[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 134 (Wednesday, September 25, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11257-S11258]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         SENATOR CLAIBORNE PELL

  Mr. BYRD. Madam President, at the end of this session of Congress, 
one of the Senate's longest-serving Members will be retiring. Senator 
Claiborne Pell's sterling 35-year record--actually it is 36 years this 
year--of dedicated service to the people of Rhode Island and the United 
States began in 1960, when he was elected to the first of his six 
terms. He is the third longest-serving Member of today's Senate, after 
only Senator Thurmond and myself. Yet Senator Pell's service to the 
United States and to his own strong principles began even earlier.

[[Page S11258]]

  Senator Pell's life has continued a long and honorable family 
tradition of service. His father, Herbert Claiborne Pell, was a 
Congressman and a Democratic State chairman before serving as U.S. 
Minister to Portugal and Hungary. Other Pell family ancestors include 
five Members of the Senate or House of Representatives, one of whom, 
George M. Dallas, also served as Vice President of the United States 
from 1845 to 1849, during the term of President Polk.
  Senator Pell began his own lifetime of service when he was just 22 
years old. In 1940, after graduating cum laude from Princeton 
University, he went to Europe to try and help concentration camp 
inmates. For his efforts, he was arrested not once but several times by 
the Nazis. He has never ceased his efforts to assist the suffering. 
This has been a guiding principle of his service on the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee, and underlies the truth of his acknowledged creed 
as a Senator: ``Translate ideas into action and help people.'' 
Claiborne Pell has long lived that precept. Four months before Pearl 
Harbor, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. As an enlisted man and then 
officer, he was posted to duty stations in the North Atlantic and 
Sicily. He remained in the Coast Guard Reserve after the war, attaining 
the rank of captain before retiring in 1978.
  After the war, Senator Pell turned his intellect and energies from 
the waging of war to the building of peace, participating in the San 
Francisco Conference that established the United Nations. He then 
served 7 years in the State Department, representing the United States 
as a Foreign Service officer in Czechoslovakia and Italy. Just as I 
carry a much-thumbed copy of the Constitution in my shirt pocket, 
Senator Pell carries in his hip pocket a copy of the United Nations 
Charter. Wherever you see Senator Pell, you can say, ``There goes the 
United Nations Charter.''
  His passion for peace, born from a tradition of diplomacy and 
tempered by the brutality of the Nazis and the anguish of world-
consuming war, has honed his character and shaped his subsequent 
legislative legacy.
  As elegant in his reasoning as he is in his person, Senator Pell has 
been a key player in the passage of many pieces of landmark legislation 
during his years in the Capitol. As befits his background of education 
and diplomacy, Senator Pell's accomplishments in the fields of 
education and arms control are most notable, but he also has been 
instrumental in authoring or ensuring passage of legislation supporting 
rail travel, curtailing drunk driving, and promoting cultural 
activities. He is the originator of the High Speed Ground 
Transportation Act to improve passenger rail service. He is also a 
founding father of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National 
Endowment for the Humanities, having served as the principal Senate 
sponsor of the legislation that created these entities in 1965.
  As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Senator 
Pell has been influential in securing the passage of major arms control 
treaties, including the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that reduced 
the nuclear arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States, a 
treaty to prohibit the deployment of weapons of mass destruction on the 
sea floor, and a treaty prohibiting the use of environmental 
modification techniques as weapons of war. I feel certain that he 
regrets that this, his final session of Congress, will end without the 
ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the passage of which 
he has labored so mightily and so long to secure.
  Senator Pell's longstanding commitment to universal human rights 
lends passion to his efforts to stem the spread of chemical weapons as 
well as to other efforts. He has been a steadfast advocate for 
diplomacy and multilateral solutions that avoid armed conflict, as well 
as a strong voice for justice when crimes have been committed against 
humanity. He opposed the Vietnam war, opposed the gulf war, and called 
early for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal in Bosnia, just as 
his father had called for the Nuremburg tribunals after World War II.
  On the home front, Senator Pell's appreciation for the benefits of 
education resulted in perhaps his best known legacy, the Pell grants 
for education. In 1972, Senator Pell won passage of legislation 
establishing basic educational opportunity grants. This grant program, 
which provides assistance directly to low- and middle-income college 
students, was renamed the Pell Grant Program in 1980, in recognition of 
Senator Pell's leadership in making college more accessible to 
deserving students.
  Education is the hope of the future, the basis on which civilized 
society rests. Senator Pell has been active in furthering that 
principle in his service as chairman and ranking member on the 
Education, Arts and Humanities Subcommittee of the Labor and Human 
Resources Committee. He also authored the National Sea Grant College 
and Program Act of 1966, and he has been instrumental in supporting 
vocational and special education programs. These efforts, again, 
illustrate the credo that he has lived by, translating ideas into 
actions that help people. +
  I will now refer to John Milton and his great work, Paradise Lost, 
which was written after he was totally blind.
  In his work, ``Of Education,'' John Milton (1608-74) wrote:

       I call therefore a complete and generous education that 
     which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully and 
     magnanimously all the offices both private and public of 
     peace and war.

  By those standards, Senator Claiborne Pell can surely be judged a 
well-educated man. He has served justly, skillfully, and magnanimously 
as a human rights activist, soldier, diplomat, businessman, and 
legislator. He has done so all of his life, as a private citizen and as 
an elected official. In doing so, he has educated and informed all of 
us by his example.
  Senator Pell has never let his passions override his reason or his 
courtesy. He has never let the passions of the moment override his 
principles. And in a time when public service has been belittled and 
derided, he has never stopped striving to the best of his considerable 
ability to make the world a safer, more civilized, more educated place.
  I think of Claiborne Pell as Mr. Integrity. There is not a false word 
that he has ever knowledgeably spoken. His word is as good as his bond. 
His handshake is as good as his bond. And to Mr. Integrity I say I wish 
him well as he leaves us to enjoy a much-deserved retirement with his 
lovely wife Nuala and his family.

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