[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 49 (Wednesday, April 23, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H1773]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           TWO GREAT AMERICANS: BOB DORNAN AND BILL BLAKEMORE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California [Mr. Hunter] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend, the gentleman from 
Georgia, Jack Kingston, for giving me some time here ahead of his 1 
hour.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise to say a few things about two great Americans. 
One of them is my good friend Bob Dornan, who is no longer with us, but 
may be back soon depending on the outcome of the election challenge 
that he has offered; and the other one is Bill Blakemore, a private 
American citizen who right now is in the hospital, the Methodist 
Hospital in Houston, TX, who is in pretty serious condition, but who 
was very, very important to this country in the 1980's when he helped 
to put together a group of Texas conservatives who rallied the country 
behind the idea that Central America was worth saving, and particularly 
that we needed to support the Contras, the freedom fighters who were 
fighting the Communist-backed, Soviet-backed insurgents or Soviet 
backed Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and also that we needed to protect the 
very fragile government of El Salvador, the government of Jose Duarte, 
which at that time was holding off the Soviet-backed FMLN.

                              {time}  2015

  When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980, and I was lucky to be 
one of the people that came in with him as one of the 54 Republican 
Congressmen who were elected that year, Honduras, Guatemala, El 
Salvador and Nicaragua were all under some sort of a military 
dictatorship. Today all those nations have fragile democracies, 
imperfect, certainly not totally cast in the image of democracy that we 
have in the United States, but represented I think by a determination 
that was manifested in one of those voting lines in the 1980's, when 
one woman who had been ordered by the FMLN Communists not to go to the 
polls that day was standing in a voting line with a bullet wound in her 
shoulder and was asked by one of the reporters if she was not going to 
leave the line and she said ``no''. Essentially she said ``We fought 
for a long time to get to this point, I'm going to vote.'' And they had 
a great turnout that year.
  Jose Duarte remained the leader of El Salvador and, because of the 
steadfastness of Ronald Reagan a lot of his supporters and guys like 
Bill Blakemore of Texas, who was a real leader of the business 
community, we have a chance for real democracy in our own hemisphere.
  Let me say just a word, Mr. Speaker, about my great friend Bob 
Dornan. There will never be another one like him. He was of great value 
to this House, and I think there is a good chance he will be of great 
value to this House again. I am just reminded when they had the 
incident in Somalia and those Americans were killed, Bob Dornan was the 
only Member of the National Security Committee who went over, flew that 
long distance, some 40 hours in the air, to Somalia, went over the 
event in detail, and came back and contacted the family of every member 
of that Ranger unit who were killed in that debacle.
  That was Bob Dornan. A heart as big as all outdoors, a keen 
intellect, a great ability to speak. He has still got it. Obviously we 
have heard from him across the airwaves lately, but I just wanted to 
say that Bob Dornan was a great, great asset to the National Security 
Committee, flew all of the aircraft, knew all of the countries with 
whom we had treaty relations and knew what the treaty relations were 
and was a real expert in national security. God bless you, Bob. I hope 
to see you back soon.

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