[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 125 (Tuesday, October 10, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10133-S10135]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO CONGRESSMAN BRUCE VENTO

  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I come to the floor of the Senate to 
speak about Congressman Bruce Vento from Minnesota, the Fourth 
Congressional District, who passed away today.
  Bruce Vento was a fierce advocate for justice and a true 
representative, in the best sense of that word, of the people of the 
4th District. He was generous and good-humored, with a seriousness of 
purpose that energized his work and inspired others. A gentle teacher 
and great friend, we were all ennobled, challenged and made greater by 
his presence among us, and will be less for his absence. The model he 
offered, of a life of public service for the common good, beckons us 
forward, toward the light, and for that we are grateful.
  From working to protect our nation's vulnerable homeless, to fighting 
to protect and preserve earth's natural treasures from the Boundary 
Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to South American Rain Forests, Bruce's 
legacy will last many generations. His leadership resulted in enactment 
of hundreds of conservation-related measures through the years, and 
protected millions of acres of our nation's parks, forests and 
wilderness areas. Close to home, when we look at a map of Minnesota we 
literally are looking at an image created in part by Bruce Vento. Our 
state's parks and green spaces are as healthy as they are in large part 
because of Bruce's work over these many years.
  Sheila and I will miss him terribly, and our thoughts and prayers are 
with his family.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an AP story by 
Frederic Frommer from today, a piece in the Minnesota Star Tribune by 
Greg Gordon, and a piece from Tom Webb from the Pioneer Press.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                      [From the Associated Press]

                 Minnesota Rep. Bruce Vento dead at 60

                        (By Frederic J. Frommer)

       Washington (AP).--Minnesota Rep. Bruce Vento, a 12-term 
     liberal Democrat who championed environmental and homeless 
     causes, died Tuesday after a bout with lung cancer.
       Vento, who was diagnosed in February, died at 12:20 p.m. at 
     his home in St. Paul, Minn., surrounded by his family, 
     spokesman Rick Jauert said. He had malignant mesothelioma, a 
     rare type of cancer caused by inhaling asbestos fibers.
       Vento, who was 60, announced in February that he had cancer 
     and would not seek re-election. His treatment included the 
     removal of one lung, chemotherapy and radiation, but doctors 
     discovered more cancer last month.
       As a young man, Vento worked as a state-paid laborer in 
     several St. Paul-area facilities that he claimed exposed him 
     to asbestos fibers. Two weeks ago he filed a lawsuit against 
     11 companies that allegedly supplied or installed asbestos 
     products at those job sites.
       Vento made his most significant legislative contributions 
     on environmental issues, which he called his ``true 
     passion.''
       ``I have been a member of Congress for the past 24 years, 
     dedicated to making the federal government work for the 
     people, to do for our community and state--and, yes, even 
     internationally--that which we cannot do for ourselves,'' 
     Vento said in February. ``The federal government can and 
     should make a difference.''
       When Democrats controlled the House, Vento was chairman of 
     the Natural Resources subcommittee on national parks, forests 
     and lands for 10 years, pushing for more money for national 
     parks and other environmental priorities.
       ``I think Bruce Vento has been one of the most impressive 
     and effective congressmen in modern Minnesota history,'' said 
     former

[[Page S10134]]

     Vice President Walter Mondale. ``It's hard to think of an 
     environmental issue where his leadership has not been 
     found.''
       Vento worked on efforts to ban oil drilling on the coastal 
     plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on 
     preserving tropical rain forests. The Wilderness Society 
     recognized Vento's work in 1994 with the Ansel Adams 
     Conservation Award.
       ``He's been a hero,'' said Debbie Sease, legislative 
     director for the Sierra Club. ``He's done more for parks than 
     anyone I know.''
       Vento also helped establish the emergency shelter grants 
     program and preserve the Federal Housing Authority.
       President Clinton paid tribute to Vento at a dinner in June 
     for his environmental record and work on behalf of the 
     homeless.
       ``He has steered into law more than 300 bills to protect 
     our natural resources,'' Clinton said. ``The thing I like 
     even more about Bruce Vento is he cares about people, 
     especially people without a voice--the homeless.''
       Vento was born Oct. 7, 1940, in St. Paul and attended the 
     University of Minnesota and Wisconsin State University. He 
     worked as a science and social studies teacher before winning 
     a seat to the state House in 1970. He was first elected to 
     Congress in 1976.
       For the last decade, Vento pushed a bill to make it easier 
     for the Hmong--an ethnic group in Laos--who fought with U.S. 
     forces during the Vietnam War to become U.S. citizens by 
     waiving the English-language requirement for them.
       After he was diagnosed with cancer, Vento made passage of 
     the bill a top priority. His effort ended successfully when 
     Congress approved the measure in May.
       ``This bill would have never been conceived or passed if it 
     had not been for Bruce Vento,'' said Philip Smith, Washington 
     director of Lao Veterans of America, which lobbied on behalf 
     of the legislation.
       ``He reached across the aisle and worked and persevered to 
     make this happen. He is our hero. He is a champion of the 
     Hmong people.''
       Vento is survived by his wife, Susan Lynch Vento, whom he 
     married in August, and three sons.
                                  ____


           [From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Oct. 10, 2000]

                      Rep. Vento Dies in St. Paul

                            (By Greg Gordon)

       Washington, D.C.--Rep. Bruce Vento, D-Minn., died at his 
     St. Paul home this morning after an eight-month battle with 
     mesothelioma, a rare form of lung cancer usually associated 
     with asbestos exposure.
       Vento, a longtime environmental champion who planned to 
     retire when his 12th term in office ends in January, 
     celebrated his 60th birthday on Saturday.
       Rick Jauert, Vento's press secretary, said the congressman 
     died at 11:20 a.m. Twin Cities time at his home in St. Paul 
     with his family by his side. He said he had no further 
     details, and that Vento's chief of staff, Larry Romans, was 
     flying to Minnesota, apparently to be with Vento's family and 
     help with funeral arrangements.
       Vento underwent surgery at Rochester's Mayo Clinic last 
     February for removal of his left lung and diaphragm shortly 
     after the fast-moving disease was discovered. But despite 
     months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, a person 
     familiar with Vento's condition said in late September that 
     the cancer had spread to his remaining lung. Doctors had 
     drained fluid from Vento's remaining lung on at least two 
     occasions.
       ``It's too bad he died so fast,'' former U.S. Sen. Eugene 
     McCarthy, who held the same Fourth District congressional 
     seat as Vento from 1948-58, said this afternoon. ``It's too 
     bad to lose him. He was such an established person in the 
     Congress, but cancer is pretty impartial.''
       The former school teacher and state legislator leaves 
     behind one of the most tangible legacies of any Congress 
     member: He shepherded more than 300 laws that preserved 
     natural lands from the Florida Everglades to the Alaska 
     wilderness.
       Since February 2000, Vento had been treated for malignant 
     mesothelioma, a virulent form of cancer usually caused by 
     asbestos exposure. Yet his final year in office included some 
     of his most important legislative accomplishments, including 
     easing citizenship requirements for Hmong veterans living in 
     the United States.
       Vento approached his ailment and last months in office with 
     a graceful determination that won him the admiration of 
     political friends and foes in Washington.
       President Clinton hailed his fellow Democrat at a 
     testimonial in June as a man who ``never stops being a 
     teacher. As he fights a disease that has not yet yielded all 
     it secrets to science, he's our teacher again. He's shown us 
     all a lot about courage.''
       Clinton made the comments at a bipartisan tribute dinner 
     that Vento helped turn into a fund-raiser for scholarships to 
     train future high school science teachers.
       Vento was like that. As a legislator he was known for using 
     every opportunity to pursue causes he held dear: Directing 
     more resources to poor city neighborhoods, helping Hmong 
     veterans, promoting public schools, raising the minimum wage 
     and, always, protecting the environment.
       Throughout the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years in 
     Washington, he never gave up his belief in activist 
     government.


                           saving wilderness

       In his first year in Congress he worked with others for the 
     establishment of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. 
     In every one of his 23 years in Congress, his name was 
     associated with wilderness preservation legislation. He was 
     best known in Minnesota as a defender of the ban on the use 
     of motorized vehicles in the BWCA. At the beginning of his 
     last term in Congress he ended up having to embrace a painful 
     compromise that allowed two motorized portages there.
       Vento was at the center of similar fights in dozens of 
     other states because, before the Republican takeover of 
     Congress in 1994, he was chairman of the House Subcommittee 
     on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands.
       In relentlessly pushing that legislation, Vento became 
     better known in some parts of the West than he was in 
     Minnesota.
       ``He spends all of his waking hours working against our 
     interests,'' complained Charles Cushman, president of an 
     organization of private property owners in Washington state 
     in 1993. ``The name Bruce Vento is without a doubt a very 
     dirty word in many communities in the West,'' Cushman said in 
     an interview. ``Any place there's a national park, they fear 
     Mr. Vento with a passion.''
       Indeed, the Sierra Club credits him in part for preserving 
     and protecting 5 million acres of wild lands during the 
     decade he was chairman of the subcommittee. In addition, he 
     tended the designation of 76 ``wild and scenic'' rivers. His 
     passion for parks came to him through personal experience. 
     His father, a Machinists union officer, was not wealthy and 
     couldn't afford fancy holidays or a lake cabin.
       ``We depended on the parks along the St. Croix River,'' 
     Vento recalled in an interview a few years ago. ``That was 
     our Sunday picnic, our vacation.''


                             high rankings

       If Vento received poor marks from conservative property 
     rights groups, he was generally adored by environmentalists, 
     though his occasional willingness to compromise--as on the 
     motorized portages in the BWCA--cost him support from a few 
     die-hards.
       At the June testimonial dinner, Interior Secretary Bruce 
     Babbitt called him ``a hero of the nation's parks'' and said 
     Vento coached him on how to handle the Republican takeover of 
     Congress, which threatened continued investment in some 
     national parks.
       ``Bruce said to me, `Don't panic. Don't make a deal with 
     these guys,'' Babbitt recalled. The interior secretary said 
     the GOP threat to cut parks funding evaporated after Vento 
     advised him to draw a chart of national parks units in the 
     districts of congressional opponents, including House Speaker 
     Newt Gingrich.
       It wasn't just the environmentalists who considered Vento a 
     hero. He also received 100 percent rankings most years from 
     labor and liberal interest groups, while getting extremely 
     low ratings from conservative and Christian fundamentalist 
     organizations.
       In 1992, Vento, a Catholic, shifted his position on 
     abortion legislation, saying his views had ``evolved'' to the 
     point that he would support abortion rights while remaining 
     personally opposed to abortion.
       That shift brought him fully in line with the dominant 
     views of the DFL in Minnesota and the liberal wing of the 
     Democratic party nationally.
       From his seat on the House Banking and Urban Affairs 
     Committee, Vento in 1982 became one of the first members of 
     Congress to urge action to deal with homelessness. His 
     proposal that year to provide $50 million to repair derelict 
     buildings for temporary shelter was never brought to a vote 
     by the full House.
       Vento persevered, however, and eight years later he was the 
     prime sponsor of the $1.3 billion McKinney homeless aid bill, 
     which won approval and was signed into law.
       Vento's work on low-income housing was enhanced when he 
     became chairman and later ranking member of the Housing and 
     Community Opportunity Subcommittee.
       On the Banking Committee he was an advocate for smaller 
     banks and credit unions and for community reinvestment 
     requirements for major financial institutions.
       Before coming to Washington, Vento served several terms in 
     the Minnesota House, where he was assistant majority leader 
     under Speaker Martin Sabo, who would later be Vento's close 
     colleague in Congress.
       The two Twin Cities congressmen were twins only in voting 
     record. In demeanor they couldn't have been more different. 
     While the Scandinavian Sabo was reticent and disinclined to 
     give speeches, Vento was known as a ceaseless orator who 
     didn't seem to know how to end a sentence.
       When St. Paul's nine-term congressman Joseph Karth decided 
     to retire in 1976, he endorsed the voluble Vento for his 
     seat. That and strong labor support got Vento the party 
     endorsement despite opposition in the primary from St. Paul 
     attorney John Connolly and State Auditor Robert Mattson. 
     Vento won that year with 52 percent of the vote, and would 
     win reelection 11 more times.


                           fighting for hmong

       After St. Paul became one of the major centers of Hmong 
     immigration in the 1980s, Vento embraced the needs of the 
     former Laotian hill tribespeople who had fought for the CIA's 
     Secret Army during the Vietnam War. He pushed for federal 
     housing and educational assistance and to waive the English-
     language requirement for citizenship for those who had fought 
     with the United States in Laos.
       In the 1990s, Vento's office became an informal Washington 
     headquarters for this new

[[Page S10135]]

     group of Americans. His office wall was decorated with an 
     enormous Hmong tapestry given in appreciation. And, on 
     occasion, his inner and outer offices were lined with former 
     Hmong soldiers in fatigues using his phones and desks to plan 
     their lobbying assault on Washington.
       After years of persistent advocacy by Vento and others, the 
     bill easing citizenship requirements of Hmong veterans was 
     passed by both Houses and signed into law in 2000 by 
     President Clinton.
       Lee Pao Xiong, a Hmong member of the Metropolitan Council, 
     called Vento's decision to leave Congress at the end of his 
     12th term ``a great loss to our community. Bruce Vento was a 
     strong advocate for the Hmong community, always willing to 
     bear our concerns.''
       The advocacy of the latest immigrant group by a man who was 
     himself the descendent of immigrants was in the tradition of 
     St. Paul, said Garrison Keillor, Minnesota's homegrown 
     humorist. He said at the testimonial dinner that Vento never 
     seemed like a slick Washington pol. ``Bruce is like St. 
     Paul,'' he said, later describing Vento as a man of ``modesty 
     and courage and passion.''


                             personal life

       Vento's final year in Washington was not filled with 
     funereal sentiment. In August he married a fellow educator, 
     Susan Lynch of Chatfield, Minn.
       It was the first wedding for Lynch but not for Vento, who 
     has three adult sons from his first marriage, Michael, Peter 
     and John.
       A week before the nuptials, Vento, smiling but wan, 
     attended the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, 
     appearing with former Vice President Mondale and Minneapolis 
     Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton as the Minnesota delegation cast 
     its ballots for Vento's friend from their first days together 
     in the House, Vice President Al Gore.
       Vento's energy astonished his colleagues. After his cancer 
     was diagnosed in February, he underwent surgery at the Mayo 
     Clinic for removal of his left lung and diaphragm. He lost 25 
     pounds and some of his hair as he completed a draining 
     regimen of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
       ``I'm looking forward to fishing,'' Vento told reporters 
     and supporters who asked what he planned to do next. ``That's 
     the ulterior motive in all the environmental protections I've 
     fought for.''
       His longtime colleague and partner in liberal Democratic 
     legislative ventures, Sabo, seemed stunned by Vento's news, 
     saying over and again, ``I can't imagine this place without 
     Bruce around.''
       In the weeks after Vento announced his illness and his 
     plans to retire, Republicans--from former Rep. Vin Weber to 
     Sen. Rod Grams--acknowledged his 24 years of service.
       ``Put the partisan differences aside,'' said St. Paul Mayor 
     Norm Coleman. ``He delivered a lot for this community, and 
     his passion will be missed.''
                                  ____


            [From the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Oct. 10, 2000]

                          U.S. Rep. Vento Dies

                             (By Tom Webb)

       U.S. Rep. Bruce Vento, St. Paul's unwavering voice in 
     Congress for 24 years, died Tuesday morning at his home in 
     St. Paul after a long bout with cancer. He was 60.
       A native of St. Paul's East Side, Vento was famed as a 
     champion for wilderness, consumers, working people and the 
     homeless, who never forgot the everyday struggles of average 
     folks fighting to build a better life.
       Vento died at 11:20 a.m., with his family at his bedside, 
     his staff announced.
       Vento was elected to Congress in 1976 from the Fourth 
     Congressional District, covering Ramsey County and a sliver 
     of Dakota County. He was the longest serving of a trio of 
     notable DFLers who for a half-century have served the Fourth 
     District in Congress, a group including Eugene McCarthy and 
     Joseph Karth.
       He was suffering from mesothelioma, a form of cancer 
     usually linked with exposure to asbestos.
       He is survived by his wife, Susan Lynch; his three sons, 
     John, Peter and Michael; their spouses, four grandchildren; 
     his parents, Frank and Anne Vento; and seven brothers and 
     sisters and their families.
       Funeral arrangements are pending.

  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, Bruce was elected to the State 
legislature in 1970 and to the House of Representatives in 1977. Before 
that, he had been a science teacher on the lower east side of St. Paul. 
He is a true product of the lower east side.
  His family is wonderful. Sheila and I have had the chance to spend a 
lot of time with his family. It is a wonderful, caring, Italian 
Catholic family. I believe Frank and Annie had eight children; Bruce 
was the second oldest.
  I want to say two or three things if I may. One, I want to say to 
Bruce's family and to his wife Sue: Sue, you have been a gift from 
Heaven for Bruce and his family.
  I talked to Bruce Saturday. He turned 60. Today he passed away. When 
he passed away, all of his family were with him. All of them said: You 
can let go.
  What a beautiful, caring, loving, wonderful family. And what a 
beautiful, loving, caring man. Bruce has done so much for so many 
people. He was so committed to public service. But most important of 
all, to me, he was a friend whom I will miss.
  I remember once he was going to come over to our home in St. Paul to 
talk about a big dispute over the Boundary Water Wilderness Area. We 
were supposed to meet early in the morning, but there was a huge 
snowstorm and all the weather reports were that all the schools were 
closed. People weren't going to be able to go to work. Everything was 
shut down. It was impossible to get around. We were supposed to meet at 
8 o'clock in the morning. At 5 minutes to 8 o'clock, there was a knock 
on the door. There was Bruce. He was in seventh heaven. This was like 
the outdoors, this was snow, this was Minnesota, and he was there. He 
loved the environment and did so much for our State and our country.
  I say to Bruce's family, what a great Congressman. It is easy to say 
that when someone has passed away, but he truly was. People in 
Minnesota loved this man. They always will. They will never forget him, 
will never forget all he has done for our Fourth Congressional District 
and for our State. Sheila and I will never forget Bruce.
  Bruce is like my friend, Mike Epstein, about whom I spoke. Mike was 
here for all these years, so committed to public service. Two men, they 
died too young, from the horrible disease of cancer, two men who were 
so committed to public service, so committed to people.
  From this day on, my belief is I have two friends who are looking 
down from heaven. I will be talking to them every day. I know Bruce's 
children and grandchildren will be talking to him every day.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I certainly commend the Senator on his 
moving tribute to Bruce Vento. Certainly we can tell how emotionally 
attached the Senator was to that gentleman.
  I knew him also. I served with him on the Resource Committee in the 
House. Certainly he was a fine gentleman. The Senator has described him 
well. We are all very sad at this loss.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming

                          ____________________