[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 95 (Thursday, July 16, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8374-S8376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 REMARKS OF THE HONORABLE HOWARD H. BAKER, JR.--LEADER'S LECTURE SERIES

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, this was old home week in the Senate. Former 
Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, who served almost two decades in 
this body, returned to give us a piece of his mind--in the best sense 
of the phrase.
  To be precise, he delivered, in the august Old Senate Chamber, the 
second presentation in our Leader's Lecture Series. The first address 
earlier this year, by former Senator Mike Mansfield, was both moving 
and memorable. Senator Baker's remarks were no less so.
  He entitled his remarks ``On Herding Cats,'' a reference to the 
nature of the work of a Senator Majority Leader--or, for that matter, a 
Minority Leader. Suffice it to say that, as the current holder of the 
leadership office which Senator Baker gave up when he left the Senate, 
I fully understand what he means.
  To advance the public's understanding of the Senate, and to further 
appreciation of its unique traditions and procedures, I ask unanimous 
consent that the text of Senator Baker's Lecture be printed in the 
Record.
  There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

Remarks of the Honorable Howard H. Baker, Jr., Leader's Lecture Series, 
                             July 14, 1998

                            On Herding Cats

       I first walked into the gallery of the United States Senate 
     nearly sixty years ago. My great-aunt Mattie Keene was 
     secretary to Senator K.D. McKeller of Tennessee, and I came 
     here to visit her in July 1939 as a 13-year-old-boy, and she 
     procured gallery passes for the House and the Senate.
       The Senate had only the most primitive air conditioning in 
     those days. It was principally cooled by a system of louvers 
     and vents and sky lights that dated from 1859, when the 
     Senate vacated this chamber and moved down the hall to its 
     present home.
       The system did not work very well against Washington's 
     summertime plague of heat and humidity, and as a consequence, 
     Congress was not a year-round institution in those days.

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       Anyone who knows me understands how tempting it is to 
     devote the remainder of these remarks to my perennial 
     thesis--that this was precisely the way the national 
     legislature was designed to operate: as a citizen legislature 
     that did its work and went home, rather than a perpetual 
     Congress hermetically sealed in the capitol city. In the 
     summer of 1939, in any event, nature and technology offered 
     little choice.
       On that same trip in 1939, I traveled even further north--
     to New York, in the company of the same Aunt Mattie--to see 
     the New York World's Fair. There I had my first encounter 
     with a novel technology that would have even more profound 
     consequences than air conditioning. It was called 
     ``television.''
       And it was the same K.D. McKeller, my Aunt Mattie's boss, 
     who only three years later would help President Roosevelt 
     launch the Manhattan Project that would shortly usher in the 
     nuclear age.
       (Senator McKeller, by the way, was chairman of the Senate 
     Appropriations Committee at the time, and when President 
     Roosevelt asked him if he could hide a billion dollars to 
     finance this top-secret project, Senator McKeller replied, 
     ``Of course I can, Mr. President--and where in Tennessee are 
     we going to build this plant?'')
       I recite all this personal history not to remind you how 
     old I am but to remark on how young our country is, how true 
     it is in America that, as William Faulkner wrote, ``the past 
     isn't dead. It isn't even the past.''
       The same ventilation system that Senator Jefferson Davis of 
     Mississippi had installed in the new Senate chamber in 1859--
     just before leaving Washington to become President of the 
     Confederacy--was still in use when I first came here as a 
     boy, when television and nuclear power were in their infancy.
       We enter rooms that Clay and Webster and Calhoun seem only 
     recently to have departed. We can almost smell the smoke of 
     the fire the British kindled in what is now Senator Lott's 
     office to burn down Washington in August of 1814.
       (By the way, you can thank me for whatever smoke you now 
     smell. My late father-in-law, Everett Dirksen, has told me 
     that the fireplaces in the Republican Leader's offices didn't 
     work since they were sealed when they air conditioned the 
     Capitol. So when I was elected Republican Leader, I asked the 
     Architect of the Capitol what it would take to make these 
     fireplaces work, and he replied, ``A match, I suppose.'')
       My dear friend, Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, with 
     whom I helped write much of the environmental and public work 
     legislation of the 1970s and who passed away recently, came 
     to Washington with Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and was still 
     here when Ronald Reagan arrived in 1981. He was a walking 
     history lesson who embodied--and gladly imparted--a half 
     century of American history.
       You may be wondering by now what all these ruminations have 
     to do with the subject of Senate leadership. The answer is 
     this: what makes the Senate work today is the same thing that 
     made it work in the days of Clay, Webster and Calhoun, in 
     whose temple we gather this evening.
       It isn't just the principled courage, creative compromise 
     and persuasive eloquence that these men brought to the 
     leadership of the Senate--important as these qualities were 
     in restoring political prestige and Constitutional importance 
     to the Senate in the first half of the 19th century.
       (Heretical as it may sound, before these gentlemen arrived, 
     an alarming number of men left the Senate to pursue more 
     influential political careers in the House of 
     Representatives.)
       It isn't simply an understanding of the unique role and 
     rules of the Senate, important as that understanding is.
       It isn't even the devotion of the good of the country, 
     which has inspired every Senator since 1789.
       What really makes the Senate work--as our heroes knew 
     profoundly--is an understanding of human nature, an 
     appreciation of the hearts, as well as the minds, the 
     frailties as well as the strengths, of one's colleagues and 
     one's constituents.
       Listen to Calhoun himself, speaking of his great rival 
     Clay: ``I don't like Henry Clay. He is a bad man, an 
     imposter, a creator of wicked schemes. I wouldn't speak to 
     him. But by God, I love him.''
       It is almost impossible to explain that statement to most 
     people, but most Senators understand it instinctively and 
     perfectly.
       Here, in those twenty-eight words, is the secret to leading 
     the United States Senate. Here, in a jangle of insults 
     redeemed at the end by the most profound appreciation and 
     respect, is the genius and the glory of this institution.
       Very often in the course of my eighteen years in the 
     Senate, and especially in the last eight years as Republican 
     Leader and then Majority Leader, I found myself engaged in 
     fire-breathing, passionate debate with my fellow Senators 
     over the great issues of the times: civil rights, Vietnam, 
     environmental protection, Watergate, the Panama Canal, tax 
     cuts, defense spending, the Middle East, relations with the 
     Soviet Union, and dozens more.
       But no sooner had the final word been spoken and the last 
     vote taken than I would walk to the desk of my recent 
     antagonist, extend the hand of friendship, and solicit his 
     support on the next day's issue.
       People must think we're crazy when we do that. Or perhaps 
     they think our debates are fraudulent to begin with, if we 
     can put our passion aside so quickly and embrace our 
     adversaries so readily.
       But we aren't crazy, and we aren't frauds. This ritual is 
     as natural as breathing herd in the Senate, and it is as 
     important as anything that appends in Washington or in the 
     country we serve.
       It signifies that, as Lincoln said, ``We are not enemies 
     but friends. We must not be enemies.'' It pulls us back from 
     the brink of rhetorical, intellectual, even physical violence 
     that, thank God, has only rarely disturbed the peace of the 
     Senate.
       It's what makes us America and not Bosnia. It's what makes 
     us the most stable government on Earth, not a civil war 
     waiting to happen.
       We're doing the business of the American people. We have to 
     do it every day. We have to do it with the same people every 
     day. And if we cannot be civil with one another--if we stop 
     dealing with those who disagree with us or those we do not 
     like--we would soon stop functioning altogether.
       Sometimes we have stopped functioning. Once we had a civil 
     war. Once Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina 
     (who, by the way, was born in Senator Thurman's hometown of 
     Edgefield) came into this chamber and attacked Senator 
     Charles Summer of Massachusetts with a cane, nearly killing 
     him. And it is at those times we have learned the hard way 
     how important it is to work together, to see beyond the human 
     frailties, the petty jealousies, even the occasionally craven 
     motive, the fall from grace that every mortal experiences in 
     life.
       Calhoun didn't like Clay, didn't share his politics, didn't 
     approve of his methods. But he loved Clay because Clay was, 
     like him, an accomplished politician, a man in the arena, a 
     master of his trade, serving his convictions and his 
     constituency just as Calhoun was doing.
       Calhoun and Clay worked together because they knew they had 
     to. The business of their young nation was too important--and 
     their roles in that business too central--to allow them the 
     luxury of petulance.
       I read recently that our late friend and colleague Barry 
     Goldwater had proposed to his good friend, then Senator John 
     Kennedy, that the two of them make joint campaign appearances 
     in the 1964 presidential campaign, debating the issues one-
     on-one, without intervention from the press, their handlers, 
     or anyone else.
       Barry Goldwater and John Kennedy would have had trouble 
     agreeing on the weather, but they did agree that presidential 
     campaigns were important, that the issues were important, and 
     that the public's understanding of their respective positions 
     on those issues was important.
       That common commitment to the importance of public life was 
     enough to bridge an ideological and partisan chasm that was 
     both deep and wide. And that friendship, born here in the 
     Senate where they were both freshmen together in 1953, would 
     have served the nation well whoever might have won that 
     election in 1964.
       Barry Goldwater and I were also personal friends, as well 
     as professional colleagues and members of the same political 
     team. Even so, I could not automatically count on his support 
     for anything. Once, when I really needed his vote and leaned 
     on him perhaps a little too hard, he said to his Majority 
     Leader, ``Howard, you have one vote, and I have one vote, and 
     we'll just see how this thing comes out.''
       It was at that moment that I formulated my theory that 
     being leader of the Senate was like herding cats. It is 
     trying to make ninety-nine independent souls act in concert 
     under rules that encourage polite anarchy and embolden people 
     who find majority rule a dubious proposition at best.
       Perhaps this is why there was no such thing as a Majority 
     Leader in the Senate's first century and a quarter--and why 
     it's only a traditional, rather than statutory or 
     constitutional, office still today.
       Indeed, the only Senator with constitutional office is the 
     President Pro Tempore, who stands third in line of succession 
     to the Presidency of the United States. Strom Thurmond has 
     served ably in that constitutional role for most of the last 
     17 years, and I have no doubt he has at least another 17 to 
     go.
       In Strom's case I am reminded of an invitation that I 
     recently received to attend the dedication of a time capsule 
     in Rugby, Tennessee to be opened in a 100 years. 
     Unfortunately, I could not attend because of a schedule 
     conflict so I wrote that I was sorry that I couldn't be there 
     for the burying of the time capsule, but I assured them that 
     I would try to be there when they dig it up.
       There was a time when even the Vice Presidency was a 
     powerful office. When John Calhoun served as Andrew Jackson's 
     vice president, he had the power not only to cast tie-
     breaking votes but also to appoint whole congressional 
     committees.
       There was also a time when Majority and Minority Leaders 
     could keep their members in line by granting or withholding 
     campaign funds from the national parties--the only major 
     source of funds, besides personal wealth, that most Senators 
     could call upon.
       Even Lyndon Johnson, in the late 1950s, could wield this 
     power and enforce his party's discipline with cash and 
     committee assignments, as well as the famous ``Johnson 
     treatment.''
       Today, every Senator is an independent contractor, beholden 
     to no one for fund-raising, for media coverage, for policy 
     analysis, for political standing, or anything else. I herded 
     cats. Trent Lott and Tom Daschle have to tame tigers, and the 
     wonder is not

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     that the Senate, so configured, does so little but that it 
     accomplishes so much.
       That it does is a tribute to their talented leadership. 
     They can herd cats. They can tame tigers. They can 
     demonstrate the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the 
     poise of Cary Grant and the sincerity of Jimmy Stewart--all 
     of which are essential to success in the difficult roles they 
     play.
       For whatever help it may be to these and future leaders, 
     let me offer now a few rules of Senate leadership. As it 
     happens, they are an even Baker's Dozen.
       1. Understand its limits. The leader of the Senate relies 
     on two prerogatives, neither of which is constitutionally or 
     statutorily guaranteed. They are the right of prior 
     recognition under the precedent of the Senate and the 
     conceded right to schedule the Senate's business. These, 
     together with the reliability of his commitment and whatever 
     power of personal persuasion one brings to the job, are all 
     the tools a Senate leader has.
       2. Have a genuine and decent respect for differing points 
     of view. Remember that every Senator is an individual, with 
     individual needs, ambitions and political conditions. None 
     was sent here to march in lockstep with his or her colleagues 
     and none will. But also remember that even members of the 
     opposition party are susceptible to persuasion and redemption 
     on a surprising number of issues. Understanding these 
     shifting sands is the beginning of wisdom for a Senate 
     leader.
       3. Consult as often as possible, with as many Senators as 
     possible, on as many issues as possible. This consultation 
     should encompass not only committee chairmen but as many 
     members of one's party conference as possible in matters of 
     legislative scheduling.
       4. Remember that Senators are people with families. 
     Schedule the Senate as humanely as possible, with as few all-
     night sessions and as much accommodation as you can manage.
       5. Choose a good staff. In the complexity of today's world, 
     it is impossible for a Member to gather and digest all the 
     information that is necessary for the Member to make an 
     informed and prudent decision on major issues. Listen to your 
     staff, but don't let them fall into the habit of forgetting 
     of who works for whom.
       6. Listen more often than you speak. As my father-in-law 
     Everett Dirksen once admonished me in my first year in this 
     body, ``occasionally allow yourself the luxury of an 
     unexpressed thought.''
       7. Count carefully, and often. The essential training of a 
     Senate Majority Leader perhaps ends in the third grade, when 
     he learns to count reliably. But 51 today may be 49 tomorrow, 
     so keep on counting.
       8. Work with the President, whoever he is, whenever 
     possible. When I became Majority Leader after the elections 
     of 1980, I had to decide whether I would try to set a 
     separate agenda for the Senate or try to see how our new 
     President, with a Republican Senate, could work together as a 
     team to enact his programs. I chose the latter course, and 
     history proved me right. Would I have done the same with a 
     President of the opposition party? Lyndon Johnson did with 
     President Eisenhower, and history proved him right, as well.
       9. Work with the House. It is a co-equal branch of 
     government, and nothing the Senate does--except in the 
     ratification of treaties and the confirmation of federal 
     officers--is final unless the House concurs. My father and 
     step-mother both served in the House, and I appreciate its 
     special role as the sounding board of American politics. John 
     Rhodes and I established a Joint Leadership Office in 1977, 
     and it worked very well. I commend that arrangement to this 
     generation of Senate leaders and to every succeeding 
     generation.
       10. No surprises. Bob Byrd and I decided more than twenty 
     years ago that while we were bound to disagree on many 
     things, one thing we would always agree on was the need to 
     keep each other fully informed. It was an agreement we never 
     broke--not once--in the eight years we served together as 
     Republican and Democratic Leaders of the Senate.
       11. Tell the truth, whether you have to or not. Rather that 
     your word is your only currency you have to do business with 
     in the Senate. Devalue it, and your effectiveness as a Senate 
     leader is over. And always get the bad news out first.
       12. Be patient. The Senate was conceived by America's 
     founders as ``the saucer into which the nation's passions are 
     poured to cool.'' Let Senators have their say. Bide your 
     time--I worked for 18 years to get television in the Senate 
     and the first camera was not turned on until after I left. 
     But, patience and persistence have their shining reward. It 
     is better to let a few important things be your legacy than 
     to boast of a thousand bills that have no lasting 
     significance.
       13. Be civil, and encourage others to do likewise. Many of 
     you have heard me speak of the need for greater civility in 
     our political discourse. I have been making that speech since 
     the late 1960s, when America turned into an armed 
     battleground over the issues of civil rights and Vietnam. 
     Having seen political passion erupt into physical violence, I 
     do not share the view of those who say that politics today 
     are meaner or more debased than ever. But in this season of 
     prosperity and peace--so rare in our national experience--it 
     ill behooves America's leaders to invent disputes for the 
     sake of political advantage, or to inveigh carelessly against 
     the motives and morals of one's political adversaries. 
     America expects better of its leaders than this, and deserves 
     better.
       I continue in my long-held faith that politics is an 
     honorable profession. I continue to believe that only through 
     the political process can we deal effectively with the full 
     range of the demands and dissents of the American people. I 
     continue to believe that here in the United States Senate, 
     especially, our country can expect to see the rule of the 
     majority co-exist peacefully and constructively with the 
     rights of the minority, which is an interesting statement.
       It doesn't take Clays and Websters and Calhouns to make the 
     Senate work. Doles and Mitchells did it. Mansfields and 
     Scotts did it. Johnsons and Dirksens did it. Byrds and Bakers 
     did it. Lotts and Daschles do it now, and do it well. The 
     founders didn't require a nation of supermen to make this 
     government and this country work, but only honorable men and 
     women laboring honestly and diligently and creatively in 
     their public and private capacities.
       It was the greatest honor of my life to serve here and lead 
     here. I learned much about this institution, about this 
     country, about human nature, about myself in the eighteen 
     years I served here at the pleasure of the people of 
     Tennessee.
       I enjoyed some days more than others. I succeeded some days 
     more than others. I was more civil some days than others. But 
     the Senate, for all its frustration and foibles and failings, 
     is indeed the world's greatest deliberative body. And by God, 
     I love it.

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