[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 64 (Thursday, April 6, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E802-E803]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         TRIBUTE TO OTIS BOWEN

                                 ______


                            HON. MEL HANCOCK

                              of missouri

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, April 5, 1995
  Mr. HANCOCK. Mr. Speaker, Dr. Otis Bowen is one of the finest people 
God ever put on Earth. Indiana is justifiably proud of him and John 
Krull has captured Doc's goodness beautifully in the following article:
                   Bowen Reflects on Life of Politics


          popular former governor still holds great influence

                            (By John Krull)

       Bremen, In.--Otis Bowen singles out one photograph on his 
     wall of memories.
       It is near the edge of one of the walls of a long hallway. 
     Almost every inch of space is covered with certificates and 
     pictures--photos of Bowen when he was in the Indiana 
     Legislature, when he was governor, when he was the secretary 
     of Health and Human Services in Ronald Reagan's Cabinet.
       The images on Bowen's walls are a fairly comprehensive 
     photographic record of recent American political history. 
     There are pictures of Bowen with many of the most powerful 
     politicians of the past 30 years. Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford. 
     Jimmy Carter. Reagan. George Bush. Dan Quayle. Richard Lugar. 
     Robert Orr.
       As he points to one photograph, though, the former small-
     town doctor reveals something of the political know-how that 
     made him one of the most popular politicians in Indiana 
     history.
       The picture is of the staff at the Department of Health and 
     Human Services. In it, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop 
     is seated near Bowen.
       ``Koop was kind of a character,'' says Bowen, 77. ``But 
     Chick--that's what we called him--had great credibility with 
     the media. So, whenever we had some idea we wanted to explore 
     or try to get a fair hearing, we'd send Chick out to talk 
     about it. It worked pretty well that way.''
       That hidden-hand style of leadership was one of the 
     qualities that made Dr. Otis Bowen such a formidable 
     politician, says William J. Watt.
       ``One of Doc's supporters had a saying that sort of 
     captured it,'' says Watt, who wrote a book about Bowen's 
     years as governor after serving as one of his executive 
     assistants.
       ``He said that Doc always let other people have his way. 
     That was the way he operated. He could control things without 
     letting other people know it.''
       Watt attributes Bowen's success to several factors.
       ``Doc is very intelligent, but he has a greater sense of 
     focus than a lot of intelligent people do. He had a very 
     clear sense of what his priorities were. He knew what he 
     wanted and he could be very determined in going after it. He 
     would not quit or back off. And he could be very, very 
     tough.''
       So tough that for a long time Otis ``Doc'' Bowen--the pride 
     of Bremen, Ind., a small town not far from South Bend--
     practically ruled the political arena in Indiana.
       In 1972, he ran for governor against a popular former 
     governor, Matthew Welsh, and won convincingly. In 1976, he 
     trounced then-Secretary of State Larry Conrad to win 
     reelection.
       In 1980, a young member of the U.S. House of 
     Representatives felt compelled to ask Bowen if he intended to 
     run for the U.S. Senate that year. Only after Bowen said he 
     wasn't interested did Dan Quayle feel it was safe to enter 
     the race.
       His shadow has proven to be so long that rising Hoosler 
     Republicans still feel the need to seek out his counsel and 
     blessing.
       ``They still come up here. In the last election, a fair 
     member--David McIntosh, Sue Anne Gilroy and some others--came 
     up to sit down and ask my advice. It was gratifying to know 
     that they haven't forgotten me,'' Bowen says, and smiles.
       ``Up here'' is a converted barn on the outskirts of Bremen. 
     It is a large, open house filled with memorabilia and 
     souvenirs. Along the mantle atop the fireplace is a 
     collection of ceramic elephants.
       ``Every time you speak at a Lincoln Day dinner, they given 
     you an elephant. I've lost track of how many I have,'' he 
     says.
       It is the home Bowen built in the early 1970s with his 
     first wife, Elizabeth, who died in 1981. They had been 
     married for nearly 42 years at the time of her death.
       She was the reason he did not run for the U.S. Senate.
       ``Her health was failing and she had to be my first 
     priority,'' he says.
       Later that year, he married an old friend, Rose 
     Hochstetler. Because of his service in Washington, he only 
     got to live in this house for a short time with her before 
     she died in 1992.
       He now shares the home with his third wife, the former 
     Carol Mikesell.
       He had known her for much of her life--even delivered her 
     children. But they had lost touch during the years he was 
     governor. She, too, had been married twice.
       They became reacquainted at a political fund-raiser he held 
     at his house in 1992. At the time, she was working at a bank 
     in Warsaw.
       Their courtship did not begin right away.
       ``It took me about a month or more to work up the nerve to 
     call her,'' he says.
       When he did, they went to dinner in Fort Wayne.
       ``We knew pretty quickly that it was going to be serious,'' 
     says Carol, 52.
       They were married two years ago in the living room of the 
     house, right in front of the fireplace with all the 
     elephants. It was a small ceremony with only family members 
     present.
       Bowen says Carol helped him recover a zest for living.
       ``I have to give Carol much of the credit for turning me 
     around. She made all the difference,'' he says.
       When he met her, he says, the loss of his second wife still 
     was fresh. The deaths of his two wives have been the most 
     difficult things in his life.
       ``The grief was just devastating. You have six or eight 
     months when you can't eat or sleep or even think about much. 
     You lose 25 or 30 pounds and you wonder if you can go on.'' 
     he says, shaking his head.
       ``But then there comes a point when you get tired of 
     feeling so bad. You realize that you have to go on living. 
     It's hard, but you do it.''
       He teases Carol about not being politically active.
       ``I don't even know is she voted for me,'' he laughs.
       ``Of course I did,'' she says, laughing too.
       He and Carol now try to stay close to home. They work 
     outside on their five acres of land. They journey into Bremen 
     once a day. And they travel around the state, when Bowen 
     delivers one of his many speeches, mostly about health-care 
     issues.
       Carol quit her job at the bank. Bowen says he's going to 
     try to cut down on the number of speeches he makes. They plan 
     to travel together some, but mostly they hope to enjoy their 
     home and each other.
       ``This is a pretty good size bit of land, and we work on it 
     ourselves, because we like that. And we want to spend the 
     time together,'' he says.
       Bowen says he doesn't know exactly why he was so popular 
     with Indiana voters.
       ``Maybe it had to do with my medical training. You're 
     taught as a doctor not to panic or act rashly in difficult 
     situations,'' he says, and then he changes the subject.
       His biographer and former aide William Watt sees it 
     differently.
       ``With Doc Bowen, the public man and the private man were 
     one and the same. There was a genuineness to the man people 
     responded to,'' he says.
       [[Page E803]] What's more, Watt says, Hoosiers remember the 
     1970s--the Bowen years--with fondness. Government and its 
     problems seemed smaller and more approachable then.
       Bowen recalls those days with affection, too.
       ``I miss the people contact,'' he says. ``As governor, you 
     always were with people, working with them, getting things 
     done. I miss that.''
       He does not view his days at the Department of Health and 
     Human Services with the same warmth he does his days at the 
     Statehouse.
       ``I didn't enjoy my time in Washington as much. As 
     governor, you could get things done. But in Washington you 
     had more than 500 bosses in Congress to answer and 
     bureaucrats to frustrate you. You never seemed to make 
     contact with people,'' he says.
       Still, there were people in Washington he respected.
       ``Gerald Ford was my favorite president, because he was 
     just a good, down-to-earth man. He had common sense, and 
     that's the most important thing.
       Ford's successor in the White House, Jimmy Carter, also 
     merits a spot in Bowen's affections.
       ``I don't think he was a very good president, but he is a 
     fine man. He wanted to do the right things, but his 
     management style undid him. But he is one of the nicest men 
     you would ever want to meet,'' he says.
       Closer to home, there are many people Bowen misses.
       Again and again, as he points to people in the pictures, he 
     has no say, ``he has since died'' or ``he passed on a few 
     years ago.''
       One person he mourns is one of his predecessors in the 
     governor's chair and an occasional political adversary, Roger 
     Branigin.
       ``He was a good man,'' Bowen says. ``He was likable, 
     personable and very open. It wasn't hard getting in to see 
     him when he was governor. In fact, it could be kind of hard 
     getting out of the office, because it was so pleasant to pass 
     time with him and he enjoyed people so much.''
       Bowen says that some Indiana Republicans don't entirely 
     accept the fact that he is retired.
       ``Some people have come up here to try to talk me into 
     running for governor again,'' he says.
       ``I don't know if they were serious or if they were just 
     trying to flatter me. I told them that I'd had my time at bat 
     and it was time to let younger folks have their try.''
       Watt says he's not surprised that some people would want 
     Bowen to run for governor again.
       ``Doc made people feel comfortable. It wasn't his style to 
     have public confrontations. He seemed to make things work, 
     and people liked that,'' he says.
       That style manifests itself even in the way Bowen assesses 
     his own career.
       ``I've been fortunate. Sometimes I almost have to pinch 
     myself,'' he says.
       ``I've been a governor and I've worked with presidents. But 
     then you realize that people of power and prominence came to 
     their positions through some quirk or accident of fate, and 
     that basically they're no more intelligent than you are. When 
     you realize that, you can just go about doing what you have 
     to do. That's what I tried to do.''
     

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