[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 21 (Tuesday, February 25, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1588-S1591]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         JOURNEY OF GENERATIONS

  Mr. TORRICELLI. Mr. President, I rise to address the Senate for the 
first

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time as a Member of this proud institution, and, indeed, it is an 
important moment in my life and that of my family.
  Although I stand where I know preceding generations have often become 
legends, I also stand tall because I am standing here today on the 
shoulders of genuine giants--a tailor and his seamstress wife who 
walked from their native village in Italy for a boat to New York, a 
German steelworker who settled his young family in my native New 
Jersey.
  Mr. President, a journey of generations brings me to this moment. I 
understand that I may be bound to some Members of this Senate by little 
more than a single common thread. Many families are more powerful, and 
most biographies are genuinely more compelling. But Providence has 
chosen what we share this moment to help define the future of our 
people and the Republic that they have chosen to serve them.
  The burden of leadership may be greater on some generations, and 
perhaps it has been less on others. The only certainty for our time is 
that it is different. The great debates of this Chamber in other times 
have been framed by events--the threat of conflict in the time of our 
fathers, the immediate threat of economic dislocation not so many years 
ago. Previous generations often read the national agenda simply by the 
history that was presented to them. The choices were fundamental and 
they were very clear.
  The principal issue of governance before us now is very different. 
The United States is largely without large-scale military strife. The 
successive defeats of fascism and communism leave the United States 
with a relative military advantage that is unprecedented. The greatest 
economic expansion in history has resulted in a standard of living and 
a scale of economic activity that was unimaginable only a generation 
ago. This is not to suggest that either providing for the national 
defense or building the national economy are complete. The world 
remains a dangerous place in the age of terrorism, and the blessings of 
America still elude too many.
  But our time is different. We inherit no agenda and few national 
commitments from which we are not freed by the end of the cold war. 
This opportunity presents an enormous opening, but has also led to an 
extraordinary national anxiety. As a nation, we have consumed almost a 
decade since the cold war has subsided without being clear about what 
we need to achieve to succeed with the reward of peace.
  In our domestic affairs, some view the success of civil rights, the 
completion of universal education for the construction of a national 
infrastructure as ends in themselves.
  In our family lives, many seem uncertain as to our own objectives as 
people. The comfort of a home, the completion of an education, seem to 
bring neither the security nor the fulfillment that we once envisioned. 
It is in short, Mr. President, a time of extraordinary anxiety in our 
affairs. Across the aisles of this Chamber, the conference tables of 
our businesses and even the living rooms of our homes, there is need 
for an honest conversation. It is time to ask the most fundamental 
questions about the objectives of our times and our goals as a people 
and as individuals.
  No one element of this debate is more fundamental than our new 
national objectives in our relations with other States around the 
globe. The foreign policy goals of the United States in the next 
century can best be explained relative to the experience of our own 
time. For although the 20th century has not yet concluded, it is 
already possible to predict that despite all the advances of science 
and culture this time will best be remembered for our inability to 
manage relations between nations.
  Any discussion of our foreign policy objectives, therefore, must 
simply begin with this simple commitment: the future must simply be 
different than the past. This century evolved through the lessons of 
collective security. A series of States with similar interests, 
political institutions, compatible military capabilities and goals 
found common cause. The NATO treaty was the best example and remains 
the foundation of our policy. But the first principal difference we are 
likely to face in the 21st century is that American security interests 
are no longer disproportionately European. In a world of global markets 
and intercontinental weapons, there are no regions of sufficient 
distance or size that they lack relevance. Treaties which restrict the 
global scope of our collective security including NATO are simply no 
longer acceptable. Creating new arrangements tailored to individual 
crises like the Persian Gulf are too inefficient and insufficient. 
Leadership requires the adoption of an established global structure of 
collective security. Whether under the NATO umbrella, under different 
sponsorship or a structure that is global in scale, collective security 
for our international security threats remains paramount.
  The second defining difference in American foreign policy is 
recognizing that international conflict on a scale seen in the 20th 
century must never be allowed to occur again because by definition such 
conflicts can never be won again. Technological change will place all 
nations within the range of secondary powers that retain weapons now 
reserved for more stable nations.
  Collective security, therefore, must be designed not only to prevail 
in conflicts but to avoid their ever occurring by denying capability to 
certain well-defined governments. These are States which by their 
systems of government, record of actions or temperament of leadership, 
should make themselves ineligible to ever possess or attempt to develop 
certain weapons. This policy of weapons denial already encompasses 
technological and trade restrictions. In the future, it must also 
include covert or overt actions by the United States or now collective 
international organizations to ensure weapons denial as an assurance of 
national security.
  A third national consideration will involve far more introspection by 
every American. As a decent people with deep religious traditions, it 
is time to recognize that technology presents a new moral dilemma. For 
two centuries Americans witnessed a world of famine and disease. Untold 
millions suffered and died with little more than passing commentary 
while we remained reconciled to both our moral principles and 
international realities by concluding that nature was sometimes cruel 
and divine actions difficult to comprehend. In critical moments, from 
the Marshall Plan to the Alliance for Progress, the Nation committed 
itself to confronting these tragic realities.
  During most generations, the national boundaries served to define our 
sense of moral responsibility. That was all enough. But something has 
now fundamentally changed. Perhaps it is because global communication 
now no longer allows us to be shielded from harsh realities. But, 
indeed, it is even more than that. The world population group now 
estimates that 35,000 children die from starvation every day, this year 
an estimated 18 million will contract river blindness, and over 100,000 
children will suffer from new cases of polio. No American can feel 
comfort any longer in reaching conclusions about the inevitability of 
human suffering. There has been a cure for polio for 40 years. River 
blindness is treated by medication that costs $3. The simple truth is 
that some disease and much human suffering is no longer a question of 
divine providence or lack of understanding or a failure of technology. 
Most are the results of a political decision, a judgment to withhold 
technology, withdraw from efforts to relieve suffering because of 
shortages of funds or simply because we believe that political 
boundaries place us at sufficient distance.
  Reconciling our beliefs and our actions is no longer a simple affair. 
Suffering in the world and judgments made by individual Americans and 
their governments are debate long needed on the floor of our great 
institutions. Within our own communities, Americans need to decide a 
new set of national objectives as well.
  Americans have learned a lesson from the excesses of Government. 
Every citizen can recite a list of programs that failed or funds that 
were wasted. Our generation has concluded that the role of Government 
needs to be more limited. A previous generation learned from the 
lessons of child labor, the disabled, the failure to care for the 
elderly, that Government was sometimes too restricted in its role. Now 
it

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is time for us to decide: Is it too limited or is it too much? It is, 
indeed, extraordinary that after two centuries of the American 
experiment we are still debating the appropriate role and scale of the 
U.S. Government. In our time we must ask both the appropriate range and 
the scale of Government activities that are needed for our generation.

  The answer is likely to be somewhere in between. We must, obviously, 
be shaped by our own experiences. But I think most Americans will 
recognize that simply because Government sometimes failed, because we 
have learned that it cannot do everything, is not a reason to conclude 
that it can do nothing. We take enormous pride in the fact that America 
is a place with an unlimited ceiling of opportunity. But all too often 
we are also learning that the floor of American life is too hard. 
Because many, or most can succeed is not a reason to turn away from 
public responsibilities, because some will fail.
  We are also learning, for all the lessons of the past which we must 
remember, they are not instructive of the future. We are living in a 
different time. Indeed, we are discovering that the economic success of 
each family, many communities, and many States are now connected in a 
means that we never would have imagined. We are discovering that the 
operation of our railroads, our airports, our highways, the education 
of our children all inevitably will affect the quality of life of our 
own families.
  For two centuries our Federal Government was central to providing the 
private economy with certain elements that were needed for 
competitiveness. From inexpensive labor, through our immigration 
policy, to access to raw materials, competitive taxes, copyright laws, 
sometimes even direct subsidies, we understood an appropriate role for 
the U.S. Government in ensuring economic success.
  As we now face this debate again in our own time, reaching our own 
conclusion about the role, size and scale of the Federal Government, 
perhaps at least this one thing should be recognized as different. As 
certainly as those before us recognize immigration policy, raw 
materials, these other elements as central to economic success, 
education and knowledge is now the fodder of the private economy in our 
own time. Therefore, as certainly as local governments, as 
neighborhoods at one time confronted the need for quality schools, high 
standards and a quality education, now the Nation itself is confronted 
with this question, because it is no longer good enough to know that 
education meets standards in our neighborhoods or our towns or even our 
States. Our States collectively in our Federal system will meet success 
or failure in whether or not people we don't even know in communities 
we have never visited in States we hardly know meet those same 
standards and are competitive.
  Second, as a national community, redefining ourselves again, debating 
the appropriate role of the Federal Government, we are also faced with 
the most fundamental of issues that first confronted our Republic. It 
is the issue of providing security for our communities and our 
families. It is, in short, assuring domestic order. From longer prison 
sentences to direct assistance to local police, we have in recent years 
redefined our Federal system for a larger role because it was necessary 
to assure the security of our people.
  In the future, the Federal Government, as it redefines itself, will 
also play a larger role in other areas. We have begun to deny parents 
the ability to flee responsibilities to children by fleeing State 
jurisdictions. We have begun, indeed, to change Federal laws in 
relation to access to weapons. Three decades ago, in my State of New 
Jersey and in many other urban communities, we began to enact gun 
control laws. But recently, in the city of New York, it was discovered 
that fully two-thirds of all the weapons now found involved in serious 
felony crimes were not sold in New York or New Jersey or other States 
that had gun control laws, but were imported from other States. The 
Brady bill was an important beginning to assuring that, as a community, 
while some States did not, fortunately, share in the plague of crime, 
they nevertheless would begin to exercise responsibility by, through 
new national laws, beginning to separate criminals from the guns they 
use.
  A third unfinished piece of business in the American social compact 
also needs to be addressed. It began in this century with labor 
standards and grew to include Social Security, unemployment insurance 
and Medicare. Each of those in our social compact was a generational 
judgment. Now there is a need for another, because that list which 
began early in the progressive era and expanded through Medicare by way 
of unemployment and Social Security now leaves us with the question of 
health care insurance. Before the book is closed on the 20th century, 
in this great redefining of America's social commitments, surely access 
to affordable and quality health care needs to be added to the list. It 
is not a question of the Government supplanting private health care. It 
is not a question of the loss of private options or the private 
exercise of talents within the health care field any more so than 
Medicare meant that doctors were no longer working privately or 
unemployment insurance meant that private companies no longer managed 
their own affairs.
  But it is a question that what began with our grandparents and our 
great grandparents in assuring independence in the workplace, the right 
to bargain for your own wage, your freedom from want for the elderly 
through Social Security, that movement is not complete and that work is 
not finished without addressing the reality of 40 million Americans 
outside of the private health care insurance system, or their children 
who come of age without inoculation to disease or, indeed, often are 
born without access to a health care system for their mothers or in 
their infancy.

  All these are part of expanding our domestic agenda at a time when we 
redefine the role of Government. I recognize that there are many in 
this institution, as there are across this country, who would confront 
these issues differently. But in our time there is a new, greater 
threat to resolve in these questions. It is on the mantle of 
bipartisanship, part of the desire to settle all disputes. We are, in 
this institution and around the country, confusing the desire to end 
the noise of squabbling, the needless bickering of partisanship, with a 
new seeming desire of bipartisanship, to end all conflicts together.
  This is, Mr. President, in my mind, a new and compelling problem. 
American democracy is not served best by Democrats and Republicans, or 
liberals and conservatives, setting aside all their differences. The 
public believes we are in some new accord in which we have no 
differences. Democracy is served best by people who do put petty 
interests aside, who do not argue simply for partisan reasons, who do, 
indeed, come together in moments of great national crisis, but who, in 
honesty, come to this floor as they come to their dinner tables and 
their businesses and their places of work every day in honest 
disagreement where they have honest difference.
  Let us, therefore, debate the question of America's new role in the 
world with different perspectives. Because they are complex questions 
and difficult to answer. Let us begin to finally redefine the role of 
Government in our lives and our economy from our various perspectives, 
because Americans have different views, and they are difficult and 
complex questions. But let us not, because we want to end 
disagreements, where we were sometimes disagreeable, make 
bipartisanship a goal in and of itself. The goal is to answer the 
question and to serve our people, no matter the disagreements.
  This is, Mr. President, finally, an extraordinary time. None of the 
problems that I have tried to outline tonight should overwhelm us. None 
concern me because none are as big as the country we represent or as 
bold or as talented as the people who live in our generation in this 
Nation.
  This is an extraordinary time, and we are an extraordinary people. 
Indeed, I would dare to say what probably no other generation ever 
would have said on the floor of this Senate: That there is no time and 
no place when it is better to have been alive or to be an American than 
this moment. We have won the great conflicts in the world that 
threatened our democracy and the peace. We are the masters of a great 
new technology that can serve us, our interests and our families. There 
is a quality of life that awaits us if we learn to manage our affairs, 
raise the

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resources, deal responsibly with our economy and invest in our future.
  It is not to say that there will not be difficult days in our own 
time. There will always be difficult days. But we are a people who 
managed to carve out a new social order through Social Security and 
labor rights in the depths of a depression.
  We are a people who managed through economic despair to rise to win a 
great world war.
  We are a people who, in the midst of a cold war, conquered space, won 
the fight for civil rights, even enacted Medicare and began the 
greatest expansion of education in history.
  We are a people who, through difficult times, mastered the moment to 
achieve great things.
  Now, in far better times, though most certainly with some problems in 
our public and private lives, we are asked to rise again. In this, I 
have no doubts. Let us find a new role for America in the world where 
we simply do not respond to events, but help shape them; no longer see 
our responsibility simply to win international conflicts but to prevent 
them by negotiating the peace where possible, by taking action to 
prevent war by military means when necessary.
  Let us redefine the role of Government in our lives and our private 
economy to ensure that it is no more than necessary, but everything 
that is essential to ensure our competitiveness, our fairness in social 
justice.
  I pledge, Mr. President, in my 6 years in this institution, to simply 
be guided by this: The words given to me by a friend who came to me 
knowing that I would rise on this day and remembering that they were 
once spoken by Edmund Burke in a speech to the Electors of Bristol. He 
said:

       Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his 
     judgment. And he betrays instead of serves you if he 
     sacrifices it to your opinion.

  Mr. President, to the citizens of New Jersey and to this Nation, I 
promise simply in these years to be guided by my judgment.
  Mr. President, I thank you, and I yield the floor.

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