[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 70 (Wednesday, April 30, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3587-S3588]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 RECOGNITION OF THE SERVICE OF FORMER SENATOR WALTER ``FRITZ'' MONDALE

  Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed 
in the Record a statement made by Senator Leahy at the University of 
Minnesota on April 7, 2008.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       Mr. LEAHY. Thank you Senator Klobuchar. And what a joy it 
     still is to say those two words together. Minnesota's new 
     senator already is bringing even more distinction to the seat 
     that Hubert Humphrey held. She is another star who was 
     mentored by Fritz Mondale, and she is upholding that grand 
     DFL tradition.
       When I was asked if I could be here with you, I was more 
     than glad to clear my calendar to do it. It is a special 
     honor and a great pleasure to be here with you in recognition 
     of the service, the historical significance, and the 80th 
     anniversary year of a friend, a former colleague, and an 
     American statesman.
       In this room we know him as ``Fritz.'' Others call him 
     Walter. When he was a halfback in high school, they called 
     him ``Crazylegs Mondale'' for some reason. He has also gone 
     by Mr. Attorney General, Senator, Mr. Vice President, Mr. 
     Ambassador, and Dad. I think I like Crazylegs best. I can't 
     wait to ask him about how that happened.
       The history of the era of his public service has not yet 
     taken full form for the ages, but even now Fritz Mondale 
     looms large as a model and as a catalyst, in his roles in the 
     Senate and as Vice President.
       I have been asked to focus particularly on his time in the 
     Senate.
       Walter Mondale is sometimes described as the paradigm 
     figure of the transition between two eras--the FDR Coalition 
     up to the War in Vietnam, and the social ferment that came 
     after the war. And perhaps this is so. But to me, who Fritz 
     Mondale is, and what he stands for, are just as important as 
     when he stood there. Deep echoes resonate throughout his 
     service of the first principles of our Republic. The issues 
     he led on then are as fresh as today's news, and as enduring 
     as our founding documents.
       Issues like the concentration and abuse of power. Or social 
     and economic justice and the consolidation of wealth in the 
     pockets and portfolios of just a few. Or the role of 
     government in protecting the little guy when powerful market 
     forces run roughshod. Or the tension between freedom and 
     security. Or the challenge of achieving energy security. Or 
     the very roles of both the Senate and the Office of the Vice 
     President in the American system. Even the question of 
     whether a woman ever could credibly assume the highest 
     office in the land. Trace any of these issues back in 
     time, and you will find Fritz Mondale at earlier decision 
     points. For example, just imagine how loose from our 
     moorings we might be right now without the guideposts of 
     the FISA law, which resulted from the investigation that 
     he, Frank Church and others launched into earlier abuses 
     of the power of government to snoop into Americans' lives.
       Here is something to which we all can attest. Fritz Mondale 
     is a good man whose decency elevated every institution in 
     which he served. Who he is has everything to do with what he 
     achieved.
       Clarence once said that his brother's politics were, as he 
     put it, ``an extension of our father's preaching,'' and I can 
     see that. Their father, the farmer-turned-minister, felt and 
     saw the ravages of the Great Depression on the farms and the 
     communities of the heartland. And when Fritz entered 
     politics, he did it for the right reasons, to make life 
     better for the people.
       In the Senate we mostly chalked Fritz's personality up to 
     clean air, clean living and Norwegian genes. He was and is 
     well liked on both sides of the aisle. Fritz's dad taught him 
     that your integrity is everything, and the lesson stuck. He 
     kept his word and everyone trusted him. He was always well 
     prepared. And he surrounded himself with good and competent 
     people. He had one of the best staffs on the Hill, and it's a 
     treat to see some of those staffers sprinkled around the room 
     today.
       I've known Fritz a long while, but you still pick up some 
     new perspectives in preparing for an occasion like this. I 
     knew he was avid about hunting and fishing in the North 
     Woods, but I hadn't known his reputation for being such a 
     good ``bull cook.''
       I looked it up. A bull cook is the fellow stuck with doing 
     the chores around camp, cutting fuel, cleaning up and 
     cooking. But when he rings the bell in the morning, everyone 
     has to get up. I think that after being in a place like the 
     Senate where no one is able to give orders that stick, Fritz 
     likes that sense of real power when he rings that bell.
       One side of Fritz that the public did not see as readily as 
     we did in the Senate was his sense of humor--one of the best 
     I have ever known. In many a tense moment, his sense of humor 
     often defused the tension and restored the spirit of comity 
     that is so crucial in getting things done in the Senate.
       I wish the American people had seen more of that side of 
     Fritz Mondale. Mike Berman told Fritz's biographer Finlay 
     Lewis that the staff was always urging Fritz to loosen up in 
     public. Mike said, ``I can't count the number of lit cigars I 
     have stuffed in my pocket over the years.''
       He loved the Senate, and the Senate loved him back. He once 
     said that he ``found his sweet spot'' in the Senate. He was a 
     quick learner and craved learning new things. He said the 
     Senate ``was like mainlining human nature.'' And it's true. 
     You pick up any day's Congressional Record, and it's like 
     America's newspaper. Whatever is happening in

[[Page S3588]]

     the country or the world on any given day is being talked 
     about and sometimes even acted on in the United States 
     Senate.
       His first major legislative achievement was a 1966 law to 
     make automakers notify car owners of dangerous defects. He 
     went on to win another victory for consumers by stepping up 
     regulation of slaughterhouses that had been selling diseased 
     and putrid meat.
       But he really came into his own in mastering the 
     legislative process with a key victory on his open housing 
     bill. Part of his success in winning a key cloture vote, 
     against great odds, was helped along by his earlier bonding 
     with a crusty earlier chairman of the Judiciary Committee, 
     James Eastland. I hasten to note that I haven't yet entered 
     into my crusty phase. Fritz knew the art of being able to 
     disagree without being disagreeable.
       That was a heady and vibrant legislative era, and Fritz had 
     a hand in virtually every major piece of civil rights, 
     education and child care legislation that emerged from 
     Congress during that period.
       To me, part of his Senate legacy that is the most 
     significant and timely--timely, even today--was his work on 
     and after the Senate's investigation--headed by Senator Frank 
     Church--into the abuses that led to the spying on the 
     American people by their own government. The FBI's COINTELPRO 
     operation, for instance, had spent more than two decades 
     searching in vain for communist influence in the NAACP, and 
     they had infiltrated domestic groups like organizations that 
     advocated for women's rights.
       More than any other member of the special committee, Fritz 
     Mondale mastered the issues and dug into the research, which 
     spanned testimony from 800 witnesses and more than one 
     hundred thousand classified pages. The evidence added up, in 
     his words, to ``a road map to the destruction of American 
     democracy.'' Powerful government surveillance tools were 
     misused against the American people. There had been little 
     effective congressional oversight of these federal 
     investigative and intelligence agencies, and too little 
     judicial review.
       Their work led to the creation of the Select Committee on 
     Intelligence, and later, to the Foreign Intelligence 
     Surveillance Act--the FISA law that only lately has entered 
     the public lexicon.
       Then, as now, in the name of security, some were willing to 
     trade away the people's rights. Then, as now, some would have 
     the United States of America stoop to the level of our 
     enemies, giving them a victory over us that they could not 
     achieve on their own.
       The parallels with today are clear and so are the lessons, 
     but Fritz freshened the bottom line for us in his address to 
     Senators not long after 9/11, as part of the Senate's leaders 
     lecture series. Even before Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of the 
     torture memos, the revelations about unlawful surveillance of 
     Americans, or White House political tampering with U.S. 
     Attorneys, this is what he said in September, 2002: ``There 
     is always the danger that our fears will overcome our faith 
     in the power of justice and accountability. Whenever we have 
     gone down that road, we have hurt the innocent and 
     embarrassed ourselves. Justice and accountability make us 
     better able to face our enemies. Justice strengthens us.'' 
     Unquote, and amen.
       Another of Fritz Mondale's most remarkable and lasting 
     achievements in the Senate was to engineer a change in the 
     Senate's rules, to curb the abuse of filibusters in thwarting 
     the will of clear majorities of the American people. The 
     difficulty in passing the civil rights laws of the 60s had 
     gradually convinced more and more Senators that the bar for 
     cutting off debate in the Senate was set too high.
       That might not sound difficult, but changing the way the 
     Senate operates is something akin to trying to change the 
     weather.
       As a freshman Senator, I had a front seat and a bit part in 
     Fritz's highly organized campaign to change the cloture rule.
       He and Republican Senator James Pearson of Kansas launched 
     the effort to change cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths. 
     Fritz preceded and followed that launch by carefully laying 
     the groundwork, enlisting Senators one by one. When it 
     finally reached the Senate Floor, the debate itself was 
     protracted. Finlay Lewis set the scene well in describing 
     part of the debate. Quoting him, ``To an uninitiated or 
     casual visitor, the proceedings must have seemed arcane, even 
     bizarre. Here was the world's greatest deliberative body 
     solemnly voting to table the Lord's Prayer. At another point, 
     the Senate became polarized over a murky motion to table a 
     motion to reconsider a vote to table an appeal of a ruling 
     that a point of order was NOT in order against a motion to 
     table another point of order against a motion to bring to a 
     vote a motion to call up a resolution that would change the 
     rules. At least, that's what it sounded like.'' Unquote.
       Late, late one night, at about this point in the debate, 
     Fritz and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield enlisted me, a young 
     whippersnapper, to play a role. They asked me to stay on the 
     floor one night around two in the morning to take the gavel 
     as the presiding officer. They expected that a lot of tight 
     rulings were coming up. But I felt the honor of the calling 
     drain away as Mansfield explained that they needed someone 
     big who was still awake to be in the chair for those rulings. 
     Sometimes a Senator is no more than a conscious body in the 
     right place at the right time.
       The debate went on and on and on, and so did the 
     parliamentary and coalition-building by Fritz and by his 
     opponents. Relationships and Senate comity were being tested. 
     Before they reached the breaking point, Fritz rightly knew 
     when to strike a compromise, and he worked one out with 
     Russell Long.
       He won the change in the cloture rule, and it is not an 
     exaggeration to point out that his efforts probably saved the 
     Senate as we know it, and he did it without changing the 
     Senate's fundamental character. As difficult as it still is 
     to get things done in the Senate, without the Mondale cloture 
     rule the Senate by now would be largely unmanageable.
       It is saddening and frustrating today to see that even the 
     Mondale rule has been abused. Filibusters are used far more 
     often than they used to be. We had to have 72 cloture votes 
     last year, and with a razor thin majority like the current 
     Democratic majority in the Senate, that usually is an 
     insurmountable hurdle. As Fritz knows and as Fritz 
     practiced, the Senate's machinery is oiled by good will 
     and self restraint, and there is less and less of that 
     around.
       Through his public service, Fritz Mondale invested himself 
     in the belief that our democracy offers civilizing power to 
     all of us together as a community, through our representative 
     government, to give each of us, and all of us, the 
     opportunity to thrive, to make justice real, and to make the 
     economy work for all and not just for some.
       In a time when government is compiling more and more 
     information about every American, every American deserves to 
     know what their government is doing. Checks and balances and 
     the kind of oversight that Fritz Mondale believes in and 
     practiced makes government more accountable to the people. It 
     helps make our system work as the Framers intended.
       This is the way he put it in that address in 2002: ``What a 
     paradise we would live in if trust were never abused. But our 
     Founders knew better. They built our system on this deep 
     insight into human nature. We are not perfect. We are, all of 
     us, mixtures of the good and base, lofty and lowly, selfless 
     and selfish. We are capable of sonatas, sonnets, and 
     cathedrals. But we are also capable of greed, paranoia, and a 
     dangerous thirst for power.'' Unquote. That insight of the 
     Framers, he concluded, accounts for our unique system of 
     checks and balances.
       The Senate at its best can be the conscience of the nation. 
     I have seen that when it happens, and I marvel in the 
     fundamental soundness and wisdom of our system every time it 
     does. But we cannot afford to put any part of the mechanism 
     on automatic pilot. It takes constant work and vigilance to 
     keep our system working as it should for the betterment of 
     our society and its people. Keeping faith with these 
     fundamentals accounts for much of the legacy of Fritz 
     Mondale.
       It is easy for politicians to appeal to our worst instincts 
     and to our selfishness. Political leaders serve best when 
     they appeal to the best in us, to lift our sights, summon our 
     will and raise us to a higher level.
       This year we celebrate our good fortune of knowing and 
     benefiting from Fritz Mondale's ample service to the nation, 
     and there is much to celebrate. His is the generous and 
     optimistic spirit of the reformer, and of the patriot.
       Thank you, Fritz. And Happy Birthday.

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