[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 136 (Tuesday, September 30, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12183-S12184]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              TRIBUTE TO THE HONORABLE ERNEST F. HOLLINGS

  Mr. INOUYE. Mr. President, it has come to my attention that Mr. Mark 
Shields, whose syndicated column appears in more than 100 newspapers, 
including The Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times, paid 
tribute in a recent column to our dear friend and colleague, the 
Honorable Ernest F. Hollings.
  That column was most insightful, as it examined the character of 
Senator Fritz Hollings, who, unfortunately, has announced that he will 
not be seeking reelection to the U.S. Senate after nearly four decades 
of service in this Chamber.
  I hope that throughout the history of our Nation there will always be 
a Fritz Hollings. As Mr. Shields noted in his column, Fritz Hollings 
``was a leader of uncommon courage and uncommon candor.'' Indeed, Fritz 
Hollings' leadership, courage, and candor will be sorely missed.
  I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Shields' column, as it appeared on 
September 5, 2003, in The State, one of the newspapers in Senator 
Hollings' home State of South Carolina, be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

           A Candidate With That Rarest of Attributes: Candor

                           (By Mark Shields)

       On Oct. 6, 1983, in a televised debate among Democratic 
     presidential candidates, one candidate said the following 
     about the 1,800 U.S. Marines whom the Reagan administration 
     had then sent to warring Lebanon: ``If they were sent there 
     to fight, they were too few. If they were sent there to die, 
     they are too many.''
       Less than three years later in Beirut, just before dawn on 
     Oct. 23, a terrorist driving a truck loaded with thousands of 
     pounds of explosives plowed into the Marine barracks and 
     killed 241 Americans.
       That same presidential candidate went on Nov. 4, 1983, to 
     Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League school with an 
     advantaged student body, and shocked the undergraduates: ``I 
     want to draft everyone in this room for the good of the 
     country.''
       He was not advocating the ``old Vietnam-style draft, where 
     if you had enough money, you were either in college or in 
     Canada.'' His campus audience gasped at the man's 
     discomforting bluntness: ``Conscience tells us that we need a 
     cross-section of America in our armed forces. Defense is 
     everybody's business . . . everybody's responsibility. A 
     professional army is un-American. It is anathema to a 
     democratic republic--a glaring civil wrong.''
       You like candor in your political leaders? This Democrat 
     truly brimmed with the stuff.
       That July, to a Washington gathering of the National 
     Council of Senior Citizens--a group with political clout in 
     its membership and Social Security and Medicare benefits on 
     its agenda--he refused to coddle.
       Instead, in the face of runaway federal budget deficits, he 
     reminded the seniors, not of the obligations owed to them, 
     but of the seniors' own obligation ``to your children and 
     grandchildren.'' He, alone, would say, ``If I'm elected, I 
     will freeze your cost-of-living adjustments for a year.''
       To a Capitol Hill meeting of defense contractors, pleased 
     and prosperous with President Reagan's doubling of the 
     Pentagon budget, the candidate, himself a combat veteran of 
     World War II, had been frank: ``If I'm

[[Page S12184]]

     elected president, I will freeze the defense budget at 3 
     percent real growth and do away with the MX (missile) and the 
     B-1.''
       Exempted from his proposed spending freeze? Food stamps and 
     assistance to the disabled.
       We in the press corps are forever lamenting the lack of 
     candor in our political debates and the lack of courage in 
     our presidential candidates, who are unwilling to ask us to 
     sacrifice even the slightest personal comfort for the 
     national well-being.
       But when we do encounter the brand of straightforwardness 
     that this 1984 Democratic candidate practiced, we do not 
     applaud or praise it. Doubts are predictably recorded about 
     ``the discipline,'' the ``presidential temperament,'' even 
     the rashness of the fellow.
       That's mostly the press treatment Sen. Ernest ``Fritz'' 
     Hollings, D-S.C., received when he ran for president and 
     publicly said all of the above and again, earlier this month, 
     when he announced that he would retire after 38 years in the 
     Senate.
       True, Hollings gave us a lot to work with. While President 
     Bush was furiously trying to publicly distance himself from 
     the disgraced chief of Enron, Hollings quipped, ``I did not 
     have political relations with that man, Ken Lay.''
       That was a take-off on a discredited disclaimer by 
     President Clinton--of whose then-improving poll ratings, 
     Hollings had quipped, ``If they reach 60 percent, then he can 
     start dating again.''
       When his own presidential campaign failed, Hollings 
     reported that ``Thomas Wolfe was wrong--`You can go home 
     again.' I know. That's what the people of New Hampshire told 
     me to do.''
       But let it be recorded that in 1963, when the states of 
     Alabama and Mississippi, governed respectively by George 
     Wallace and Ross Barnett, were battlefields of bloodshed and 
     bayonets in the struggle for civil rights, a young South 
     Carolina governor delivered a much different message to his 
     state and its Legislature: ``(T)his General Assembly must 
     make clear South Carolina's choice, a government of laws 
     rather than a government of men. . . . We of today must 
     realize the lesson of 100 years ago, and move on for the good 
     of South Carolina and our United States. This should be done 
     with dignity. It must be done with law and order.''
       Fritz Hollings was no plaster saint. His tongue was 
     sometimes too sharp. His temper was sometimes too short. But 
     his departure will leave a lonesome place against the sky. He 
     was a leader of uncommon courage and uncommon candor.

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