[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 21 (Thursday, February 11, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S545-S547]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO KYLE SIMMONS

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, one of the most gratifying things about 
spending a good deal of time in the Senate, as I have, is the optimism 
that comes from seeing talent renew itself year after year. I have had 
the good fortune of having many talented staffers over the years, and 
the staff I have now is an incredible group. But every one of them will 
tell you that when Kyle Simmons gets up from his tidy desk and walks 
out of his office this Friday, the office they return to on Monday will 
be a very different place.
  It has been said that no one is indispensable, and that may be true. 
But few of us can imagine S-229 without Kyle Simmons in it. So it will 
take some adjusting. And part of that adjustment involves doing 
something this week that Kyle never did. We are going to speak well of 
him. We are going to talk about his many virtues. We are going to make 
him a little uncomfortable. Because every single person on my staff 
knows what it's like to be singled out for a good piece of work, or for 
going above and beyond the call of duty; everybody, that is, except our 
chief of staff. Now it is our turn.
  The first thing to say about Kyle is that he is humble. And that is 
really saying something in this town. Most people in Washington look in 
the mirror in the morning and think they see a future President. Not 
Kyle. If he looks in the mirror at all in the morning, I would imagine 
that what he sees is the son of a Baptist minister who was blessed with 
a privilege he didn't seek and who has tried to earn that privilege 
every single day, regardless of how well he did the day before. As he 
used to tell his father, ``Dad, I'm always just one mistake away from 
looking for a job.''
  He had a modest upbringing. But he excelled at everything. One day 
when Kyle was about 10 years old, he made his way over to the Tate's 
Creek public golf course and picked up a club. Soon

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enough, he was a better golfer than his dad. It was sign of things to 
come--a sign that for him, as for so many others in this country before 
and since, success would come not from who he knew or where he came 
from, but from hard work and the determination to succeed.
  When Kyle showed up in Washington, he didn't have any connections. He 
didn't have an Ivy League degree. He didn't even have a job. All he had 
was some furniture he got from his grandfather, and a lot of talent. He 
got evicted from the first place he rented because the owner of the 
building wanted to tear the building down. As his old friend and 
roommate at the time put it, ``We were just two country bumpkins in a 
crowd . . . We just wanted to pay our electric bills.''
  There were times, I am sure, when back home didn't look so bad. And 
after a series of jobs outside government and a brush with politics 
during the 1992 Presidential campaign, Kyle decided he had been in 
Washington long enough. And so he moved back home to Kentucky, but this 
time with enough experience under his belt to run a corporate 
communications shop in Louisville and that is just what he was doing 
when I first met him on an elevator at the old Seelbach Hotel.
  I had just lost my press secretary, and we struck up a polite 
conversation--the second thing you notice about Kyle is that he is 
unfailingly polite--and then we pulled a Cheney on him. We asked him if 
he wouldn't mind coming up with a list of candidates for us, which he 
did with characteristic diligence. And when he had gone through his 
list, we asked him if maybe he would be interested in the job. Soon 
after that, he was sitting at a desk in the Russell Senate Office 
Building.
  He was a quick study. Not even a year had passed before I knew that 
Kyle was the guy I wanted to manage my next campaign. I sent him down 
to the office I have always used out on Bishop Lane in Louisville, and 
he did a flawless job. In a year when Bill Clinton got reelected and 
carried Kentucky for the second time, Kyle got me reelected by 12 
points. It was a landslide, a truly remarkable feat.
  After that, he just went from success to success. After returning 
from Kentucky, I put him in charge of my office. It was one of the best 
decisions I ever made. Nothing rattled him, and he was always, always, 
thinking of the one thing that no one else had thought of.
  Whether it was taking apart what I had thought to be a terrific idea 
and patiently explaining to me why it wasn't such a good idea, or 
mapping out a legislative or political strategy when everyone else was 
ready to take a break, he became the calm navigator in the middle of 
the storm--the one person in the office who never took his eye off the 
destination we had set. And when it came to smoking out some unforeseen 
problem or vetting some proposal for potential pitfalls, he was, and 
is, quite simply, the best I have ever seen. It was a skill I always 
thought I was pretty good at. But Kyle was better. And it is impossible 
to overstate the value of that kind of mind in politics.
  Many of the people who might be listening to me right now are 
probably asking themselves why they have never heard of this guy. That 
is no accident. Kyle was never in it for himself. I know as well as I 
know the sun's coming up tomorrow that through three Senate elections, 
two whip races, two leader races, and countless legislative efforts in 
between, that he never put his own interests ahead of my own. He was as 
loyal as he was effective. He has made me look better than I am for 15 
years. And nearly everything I have accomplished over that time I owe, 
in large part, to him.
  He always deflected attention. And if he was suspicious of anything, 
it was the glory seekers, the people who like to talk about themselves. 
It is something he just never did. He kept his own counsel and kept to 
himself. As his mother used to say, ``Kyle can keep silent in 30 
different languages.''
  But if you ever do get Kyle to talk about his accomplishments, he 
will probably tell you that his proudest professional achievement was 
finding a talented group of people in Washington, DC, who had the same 
attitude about the limelight and about empty praise that he does. He 
will tell you the thing he's proudest of is the staff he put together--
and that he will soon leave behind.
  But he was always the one who set the example.
  On any given day over the past few years, any visitor to our office 
could be excused for wondering who the tall gentleman was out in the 
reception room asking one of our new staff assistants whether she'd 
found an apartment yet, and whether it was in a safe neighborhood.
  ``I'd never be able to look your parents in the eye if anything ever 
happened to you,'' he would say.
  Anyone who had the privilege of sitting in one of our morning staff 
meetings could be excused for wondering who the guy was at the end of 
the table who seemed to know absolutely everything--from the 
legislative details to the fact that some of the Senate pages would be 
graduating later that day, that one of them was from Kentucky, that his 
dad had just died, and that our No. 1 priority in the office that day 
would be to make that young man feel like a million bucks.
  Any visitor to our office could be excused for being astonished at 
seeing that same tall gentleman walk away from a room full of CEOs to 
focus on a staff issue or at seeing him sneak out during an important 
vote so he could get home just a little while to see his little girl 
before she went to bed.
  Anyone would be amazed how he could manage such a high-pressure 
environment with such efficiency, focus, and vision, without ever 
losing his sense of humor. He inspired confidence in the staff and he 
inspired loyalty.
  Everything I ever asked him to do he did well, especially when he had 
every excuse not to. I asked him to manage a campaign, even though he 
had never managed a campaign before. I asked him to run my office, even 
though he had never run an office before. I asked him to put together a 
leadership staff, even though he had never done that before. He had 
never done any of these things, but he excelled at every one, and he 
never needed the praise. I assure you, that kind of person is in very 
short supply in Washington.
  Someone once said, the best business in the world would be to buy 
someone for what they are worth and to sell them for what they think 
they are worth. It was never that way with Kyle. He was always worth 
more than he thought he was, and that is why he will succeed at 
whatever he chooses to do.
  In the meantime, he leaves a legacy. I cannot tell you how many 
Senators have come up to me over the past week to tell me how much they 
will miss his counsel, his advice, and his steady hand. He has left a 
lot of himself in this place, and it is the better for it.
  Above all, though, Kyle leaves his example. It is the example of 
someone who showed you could be committed to winning and gracious at 
the same time; that you could be intensely focused, without losing 
sight of the human beings around you. It is that combination of 
aggressiveness and caution, political savvy and humanity that anyone 
who has worked with Kyle has come to admire and will miss.
  Now that he is leaving, I am just as confident our office will carry 
on as it always has because he leaves a fantastic team behind. That is 
because Kyle's solution to everything was to throw the smartest people 
in the room at the problem, to find the best talent but not just any 
talent. He only wanted people who would rather be on a team than on the 
style pages of the Washington Post--in other words, people like him: 
honest, intelligent, kind, straightforward people with humility, a deep 
commitment to excellence, and always a sense of humor.
  You do not get those qualities in Washington. You bring them here. In 
Kyle's case, that means he brought them from a quiet street in 
Lexington, KY, and, more specifically, from the home of Bill and Barbie 
Simmons.
  Anyone who ever spent any time at the Calvary Baptist Church, where 
Kyle's dad served as pastor, could tell you there was one thing Bill 
Simmons could always count on when he climbed into the pulpit, whether 
he was presiding over a Sunday service, a funeral, a wedding--you name 
it--Mrs. Simmons would always be out there, always sitting in the same 
spot. She was always there as a point of reference, as a point of 
comfort for her husband. When I think of what Kyle has meant

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to me over the past 15 years, I cannot help but think that is exactly 
what he has been to me. He has been that steady presence in the midst 
of it all. As long as he was there, the team was confident things would 
turn out well, and they always did.
  To me, he has been more than a staffer. He has been a colleague, a 
confidant, and a dear friend.
  Kyle once summed up his approach to the job, and I would like to 
share it because every Senator should be so fortunate as to have a 
chief of staff who would write such a thing. It is from a letter he 
left on the chair of my other chief of staff, Billy Piper, the day 
Billy took Kyle's job in the personal office 7 years ago.
  After a brief introduction, here is what Kyle wrote:

       Billy . . . while you sit here you are no longer simply 
     Billy Piper. You are Billy Piper, Senator Mitch McConnell's 
     chief of staff. Carry the privileges and responsibilities 
     just as you have throughout your outstanding career--with 
     humility and honor. . . .

  Kyle went on:

       . . . it's a constant struggle while balancing the demands 
     on your time to remember your audience: the people of 
     Kentucky, the staff who looks to you for leadership, and 
     Senator McConnell. . . . We're only here for a short period 
     of time--and few of us have made it to where you now sit. Do 
     us proud.

  He was honored to serve the Senate and his country. Yet, at the end 
of that service, he knew he had a more important job still. It was the 
job of husband and father. That is why, to paraphrase Macbeth, nothing 
became Kyle's service to the Senate more than the leaving of it. His 
first love was and is his dear wife Carrie and their beautiful daughter 
Ava and the Senate could not compete with that--as much as it tried to, 
especially these last few months.
  So he has made the right decision, as he usually does. But that does 
not change the fact that he leaves behind an office and a boss who will 
miss him terribly.
  Kyle, thank you so very much.

                          ____________________