 
     obstructionists could and would keep the filibuster going 
     until sine die adjournment at noon on March 4, throttling 
     other legislation in the process. In the face of this threat, 
     Senator Jones and the administration forces capitulated on 
     February 28 by moving to take up a so-called filled milk 
     bill, thus displacing the ship subsidy bill. In the words of 
     Alabama Senator J. Thomas Heflin, the ``miserable measure'' 
     had ``gone to its long, last sleep.'' It was ``already 
     dead.''

  That sounds very much like Howell Heflin.
  And on page 138, we read of another filibuster that was occurring in 
the spring of 1926. This was

       . . . a filibuster was conducted against legislation for 
     migratory bird refuges, but the bill died after an effort to 
     invoke cloture failed. Legislation for development of the 
     Lower Colorado River Basin suffered a similar fate when, on 
     February 26, 1927, cloture was rejected by a vote of 32 to 
     59. Two days later, however, the Senate did invoke cloture on 
     a Prohibition reorganization bill, although a final vote on 
     the bill was delayed for almost two days by the opponents of 
     a resolution extending the life of a committee that was 
     investigating charges of corrupt senatorial elections in 
     Illinois and Pennsylvania. As Franklin Burdette, author of 
     the study of filibusters, observed, ``filibusterers against 
     one measure had been able to make cloture against another 
     serve their purposes for nearly two days!'' At one point, 
     Senator J. Thomas Heflin of Alabama--who, incidentally, was--

  As I say, in my book

       --an uncle of our own colleague and friend from Alabama, 
     Senator Howell Heflin--ridiculed ``obstreperous Republican 
     filibusterers''--

  This is Senator J. Thomas Heflin talking

       --ridiculed ``obstreperous Republican filibusterers'' for 
     obstructing action on the resolution for campaign 
     investigations. ``You are saying in your hearts,'' he 
     declared with fine sarcasm:
       Committee, spare that campaign boodle tree,
       Touch not a single bow;
       In election times it shelters me,
       You must not harm it now.

  Well, I can just hear Howell Heflin saying that. That is just about 
the way he would say it, except he would say it better than I said it.
  I can hear Senator Howell Heflin saying something very much like that 
right today, should the proper kind of vexation come along.
  I salute my friend and colleague, and I regret his decision to leave 
this body. I salute him for his character, for his wit, for his 
steadfast determination to follow his own star, to refuse to be 
hurried, to study and to deliberate until he is satisfied and at peace 
with his conclusion. I salute him for taking his time in a world which 
demands that everyone hurry. I salute him for his courage. This is a 
man who will be himself, and there is certainly no one else he would 
rather be. He is an Alabama original, and I regret that, in not too 
many months, Alabama will reclaim him.
  But we here in the Senate will have enjoyed his wit, benefited by his 
wisdom, and been inspired by his integrity when that time is come. And 
just as we are certain in our knowledge that all excellent things must 
come to a close, we will not begrudge him his time to go home, to be 
with his lovely wife, Mike, and to contemplate with peace and pleasure 
the seasons' change in the rolling hills of Alabama.
  My wife, Erma, and I join in these warm felicitations for Howell and 
his wife, Mike.

     Nature's first green is gold.
     Her hardest hue to hold.
     Her early leaf's a flower;
     But only so an hour.
     Then leaf subsides to leaf.
     So Eden sank to grief,
     So dawn goes down to day.
     Nothing gold can stay.

  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  

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