[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 32 (Thursday, March 13, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E460-E461]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    BIPARTISAN CONGRESSIONAL RETREAT

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 13, 1997

  Mr. GRINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, at our bipartisan congressional retreat 
this past weekend, historian David McCullough shared a view of the 
legislative process which was idealistic, practical, and filled with 
historic insights. He reminded us that this country was founded by 
practical idealists who understood both the frustrations of traditional 
political and legislative life and yet who were able to focus again and 
again on the idealistic long-term needs of America. I believe every 
citizen would profit from reading Mr. McCullough's speech. I submit it 
into the Congressional Record.

                    Bipartisan Congressional Retreat

                         (By David McCullough)

       Well, Amo, you've taken my breath away and your invitation 
     to speak here is as high a tribute as I've ever received. I 
     feel greatly honored but also a strong sense of humility. And 
     I hope it won't seem presumptuous if I--in what I say today--
     appear to know your job. I don't. If I can help you in what I 
     say, if I can help the country, then I will be very deeply 
     appreciative of the chance to be here.
       Your speaker welcomed you to Pennsylvania, I do so too as a 
     Pennsylvanian, by birth and by education and as one who loves 
     this state. There is more history here than almost anywhere 
     else in our country. Our most important, our most sacred 
     historic site--Independence Hall--is less than 100 miles from 
     where we sit, as the crow flies. And if you come to 
     Pennsylvania, you can always learn something, at whatever 
     stage in life.
       Last year, Rosalee and I came back to Philadelphia. We 
     pulled up in front of the hotel in a big, shiny, rented car 
     and the doorman, a handsome fellow in full regalia, opened 
     the door for Rosalee. I popped the button for the trunk and I 
     could see him getting the luggage out. I got out and walked 
     around the back of the car and he looked up and said: ``Well, 
     Mr. McCullough, welcome to Philadelphia; it is wonderful to 
     have you here.'' And I thought, ``I wonder if he knows me 
     because of my books or because of the work I do on public 
     television?'' And so I said, ``If you don't mind, I'd like to 
     know how you know who I am?'' And he said, ``the tag on your 
     suitcase.''
       You can't but help learn a great deal in this session and 
     as Speaker Gingrich said, this event is unprecedented in the 
     long history of the U.S. Congress. A gathering like this 
     never happened before. And how wonderful that your children 
     are here--the next generation--some of whom may also be 
     serving in Congress. We have the future with us too. And we 
     have the past.
       Now many people think of the past as something far behind, 
     in back of us. It is also possible to think of it as in front 
     of us, in the sense that we're going down a path that others 
     have trod before, and some very great people; we are in their 
     footsteps. And it is in that spirit that much of what I have 
     to say will be said. I want to talk about history; I want to 
     talk about purpose, and because there's an old writer's 
     adage, ``Don't tell me, show me.'' I want to conclude by 
     showing you.
       ``We live my dear soul in an age of trial,'' he wrote, in a 
     letter to his wife. In the seclusion of his diary he wrote, 
     ``I wander alone and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate.'' He 
     was a new Congressman and he was about to set off for his 
     first session in Congress. John Adams, heading for his very 
     first Congress--the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 
     1774--and he was very disturbed, very worried.
       ``We have not men fit for the times,'' he wrote, ``we are 
     deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune, in 
     everything. I feel unutterable anxiety.'' The next year when 
     he returned for the second Continental Congress he found that 
     the whole atmosphere had changed. This was after Lexington, 
     Concord, and Bunker Hill. This was a time of pressing need 
     and America, he decided, was a great, ``unwieldy body.''
       ``Its progress must be slow, it is like a large fleet 
     sailing under convoy, the fleetest of sailors must wait for 
     the dullest and the lowest. Every man in the Congress is a 
     great man,'' he wrote, ``and therein is the problem--an 
     orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon 
     every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his 
     political abilities.'' In 1776, in the winter--in the dead of 
     winter--with the temperature down in the 20s, John Adams set 
     off again from Braintree on horseback to ride 300 miles. 
     Nothing unusual then; we think of communications and 
     transportation as two different subjects. In the 18th 
     century, transportation and communication were the same. 
     Nothing could be communicated any faster than somebody on a 
     horse.
       He arrived back in Philadelphia--this is early in 1776, and 
     bear in mind this was the year of the Declaration of 
     Independence--and he wrote: ``There are deep jealousies. Ill-
     natured observations and incriminations take the place of 
     reason and argument.'' Inadequate people, contention, sour 
     moods, and from his wife, Abigail, John Adams received a 
     letter in which she said: ``You cannot be I know, nor do I 
     wish to see you, an inactive spectator.'' She wants him to be 
     there for all it is costing her, for all the difficulties she 
     is having, caring for the family and running the farm. And 
     then she adds, ``We have too many high-sounding words and too 
     few actions that correspond with them.''
       1776--History. History is a source of strength. History 
     teaches us that there is no such thing as a self-made man or 
     woman. We all know that. We all know the people who helped. 
     Teachers, parents, those who set us on the right track, those 
     who gave us a pat on the back, and when need be, those who 
     have rapped our knuckles.
       History teaches us that sooner is not necessarily better; 
     that the whole is often equal to much more than the parts; 
     and what we don't know can often hurt us deeply. If you want 
     to build for the future, you must have a sense of past. We 
     can't know where we're going if we don't know where we've 
     been and where we've come from and how we got to be where we 
     are. A very wise historian, who was also the Librarian of 
     Congress--Daniel Boorstin--said that to try to create the 
     future without some knowledge of the past is like trying to 
     plant cut flowers.
       History is an aid to navigation in troubled times; history 
     is an antidote to self-pity and to self-importance. And 
     history teaches that when we unite in a grand purpose there 
     is almost nothing we cannot do.
       Don't ever forget the great history of your institution--
     your all-important institution.

[[Page E461]]

     All of us, all of us want to belong to something larger than 
     ourselves. I'm sure it's why you're in Congress; I'm sure its 
     why you decided in the beginning, ``I'm going to give up this 
     and do that, and it's going to be difficult for my family''--
     because you wanted to serve something larger than yourselves. 
     It's at the heart of patriotism; it's why we are devoted to 
     our churches, our universities, and, most of all, to our 
     country.
       With that kind of allegiance--that kind of devotion--we can 
     rise to the occasion in a greater fashion than we have any 
     idea. And we've done it time and again, we Americans. Think 
     what your institution has achieved. It was Congress that 
     created the Homestead Act. It was Congress that ended 
     slavery. It was Congress that ended child labor. It was 
     Congress that built the Panama Canal and the railroads. It 
     was Congress that created Social Security. It was Congress 
     that passed the Voting Rights Act. It was Congress that sent 
     Lewis and Clark to the West and sent us on voyages to the 
     moon.
       Some acts of Congress like the Marshall Plan or Lend Lease, 
     as important as any events in our century, were achieved 
     under crisis conditions. But it doesn't have to be a crisis 
     condition. It can be an ennobling, large, imaginative idea. A 
     big idea.
       Much of what has happened in our time has been determined 
     by outside forces. In the Depression, the national 
     aspiration--the national ambition--was to get out of the 
     Depression. In the Second World War, the national 
     aspiration--the national ambition--didn't need to be defined, 
     it was to win the war. In the Cold War, the national 
     aspiration was to maintain our strength against the threat of 
     the Soviet menace, but at the same time, maintain our open 
     free way of life.
       But now the Cold War is over. And outside forces are not 
     determining the national ambition. So what is it going to be?
       Because we have the chance to choose. You have the chance 
     to choose. And as important as balancing the budget may be, 
     as important as restoring civility and law and order in the 
     cities may be, as important as fourth-grade testing may be, 
     or school uniforms, they aren't the grand ennobling ideas 
     that have been at the heart of the American experience since 
     the time of John Winthrop and the ideal of the City on the 
     Hill.
       And we have the chance to do that. We have the chance to 
     create that--you have the chance to do that. There has never 
     been in any of our lifetimes a moment of such opportunity as 
     now with the Cold War over. And if we just lift up our eyes a 
     little and begin to see what we might be able to do, we too--
     we in our time--could be cathedral builders. We can be a 
     great founding generation, like the founding fathers. And 
     what a wonderful, uplifting, thrilling, unifying sense of 
     purpose that can provide. America itself at the very 
     beginning was a big idea; the biggest idea in the political 
     history of the world. That could happen again.
       John Adams, who was one of the most remarkable of our 
     Founding Fathers and whose wife Abigail has left us a record 
     unlike that of any other spouse of a political leader of that 
     time, set something down on paper in the Spring of 1776 that 
     ought to be better known, It's called Thoughts on Government. 
     It was originally written as a letter to the eminent legal 
     scholar, George Wythe of Virginia. It was about twelve pages 
     long and when other Members of Congress asked him for a copy 
     he sat there, by candlelight, at night in a room in a house 
     across the street from the City Tavern in Philadelphia, 
     copying it all down. And then Richard Henry Lee of Virginia 
     suggested that it be published.
       Keep in mind please that it was written before the 
     Declaration of Independence. And listen to the language, 
     listen to the quality of the language, which of course, is 
     the quality of thinking. That's what writing is: thinking. 
     That's why it's so hard.
       ``It has been the will of heaven that we, the Members of 
     Congress, should be thrown into existence in a period when 
     the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would 
     have wished to have lived.'' Right away, you see, he's 
     saying, it is the will of heaven, there are larger forces 
     than we ourselves, and he's applying the moment against 
     the standard of the past: antiquity. It is to a very large 
     degree, a lesson in proportion. ``A period when a 
     coincidence of circumstances without an example has 
     afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity at 
     beginning government anew from the foundation and building 
     as they choose.'' New, unprecedented, and they may choose. 
     ``How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity 
     of choosing a system of government for themselves and for 
     their children.'' And here is the sentence I dearly love. 
     ``How few have ever had anything more of choice in 
     government than in climate.''
       He proposed a bicameral legislature. ``A representative 
     assembly,'' he called it, ``an exact portrait in miniature of 
     the people at large,'' balanced by a second ``distinct'' 
     smaller legislative body that it may ``check and correct the 
     errors of the other.'' Checks and balances. There was to be 
     an executive whose power was to include the appointment of 
     all judges, and command of the armed forces, but who was to 
     be chosen--and you'll like this--who was to be chosen by the 
     two houses of legislature and for no more than a year at a 
     time.
       At the close, he also wrote this--and think about this 
     please, as maybe a clue to what the cathedral we build might 
     be. ``Laws for the liberal education of youth are so 
     extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind 
     no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.''
       Then after another month or so he sat down and wrote a 
     letter to a friend back in Massachusetts, a fellow son of 
     Liberty. April 1776. Carved into a mantelpiece at the White 
     House, in the State Dining Room, is the prayer--the wishful 
     prayer taken from a letter Adams wrote to his wife Abigail 
     after his second or third night as President in the White 
     House--the first American to occupy the White House as 
     President--in which he says, ``May only wise and honest men 
     rule here.''
       I offer for your consideration the possibility that what 
     I'm about to read might be carved, if not in a mantelpiece, 
     somewhere in our Capitol where it would have appropriate 
     attention. I can think of almost no other line from any of 
     the founders so appropriate, so pertinent, to what you face--
     what we all face--not just in problems, not just in personal 
     animosities or contention or rivalries, but what we face in 
     the way of opportunity: to be builders as they were. Because 
     he establishes both a way and a warning: ``We may please 
     ourselves with the prospect of free and popular governments. 
     God grant us the way. But I fear that in every assembly, 
     members will obtain an influence by noise not sense, by 
     meanness not greatness, by ignorance not learning, by 
     contracted hearts not large souls. There is one thing my dear 
     sir that must be attempted and most sacredly observed or we 
     are all undone. There must be decency and respect and 
     veneration introduced for persons of every rank or we are 
     undone. In a popular government this is our only way.''
       I salute you all. I salute you as a fellow citizen, as a 
     fellow American, as the father of five children, as the 
     grandfather of nine children. I salute you as one who has 
     spent a good part of his working life trying to write some of 
     the history of your great institution.
       Our country deserves better--from all of us. But we look 
     especially to our leaders as we should rightfully do. And 
     there are no more important leaders than you. We don't expect 
     you to be perfect. We do expect hard work, diligence, 
     imagination, a little humor, civility, and especially, the 
     sense that there is really no limitation to what we, a free 
     people, can do. And that, with the grace of God, and a common 
     sense of purpose, there is no limit--which has always been at 
     the heart of the vision of American since the beginning.

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