[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 150 (Tuesday, October 20, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12731-S12733]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      THE RETIREMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE LEE H. HAMILTON OF INDIANA

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today humbled by the 
considerable accomplishments of a great friend and colleague, Lee 
Hamilton of Indiana. After 17 terms, he will leave the House of 
Representatives at year's end. What a profound loss for us all.
  Not surprisingly, Lee Hamilton continues to be recognized for his 
achievements. Last Tuesday's New York Times quotes Congressman Hamilton 
as ``feeling pretty good about the job'' he has held for 34 years. ``I 
have more confidence in the institutions of government and the Congress 
than most of my constituents. The process is often untidy, but it 
works.'' David S. Broder wrote in a column entitled ``Lee Hamilton's 
Mark,'' ``. . . no one will be more missed by his colleagues of both 
parties than Lee Hamilton of Indiana . . . (h)e is an exemplar of the 
common-sense, instinctively moderate model of legislator that used to 
be common in Congress but is increasingly rare today.''
  I had the honor of serving with Representative Hamilton on the 
Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (1995-1997). 
Our Commission recommended unanimously that legislation should be 
adopted to govern the system of classifying and declassifying 
information, which for a half century has been left to executive 
regulation. The Congressional members of the Commission introduced such 
legislation in the House and Senate and one of my largest regrets for 
the 105th Congress is that we could not get this legislation adopted in 
honor of Lee Hamilton's retirement. This will take some time, but 
eventually, surely, we will pass such a bill.
  As the former Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, the Joint 
Committee on the Organization of Congress, the Select Committee to 
Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, and the Permanent 
Select Committee on Intelligence, Lee Hamilton has showed an 
extraordinary capacity to lead our country through difficult times. 
Last year, Lee received the Edmund S. Muskie Distinguished Public 
Service Award from the Center for National Policy and, just last month, 
the Hubert Humphrey Award from the American Political Science 
Association.
  I might note here that Hubert Humphrey was the first Chairman of the 
Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for 
Scholars here in Washington. To our great benefit, Lee Hamilton has 
just recently agreed to head the Wilson Center. He will assume his new 
post in January, succeeding the Center's distinguished director, 
Charles Blitzer. Dr. Blitzer's tremendous achievement--the building of 
a permanent home for the Wilson Center at the now complete Federal 
Triangle--fulfills the commitment to President Wilson's living memorial 
as established in its 1968 founding statute. That statute required that 
the Center be located on Pennsylvania Avenue. Today the Wilson Center 
can be found at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue where 
it maintains architectural and functional autonomy from its neighbor, 
the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.
  It is of enormous comfort to this Senator to know that Lee Hamilton 
will remain close at hand and continue to engage us all in matters of 
great import.
  I ask that David Broder's column ``Lee Hamilton's Mark'' from The

[[Page S12732]]

Washington Post and the article, ``A Life Reflected in a House 
Transformed,'' by Melinda Henneberger in The New York Times be printed 
in the Record.
  The article follows:

              [From the Washington Post, October 11, 1998]

                          Lee Hamilton's Mark

                          (By David S. Broder)

       He's not the oldest or longest-serving of the 21 House 
     members who are retiring this year and not running for other 
     offices. Those distinctions belong to two other Democrats, 
     Illinois' Sidney Yates, the ardent defender of arts funding, 
     and Texas's Henry Gonzalez, the populist scourge of bankers 
     and other big shots.
       He may not have had the political impact of a much more 
     junior Republican retiree, New York's Bill Paxon, who led the 
     1994 campaign that ended 40 years of Democratic control of 
     the House and who appeared to be on track to a future 
     speakership until he fell out last year with his former ally 
     Newt Gingrich.
       But my hunch is that no one will be more missed by his 
     colleagues of both parties than Lee Hamilton of Indiana, who 
     is ending a notable 34-year career in the House with the 
     adjournment of this Congress.
       Hamilton is a throwback to the old days of the House--and 
     not just because he still has the crew cut he wore when he 
     came to Washington as a small-town Hoosier lawyer in the 
     Democratic landslide of 1964. He is an exemplar of the 
     common-sense, instinctively moderate model of legislator that 
     used to be common in Congress but is increasingly rare today.
       Hamilton has made his mark in two areas unlikely to produce 
     public acclaim. Like his mentor and friend, former 
     representative Morris Udall of Arizona, he has struggled with 
     modest results to improve the internal organization and 
     operations of the House and the way its members pay for their 
     campaigns. More notably, he has been the Democrats' leader on 
     international policy, serving as chairman of the Foreign 
     Affairs Committee when his party had the majority. In both 
     arenas, he has consistently placed principle above 
     partisanship and worked comfortably with like-minded 
     Republicans.
       He first attracted attention in 1965 when, as chairman of 
     the big freshman Democratic class, he wrote President Lyndon 
     Johnson urging ``a pause'' in the breakneck pace of Great 
     Society legislation, the first clear signal that Johnson has 
     pushed the mandate of his election sweep beyond safe 
     political limits. Johnson came to Indiana to help Hamilton 
     with his first--and hardest--reelection campaign in 1966, but 
     the following year, Hamilton again demonstrated his 
     independence--and his prescience--by sponsoring one of the 
     first (but unsuccessful) amendments to scale back American 
     military operations in Vietnam.
       As Hamilton recalled in a speech last November, Johnson had 
     been a friend as well as his ally. ``He had the freshman 
     class in the Cabinet Room and told us, `Buy your home.' He 
     said, `If you're like most politicians, it'll be the only 
     decent investment you'll ever make.' I did, and it was.''
       But after the Vietnam amendment, Johnson called him in. ``I 
     will never forget his eyes when he asked me, `How could you 
     do that to me, Lee?' '' Hamilton recalled. ``I have served 
     with eight presidents and 11 secretaries of state, and I have 
     sympathized with the burdens and pressures all of them have 
     faced.'' But he has operated on the principle that if 
     Congress is to meet its responsibilities, it must offer its 
     best and most candid counsel to an administration. ``Our 
     great fault,'' he told me, ``is timidity. We don't like to 
     stick our necks out.''
       That has not been true of Lee Hamilton. He has given his 
     best judgment freely and plainly, usually supportive of the 
     president, but has never been reluctant to dissent.
       In his final months in office, Hamilton received the Edmund 
     S. Muskie Distinguished Public Service Award from the Center 
     for National Policy and the Hubert Humphrey Award from the 
     American Political Science Association. Accepting the first 
     award, he said, ``Politics and politicians may be unpopular, 
     but they're also indispensable. . . . Representative 
     democracy, for all its faults, enables us to live together 
     peacefully and productively. It works through a process of 
     deliberation, negotiation and compromise--in a word, the 
     process of politics. At its best, representative democracy 
     gives us a system where all of us have a voice in the process 
     and a stake in the product.''
       Hamilton understands that ``when healthy skepticism about 
     government turns to cynicism, it becomes the great enemy of 
     democracy.'' So his new career will position him to battle 
     for understanding of politics and against corrosive distrust. 
     He will head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for 
     Scholars in Washington, where academics from other nations 
     gather with Americans to think and write about contemporary 
     public policy problems. He will also lead a newly formed 
     Center on Congress at Indiana University, an 
     interdisciplinary program aimed at making the legislative 
     branch less mysterious and suspicious. He is the right man 
     for both jobs.

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 13, 1998]

                A Life Reflected in a House Transformed

                        (By Melinda Henneberger)

       Washington, Oct. 12.--As he waits for the last votes of his 
     34-year Congressional career, Democratic Representative Lee 
     Hamilton runs one hand through his crew cut and thinks out 
     loud, in his right-down-the-middle way, about why the House 
     is both meaner and cleaner, more hard-working and less 
     thoughtful, than when he arrived here from Columbus, Ind., in 
     1965.
       In those days, he recalls, members of Congress palled 
     around, played cards and made a good-faith effort to be on 
     the golf course by 1 P.M. Now they barely have time to get to 
     know one another, let alone contemplate the meaning of 
     legislative life, in the press of 24-hour news cycles and 
     three-day work weeks bracketed by rush-rush trips home.
       Back then, you could legally accept fancy gifts and pocket 
     leftover campaign money when you retired. Even if you managed 
     to get into trouble, there was no House ethics committee 
     until 1978. Then again, neither was there any need to work 
     full time raising money. Mr. Hamilton is nostalgic about the 
     $30,000 he spent as a small-town lawyer on his first race in 
     1964, the year of Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide. He spent $1 
     million on his last race in 1996.
       In his office, the Congressman's papers are already being 
     packed up, and the mail marked ``return to sender.'' Settling 
     in for a leisurely interview, the 67-year-old Indiana 
     Basketball Hall of Famer drapes his large frame over a 
     straight wooden chair in a room adorned with paintings of his 
     dogs, Tawny and Buffy.
       The politically moderate son of a Methodist minister from 
     Evansville, Ind., he has been a major force on foreign policy 
     and led opposition to aid for the Nicaraguan contra 
     guerrillas. He was House chairman of the panel that 
     investigated Reagan Administration support for the contras 
     with the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran, and also 
     chaired the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees. The 
     Presidential nominees Michael S. Dukakis and Bill Clinton 
     seriously considered him as a running mate.
       Yet when invited to linger for a moment over some favorite 
     accomplishment, he mentions, not very grandly, that he was 
     proud simply to have been among those who voted for the 
     creation of Medicare, even if he did not write the bill.
       Despite his talk about 1960's sociability on the Hill, Mr. 
     Hamilton seems always to have put in long hours. A 1966 
     profile in The Washington Star noted that, ``Hamilton gets to 
     the office every morning at about 6:30, reads all the mail, 
     answers nearly all the roll calls, and has missed going back 
     home on weekends only a couple of times since he took office. 
     He doesn't drink and he doesn't smoke and he works hard.''
       He has been enormously popular in the Ninth District in 
     southeastern Indiana. (He is also popular among his staff in 
     a workplace in which aides are often treated casually. Behind 
     his back, staff members are misty about his retirement.)
       ``I've been going to a lot of retirement dinners back in 
     Indiana,'' he said, ``and the things people remember are the 
     simple things, that I've tried to be accessible and honest 
     and tried to make government work. When I drive through my 
     district and see a sewage system or a library or a school 
     I've had something to do with, that gives me a lot of 
     satisfaction.''
       And most likely, this unwillingness to trumpet his career 
     and contributions would have set him apart at any moment in 
     the history of the big, noisy institution he clearly loves.
       On the other side of the ledger, Mr. Hamilton said, ``You 
     don't walk away from a 34-year career without some regrets, 
     and I leave very disappointed that we haven't done something 
     on campaign finance or affordable health care.''
       Not surprisingly, his most immediate regret is what he sees 
     as the necessity of an inquiry into the possible grounds for 
     impeaching the President, a man he has praised on policy and 
     excoriated for the private conduct that got him into trouble.
       ``It's a depressing way to end a career, on the note of 
     impeachment,'' he said, removing his glasses, fiddling with 
     them, putting them back on. ``I'm distressed with the ending, 
     but you don't control these things.''
       Still, living through Watergate and Iran-contra, Mr. 
     Hamilton said, has given him some perspective on the current 
     situation: ``We look back now and say the system worked in 
     Watergate but in the middle of it, it was messy and partisan. 
     And something like that is happening now, in my view.''
       How does he answer those in his own party who respond to 
     criticism of Mr. Clinton's behavior by saying essentially 
     that President Reagan did far worse and survived? ``In Iran-
     contra you were looking at a President abusing the powers of 
     the Presidency''--as opposed to the personal conduct under 
     discussion in the Clinton case, in his view. ``But though a 
     lot of people on the left were disappointed we didn't hang 
     him, the evidence didn't point to that.''
       Mr. Hamilton was among the 31 Democrats who broke party 
     ranks and voted for an open-ended impeachment inquiry. He 
     thought it only right to continue the process, he said, 
     though he has concluded that the President's wrongdoing 
     does not meet the constitutional standard of an 
     impeachable offense and believes Mr. Clinton will finish 
     his term.
       And as Mr. Hamilton leaves office, he wants to spend some 
     time thinking about how the President might be rehabilitated 
     to assure that America is not weakened, particularly on the 
     international stage.
       Mr. Hamilton's future includes two new jobs, as director of 
     the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, a Government-
     sponsored

[[Page S12733]]

     institution that promotes research as well as exchanges 
     between scholars and policymakers, and of a new center for 
     the study of Congress at Indiana University. He and his wife, 
     Nancy, will stay on here, in their home in Alexandria, Va.
       Not only Congress, he said, but political life in general 
     is a different game now than it was in 1960, when Mr. 
     Hamilton was unable to turn out a respectable crowd to greet 
     Senator John F. Kennedy in Columbus.
       ``I called everybody I knew and couldn't get 40 people to 
     come out to the Old City Hall to see him just a few months 
     before he got the nomination'' for the Presidency, he said, 
     laughing at the innocence of the time. ``Now you start 
     running for President four years ahead of time and the voters 
     are so well informed, you do something and get back to the 
     office and the phones are already ringing.''
       Not all of that sophistication is progress, he said. He 
     dared to say what no candidate would: that today's elected 
     officials pay too much attention to constituents, tracking 
     every hiccup in public opinion.
       In some ways, he feels he is leaving on the same note he 
     came in on: ``We're still fighting about Medicare 30 years 
     later.'' But there has been positive change, he said, in that 
     the workings of Congress are much more open now, and the body 
     more truly representative, with many more women and members 
     of minority groups in office. If he has learned anything, he 
     said, it is the difficulty of making representative 
     government work.
       He has for some time now missed the collegiality of his 
     early years in Washington, when a senior Republican corrected 
     a glaring parliamentary error Mr. Hamilton had made on a bill 
     the man opposed--an act of generosity that he said would be 
     unimaginable today.
       He will miss his colleagues, too. And if he has not fully 
     focused on his feelings about leaving, because there has not 
     been time, Mr. Hamilton exits feeling pretty good about the 
     job: ``I don't leave as a pessimist. I'm not gloomy because I 
     have more confidence in the institutions of government and 
     the Congress than most of my constituents. The process is 
     often untidy, but it works.''

                          ____________________