[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 158 (Wednesday, November 10, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14580-S14581]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     DAVID GRISWOLD--LOYAL STAFFER

 1Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, in the days since the untimely 
death of our beloved friend and colleague, Senator John Chafee, we have 
heard numerous testimonies to the impact Senator Chafee had on the 
lives of those who were fortunate enough to associate with him. From 
those with whom he served, both in Rhode Island and here on the floor 
of this august body, we have heard of his skills as a statesman and his 
benevolent manner as a friend. I am sure all of us are also aware of 
the love and pride he felt for those who were most important in his 
life--his family.
  We would be remiss, however, if we did not also acknowledge another 
set of lives that Senator Chafee touched--those of his staff. His 
significance in their lives is perhaps best reflected in the story of 
David Griswold, Senator Chafee's chief-of-staff.
  As a friend of Senator Chafee's, I wanted to thank Dave for the 
invaluable assistance that he provided the Senator over the past 23 
years. A recent article in the Providence Journal reflects on the years 
that Dave worked with Senator Chafee for the people of Rhode Island and 
the people of this great nation. This article, which is a thoughtful 
reflection on Dave's 23 years of dedicated service, captures 
beautifully the loyalty, modesty and sincerity with which he did his 
job. I ask that it be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

         [From the Providence Journal-Bulletin, Oct. 30, 1999]

                Aide Became a Reflection of John Chafee


 in a 23-year journey, David J. Griswold rose from being the senator's 
                driver to serving as his chief of staff

                        (By Maria Miro Johnson)

       U.S. Sen. John H. Chafee in a bowling alley.
       That was a bad night, says David J. Griswold, reflecting 
     yesterday on his life alongside the man he'd served for 23 
     years.
       Griswold started out as his go-fer and driver, then rose 
     through the ranks to become his chief of staff, a position he 
     has held for 10 years.
       Now he sat in the senator's sunny office on Dorrance 
     Street, having just come from a service, which he wrote 
     himself, at the State House rotunda. His mind, he said, was 
     ``numb.'' At one point, he interrupted himself in mid-
     sentence ``It's so hurtful to be referring to him in the past 
     tense, I cannot tell you.''
       But he also laughed now and then to recall certain stories. 
     Such as the bowling alley story.
       It was an October day in 1982, says Griswold, the closing 
     days of a tense reelection campaign against Democratic Atty. 
     Gen. Julius Michaelson. President Ronald Reagan had tumbled 
     in the polls and people were anxious about the economy. 
     Republicans feared people might vote Democratic simply to 
     signal their displeasure with the president.
       Griswold, working as a scheduler then in Chafee's 
     Providence office, had an idea: Why not campaign in a 
     Cranston bowling alley on a Saturday night? The place was 
     sure to be full of good-natured Rhode Islanders.
       Chafee had never campaigned in a bowling alley, Griswold is 
     sure, ``he said, `All right, we'll try this.' '' So they 
     loaded up the car with brochures and headed for the lanes on 
     Elmwood Avenue.
       ``And it was awful,'' says Griswold. The place was full of 
     kids and teenagers, the adult leagues having bowled during 
     the week. ``They didn't know who he was. They weren't rude, 
     but they were just not tuned in. Many of them were not even 
     voting age.''
       Nonetheless, ``we schlepped along dowwwn one side and 
     baaaaack up the other side,'' with Chafee shaking every hand. 
     ``He must've been just ready to burst and I was feeling like 
     I wanted to die, 'cause I knew immediately, `Oh boy, this was 
     not a good idea.' ''
       Griswold drove the senator home to Warwick, and that's when 
     ``he let me have it.''
       ``He said, `Whose idea was this? That was the biggest waste 
     of time I ever had. Don't you know how tired I am? Don't you 
     know how stressful this is? What was the point of wasting 
     time in there with that crowd? They weren't very friendly
       ``And I said, `Senator, it was my idea. I'm sorry.' And he 
     was very quiet. The whole way home, neither of us said 
     anything, and I dropped him off.''
       The next day, Griswold returned from some errands to find a 
     phone message: ``Senator Chafee called. He called to say that 
     he was sorry that he was cross with you last night. He 
     appreciates everything you do, and he's very proud of you.''
       ``I saved that note,'' says Griswold. ``Here it was Sunday 
     before the election. We were all in a state of terror. I 
     would have forgiven him for being much worse to me than he 
     had been. I would have forgiven him for hitting me. . . .
       ``I fell in love with him forever at that point. That made 
     me know I would stay with this organization for as long as 
     the door would open.''
       David J. Griswold, 45, grew up in Warwick, the son of David 
     F. and Nancy Griswold, a salesman and a secretary, both of 
     them Republicans who ``revered'' John Chafee, as did so many 
     members of their generation.
       Over the years, he says, parents of younger staffers have 
     expressed the same feeling his own parents did that working 
     for Chafee ``lifted up their families'' and made them proud.
       Griswold was only 14 when, in 1968, he first encountered 
     then-Governor Chafee, who was throwing a rally at Providence 
     City Hall for Nelson Rockefeller, who was seeking the 
     Republican nomination for president.
       ``I heard about it and came downtown,'' says Griswold. ``In 
     those days, we didn't have C-Span and all these constant 
     reports of everything, minute by minute. When a presidential 
     candidate came to Providence, Rhode Island, it was a big 
     deal.''
       The teenager handed out fliers directing people to City 
     Hall, and then he went to the rally himself. The speeches 
     were great, he said, and afterward, Chafee shook Griswold's 
     hand. ``It was thrilling.''
       Later, as Griswold headed to the Outlet building to catch a 
     bus, a limo came rolling by. ``And Rockefeller looks out of 
     the car and gives me a thumbs-up. And I knew in that split 
     second it was me that he was gesturing to. And it was 
     magical. And then in a flash, the care was gone and the 
     day was over and real life returned. . . .
       But ``that day, I began to love politics because I had made 
     a connection with this figure and had felt that he was 
     reaching out to me.''
       Griswold kept volunteering for Republicans, kept going down 
     to defeat after defeat. (Republicans in Rhode Island, says 
     Griswold, are ``a pathetically lonely, small community.'') 
     And it wasn't until 1975, when he was a 21-year-old 
     Providence College student, that he encountered Chafee again.
       Chafee had lost his first Senate race to Claiborne Pell in 
     1972, but was gearing up for a run in '76.
       ``Oh, he didn't know me from Adam,'' says Griswold of their 
     meeting at Chafee's headquarters in the Turks Head Building. 
     ``I was one of a hundred people, but he made me feel as if he 
     and I connected.''
       The day after graduating from PC, Griswold joined Senator 
     Chafee's staff. He has never looked back.
       One of his early jobs was to drive the senator to his 
     appointments. Though Chafee was a friendly enough passenger, 
     Griswold made it a practice to speak only when spoken to. For 
     one thing, he was nervous about getting lost which, at time, 
     he did.
       Inevitably, he says it was Chafee who got them back on 
     track ``He knew all the roads of Rhode Island. He knew every 
     village in the State.'' Realizing that Griswold felt awful 
     about it, he'd say,'' `Well, you know David, if that's the 
     worst thing you ever do, you don't have much to worry about.'
       ``It always felt so good to hear that.''
       After his reelection in 1982, Chafee was aware that 
     Griswold was a conscientious

[[Page S14581]]

     worrywart and was a bit afraid of inviting him to be one of 
     his legislative assistants in Washington.
       ``He valued thoroughness,'' says Griswold. ``He valued the 
     willingness to stay until the job was done at night. He 
     valued commitment and honesty. He valued when you didn't know 
     the answer to something, you said, `Senator, I don't know,' 
     rather than inventing a guess about what the answer might be, 
     because that would just be a waste of time.''
       Griswold went on to become Chafee's chief legislative 
     assistant, then his legislative director, then his chief of 
     staff.
       One former colleague, Christine C. Ferguson, now head of 
     the state Department of Human Services, worked closely with 
     Griswold from 1981 to 1995 ``some of the best working years 
     of my life.''
       Unlike some chiefs of staff, who are ``really political 
     animals, operators, very slick,'' she says, ``David is very 
     much a reflection of John Chafee.''
       As Griswold recalls those days, the work of advising Chafee 
     could be ``painful.''
       He and Ferguson were always having to remind the senator of 
     the political ramifications of his upcoming votes. ``We would 
     say things like, `What good is it to know you're gonna do the 
     right thing if in the end, you lose an election and you can't 
     come back here and try to keep on doing what you're doing?'
       ``And he struggled. I remember nights that he would pound 
     his fist on the desk and say to us, `Thank you. I've heard 
     enough.' ''
       Griswold was seldom sure how Chafee would end up voting 
     when he went to the floor ``He had his own compass.''
       Griswold sometimes warns young applicants for staff jobs 
     that it's easier to work for a conservative or a liberal than 
     for a moderate like Chafee, ``because you at least start out 
     kind of knowing where you're headed.''
       On the other hand, ``it made us do our jobs better. You 
     really had to think to step back from each question and try 
     to look at it from everybody's side.''
       Over the years, Griswold became ``very slightly less 
     afraid'' of Chafee, but still never called him by his first 
     name, always ``Senator.'' Frankly, he says, he resented 
     staffers who did otherwise, because it presumed an equality 
     that could never exist. (Chafee, for his part, never 
     complained about it, Griswold says.)
       ``This is the biggest person that has served this state in 
     this century,'' he said, ``in terms of length of tenure, in 
     terms of types of jobs he's done, in terms of the barriers 
     he's broken politically and in terms of just his 
     statesmanship.''
       When it's pointed out that Griswold has given his entire 
     adult life to serving Chafee, he says that in fact, it's 
     Chafee who has given him something. ``He's given me 
     opportunities at every turn which I could not have expected I 
     was ready for.''
       In recent years, Chafee has reminded Griswold to ``smell 
     the roses'' and indeed, Griswold has eased up a bit on work. 
     ``Ironically,'' he says, ``it is he that I wanted to be 
     smelling roses.''
       Griswold had known that the senator was ailing, and that 
     the job was requiring more of a struggle. But he was active 
     to the end.
       ``He had made a wonderful speech, just three or four days 
     before his death, at the National Cathedral to a hugh 
     gathering of the National Trust for Historic 
     Preservation.''
       Chafee had worked hard on the speech, and it won him a 
     standing ovation from the crowd of 2,000 people. ``He felt 
     pumped up and he knew he'd done a good job.''
       Then, last weekend, Chafee called Griswold to say he wasn't 
     feeling well, and needed to cancel two planned events. 
     Griswold thought he heard something different in his voice.
       ``I think he was always prepared for everything,'' he says 
     even death. ``He was a person of faith and a person with a 
     compass that guided him and he was ready even when he was 
     unprepared, in the sense of having no script in hand just 
     ready to do what he was called to do, and do it with grace.''
       On Sunday night, at about 8, Griswold got the call from 
     Chafee's daughter, Georgia Nassikas.
       ``When I heard her voice, my heart just fell to the floor. 
     I knew this had to be something bad.'' But the way she said 
     the last three words ``my father died'' with such composure 
     and strength, helped Griswold.
       He realized ``this was where we were now,'' and felt 
     prepared.
       Nonetheless, as he paced around the room with the phone in 
     his hand, he found himself double-checking his facts: `` `Did 
     you tell me now that your dad has died?' '' he asked. ``And 
     she laughed, and said yes.''
       Such, he says, are the habits born of working for John 
     Chafee.
       So many logistical details are involved in helping arrange 
     today's massive funeral that Griswold has had no time to 
     grieve.
       It's as if the funeral was one more big project, which the 
     staff is handling as it has handled so many others through 
     the years. ``At any given point in the process, we've all 
     thought he might walk in and say, `Well, how's this coming 
     along, folks?' ''
       Now, every morning, when Griswold wakes up, it takes him a 
     moment to remember that ``the world is different now, 
     completely different. . . . I never thought he'd leave. I 
     never believed that John Chafee would leave. And it's scary 
     to me, not to have him.''
       In the smallest, most everyday actions just making a phone 
     call Griswold remembers him. It's always, Hello, this is 
     David Griswold with Senator Chafee.
       ``I had five names. David Griswold With Senator Chafee. I'm 
     afraid that I will say that for a long time.''

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