[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 3 (Friday, January 5, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S100-S101]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______


           THE CENTENNIAL OF EVERETT McKINLEY DIRKSEN'S BIRTH

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, this week marks the 100th 
anniversary of the birth of one of the greatest leaders ever to have 
served in this body, the late Senator from Illinois and former 
Republican leader of the Senate, Everett McKinley Dirksen.
  Everett Dirksen was born on January 4, 1896. He brought the small 
town values and the sense of civility of his native Pekin to his work 
in the Senate, where he combined these qualities with some of the 
finest oratorical and parliamentary skills that have been displayed on 
this floor in his or any era.
  The Senate has honored his memory by naming one of its office 
buildings for him, and the Dirksen Congressional Center in Pekin 
continues his tradition of public service with its many ongoing 
research and in-service activities.
  I call the attention of my colleagues to an insightful article about 
the Dirksen legacy, written by retired editor Charles Dancey of the 
Peoria Journal Star, and I ask that the article be printed at this 
point in the Record.
  The article follows:

              [From the Peoria Journal Star, Jan. 4, 1996]

           Dirksen Brought Sense of Reality Wherever He Went

                          (By Charles Dancey)

       One hundred years ago, fathers might have dreamed that a 
     son born in a log cabin could become president. But no way 
     could Johann Dirksen have imagined Jan. 4, 1896, that his 
     baby boy's birthday celebrations one day would launch the 
     social season in the nation's capitol.
       Yet, Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen's birthday bash, usually 
     at the Mayflower hotel ballroom, was the opening ``must go'' 
     event of the social season each year in Washington, D.C., 
     even before he became minority leader of the Senate and a 
     national figure beyond the Beltway. Everybody who was 
     anybody, as the saying goes, attended from both political 
     parties and from the administration and the congress.
       Those glittering parties were a long way from the 
     neighborhood in Pekin known as ``Beantown.'' Yet, growing up 
     in Beantown may have been an important part of ``Ev'' Dirksen 
     being the toast of the town in the nation's capitol.
       Actually, the residents, themselves named it that--or 
     rather in their own language, ``Bohnchefiddle.'' They were 
     German immigrants who didn't indulge in euphemisms. They had 
     a strong sense of reality. And the reality was that rich 
     folks had flower gardens in their yards; immigrants grew 
     beans. They were who they were, and saw nothing wrong with 
     it. Beantown was just their American starting place.
       In fact, most residents in Pekin, and millions more across 
     America, gardened their yards. Even a narrow small-town lot 
     was 50 feet front, 150 deep, and provided space for people 
     who didn't own a horse and didn't need a barn. There was 
     space for berry bushes along the lot line, half a dozen fruit 
     trees set wide apart, orderly squares of garden vegetables, 
     and a grape arbor.
       There was a lot more than beans, and it all required care. 
     Many folks kept a small flock of chickens by the back porch 
     as well. At one time, in fact, the Dirksens raised a pig.
       The bigger boys spaded the gardens and raked them smooth. 
     Before he was old enough for school, the youngest son, Ev, 
     could help punch holes in the prepared ground with the wooden 
     split pegs used as clothespins keeping a straight line along 
     the board on which he knelt.
       Keeping clothes as clean as possible was important when 
     washing them was a major weekly chore. As the produce grew, 
     ripening in sequence, much of it had to be ``put up'' for the 
     winter in fruit jars and glasses, sealed with hot paraffin or 
     special lids, after being well cooked. Cabbage was chopped 
     and salted and then pounded and pounded until it was soaked 
     in its own brine to be kept for winter--sauerkraut.
       The Dirksen boys took part, and it was the boys who peddled 
     surplus vegetables door to door. The basics of life to the 
     German families were food, clothes, shelter from the cold and 
     cleanliness. So, before he learned to read and write, Everett 
     Dirksen became part of a family team, doing his share in 
     providing those basics, and grew up knowing from whence came 
     the necessities of life. Somebody had to do the work to 
     produce it.
       Their father had a stroke in 1901 when Ev, the youngest, 
     was only 5. By the time Ev was 9, Dad was dead. The boys were 
     raised by their mother, and the team game of survival that 
     they played put a solid foundation under his whole life.
       In those circumstances and in the absence of radio, 
     television, telephones or computers, he found school and 
     learning downright fun. Learning was an adventure and a kind 
     of game. He loved reading. He loved to discover a new big 
     word and roll it off his tongue. In books, he could explore 
     the far reaches of this world and of the world of ideas.
       Thus in his youth, and progressively thereafter, Everett 
     Dirksen combined those wonderful opposites, the 
     contradictions of idealist and a realist. It fit the Lincoln 
     tradition of central Illinois.
       With his older brothers grown and earning money, the family 
     could let young Everett go off to college. He worked nights 
     while schooling at the University of Minnesota, until World 
     War I interrupted.
       Three years of ROTC there gave him a leg up on a 
     lieutenant's bars. In France, he was an artillery man. His 
     job was to ride a wicker basket under a rough, hydrogen-
     filled balloon, held by a cable and linked by a primitive 
     telephone to the gun batteries, overlooking the battlefield. 
     There he observed the fall of the artillery shells his 
     battery mates were firing and tell them how to adjust there 
     fire to bring it on target.
       Of course, such balloons like his were sitting ducks, even 
     for the primitive planes of the time.
       When the war ended, the army found his ability to speak 
     German useful and kept him in Europe. He remained overseas 
     for 18 months in all much of the time interpreting for 
     others, or dealing directly with the local German population. 
     He also knew Paris, Berlin, other German cities, and visited 
     England and Ireland. In Rome, the ambassador asked him to 
     join his staff, but Ev was homesick for Pekin.
       Thus, young Lt. Dirksen returned to Pekin and Bohnchefiddle 
     at age 24, with an extraordinary range of experiences. He was 
     now a college man, a combat veteran and an ex-officer who had 
     traveled, often in very sophisticated circles, in postwar 
     Europe.
       Back home, he married a Pekin girl and launched his 
     remarkable political career as the youngest person ever 
     elected to the Pekin City Council.
       As city councilman, he was a young man dealing with a 
     rapidly changing world. Streets needed to be paved for the 
     growing numbers of those new motor cars. The fire department 
     needed trucks to replace the horse-drawn rigs. The aging 
     streetcars, one car running back and forth on a single track, 
     needed replacement with bus service.
       Power plants were under construction, bringing electricity. 
     The Edison revolution was on, and radio was waiting in the 
     wings. These were not hypothetical or abstract problems to be 
     solved abstractly for the young councilman. He was intimately 
     involved with the reality of finance for technology and the 
     even tougher reality of the effects and demands new 
     technology and dramatic change made on the city workers, and 
     the public.
       When he grappled with these problems as a councilman, he 
     also worked delivering his brothers' bread to 50 small 
     groceries scattered about town. Everybody knew his route, and 
     at many a stop he confronted people with problems to take to 
     their councilman. Before he went to the national macrocosm, 
     this man had a thorough and heavy dose of the microcosm.
       Thus, the nature of the man was well-founded long before he 
     became one of that city's best-loved figures, before he 
     crated the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and brought over the 
     votes to pass it with him, before he won a Grammy for 
     recording ``Gallant Men,'' before he was the confident of 
     presidents both Republican and Democrat, and before he became 
     a darling of the once-skeptical Washington press corps.
       He brought to Washington the prestige of being the 
     Congress' best orator, a skill founded and practiced in Pekin 
     and which largely won for him his original seat in the House 
     of Representatives in the first place.
       He also brought the attention to detail, the realism, of 
     Bohnchefiddle, and was, undoubtedly, the most skilled 
     parliamentarian in the Senate of his time. He knew how the 
     system worked in every detail, and he knew who was the person 
     that counted, the person to talk to, not only in the Senate 
     but in every department of the national administration.
       Finally, he made many friends and no enemies in the best 
     tradition of the small town where he grew up, and where some 
     of his local political foes were also lifelong personal 
     friends.
       When Everett Dirksen died, the president of the United 
     States gave the eulogy--proclaiming that Sen. Everett 
     McKinley Dirksen had more impact on history than many 
     presidents.
       That he was, and he didn't learn that in Washington. That 
     was the boy from Bohnchefiddle.
     
[[Page S101]]


                        ADMIRAL ARLEIGH A. BURKE

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, our Nation has lost one of its 
most distinguished Naval heros, Adm. Arleigh A. Burke. Had World War II 
continued beyond September 2, 1945, I might have served in the Pacific 
under ``31 knot Burke,'' as he was nicknamed for his exploits against 
the Japanese. Admiral Burke was awarded 13 decorations, including the 
Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit, the 
Silver Star, and our Nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of 
Freedom. In 1991, for the first time in Navy history, the man for whom 
a ship--U.S.S. Arleigh Burke--was named was on hand to see her 
commissioned.
  Mr. President, I ask that the obituary of Arleigh A. Burke from the 
New York Times of January 2, 1996, be included in the Record.
  The obituary follows:

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 2, 1996]

        Arleigh A. Burke Dies at 94; Naval Hero of World War II

                        (By Robert D. McFadden)

       Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, a battle-decorated Chief of Naval 
     Operations whose combat exploits against Japanese naval 
     forces in the South Pacific made him the Navy's most 
     celebrated destroyer squadron commander of World War II, died 
     yesterday at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was 
     94 and lived in Fairfax, Va.
       Admiral Burke, who retired in 1961 after 42 years in the 
     Navy, including a record six-year tenure as the Chief of 
     Naval Operations in the Administration of President Dwight D. 
     Eisenhower, died of complications of pneumonia, said a Navy 
     spokesman, Lieut. Comdr. Ed Austin.
       In a career that took him from Annapolis to Washington via 
     the high seas, Admiral Burke, a stocky pipe smoker with an 
     easy smile, served in battleships and aircraft carriers, was 
     a member of the United Nations truce negotiations team in the 
     Korean War and in Washington became a strong advocate of a 
     powerful nuclear fleet for the Navy, including its missile-
     launching Polaris submarines.
       But he was best known as ``31 Knot Burke,'' a nickname 
     supplied by Admiral William F. Halsey, for his exploits as 
     the commander of Squadron 23, a pack of eight destroyers that 
     staged high-speed torpedo attacks that devastated enemy 
     warships in the Solomon Islands in late 1943 and early 1944.
       ``Stand aside! Stand aside! I'm coming through at 31 
     knots,'' Mr. Burke, then a Captain, radioed darkened American 
     troop transports as his squadron, named Little Beavers for a 
     comic-strip character, steamed up the slot at boiler-bursting 
     speed to attack a Japanese task force off Bougainville on the 
     night of Nov. 1, 1943.
       In a widely heralded action, the squadron covered the 
     landing of thousands of American troops while attacking enemy 
     vessels and aircraft. When the battle of Empress Augusta Bay 
     ended the next day, the Japanese toll was horrendous. A 
     cruiser and four destroyers lay on the bottom, and two 
     cruisers and a pair of destroyers had limped away heavily 
     damaged.
       Later that month, the squadron engaged another Japanese 
     task force off Cape St. George, New Ireland, and sank three 
     destroyers without taking a hit. In 22 engagements from 
     November 1943 to February 1944, the Navy said, Capt. Burke's 
     squadron was credited with sinking one cruiser, nine 
     destroyers, one submarine and nine smaller ships, as well as 
     downing approximately 30 aircraft.
       Later, Mr. Burke became a chief of staff to Vice Adm. Marc 
     A. Mitscher, whose carrier task forces attacked the Japanese 
     at Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Tokyo. Mr. Burke was aboard the 
     flagship Bunker Hill and later the Enterprise when they were 
     hit by Japanese suicide planes off Okinawa.
       In 1949, during interservice disputes that followed the 
     unification of the armed forces, Mr. Burke fell into disfavor 
     with some officials of the Truman Administration by heading a 
     group of high Navy officers that campaigned for supercarriers 
     and against a strategic reliance on the Air Force's B-36 
     bombers.
       His role in what was called the Admiral's revolt seemed to 
     scuttle his chances for promotion. But his name went back on 
     the lists a year later, when he became a rear admiral, and in 
     1951, he became a member of the allied cease-fire commission 
     in Korea for six months.
       In 1955, he was selected by Eisenhower over 92 more senior 
     officers to be Chief of Naval Operations. In that post, he 
     advocated a balanced and versatile fleet, new antisubmarine 
     technology, the development of Polaris submarines and other 
     nuclear systems, and new aircraft designs. He served three 
     two-year terms, but insisted on retiring in 1961, when 
     President John F. Kennedy offered him a fourth term.
       Arleigh Albert Burke was born on a farm near Boulder, 
     Colo., on Oct. 19, 1901. his parents were of Swedish and 
     Pennsylvania Dutch stock, his paternal grandfather having 
     changed the name from Bjorkegren. He graduated from the 
     United States Naval Academy in 1923, and after five years of 
     sea duty, earned a degree in chemical engineering at the 
     University of Michigan in 1931.
       He was an inspector at a naval gun factory in Washington 
     when World War II broke out. He immediately applied for sea 
     duty, but his application was not granted until 1943, when he 
     was sent to command destroyers in the Solomons. For his 
     ensuing exploits, he was awarded 13 decorations, including 
     the Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Cross, the Legion 
     of Merit and the Silver Star.
       In January 1977, he was awarded the nation's highest 
     civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, by President Gerald R. 
     Ford. In 1984, the Navy named a class of missile-launching 
     destroyers for him. And in 1991, it launched the U.S.S. 
     Arleigh Burke, an $864 million destroyer, and for the first 
     time in Navy history, the man for whom a ship was named was 
     on hand to see her commissioned.
       Mr. Burke is survived by his wife, the former Roberta 
     (Bobbi) Gorsuch, to whom he was married for 72 years.

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