[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 16 (Thursday, February 3, 2011)] [Senate] [Pages S509-S527] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] REMEMBERING PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN Mr. McCAIN. Madam President, there are many of us who will come to the floor this afternoon to pay tribute to one of the great Presidents in American history. Many of us will recollect times and experiences and contacts we had with President Reagan and the way he inspired us personally as well as a nation. When I was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, the Vietnamese went to great lengths to restrict the news from home to the statements and activities of prominent opponents of the war in Vietnam. They wanted us to believe America had forgotten us. They never mentioned Ronald Reagan to us or played his speeches over the camp loud speakers. No matter. We knew about him. New additions to our ranks told us how the Governor and Mrs. Reagan were committed to our liberation and our cause. When we came home, all of us were eager to meet the Reagans, to thank them for their concern. But more than gratitude drew us to them. We were drawn to them because they were among the few prominent Americans who did not subscribe to the then-fashionable notion that America had entered her inevitable decline. We prisoners of war came home to a country that had lost a war and the best sense of itself, a country beset by social and economic problems. Assassinations, riots, scandals, contempt for political, religious, and educational institutions gave the appearance that we had become a dysfunctional society. Patriotism was sneered at, the military scorned. The world anticipated the collapse of our global influence. The great, robust, confident Republic that had given its name to the last century seemed exhausted. Ronald Reagan believed differently. He possessed an unshakable faith in America's greatness, past and future, that proved more durable than the prevailing political sentiments of the time. His confidence was a tonic to men who had come home eager to put the war behind us and for the country to do likewise. Our country has a long and honorable history. A lost war or any other calamity should not destroy our confidence or weaken our purpose. We were a good nation before Vietnam, and we are a good nation after Vietnam. In all of history, you cannot find a better one. Of that, Ronald Reagan was supremely confident, and he became President to prove it. His was a faith that shouted at tyrants to ``tear down this wall.'' Such faith, such patriotism requires a great deal of love to profess, and I will always revere him for it. When walls were all I had for a world, I learned about a man whose love of freedom gave me hope in a desolate place. His faith honored us, as it honored all Americans, as it honored all freedom-loving people. Let us honor his memory especially today by holding his faith as our own, and let us too tear down walls to freedom. That is what Americans do when they believe in themselves. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Coons). The clerk will call the roll. The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I was honored to hear Senator McCain's comments on Ronald Reagan. This Sunday is indeed the 100th anniversary of his birth. It is an opportunity for the whole Nation to honor the memory of a man who honored us with his leadership. In the 1980s, we were a weakened country. Inflation and unemployment were in double digits. The hostage crisis in Iran dragged on, with no end in sight. Our standing abroad was waning [[Page S510]] and so too was our military strength. Challenges at home were answered with one failed Washington program after another. We had lost confidence in our future and really in the principles that made us exceptional. Ronald Reagan changed that. Part of that change began with 12 simple, crucial words: Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. It is a big part of our problem. He stirred the passions of our country, revitalizing not only our economy but our identity and confidence as free people. What some have called the Reagan revolution he called the great rediscovery. He instilled us with a new confidence in our future and in America's role as the last best hope of mankind. His achievements are well known, but they bear repeating. Working with Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he tamed the inflation which was robbing Americans of their life's work and savings. It was a tough course, a tough road, but he saw it through. He stayed on the course, and we were stronger as a result. We need to get on a tough road and stay the course today. He lowered taxes dramatically, including a reduction in the top rate from nearly 70 percent, and he reined in a runaway bureaucracy that had trapped innovation and productivity in a labyrinth of regulation and redtape. His faith in the free market was not misplaced. It rewarded us. He created 20 million new jobs, grew our gross national product by 26 percent, and began the longest peacetime boom in our history. Conditions improved for Americans in every walk of life. The net worth of families earning between $20,000 and $50,000 rose by 27 percent. Reagan's stunning success debunked every myth of those who believe a bigger government is more compassionate and can do more for more people. The growth and potential productivity of the private sector is what has made America the most prosperous Nation. This success at home was matched by his success abroad. He defended our principles and our way of life with clarity, confidence, and vigor. His policies brought down the Soviet Empire. ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall'' still resonates in our minds, and it liberated untold millions. Today, more than 20 years after President Reagan left office, we find ourselves facing many of the same challenges: a sagging economy, a growing government, and a diminished standing in the world. We would be wise to remember the lessons of that era: peace through strength, prosperity through freedom. He understood that our future greatness lies in the same place it always has--through our pioneering, restless, enterprising spirit that is filled with ambition and excitement, and a deep sense of honor and decency that defines who we are as a people and who we will be tomorrow. In President Reagan's farewell address, he issued a word of caution: If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I am warning of an eradication of that--of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. As we face daunting, defining challenges of our time, I hope we look back to the leadership he provided. On a personal note, I was tremendously honored to have been appointed a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Alabama by President Reagan in 1981. It was an office in which I had served as an assistant a number of years before. To be able to come back and lead that office was such a personal thrill. The President did not give me any directions as to what we were to do, but I absolutely knew--and I have often said it is a great example of true leadership--I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. I gathered the staff, many of whom I had worked with years before, and used these words: President Reagan sent me here to prosecute criminals and protect the U.S. Treasury. I believe that is what he did. I believe that was implicit in his campaign, his consistent leadership, that he believed in law and order and efficiency, and he wanted us to fight corruption and try to help produce a more efficient government. I remember in those days we went to a U.S. attorneys conference. I attended with my good friend, recently the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Larry Thompson. We would share rooms on the trips to save money because we knew and believed President Reagan wanted us to save money. Our spending was out of control, and we had a serious financial problem. Our budgets were frozen. But we worked harder and we produced more. That can be done today. This whining that we cannot reduce spending-- and many times, they define ``reducing spending'' as a reduction of the projected rate of growth. It is not even a reduction of current level spending. These kinds of things happened throughout the government. It increased productivity of our government. It reduced the take of the Federal Government of the private economy. The private economy grew, and the government sector became more efficient and more productive. That is what we need to return to. It was such a fabulous honor to have the opportunity to serve in that position. I hope I was faithful to the values of the President who appointed me. I have to say, I think I knew what they were, and I know I gave my best effort to be worthy of the trust he placed in me. That was true of many more people throughout the Federal Government. Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I rise for a moment to join my colleagues in paying tribute to the late Ronald Reagan, President of the United States--a great conservative leader of our country and an inspiration to many, many Americans. I want to dedicate my remarks to a lady named Kathie Miller. Kathie works for me here in Washington. She has loved Ronald Reagan since the day he came on the scene and can probably quote him verbatim much better than I can. He had a meaningful impact on her life, and so I dedicate these remarks to her today. My speech will be about two events I happened to attend where Ronald Reagan was speaking and the impact of those events not only on me but on everybody else who was there, and actually on the future of our country. One took place in 1975, when he was beginning his pursuit of the nomination for the Presidency of the United States. Gerald Ford was still President at that time and Ronald Reagan was running for the nomination for a full term. Ronald Reagan came to Cobb County, GA. Cobb County, GA, is where I live. It is a very Republican county right now, but in 1975 it was not a very Republican county. In fact, there was only one elected official in the entire county who was a Republican, out of literally 100 or more who were Democratic officials. Ronald Reagan came to the civic center in Cobb County, and an unanticipated thing happened, not by plan, certainly, not by the generation of politicians, but a crowd so large came to hear him that the fire marshals shut the building down. This is a very good-sized, 4,000-seat auditorium. People came to hear a positive message about America. I was fortunate enough, because I had been in politics a little bit, to be able to get in that room and listen to his speech. In 1975, for America, it was not the most prosperous of times. In fact, a lot of the things we have been suffering through these last couple of years we went through in 1974 and 1975. We had a difficult housing market, higher interest rates, higher unemployment, and things of that nature. So this former actor came to Cobb County and he lit a fire under everybody, and not necessarily about him but about ourselves. He uplifted people who needed uplifting and he did it with a message of a belief in ourselves, a belief in our country, pride in America, and defense through strength. Those messages were so clearly Ronald Reagan. It inspired me. And it inspired me so much that I hoped he would get that nomination and be elected President of the United States. But he failed. He did not get the nomination. Ultimately, Gerald Ford got it, not [[Page S511]] Ronald Reagan. But Ronald Reagan didn't go home and pout. He did not stop participating. He didn't drop out. He set his sights on the 1980 Republican nomination for President of the United States, and history reflects that he achieved it. He won it, and it was 8 great years for our country, 8 great years with a man who could inspire and who could lead. I have oftentimes said that two of the truly great Presidents we have had--John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan--had something in common. They were from different parties, but they could stand before a group of people and make a speech about a subject they didn't agree with and, by the time they finished, they got a standing ovation. So, first, they were great communicators. Second, they were committed to a safe and prosperous America. They were hawks on defense. They confronted our enemies straight up, as Kennedy did with Khrushchev and President Reagan did. Third, and most important, they reduced taxes and brought prosperity to the economy of the United States. The second occasion I met Ronald Reagan was an interesting one. It was in the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta, where professional basketball was played at the time. The coliseum seats 16,000 people. I was then the minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives and was elected to be the MC of a program that featured Senator Mack Mattingly, running for reelection from Georgia, but the keynote speaker was Ronald Reagan. In fact, he flew from Washington to Atlanta to make that speech and then went to Reykjavik, Iceland where he confronted Gorbachev and Brezhnev and the Russians and he stood for peace through strength, and a strong buildup of forces in America so we could be a strong country that could defend ourselves, not a weak country subservient to anybody else. In that auditorium of 16,000 people, he stood up before them and did the same thing he did in the auditorium in 1975. He inspired them to believe in their country, inspired them to believe in what was right, and inspired them to believe in peace through strength. And when he left, everybody was uplifted. I think when Ronald Reagan left the Presidency in 1988, we would all agree our country was uplifted. It was a period of prosperity and a period of strength, and it was a renaissance of the American spirit. That is the test of true leadership. So I am honored and privileged to join many of my colleagues on the floor today to pay tribute to the memory and the commitment of Ronald Reagan, President of the United States. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. WEBB. Mr. President, I wish to join my other colleagues who have come to the floor at this time to speak in honor of our late President, Ronald Reagan, on the occasion of his 100th birthday. I wish to begin by giving my best wishes to Mrs. Reagan and wish her all the best for her continued health. Also, as someone who had three different positions in the Reagan administration, I am thinking of a lot of very fine people with whom I had the opportunity to serve, especially Cap Weinberger whom I met and worked with every day for about 4 years, who is one of the finest people I ever worked with, and also John Herrington, who was the Director of White House Personnel, who first brought me into the Reagan administration and later served our country as Secretary of Energy. As I mentioned, I had three different positions in the Reagan administration, first as a member of the National Advisory Committee, and then I spent 4 years to the day in the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of Defense, and then as Secretary of the Navy. It was truly an inspiring time in my life, to have worked for an individual who had the leadership qualities Ronald Reagan demonstrated. He knew how to inspire our country. He knew how to bring strong personalities together to work toward the good of the country and for its future. He knew how to make decisions, he knew how to make hard decisions, and one of the great qualities he had was he was never afraid to take responsibility for the consequences of any of those decisions. That is something which I think motivated everyone who served in his administration. If we go back to that time period, those of us who were of age, 1980 was a bad time in this country. Our country was in tremendous turmoil. We were demoralized in the wake of the fall of South Vietnam and the bitterness that had affected so many of us along class lines, particularly between those who opposed the Vietnam war and those who had fought it, and what we were going to do in terms of resolving those issues here in this country and then our reputation internationally. Inflation was rampant, sometimes in the high teens. People were saying that the Presidency was too big a job for any one person. Our military was overworked, underpaid, and dramatically underappreciated. I had friends with whom I had served or I had gone to the Naval Academy with, who had gone into the Navy, who were saying during this time period if you make commander you may as well get your divorce because you are going to go to sea for 4 years. The Navy had gone from 930 combatant ships during the Vietnam war down to 479, precipitously, at the same time our country had assumed the obligations in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, obligations it didn't have before. The Soviet Union, it is hard to remember right now, was in a state of high activity, diplomatically and militarily. It had invaded Afghanistan, threatening instability in that part of the world. It had a massive naval buildup in the Pacific following our withdrawal from Vietnam. Our diplomatic and military personnel in Tehran had been taken hostage by the Iranian regime and were being taunted daily on TV. Our national self-image was in a crisis state. Who were we as a country? Did we really have a future? Ronald Reagan campaigned based on our national greatness and on the intrinsic good of our society and on restoring our place at the top of the world community. I can vividly remember in the summer of 1980 when Ronald Reagan made a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention and mentioned, as he was so wont to do, with symbolic phrases that Vietnam had been a noble cause. He had the media following him around the country mocking the comment at this point, only 5 years after the fall of South Vietnam, but for those of us who had stepped forward and served in order to attempt to bring democracy to South Vietnam, that was a great moment of inspiration. Once he was elected, Ronald Reagan governed with the same sense of certainty about the greatness of our system and the goodness of our people. He convinced strong, talented people to join his administration. With George Shultz as Secretary of State and Cap Weinberger as Secretary of Defense, he brought two lions into his Cabinet who did not always agree--which was rather famous in Washington at the time--but who were able to combine fierce competitive intellects with decades of valuable experience. When Ronald Reagan left the White House, our military had been rebuilt, our people had regained their pride in our country and their optimism for its future. The United States was again recognized as the leading nation in the world community and the failed governmental concept that had produced the Soviet Union was on the verge of imploding, not because of external attack but soon to disappear at the hands of its own citizens, who could look to the West and see a better way of life. To paraphrase an old saying, ``You never know when you are making history. You only know when you did.'' Ronald Reagan did make history and I was proud to be a small part of it. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. KIRK. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. [[Page S512]] Mr. KIRK. Mr. President, as the junior Senator representing the State of Illinois, and one who will lead a celebration of President Reagan's life in Chicago Saturday night, for Sunday, the 100th birthday of our native Illinoisan, our 40th President, Ronald Reagan, I want to talk for a moment about his life and what he has meant to the United States, now on the 100th anniversary of President Reagan's birth. On February 6, 1911, in Tampico, IL, with a population of 820, John and Nelle Reagan welcomed a child who would one day change the direction not just of our country but the world. According to the Reagan family lore, when he first gazed upon his son, John Reagan prophetically quipped: ``He looks like a fat little Dutchman. But who knows, he might grow up to be President someday.'' His father was a strong believer in the American dream and Nelle Reagan passed on to her son her penchant to always look for the good in people, regardless of their current position. It was those early lessons in perseverance and faith that would inspire Ronald Reagan to pursue his dream of becoming a Hollywood actor. He signed his first professional acting contract in 1935 and went on to enjoy a successful career on the silver screen. But by 1946, after serving 3 years in the Army Air Force Intelligence Corps during the height of World War II, he began to have ambitions beyond Hollywood. A 5-year stint as the president of the Screen Actors Guild laid the foundation for Ronald Reagan's political career. During the turmoil of the Hollywood communism craze, Reagan proved himself to be a skilled dealmaker and an influential leader as he successfully navigated the upheaval in the Hollywood community. In 1964, Ronald Reagan was thrust into the national spotlight as he gave his televised speech entitled, ``A Time for Choosing,'' in support of the Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. Following his speech, a group of influential citizens became convinced that Ronald Reagan should become the next Governor of California. After winning in the primary and enduring a very hard- fought campaign, Ronald Reagan unseated the two-time Governor of California, Pat Brown, to become the 33rd Governor in California's history. During his 2 terms as Governor, Californians enjoyed a smaller, less costly, and more efficient State government. Governor Reagan returned $5 billion to the taxpayers and used his line-item veto authority 943 times to ensure that the State's budget matched its priorities. Ronald Reagan had once again proved himself a determined and capable leader in difficult times, but soon the American people would learn that his best days were very much ahead of him. After an unsuccessful Republican Presidential attempt in 1976, he knew that he wanted to be President but would only enter the race if the people of the United States actually wanted him to run. In the years following the 1976 primary, Ronald Reagan became increasingly concerned about the direction the country was headed, especially in the areas of national security, unemployment, and the economy. More than anything, Reagan sensed that Americans had lost their sense of confidence, not just in themselves but also in the country. Interestingly, the concerns Mr. Reagan felt as he weighed the decision to run for President are not unlike many of the challenges we face today. Ronald Reagan was confident that he was the man who could lead the country out of a dark recession and into the light of a new prosperity and national pride. After winning a landslide election in November, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as our 40th President on January 20, 1981. He immediately went to work on repairing a broken economy by enacting the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, with his solid belief being that if people had more money in their pockets and confidence to invest, the country would get back on a sound financial footing. During his first months in office, Reagan was as much to thank for the new found economic stability as he was for a heightened sense of optimism that was returning to the United States after very hard times. He thoughtfully guided the country through a series of national tragedies and terrorist attacks on our military forces abroad. Yet through it all, President Reagan's resolve never wavered, his confidence that the American people would meet the myriad challenges they faced never faltered. This was a man who, after surviving an assassination attempt, continued to meet with congressional leaders in his hospital room as he recovered because he believed it in the best interest of the American people that he continue working to the extent his body would allow. It was that type of steadfast determination that allowed the negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to move forward and eventually led to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the signing of the I.N.F. Treaty and eventually the end of Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe. The issue that got him into politics, ending the spread of communism, became the crowning achievement of his Presidency. His constant refrain throughout his time in the White House was that government was becoming too big, too inefficient, too unresponsive and too wasteful. As Governor, Reagan demonstrated the ability to exercise fiscal restraint and he urged leaders in Congress to do the same thing. I think it appropriate that we are celebrating Reagan's 100th birthday at a time when national debt and the deficit are at an all-time high. While we know that Reagan possessed the willingness to tackle such issues, I believe the lesson we can learn most from his Presidency is the endlessly optimistic attitude he had that the United States and its people would meet challenges of the day and emerge stronger because of the struggle to overcome. His assertion that America was ``the shining city on a hill'' guided him, as it should us. A hard-nosed, gritty politician, Reagan would have jumped at the chance to take on the responsibility of leading this country out of this recession, just as he did in 1981. So as we celebrate Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, let us take a moment to reflect upon the life of a man who, as President, always did what was necessary to move the country forward in the way he felt was most beneficial to those who mattered most, the people. I know his legacy is most associated with the people of California, but as the junior Senator for Illinois, we will claim our right to note his birth in Tampico, his childhood in Dixon, and his college years at Eureka College. We will be very happy to mark the 100th birthday on Saturday in Chicagoland and through celebrations in other parts of the State, one of our great Presidents who very much changed the course and direction of this country and this world for the better. I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, in 3 days' time, across our country, from the North Country of New Hampshire to his final resting place in Simi Valley, CA, Americans will celebrate the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. It will be the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth. I am very honored to rise today to join other colleagues of both parties and others throughout the United States and, I am sure, the world in paying tribute to America's 40th President. I cannot speak as personally about President Reagan as some in this Chamber can. I met him only a few times when, as a visiting State attorney general during the eighties, I was at the White House. He was always gracious, always responsive to us. But I did have one meeting that I might call a virtual meeting with President Reagan that reminds me of his enduring importance for our country today. Twenty-two years ago, on January 4, 1989, as President Reagan was departing the White House, having completed his second term, I had just arrived in Washington as a freshman Senator from Connecticut. President Reagan was set to give his final weekly radio address on that brisk Saturday morning, and then-Senate majority leader George Mitchell had honored me by [[Page S513]] asking me if I would give the Democratic response. It was a real honor, although a daunting one, for me to be asked to do that on that occasion. Looking back, I believe President Reagan's 331st and final radio address on that January morning was among the most masterful and moving of his career. In it, he captured the very essence of the American spirit. He said: Whether we seek it or not, whether we like it or not, we Americans are keepers of the miracles. We are asked to be guardians of a place to come to, a place to start again, a place to live in the dignity God meant for his children. May it ever be so. President Reagan concluded that morning. Needless to say, President Reagan's final radio address was quite literally a tough act to follow. In my remarks, I praised him for his love of country, for his fervent devotion to freedom, and for his commitment to the values of faith, flag, and family. I was, as I put it then, inspired and encouraged by his patriotism, and I urged all Americans to ``work on our unfinished business and the challenges ahead with the spirit of purpose and confidence that is the legacy of the Reagan years.'' Today, 22 years later, I continue to feel deeply honored that I was able to deliver those remarks and evermore confident of the importance of Ronald Reagan's legacy to us and the generations of Americans to come. The optimism, moral clarity, and confidence President Reagan radiated inspired a generation, and they are precisely the ideals we need today to rekindle and reinspire the current generation of Americans and others, frankly, living without freedom around the world. I didn't always agree with President Reagan. That is a matter of public record. But I always understood the enduring value and strength and sincerity of his faith in America's values and America's destiny. In 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to make America great again. And he did. He expressed with total confidence that those who would challenge our hard-won freedoms would collapse. And they did. He led our country and the free world to victory in the Cold War against Soviet communism, and he never doubted for a moment that America and our cause could and would prevail. When in 1977 Ronald Reagan was asked about his vision for the end of the Cold War-- remember, he was not yet President--he responded with characteristic and refreshing directness. He said: My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. Well, President Reagan's understanding of world affairs was far from simplistic. He was an optimist without illusions, who guided by and, frankly, expressed moral judgments about what was right and what was wrong. We do not see that enough today. There is a kind of relativism afoot. But some things are just plain wrong, and some things, thank God, are just plain right. President Reagan had the moral clarity to make distinctions between good and evil and the moral courage to speak the truth of those distinctions unambiguously and to support them unwaveringly. When he addressed an audience of veterans and world leaders commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-day, standing as he spoke on the windswept coast of northern France, the very clifftop in Normandy where courageous allied soldiers fought to liberate Europe from the yoke of Nazi tyranny, President Reagan magnificently, masterfully, compellingly revealed again his moral clarity, and I am honored to quote these words today on this floor. The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead, or on the next. It was the deep knowledge--and pray God we have not lost it--that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here-- He said to the veterans-- to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt. You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you. It is thrilling just to read those words again. Yet President Reagan never spoke about America's enemies belligerently; rather, he spoke firmly and frankly about the deep divide between our morality and that of the Soviet Union. In doing so, I think he reawakened in all of us the belief that every human being has the potential to change history because history, as Reagan knew, was not by abstract inexorable forces, but by real live men and women. It was President Ronald Reagan who came to the defense of the dissidents in their fight against the Soviet Union and reminded the world that a single courageous human face, a single courageous voice can tear down the faceless inhumanity of a massive repressive system such as the Soviet Union. The great Soviet dissident and later Israeli leader and human rights activist Natan Sharansky once shared with me his memory of the moment he first learned of President Reagan's 1982 speech before the British Parliament, the speech in which Reagan described the Soviet Union as an evil empire. There were some in this country who thought that was much too stark and disrespectful. But Sharansky, who was a prisoner for nearly a decade in the Soviet gulag, described to me how word of Reagan's speech spread through that heartless prison and he and his fellow dissidents tapped on walls and talked through pipes and even toilets to communicate the extraordinary news that the leader of the free world had spoken the truth, a truth, as Sharansky put it, ``that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.'' Indeed, President Reagan was willing to expose an inconvenient truth about the Soviet Union that unsettled and unnerved some of his contemporaries who feared his undiplomatic words were a threat to stability. The truth is, they were. President Reagan refused to accept the stability of an authoritarian status quo that consigned millions of people to live under perpetual tyranny. So he did challenge the stability of the Berlin Wall and the gulag as the Stasi. In doing so, his moral courage helped inspire the men and women who brought down the Iron Curtain and expanded the frontiers of freedom. In his approach to foreign policy, President Reagan embodied that quintessentially American combination of idealism and pragmatism. He understood what America was about, which is freedom and opportunity. He fought to extend those great values here at home and throughout the world. In his final words to the Nation as our President, in a radio address on that January morning 22 years ago, President Reagan shared a story about a meeting Winston Churchill had with a group of American journalists in 1952. It was a time when many doubted whether the West could meet the challenges of the Cold War and prevail. Churchill asked the reporters: What other nation in history, when it became supremely powerful, has had no thought of territorial aggrandizement, no ambition but to use its resources for the good of the world? I marvel at America's altruism, her sublime disinterestedness. Churchill's friend and physician, Lord Moran, described the Prime Minister's demeanor as he spoke: All at once I realized Winston was in tears. His eyes were red. His voice faltered. He was deeply moved. President Reagan was drawn to that story in his final radio address to the Nation 22 years ago because he understood that in that moment Churchill understood and acknowledged the greatness of the American spirit. Imperfect though we are as human beings, it is the spirit that explains who we are and expresses all we aspire to be. He saw America's devotion to a cause that has defined us for over two centuries, a cause greater than our own individual self-interest or even national self- interest very often and that has given an enduring purpose to our national destiny. That is the cause of human dignity and human freedom. At a time when we face many challenges both at home and abroad and when it has, unfortunately, become fashionable to suggest that our best days as a nation are behind us, President Reagan's optimism and his abiding faith in America are more important to remember than ever before. They are as wise as they are true. Our shared national destiny has always inspired us as Americans and propelled [[Page S514]] us forward together. It is the spirit that Ronald Reagan reinspired in America at a time of great peril. It is spirit, at this time of peril here at home and around the world, that can carry us forward and continue to make us the greatest Nation on Earth and the last best hope of mankind. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Sanders). The Senator from Tennessee. Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I appreciate the remarks of the Senator from Connecticut. I am glad I had the opportunity to hear them. I, too, am here to celebrate Ronald Reagan's life, born 100 years ago, but also his nearly 50 years of influence on American public policy. I begin in this way. A few years ago when he was President, President Reagan attended one of the many Washington press dinners held here. I think it was the Gridiron dinner. It was well known to 90 percent of the people in the audience that members of the press had a different point of view on politics than he did, but they liked him anyway, and they respected him, just as he respected them. I remember that evening that he strode into the Gridiron dinner smiling and looking like a million bucks. The press rose and smiled back and applauded him. President Reagan stood in front of the media until the applause subsided and then he said: Thank you very much. I know how hard it is to clap with your fingers crossed. The media laughed. They had a wonderful time with President Reagan. The first thing we think about, those of us who had a chance to know him--and that was a great many of us--is that Ronald Reagan was a very friendly, congenial man, an easy person to know, the kind of person one would enjoy spending time with. He was very comfortable, as we say, in his own skin. What we saw in private was what everybody else saw in public. Ronald Reagan was about more than being friendly and congenial. Each of us has a personal story of his or her connection to President Reagan. I have mine, and I wish this as an example. Sixteen years ago this month I stood, as a great many Members of this body have, on the front porch of my hometown courthouse. In my case, it was in Maryville, TN. There I announced my candidacy for President of the United States. It was an offer the people of the United States did not accept. My preacher brother-in-law said I should consider that defeat as a reverse calling. I have, and I have gone on to other things. As an example of the influence President Reagan had on my generation and others, let me read an example of what I said in 1995, 16 years ago: Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan, before he was elected to any public office, made an address called ``A Time For Choosing.'' He said that in America freedom is our greatest value, and that then there were two great threats: communism abroad and big government at home. Looking back over those last 30 years, I suppose we could say, one down and one to go. Communism, the evil empire, has virtually disappeared. But big government at home has become an arrogant empire, obnoxious and increasingly irrelevant in a telecommunications age. In every neighborhood in America, the government in Washington is stepping on the promise of American Life. The New American Revolution is about lifting that yoke from the backs of American teachers, farmers, business men and women, college presidents, and homeless shelter directors and giving us the freedom to make decisions for ourselves. Ronald Reagan put it this way in 1964: ``This is the issue of the election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan ourselves.'' That was also the issue of the election in 1994. It will be the issue of 1996, and for years to come. It took 30 years of unfashionable principled leadership by the last Republican Washington outsider who became President to help collapse the evil empire. Now is a good time to give another Republican Washington outsider the opportunity to help put some humility into the arrogant empire in Washington, D.C. So we see that the issues of 1964, the issues of 1994, the issues of 2010, and most likely the issues of 2012 and 2016 and beyond have a lot of similarities. Over that half century, Ronald Reagan was the finest spokesman for that point of view, the finest and the most persuasive. We Americans say anything is possible. Nothing symbolizes that more than the American Presidency. We see it in President Obama today, we saw it in President Lincoln, we saw it in President Truman, we saw it in President Eisenhower, and we saw it in Ronald Reagan. No President symbolized that more in the last half century than President Reagan did, though. He reminded us of what it means to be an American. He lifted our spirits, he made us proud, he strengthened our character, and he taught us a great many lessons. We celebrate the centennial of his birth and the half century of his influence in public life. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record Ronald Reagan's speech ``A Time for Choosing,'' given on October 27, 1964, which launched him into public debate in the United States. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Ronald Reagan--``A Time for Choosing'' (October 27, 1964) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks. I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, ``We've never had it so good.'' But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn't something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector's share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven't balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We've raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don't own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we've just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value. As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers. Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, ``We don't know how lucky we are.'' And the Cuban stopped and said, ``How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.'' And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down--[up] man's old--old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the ``Great Society,'' or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they've been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, ``The cold war [[Page S515]] will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.'' Another voice says, ``The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.'' Or, ``Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.'' Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as ``our moral teacher and our leader,'' and he says he is ``hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.'' He must ``be freed,'' so that he ``can do for us'' what he knows ``is best.'' And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as ``meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.'' Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as ``the masses.'' This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, ``the full power of centralized government''--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy. Now, we have no better example of this than government's involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21 percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming--that's regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we've spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow. Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he'll find out that we've had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He'll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He'll find that they've also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn't keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil. At the same time, there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore. Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how--who are farmers to know what's best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down. Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a ``more compatible use of the land.'' The President tells us he's now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we've only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they've taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we've sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency. They've just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed. We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer--and they've had almost 30 years of it--shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing? But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty- stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We're spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you'll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we'd be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead. Now--so now we declare ``war on poverty,'' or ``You, too, can be a Bobby Baker.'' Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have--and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs--do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn't duplicated. This is the youth feature. We're now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps (Civilian Conservation Corps), and we're going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we're going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency. But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing. Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do- gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always ``against'' things--we're never ``for'' anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so. Now--we're for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we've accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. But we're against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They've called it ``insurance'' to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term ``insurance'' to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they're doing just that. A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary--his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due--that the cupboard isn't bare? Barry Goldwater thinks we can. At the same time, can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn't you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we're for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They've come to the end of the road. In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get [[Page S516]] your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar's worth, and not 45 cents worth? I think we're for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we're against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world's population. I think we're against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations. I think we're for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country. No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments' programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth. Federal employees--federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation's work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man's property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work. Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, ``If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States.'' I think that's exactly what he will do. But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn't the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died--because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England. Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the--or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment. Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men--that we're to choose just between two personalities. Well what of this man that they would destroy--and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I've been privileged to know him ``when.'' I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I've never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing. This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn't work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there. An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, ``Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such- and-such,'' and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he'd load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load. During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, ``There aren't many left who care what happens to her. I'd like her to know I care.'' This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, ``There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start.'' This is not a man who could carelessly send other people's sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I've discussed academic, unless we realize we're in a war that must be won. Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy ``accommodation.'' And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, ``Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters.'' Alexander Hamilton said, ``A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.'' Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then--when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for ``peace at any price'' or ``better Red than dead,'' or as one commentator put it, he'd rather ``live on his knees than die on his feet.'' And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, ``There is a price we will not pay.'' ``There is a point beyond which they must not advance.'' And this--this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's ``peace through strength.'' Winston Churchill said, ``The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits--not animals.'' And he said, ``There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.'' You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny. Thank you very much. Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record as well remarks I made in Orange County, CA, [[Page S517]] on October 28, 1994, on the 30th anniversary of the speech ``A Time for Choosing.'' There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: 30th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan Revolution (By Lamar Alexander, Oct. 28, 1994) I don't think Ronald Reagan would mind if before we get down to business, I told you one Minnie Pearl story. They are pretty good friends. Most people who have run for governor of Tennessee in the past 30-40 years have done so in order to live next door to Minnie Pearl. Her house is next door to the governor's mansion. And, you learn very quickly living next door to Minnie that you don't try to tell a better story than she can; because, she'll one up you. I was telling her after I left office about how people would look at me, but they could not remember why they knew they had seen me before. One man up in the mountains walked up and stared me in the face and said, ``Ain't you Alexander?'' I said, ``Yes, sir.'' He stared a while longer and said, ``Well, you sure don't favor yourself.'' Minnie said, ``Well, let me tell you what happened to me. . . . I was in the elevator in Opryland Hotel, minding my own business, and this tourist from California gets on and looks me up and down and says, `I'll bet a lot of people tell you that you look like Minnie Pearl.' '' She said, ``and I said very sweetly, `Yes, sir, they do,' and, he looked me down a while longer and said, `And, I'll bet it makes you mad, don't it?' '' It was reported that several Goldwater aides warned against letting Ronald Reagan make a speech this summer. He'll be inflammatory, they said. Sen. Goldwater intervened and made sure he didn't. And, Ronald Reagan didn't disappoint those aides. He began in this way, ``I am going to speak of controversial things and I make no apologies for this.'' The speech that we saw has made a landmark. It defines the things we Americans value most, our freedom. And, what most menaced that freedom, communists abroad and big government at home. It became a call to arms for conservatives, a rallying point, a promise of hope for the future. We are here tonight less than two weeks before another election, one that has taken on all the characteristics of a presidential election. It's become a referendum on the direction of our country. I would like to talk tonight for a few minutes about what the speech, ``A Time for Choosing,'' has meant to America during the last thirty years and what lessons we might learn for the next thirty. If I had to put it in one sentence, what we have learned from the last thirty, that the principle threat to freedom abroad has been defeated and the principle of threat at home has gotten more menacing. The evil empire in the Kremlin has collapsed but the government in Washington has become an arrogant empire; spreading its tentacles into our everyday lives. I was a student at New York University on October 27, 1964. And, to tell you the truth, I wasn't paying much attention to politics. So, I was struck when I read what we just saw, what Ronald Reagan said about the 1964 campaign. He said, ``This is the issue of the election whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far distant Capitol can plan our lives better than we can plan our lives ourselves.'' Replace the words ``little intellectual elite'' with an arrogant empire and you have the issue of this election, the one in 10 days, as well. In 1964, Ronald Reagan's talk of peace overseas could have just as easily applied to the dangers of the approaching encroachments of Washington, DC, into our everyday lives at home. He said it. ``Every lesson of history teaches us that the greater risk lies in people. There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which our enemies must not advance. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth that we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.'' Those were dramatic words, but these are dramatic events with dramatic consequences. Sometimes we forget just how unproven Ronald Reagan's thinking generally was. Even after he was president. At Westminster, he predicted that the Soviet Union would wind up in the ash heap of history. No other world leader would say anything like that. I remember one Sunday in 1984, when I was sitting in a church in Amsterdam, our family had just left Anne Frank's house and were remembering the stories how on another Sunday morning the German tanks had unexpectedly arrived in 1940. I was listening to the minister in that church in Amsterdam denounce the cold war policies, as he said, of Reagan and Begin and Hitler. In 1987, when Pres. Reagan was preparing for his speech at the Brandenburg gate, some nervous aides wanted to eliminate the phrase, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' They were afraid it was so unlikely that it would seem un-presidential. Pres. Reagan told Martin Anderson, not long ago, that, ``When I called them the evil empire I did it on purpose. I wanted them to know that we saw them for what they were.'' The evil empires collapsed; the Berlin Wall has come down. And we should never forget that Germany would not be united, that we and the Russians would not be dismantling weapons of mass destruction, that Arafat and Rapine would not have shaken hands, if the Cold War hadn't ended, and the Cold War would not have ended unless President Reagan had persisted in that bold and unfashionable thinking that he outlined in his speech in 1964. Unfortunately, the second great menace that Ronald Reagan pointed to in 1964 is if anything more menacing. He said in '64, ``Our government continues to spend $17 million a day more than our government takes in.'' 30 years later our government spends $643 million a day more than our government takes in. Ronald Reagan said in 1964, we haven't balanced our budget for 28 out of the last 34 years. Well, that is still true today, except it is 57 out of the last 64. But we don't need statistics to prove that, we see that in our everyday lives. I saw it this summer. Between the 4th of July and Labor Day when I did something many Americans do, I drove across the country. I came to Orange County on that drive. I spent many of the nights on that drive with families I had never met before; eating supper; staying up late talking. Driving across America, there are several ways to take the temperature of the country. Bumper stickers, for example. One of them on Interstate 10 in Louisiana said, ``Make welfare as hard to get as a building permit.'' Another one, in Florida said, ``I love my country but I fear my government!' But, as I drove along, I found a better way to take the temperature of the country. And that was by asking a question of the families with whom I stayed, and tonight I would like to ask you to ask yourselves that question, and it is this: ``Looking ahead 30 years, do you believe your children and your grandchildren will have more opportunities growing up in this country than you have had?'' When I asked that question this summer, I got a lot of long pauses and most people were afraid to say yes. This ambivalence about our future, if it is allowed to persist, will destroy what is special about this country. Namely, our almost irrational belief in the unlimited future of America and that every one of us, no matter where we come from, no matter what our station in life is, has a chance to have a piece of that future. On my drive, I was reminded that we Americans know exactly what is causing that loss of optimism. It is, first, the government in Washington, and it is, second, our drift away from standards and principles and values that have made this such a remarkable country in the first place. This is not something that I just heard at Republicans dinners. Father Jerry Hill, for example, runs a homeless shelter in Dallas, Texas. He won't take a federal grant anymore because he has grown tired of filling out forms all day Friday to justify what he has done Monday through Thursday. He says federal grants have made a nation of liars of us; applying for money that we don't need to spend for things we do need. And he is absolutely outraged that the government in Washington is paying $446 a month in Social Security disability benefits to drug addicts. He says, ``I can't help it when they have that kind of support for their addiction.'' Whether it is a school board member, whether it is a small business man or woman, a teacher, a hospital director, a housing project director, a former Cherokee Indian Chief--I have visited them all and they have had it up to here. They have had it up to here, and they can hardly say in civil terms how much they resent, not just the meddling, but the arrogance of the government in Washington, DC. Let me give you an example close to home. Many of you are candidates for the school boards of Orange County. I salute you. I cannot think of anything more important, but, let me ask you this in very blunt terms: Do you really believe that you are too stupid to set the weapons policy for the schools of Orange County? Well, your United States Senator does and most of the Congress agrees with her. In fact, the entire Congress passed a thousand-page education bill that takes a great many decisions from you, if you should be elected: The decision about what to say in a parent/teacher conference. The decision about how much school choice could be granted to parents. A definition of what a family is. The decision about whether text books should be replaced with new textbooks that focus on gender equity as defined by the new Assistant Secretary of Education. That all passed in the last week of this session of this Congress. Congress decided all of it and established in addition a sort of national school board, and they are not even embarrassed about it. President Clinton and Senator Feinstein held a press conference here in California to say, in effect, that they were proud of the fact that they had taken away the freedom of a thousand California school boards to assign a weapons policy for 7,100 schools and more than 5 million children. Senator Kennedy and President Clinton held a press conference of their own in Massachusetts. And for what? To pat themselves on the back for taking away your freedoms to make decisions in your own neighborhoods in your own schools about how to educate your own children. Here is the most powerful lesson of ``A Time for Choosing'' in the last 30 years. With the evil empire, President Reagan did exactly what a president ought to do. He solved [[Page S518]] the menace to freedom. He put aside less important issues. He developed a strategy. He persuaded at least half the people he was right. He persisted. He threw himself unfashionably into it until he wore everyone else out, and then he succeeded. Now we must do the same at home. We should train our sights on the arrogant empire in Washington, DC. That is the issue of this election, and it will be issue of 1996 as well. In 1992, Bill Clinton had a wonderful opportunity. This country was ready for a new generation of leadership; it wanted to look outside Washington for its answers. President Clinton gave us five minutes of hope and then proceeded to lead us in exactly the wrong direction. Washington taxes, Washington healthcare, a national school board, reinventing everything in Washington, DC. He has help in 2 years to create an even more arrogant empire. Which is why in California, and why in this country, we will be having a Republican sweep in 10 days. Whether that dream comes, something else will have been created which is an opportunity a mile wide for the Republican Party. Because the voters will then turn around to us and say, ``Well, what are you guys for?'' And we should not kid ourselves. The voters are not going to be expecting too much from us because our Republican agenda has either been non-existent, or too tempered, so much so that it sounds like usually that about all we can do is be against what the Democrats are for. So let us remember Ronald Reagan's example and his boldness and train our sights on the menace of freedom at home in the same way he trained his sights on the mask of freedom abroad. For example, instead of congressional reform at the margins, I say we should cut their pay and send them home. I mean by that that the United States Congress should spend six months in Washington; six months at home and have half as much pay. Let them take a real job, live alongside the rest of us. If you want a Congress of citizens who's more responsive to you than to the lobbyist in Washington, this is the way to do it. The eleven states with the lowest taxes have a legislature that is limited to meeting for 90 days. That would be one thing. Instead of reforming welfare in Washington, DC; let's end welfare in Washington, DC. Send them home and send the tax base with them back to the states. Send most of elementary and secondary education and jobs-related there as well. Send some of the departments and agencies, too. No more entitlements, period. Not one more law that imposes an unfunded mandate on a state government or a federal government. Term limits; balanced budget; line-item veto; a wholesale review of the federal rule making authority and an education bill that would free local schools from Washington control; privatize all public housing. All of this will increase our freedoms at home by preventing someone in Washington, DC, from making those decisions for us. An agenda like this will catch plenty of flak. Remember Reagan and Begin and Hitler. Already the Washington establishment has said it can't imagine a dumber idea than a citizen Congress. I cannot count the number of nights that I have been in editorial board meetings and been accused of trying to destroy public schools because I suggested that at least poor children ought to have more of the same choices of the best schools--the ones that the members of the editorial board send their children to. Approved thinking is not always right thinking. We'll be accused of turning and taking America back to the dark ages. We have already been accused by the Democrats in this election of going as far back as the days of Ronald Reagan. If that is an issue on Election Day, I think I know how the referendum will come out. But, eventually, we will be seen for what we are. Painters of a picture of America's future based on freedom and opportunity. I have this prediction to make. The arrogant empire at home will also be consigned to the ash heap. It will for a while be unfashionable to say this and it will seem overly dramatic to suggest that calling a halt to this ``too big for its britches'' government in Washington, DC, is a rendezvous with destiny for this generation but I believe that it is so. And, just as the collapse of the Soviet Union didn't solve all of our problems abroad--in fact it created a much more uncertain and unstable world that we have yet to learn how to grapple with--the devolution of responsibility from Washington, DC, to families, to churches, neighborhoods and schools will put plenty of problems in your hands; the problems that trouble us the most every day. But that is where the responsibility ought to be. I was reminded every day, on that drive across America, that we know exactly what to do in this country to put our nation back on track. We will have to do it community by community; family by family; school board by school board. In Murfreesboro, TN, families now have choices of schools 12 hours a day; all day, every year at no extra cost to the taxpayer. Reuben Greenberg, the police chief of Charleston, SC, has made even the housing projects as safe as any part of Charleston now that the government lets him kick criminals out of the housing projects. Reverend Henry Delaney has cleaned up the crack houses on 32nd street in Savannah and he knows what to do about welfare if someone in Washington will stop reinventing it long enough to ask him. And, Dan Biederman is taking whole blocks of New York City and with a private company making those blocks safe and clean and free from homeless. My own answer to the question, ``Looking ahead 30 years, do you believe your children and grandchildren will have more opportunity growing up in this country than you have had?'' is absolutely yes, because I am going to do everything in my power to see that they do, because that was done for me. When I was appointed Secretary of Education, the New York Times felt obligated to write that, Mr. Alexander grew up in a lower-middle class family in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. That was alright with me, but not, I discovered, when I called home the next week, alright with my mother, who was literally reading Thessalonians to gain strength for how to deal with this slur on the family. ``We never thought of ourselves that way,'' she said. ``You had a library card from the day you were three and music lessons from the day you were four; you had everything you needed that was important.'' And, I also had a grandfather who ran away from home when he was eight; somehow got to Oklahoma and became a railroad engineer and finally retired back to the mountains just in time to instruct us growing up in Maryville, ``Aim for the top there's more room there.'' So we grew up thinking we could be the railroad engineer, or the English teacher, or the school board member, or the principal or the governor or even the President of the United States. If some president had come on the radio offering me and my friends growing up a government credit card with benefits for the rest of my life, my grandfather would have thrown his boot through the radio because that was not his idea of America's future. When I was 5 years old, I visited my grandfather who was then a switch engineer in Newton, Kansas, a division point of the Santa Fe Railway. His job was to push and pull those huge belching steam engines into the round house put them on the turntable, turn them around and head them in the right direction. Our country today is like one of those steam engines. It is headed in exactly the wrong direction, and in the election 10 days from now, we have to slow it down and get it on the turntable and turn it around and, at least by 1996, get it headed in the right direction. That is the challenge for our party and for our country. I couldn't conclude this evening without acknowledging the magic of Ronald Reagan. The storyteller in this case was at least as important as the story. The speech would have just been a speech in anyone else's hands. He made sure he had his feet planted firmly on the ground before he entered public life and he kept them there. He knew and we knew where he stood. He assumed no false importance. He seemed to know his job was not to change everyone's mind but to speak the mind of the voters, of the citizens, and not be swayed by elites who told ordinary people they were too stupid to know what to do. He was firm and civil and eloquent and optimistic in his presidency. He appealed to the best of us. He knew and knows the value of a good story. And he knew, as President, that with the right purpose in that office, if he threw everything he had into it, he could wear everybody else out. That is how he helped to defeat the evil empire that threatened freedom in his generation and that is how in this generation that we, standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders, can finish his work and expand our freedoms by dismantling the arrogant empire at home. Thank you. Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print in the Record remarks I made in tribute to President Reagan in June of 2004. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Senate Floor Remarks of Sen. Lamar Alexander--Tribute to Former President Ronald Reagan (June 7, 2004) Mr. President, a few years ago when Ronald Reagan was President of the United States, he attended one of the many press dinners which are held. I think it was the Gridiron Dinner. I think it is well known that maybe 90 percent of the press corps in Washington had a different point of view on issues than Pres. Reagan did, but they liked him anyway, and they respected him and he had fun with them, just as they did with him. I remember on that evening he strode into the Gridiron Dinner looking like a million dollars, smiling big. The press rose, smiling back, applauding. Pres. Reagan stood in front of them until it subsided, and then he said to his adversaries in the media, ``Thank you very much--I know how hard it is to clap with your fingers crossed.'' And they laughed, and they had a wonderful time with Pres. Reagan. The first thing we think about, those of us who had any opportunity to get to know him--a great many of us--was that Ronald Reagan was a very friendly man. He was a congenial person, an easy person to know, the kind of person you want to spend a lot of time with, if you had the opportunity, and that what you saw in private was what everyone else saw in public. Howard Baker, the former majority leader of the Senate when Ronald Reagan was president, got to know him especially well. And [[Page S519]] then in 1987, Pres. Reagan invited former Sen. Baker to come to be his chief of staff, which he was for nearly two years. I remember Sen. Baker telling me that, to his surprise, when his 9 a.m. meetings came every morning with Pres. Reagan, he discovered that Mr. Reagan had a funny little story to tell to Sen. Baker, his chief of staff. What surprised Sen. Baker even more was Pres. Reagan expected Sen. Baker to have a funny little story to tell back. So for that two years, virtually every morning at 9 a.m., when the president of the United States and the chief of staff of the White House met, they swapped funny little stories. It is very reassuring to me that two men who have maybe the two biggest jobs in the world were comfortable enough with themselves, each other, and their responsibilities to begin the day in that sort of easy way. That is the part of Ronald Reagan we think more about. Another part of Ronald Reagan which I think is often overlooked is that he was a man of big ideas. I would say intellectual, although I guess there is a little difference between being devoted to ideals and being intellectual but not much difference. Unlike most people who are candidates for president of the United States, Ronald Reagan wrote many of his own speeches. When he had a few minutes, he would sit in the back of a campaign airplane and make notes on cards in the shorthand that he had. His former aide, Marty Anderson, has written a book about that and told that, to a great extent, Ronald Reagan's words were his own words, ideas he expressed or ideas he gathered himself and ideas he had thought through and wanted to promulgate. Maybe that is partly why he seemed so comfortable with himself when he finally entered public life. He came to it late in life. He was age 55 when he became governor of California, so by then he knew what he thought, and he had a sense of purpose, and he knew what he wanted to do. I got an idea of that kind of big thinking when I went to see Pres. Reagan in my third year as governor, his first year as president in 1981. I talked to him about a big swap which I thought would help our country. I suggested, the Federal Government take over all of Medicaid and let the State and local governments take over all responsibility for kindergarten through 12th grade. That would make it clear, I said, where the responsibility lies. You cannot fix schools from Washington, and it would make more efficient our health care system if we did things that way. He liked the idea. It fit his unconventional brand of thinking. He advocated it. It was a little too revolutionary for most people in Washington in the early 1980s. He had the same sort of unconventional attitude toward national defense policy. Many people overlooked the fact that Ronald Reagan did not just want us to have as many nuclear weapons as the Soviet empire did; he wanted to get rid of nuclear weapons. He saw them as wrong, as bad, and he wanted a world without nuclear weapons. Instead of mutual assured destruction, which was the doctrine at the time, he built up our strength so we could begin to reduce nuclear weapons and then unilaterally begin to do it before the Soviets did, hoping they would then follow. We can see the results. At the time, some people said Ronald Reagan was naive to think we could transfer power from Washington, from an arrogant empire at home or naive to think we could face down an evil empire abroad. And especially naive to think our policy should be based upon getting rid of nuclear weapons. It turned out Ronald Reagan saw further than most of those critics did. Perhaps his most famous speech, not my favorite speech--my favorite speech is the one we heard a lot about this weekend, 20 years ago at Normandy, which moved the whole world to tears and reminded Americans why we are Americans and what we fought for--but his most famous speech may be the one in 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin where he said, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' Earlier this year, I visited Berlin with John Kornblum who at the time was U.S. minister and deputy commandant in the American sector of West Berlin where tanks challenged tanks and white crosses marked grave sites of those who were killed trying to escape over the wall from East Berlin. Mr. Kornblum talked about the development of that speech that Ronald Reagan gave that day. Those words, or the thought, ``tear down this wall,'' went into the speech at an early stage. Some fought to keep it in. Many fought to take it out. Those who had thought Ronald Reagan was wrong to say the Soviet Union was an evil empire were not anxious for him to say, ``tear down this wall.'' Some suggested that Pres. Reagan try his hand at German as Pres. Kennedy had in a memorable speech at the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s. Some suggested that the speech should not be made at the Brandenburg Gate. That was too provocative, Mr. Kornblum remembers. But the speech was made at the Brandenburg Gate, and Mr. Reagan did keep his words in that speech. He did make his point, and his point was clear, ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.'' For those of us who had a chance to see the new countries of Eastern Europe and their enthusiasm for freedom and for a free market system, we can see the legacy of Ronald Reagan and his unconventional thinking. I think it is important for us to remember that this genial president was a man of ideas, of all the presidents I have worked with, as much a man of ideas as any one of those presidents. Ronald Reagan also taught us something about leadership. I recall in 1980 when he and Mrs. Reagan visited the Tennessee governor's mansion during the presidential campaign. I had not known him very well. He had served as governor. He was several years older. He was from the west. It was really my first chance to meet him. After one hour or an hour-and-a- half of breakfast with him the next morning, I remember going away thinking this man has a better concept of the presidency than anyone I have ever been privileged to meet. Ronald Reagan understood what George Reedy said in his book, ``The Twilight of the Presidency,'' is the definition of presidential leadership: First, see an urgent need; second, develop a strategy to meet the need; and, third, persuade at least half the people that you are right. Ronald Reagan was as good as anyone at persuading at least half the people that he was right. He taught that and he also taught us the importance of proceeding from principles. Sometimes we are described in Washington these days as being too ideological, too uncompromising, too partisan. Pres. Reagan was a principled man. He operated from principles in all of his decisions, insofar as I knew. He advocated his principles as far as he could take them, but he recognized that the great decisions that we make here are often conflicts between principles on which all of us agree. It might be equal opportunity versus the rule of law. And once we have argued our principle and the solution, and strategy has been taken as far as it could go, if we get, as he said 75, 80, or 85 percent of what we advocated, well, then that is a pretty good job. So, he was very successful because he argued from principles. He argued strenuously. He was good at persuading at least half the people he was right. Then he was willing to accept a conclusion because most of our politics is about the conflict of principles. There is another lesson that he taught us, and that was to respect the military. Now, that seems unnecessary to say in the year 2004 where we have a volunteer military that is better than any military we have ever had in our history; when we have witnessed the thousands of acts of courage, charity, kindness, and ingenuity in Iraq and Afghanistan recently; when the men and women of our National Guard and reserves are also being called up. We have a lot of respect for our military. In 1980, we were showing a lot less respect for the men and women of our military. I remember riding with Pres. Reagan in a car in Knoxville during the 1980 campaign. As we pulled out of the airport by the National Guard unit, there were a number of the soldiers waving at him, understanding and sensing that he respected them. He turned to me and said something like this: I wish we could think of some way to honor these men and women more. He said we used to do that in the movies in the 1930s and 1940s. We would make movies honoring men and women in the military and that is how we showed our respect for them. Well, he did find a way to honor them during his presidency in the 1980s, and by the time he left at the end of that decade, there was no question that the American people remembered to honor the men and women in the military. There is one other aspect of Pres. Reagan's leadership that I would like to mention, which is probably the most important aspect of the American character, and that is the belief that anything is possible. The idea that we uniquely believe in this country, and people all around the world think we are a little odd for believing it, is that no matter where you come from, no matter what race you are, no matter what color your skin, if you come here and work hard, anything is possible. That is why we subscribe to ideals such as all men are created equal, even though we know achieving that goal will always be a work in progress, and we may never reach it. That is why we say we will ``pay any price, bear any burden,'' as Pres. Kennedy said, to defend peace, even though we know that is a work in progress, and we may never reach it. That is why we say more recently we want to leave no child behind when it comes to learning to read. We know that is a work in progress, and we may not reach it, but that is our goal. We Americans say that anything is possible, and nothing symbolizes that more than the American presidency. And no president has symbolized that more in the last century than Ronald Reagan. He has reminded us of what it means to be an American. He lifted our spirits, he made us proud, he strengthened our character, and he taught us a great many lessons. Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota. Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I rise to join with my colleagues. I appreciate what the Senator from Tennessee had to say about our former President, as we look upon his 100th birthday coming up this weekend and all of us pay tribute to the legacy he gave this country and the tremendous contributions he made during his time in office. We all have different remembrances of his Presidency. I was a sophomore in college when he was elected to his first term as President. It was the first election in which I had the opportunity to [[Page S520]] vote. I guess I could say I was sort of coming of age at the time he was coming on the national political stage. He had run for President 4 years earlier. I remember, as a young person, beginning to pay a little bit of attention to politics, at the time being so impressed with the attributes that characterized him personally and were primarily responsible for his tremendous success as President and for the great legacy he left behind. I was someone who grew up in a small town in South Dakota, and my father and mother had both come through the Great Depression. They were similar in terms of their remembrances of that period and could identify in many respects with some of the things President Reagan talked about. But he was a person of strong convictions. I think he had a strength of conviction that was really appealing to a lot of Americans. He was someone who believed in American exceptionalism. He understood that the greatness of this country was not in its government institutions but in its peoples and its ideals. He was someone who was willing to confront the threats we faced around the world. The way he took on the threat of communism and promoted freedom and democracy around the globe is something for which he will always be remembered, not only here at home but by other countries around the world. I think he possessed, in many respects, a lot of the qualities we value in the Midwest. He was a very humble person. I think his humility is something that really stood out. He was always referred to as ``Dutch Reagan'' in his growing up, his formative years. I think the impact he had on this country was because he saw himself as just an ordinary American like every other American, and he was able to connect and identify with the challenges and the opportunities that were facing Americans across this country at the time. I think he also possessed, although he was the Governor of California, a midwestern sensibility that never left. He had, in many respects, values that, as I said before, many of us in the Midwest find really important--his belief that you ought to live within your means. His sort of midwestern bedrock values of individual responsibility were things he always touched upon, themes he referenced in his remarks. I think those were the types of qualities that really differentiated him on the national stage. I remember, too, as a young person being impressed with his sense of humor. Often today there are serious matters we deal with, matters of great gravity and great weight, and they need to be taken with the right level of seriousness. But he also was able to see the best in people and to use his sense of humor to connect with people about what was really distinctive and really unique about America. I remember the story that was told while we were fighting the Cold War about the guy in the Soviet Union who went in to buy a car, and he said: I want to buy a car. The guy at the transportation bureau said: Well, you can have your black sedan and you can pick it up 10 years from today. The guy thought about it for a minute, and he said: Will that be in the morning or in the afternoon? The guy at the transportation bureau said: What difference does it make? It is 10 years from now. And the guy said: Well, because I have the plumber coming in the morning. Ronald Reagan had a way of putting into very simple and understandable and sometimes humorous terms what was so distinctive and unique about the American experience. I think that is something that also really set him apart. When it came to the big issues of the day, he had a statement he made that I quote. He said: There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. I think oftentimes we face these complex problems, and we overanalyze a little bit. And the truth is, in a lot of the challenges we face today, not unlike the times when he was President, there are not easy answers, but I believe there are simple answers. Those very basic, core principles and those values that helped shape his Presidency and the things he never lost sight of are what made him an effective President. I believe that is a lesson we can apply today. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. When we believe in the greatness of America, when we look at the foundation of this country--personal freedom, personal liberty, coupled with individual responsibility--he believed profoundly that you achieve peace through strength. He was willing to confront communism at a point in this Nation's history when it posed a great threat to freedom-loving countries around the world. I think those are the types of qualities for which President Reagan will be remembered. As, again, someone who was very impressionable at that time, he was a great inspiration to public service. I think he represented the very best of public service. He got into it for all the right reasons. He understood the importance of what he was doing, the issues with which he was dealing, but always had an eye toward making a difference and providing a better future for the next generation. That is a lesson that I think all of us need to remember: that sometimes we have a tendency to believe it is about us, it is about today. We always have to keep an eye on tomorrow, on the future, and what we are doing to build a better and brighter and more prosperous and stronger nation for future generations. When I think about and remember President Reagan as we come upon his 100th birthday, those are the types of things that strike me as really standing out--his humility, his sense of humor, his belief in American exceptionalism. Those are what history has already written about him, but they certainly are permanently impressed upon my mind, my experience, in my time in public life--just the types of qualities I want to apply and bring to the work we do in the U.S. Senate. So I rise along with many of my colleagues today to pay tribute to our 40th President and to his family. Of course, we thank them for their great service and sacrifice too, because anybody who has been in this arena knows the sacrifice that comes with public service. But we are indeed grateful for his great service to our country, for the way he impacted so many, both here at home and around the world, and for the way he continues through his legacy to impact generations of Americans today. Mr. President, I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant editor of the Daily Digest proceeded to call the roll. Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I wish to speak for a few minutes today about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan inspired freedom and changed the world. Maybe nobody said that better than former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a prerecorded eulogy that was played at President Reagan's funeral at the National Cathedral. I would like to read just a little of that eulogy. It starts: We have lost a great president, a great American and a great man. And-- Mrs. Thatcher said-- I have lost a dear friend. In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set for himself. He sought to mend America's wounded spirit, to restore the strength of the free world and to free the slaves of communism. These were causes hard to accomplish and heavy with risk. Mrs. Thatcher went on: Yet they were pursued with almost a lightness of spirit. For Ronald Reagan also embodied another great cause--what Arnold Bennett once called ``the great cause of cheering us all up.'' His politics had a freshness and optimism that won converts from every class and every nation--and ultimately from the very heart of the evil empire. Yet his humor often had a purpose beyond humor. In the terrible hours after the attempt on his life, his easy jokes gave reassurance to an anxious world. They were evidence that in the aftermath of terror and in the midst of hysteria, one great heart at least remained sane and jocular. They were truly grace under pressure. And perhaps they signified grace of a deeper kind. Mrs. Thatcher said: [[Page S521]] Ronnie himself certainly believed that he had been given back his life for a purpose. As he told a priest after his recovery, ``Whatever time I've got left now belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.'' And surely it is hard to deny that Ronald Reagan's life was providential, when we look at what he achieved in the eight years that followed. Others prophesied the decline of the West; he inspired America and its allies with renewed faith in their mission of freedom. Others saw only limits to growth; he transformed a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity. Others hoped, at best, for an uneasy cohabitation with the Soviet Union; he won the Cold War--not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends. Mrs. Thatcher goes on to say: I cannot imagine how any diplomat, or any dramatist, could improve on his words to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva summit-- Quoting President Reagan-- ``Let me tell you why it is we distrust you.'' Mrs. Thatcher said: Those words are candid and tough and they cannot have been easy to hear. But they are also a clear invitation to a new beginning and a new relationship that would be rooted in trust. Ronald Reagan's truly ``only in America'' life story began 100 years ago this weekend. During his lifetime, he was a Democrat and later a Republican, he was a liberal and then a conservative, he was a labor union president and then President of the United States. During his lifetime, he developed a philosophy of faith, life, and government that Americans understood. During his Presidency, the people of this country had an extraordinary understanding of what their President would think and how their President would react to events and circumstances. The strength of the certain trumpet, the strength of the clarion call is, I believe, impossible to overestimate. Knowing how your President, how your leader views the world and views the circumstances that may meet us in the world is an incredibly comforting feeling. In fact, there is an epic Greek fable, more often applied to President Lincoln, about the fox and the hedgehog. In the epic Greek fable of the fox and the hedgehog, the fox is wily, the fox is clever, the fox knows lots of little things, but the hedgehog knows one really big thing. In that fable and in reality, the fox can never defeat the hedgehog. Now, neither Lincoln--I am really not comfortable referring to either Lincoln or Reagan and characterizing them as a hedgehog, but I am comfortable characterizing them as men of big ideas, men who understood the big things, leaders who understood the big things. With President Lincoln, it was the Union. With President Reagan, it was a focus on the big things, with an understanding that you measured the circumstances and events that came up by your view of the big things that guide the country, that guide us individually, that guide lives and, in fact, guide the lives of a nation. President Reagan understood big things. He could quickly evaluate any issue or challenge through that prism and the prism of those core values. Ronald Reagan inspired freedom and changed the world. The centennial celebration of his birth that begins this week and officially begins this weekend gives us an opportunity to think about what it was that made this President great; what it was that puts this President on the cover of news magazines, in the decade before the centennial, in one recent cover arm in arm with the current President of the United States; and what it was that made this extraordinary man so extraordinary. I will just say again, Ronald Reagan inspired freedom and changed the world. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant editor of the Daily Digest proceeded to call the roll. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California. Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to one of California's own, President Ronald Reagan. It has been nearly 7 years since President Reagan passed away, but he is still fondly remembered by so many in California, across this country and across the globe. The first time I met President Reagan was right after I was elected to Congress in 1982. I was invited to the White House as part of a large Democratic freshman class, and I wondered how President Reagan would greet us. After all, he had campaigned hard for a Republican Congress. When we arrived at the White House, he and First Lady Nancy Reagan could not have been more warm and gracious to us. I still have the photo from that evening hanging in my home office. Ronald Reagan showed all of us that you can disagree without being disagreeable, and that even if you have sharply different views on some issues, you can still work to find common ground. President Reagan once said: ``I've always believed that a lot of the troubles of the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.'' He believed if we were all respectful to each other, we could find those areas of agreement. We could get things done. That was an important lesson for me and for all of us that evening because, in the Senate, with the rules of the Senate, the only way to get things done for our constituents and for our country is by working together. I believe he had learned this lesson in California, where as a Republican Governor, he worked with a Democratic State legislature. He brought that same approach from Sacramento to the Nation's Capital. As Governor, in keeping with the values and wishes of most Californians, he helped to establish the Redwood National Park. He regulated auto emissions to reduce pollution. He opposed the State proposition that discriminated against teachers based on sexual orientation. He was willing to reach across party lines and find consensus. He continued these efforts to work across the aisle when he became President. Although there were serious disagreements on important issues, President Reagan worked closely with a Democratic House to ratify and sign important arms control agreements, increase investments in math and science education, and reauthorize the Superfund hazardous waste cleanup program. President Reagan was a conservative, but he was not an ideologue. He fulfilled his campaign promise to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court, choosing Sandra Day O'Connor as the first female Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, even though she was considered too moderate by many conservatives. Of course, there were many areas of disagreement--from offshore oil drilling to the role of the national government, to the fight against AIDS, to policies in Central America. Those disagreements were deep, but they were never taken personally by President Reagan. He and House Speaker Tip O'Neill were genuinely fond of each other. They often shared a drink after work, and they laughed after a day of locking horns. Their good nature was infectious. It raised the level of comity throughout the Nation's Capital. I believe that President Reagan will be remembered for his focus on freedom for the people behind the Iron Curtain. He saw in Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev a leader he could successfully challenge to step to the plate. And when President Reagan said, tear down this wall, he said it directly to Mr. Gorbachev. He touched Mr. Gorbachev, he touched America, and he touched people all around the world. After President Reagan passed away, Mr. Gorbachev wrote in the New York Times: ``Reagan was a man of the right. But, while adhering to his convictions, with which one could agree or disagree, he was not dogmatic; he was looking for cooperation. And this was the most important thing to me: he had the trust of the American people.'' As we honor President Reagan today, I believe the greatest tribute we can pay is to find a cure for the disease that took his life, took him away from his loved ones and from the world. Ten years before his death, Ronald Reagan knew he was battling Alzheimer's. He knew he was losing the battle. In an act of enormous courage [[Page S522]] and in a handwritten open letter, he told the American people he was suffering from the illness. He wrote: ``I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.'' And he movingly wrote: ``I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.'' Even in his darkest hour, President Reagan's eternal optimism shone through. Nancy Reagan stood by her husband throughout his long ordeal and protected him in his most vulnerable time. She has become a leading champion for increased funding for medical research to fight Alzheimer's and other diseases. She has been brave and courageous in her advocacy. In memory of Ronald Reagan, in honor of Nancy Reagan and all of the families who have lost loved ones to Alzheimer's, we must continue to seek a brighter dawn for Alzheimer's victims and their families. As a California Senator, certainly Ronald Reagan is one of our most famous residents as Governor and then as President. I was in the House of Representatives while he was the President. Clearly, there were a lot of disagreements between President Reagan and many of those in Congress such as myself who didn't believe government was the problem, which was his definite belief at that time. We certainly had a loyal opposition, and we certainly worked together when we could. One of the things that was so interesting to me compared to working with other Presidents--because I have had the honor of serving for so long that actually President Obama is the fifth President I have had the honor of serving with. I went to every State of the Union Address, all of which were very impressive. I think the thing about Ronald Reagan that I grew to admire was, as hard as one might debate with him on his vision of what the priorities should be--what should we invest in, what was important--when those debates were over and a decision was made, regardless of who won the day, we just moved on to the next issue. We tried to find common ground, and if we didn't we had the respectful debate. It was never taken personally. Again, there were many things I disagreed with him about. I remember being a young Member of Congress at the time when the AIDS epidemic came out, and I remember I was so frustrated because President Reagan was very compassionate, but he didn't want to discuss the issue of AIDS. We had to work very hard with the Surgeon General at the time, and we finally made a little bit of progress. So, yes, there were many tough debates. Of course, his presence, his very sunny presence, his optimism about the country's future was very important to a Nation that had been torn asunder because of many tough issues that separated the generations. I add my voice on this day when we remember former President Ronald Reagan, someone whom California is very proud of and someone who has obviously gone down in history for the many things he accomplished, particularly his rapprochement with the Soviet Union at that time. It was a big contribution to the world. Thank you very much. I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The assistant editor of the Daily Digest proceeded to call the roll. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Utah. Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered. Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, just over 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States. It is hard to believe that three decades have passed since he stood in front of this Capitol, just yards away, and announced to this Nation and the world that America's moment had not passed. It is hard to think that we have been without him now for over 6 years. I think of him and his wonderful, lovely wife Nancy quite often. I knew them both very well. I know Nancy very well to this day. She is a terrific human being, as was he. One of my first campaign trips for Ronald Reagan was with Nancy, and I can tell my colleagues there never was a stronger advocate for her husband. As a man, he had the rare combination of good humor and a commitment to principle. As the leader of his party and as President, he reminded us of the need for constant recommitment to our constitutional ideas, and as a couple Ron and Nancy were a pair for the ages. If there was any doubt, my colleagues have confirmed today in their tributes to President Reagan on the centennial of his birth that Ronald Reagan might have passed on, but he is most certainly not forgotten--not by a long shot. When Reagan was President, he inspired great reactions from both parties. I can attest, particularly with respect to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, that not all of those reactions were positive. Yet today's bipartisan celebration of President Reagan's legacy shows that he has become as much a part of the American story as his greatest predecessors in office. Like other great men before him, Ronald Reagan seemed to embody the times during which he lived. The man himself, his personal story, in many ways personified America's 20th century. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in the Midwest and became a westerner, moving to California like so many other of his fellow Americans. The country he grew up in looked very different from our own today. As Michael Barone recently reminded us in an article in the Claremont Review of Books, when America entered the Second World War, one-quarter of Americans still lived on farms, and half of those were either without electricity or only recently acquired electricity. America's population was at the same time both more diffuse and more concentrated than it is today. America's nonrural population was clustered in a few great cities. Again, as Barone explained, at the outbreak of the Second World War, 2 percent of all Americans lived in Brooklyn, NY. America in the 20th century became a less rural, less agricultural nation. Yet instead of concentrating in existing urban centers, new communities grew and suburbs expanded. That was the story of Ronald Reagan, who was born in tiny Tampico, IL, population 772 as of the 2000 census, and came to the world's attention in California, home of suburban life and the American highway. He became a Californian through and through. He loved his ranch, and he loved being on the back of a horse. The large landscapes of California and of the entire West suggested the boundless opportunity that is afforded those who work hard in this country. It was there that Ronald Reagan found his professional and political success. It was where he met Nancy and raised his family, and it is where he was finally laid to rest. Ronald Reagan did not have it easy. As he put it, he did not grow up on the wrong side of the tracks. But he could hear the train. He lived through the Great Depression. Yet like countless Americans before and after him, with dogged determination and a good deal of pluck, he succeeded. At a time when college was a luxury, Ronald Reagan graduated from Eureka College. He went on to have a successful career in radio as a sportscaster. But that was not enough, so he moved to Hollywood where he became an actor. Of all the roles Ronald Reagan would play, we eventually identified him most closely with the character of George Gipp in ``Knute Rockne: All American.'' It should come as little surprise that we would associate a good Irishman such as Ronald Reagan with a movie about Notre Dame and the Fighting Irish. When George Gipp first appears on screen, Knute Rockne, the head coach of the Irish, is at his wit's end with his team. Seeing Gipp--who was not a member of the team--lying around, Rockne asked him if he could go in and run the ball against the varsity. Reagan's Gipp responded, with an Irish twinkle in his eye: How far? Naturally, he ran down the field, scored a touchdown, and took his place in Notre Dame lore. For Ronald Reagan, like George Gipp, there was no challenge too big. It is a good thing he thought that way because he faced plenty of obstacles. With the outbreak of World War II, his promising acting career was put on hold. Yet he would go on to serve as President of the Screen Actors Guild, [[Page S523]] and later he worked in television as the host of ``General Electric Theater.'' It was that association with General Electric that sent Reagan on his path toward the Presidency. Going on what he called the ``mashed potato circuit,'' he spoke across the country to the thousands of GE employees, giving what would later be called ``The Speech.'' Giving these after dinner remarks, Reagan honed his thoughts about freedom, the size of government, and the Soviet menace. In 1964, on the eve of the Presidential election, he would deliver that speech to the Nation. Senator Barry Goldwater went on to lose that election in an epic landslide. Today we know that conservatives might have lost that battle, but they would ultimately win the war. A week before the election, Ronald Reagan delivered a taped address-- ``A Time for Choosing''--on Goldwater's behalf. He spoke as a partisan for liberty, and he urged his fellow Americans to join him in that struggle. He concluded his remarks telling a national television audience: You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth. This speech resonated with the American people. It raised $8 million for Goldwater, an astronomical sum at the time. More importantly, it made Ronald Reagan a formidable presence on the political scene. I knew Barry Goldwater. I knew him well. When I ran for the Senate, he was one of two people I came to visit in Washington just to get some advice. I admired him so much, and it was a privilege to serve with him. The other one was Chuck Grassley who was then in the House, and I count him as one of my dearest friends on Earth. Against the odds and conventional wisdom, Ronald Reagan ran for Governor of California in 1966. The California establishment made the mistake of underestimating this actor from the Midwest, and he went on to beat his more liberal primary opponent and the popular incumbent Governor. Underestimating Reagan was a mistake that the Washington establishment would make time and again when he arrived there 14 years later. They never seemed to understand what was so obvious to President Reagan. For all of the superficial differences, Americans of his age were not so different than the generation that founded this Nation, fought the Civil War, worked through the Great Depression, and struggled for civil rights. In the end, Americans of today are committed to the same principles of liberty and equality that animated the authors of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. This shared commitment to our founding principles served him well, because he took office at a time of great uncertainty, a time not unlike our own. A combination of factors seemed to be putting the aspirations of Americans out of reach. To be blunt, America was on its heels. The prime interest rate was 15 percent. Inflation was 12\1/2\ percent. And civilian unemployment was at 7 percent. Government regulations and tax rates were smothering American innovation, and with it the American dream. And abroad the picture was just as grim. An imperialist Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and was supporting revolutionary movements across the globe. The American hostages had not yet been freed from Iran. Yet when Ronald Reagan left office 8 years later, he had left his mark. According to his biographer, Lou Cannon, when he came into office, there were 4,414 individual tax returns with an adjusted gross income of more than $1 million. By 1987, fueled by tax cuts, the breaking of inflation, and explosive economic growth, there were 34,944 such returns. When he entered the White House, only 1 in 6 Americans owned a microwave, and VCRs were a luxury for the wealthy. By the time he left office, these were common household goods. He helped to restore our understanding of a limited judiciary that respects the traditions of the American people and their elected representatives. And he restored faith in our men and women in uniform. Just before he left office, President Reagan reviewed the troops at Andrews Air Force Base one last time. During that visit, he said that serving as commander-in-chief was ``the most sacred, most important task of the presidency.'' Barely five years after America left South Vietnam, Reagan spoke at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention and reminded America that Vietnam had been a ``noble cause.'' The rush to ``blame America first'' in our conflict with totalitarian regimes, and the days of holding our military men and women in low esteem, came to an end with the Reagan Presidency. And though his greatest achievement--the collapse of the Soviet Empire--would occur on his successor's watch--the writing was on the wall by the time Ronald Reagan left office. His recommitment to freedom during our twilight struggle with what was truly an evil empire quite literally saved the world and liberated millions. It is no surprise that he will be honored in Prague, Budapest, and Krakow--the home of his great partner Pope John Paul II--later this summer for his role in exposing the great lie that was the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan succeeded as president because he knew what he was about. In his farewell address from the Oval Office, he said, ``I went into politics in part to put up my hand and say, Stop. I was a citizen politician, and it seemed the right thing for a citizen to do. I think we have stopped a lot of what needed stopping. And I hope we have once again reminded the people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.'' I could not agree more. And that Reagan Revolution--the aspiration of citizens for greater freedom and greater futures for the generations that follow--continues. I am proud to be a part of that revolution. President Reagan took a flyer on me when I first ran for the Senate, supporting me in my primary. I have tried to do him proud. I remember well the blistering hot day in the Rose Garden when he signed the Hatch-Waxman legislation into law in 1984. In his signing statement, he joked that with this law ``[e]veryone wins, particularly our elderly Americans. Senior citizens require more medication than any other segment of our society. I speak with some authority on that.'' In my opinion, that law typified the commitments of President Reagan. Since its passage it has saved the Federal Government and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars--some say trillions--and it essentially created the generic drug industry and incentives for the creation of the next generation of life saving drugs. I worked with him when he was in office. And as I work today for the citizens of Utah, his principled example is always on my mind. We still have work to do. Reagan understood the danger of what is today called progressivism, but was then called liberalism. It knows no bounds. As he put it, ``No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth.'' In some respects, Ronald Reagan belonged to a different age. He was governor during the student protests of the 1960s. He entered the national political consciousness during a presidential campaign where the possibility of global nuclear conflict was an imminent threat. When he became President, he was only a few years removed from widespread urban riots and the end of the Vietnam war. When he spoke at Pointe-du- Hoc on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, he spoke to the men who actually scaled those cliffs and liberated a continent. Today, most of those veterans have passed on. But ultimately, Reagan remains one of us. I think that his advisor, David Gergen, got it wrong when he mused that Reagan's legacy was how much he changed our minds. In my view, Ronald Reagan was a success because he understood that the American people did not need to change their minds. Americans, in 1980, had the same beliefs and hopes that we have always had. Ronald Reagan's genius was in giving voice to those hopes. Ronald Reagan was a big man, made for a big screen, and eventually the biggest stage. He played his part well. To borrow from Hollywood, he knew [[Page S524]] that even as time goes by . . . the fundamental things apply. Before leaving office, President Reagan addressed the Nation one last time. Speaking to the citizens of this shining city upon a hill, he told us, ``[w]e did it. We weren't just marking time. We made a difference. We made the city stronger. We made the city freer, and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.'' Indeed. It has been said that Ronald Reagan had a love affair with the American people. He did. But it took two to tango. Ronald Reagan loved his country. But I think his country loved him more. That includes people on both sides of the aisle. Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, in early 1983, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky was in an 8-by-10 foot cell in a Siberian prison when jailers permitted him to read the latest issue of the official Communist Party newspaper. The front page was filled with global condemnations of American President Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an ``evil empire.'' Tapping on the walls and whispering through plumbing pipes, political prisoners spread the word. Rather than being demoralized by the criticisms, they were ecstatic. The leader of the free world had spoken the truth. There was hope. By the end of the decade, hope became freedom, freedom for the hundreds of thousands imprisoned in the Soviet gulag and for the hundreds of millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Countless men and women of courage and determination, their names lost to history, stood up to tyranny and won a great victory with a leader whose name will forever be remembered by history. Lech Walesa, the founder of the valiant Solidarity movement, said this of President Reagan: ``We in Poland . . . owe him our liberty.'' In this centennial year, we are experiencing something rare. While many great figures of their time diminish over time, our regard for Ronald Reagan only grows. This cannot be explained by merely citing the qualities for which he was so well known: his confidence in America, his wit, and his optimism. It goes beyond his courage when attacked by an assassin's bullet or, at the end, a devastating disease or even his skills as the ``Great Communicator.'' Ronald Reagan looms ever larger because of his ideas and the enduring convictions that gave those ideas their power. ``History comes and goes,'' he said, ``but principles endure and inspire future generations to defend liberty, not as a gift from government, but a blessing from our Creator.'' Ronald Reagan knew that liberty was not a blessing merely to enjoy but one that must always be defended. He expressed his faith in our ability to rise to its defense with these words: ``No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.'' His optimism sprang from his belief in the nobility of the human spirit. The very ideas that are the foundation of this great Nation were the foundation of Ronald Reagan's character. He became President at a time when America had begun to question its place in the world and the values upon which this Nation was built. He tore down the wall of doubt and reminded us that our many blessings carried with them great obligations. Ronald Reagan was a great communicator because he had something great to communicate: the exceptionalism of the United States of America. The birthday of one who has passed from this life is always a bittersweet occasion as we remember what we had and reflect on what we have lost. I would like to extend my best wishes to President Reagan's beloved First Lady, Nancy, and to the entire Reagan family. Ronald Reagan was the right man for his time. He now belongs to the ages. He is missed, but his ideals will always be with us. Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, we will soon mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, one of our greatest Presidents. In the days and months to come, in cities and towns all across this great Nation of ours, people will pause for a moment to reflect on the past and remember him, each in their own way, for the greatness in him that inspired a nation. I know he would be humbled by and greatly appreciative of our remembrance of his legacy of service and touched by the great admiration and affection with which we will always remember him. I don't think anyone is a better example of the American dream than Ronald Reagan. He was born in Illinois, the son of a shoe salesman. His mother loved to read and she encouraged him to do the same by reading to him. In books Reagan was able to tap into the wisdom of our Founding Fathers and many other great leaders of our past. What he learned from his reading would help to shape his character and ultimately mold his destiny. It wasn't long before Reagan's natural confidence and his determination to do something with his life began to show itself, first during his school years and later when he pursued a career as an actor. He proved to be a born leader and he took a leadership role at every stage of his life. While in college, he served as student body President. In his acting days he served as the president of the Screen Actors Guild. In between he worked hard and built a career as a successful actor in film and television as he became a familiar face in Hollywood. If that had been all he had done, he would be remembered for his talents and abilities as an actor. He would have earned his reputation for being unafraid of hard work and his life would have inspired others to follow his path just by his success in Hollywood. All of the fame and notoriety that came from his acting days would have been enough for most people, but not for Ronald Reagan. He was just getting warmed up. The best was yet to come. With his beloved wife Nancy by his side, Ronald Reagan began to pursue a bigger dream. He wanted to make an impact on the world that would put him on a bigger stage. He wanted to get more involved in politics and put his principles and values into action in the work that had to be done to solve the problems facing the Nation. His first effort was a run for Governor of California. People thought that was an impossible dream of his and he would never make it. Ronald Reagan proved them wrong--not for the first or the last time. He took his case to the people, put together a coalition of both Republicans and Democrats and when the votes were counted, he had won. I still remember meeting him when I was the president of the Wyoming Jaycees. We held our national convention in California and Ronald Reagan spoke to us. I had a chance to meet him and I was quickly impressed by his personality and his style. He clearly had a way not only with words, but to connect to people one on one. Still, I don't think any of us could have guessed what would happen next in his life. Reagan had his sights set on the Presidency of the United States. He knew it wasn't going to be easy, but for Ronald Reagan the only failure would be to fail to try. He wasn't successful at first, but he never gave up. He kept traveling around the country, speaking to groups, and sharing his message of hope and opportunity with the people who came to hear him speak. This seemed to be another impossible dream, but once again Reagan made it happen. He won the Republican nomination for President, facing an incumbent who spoke often about the terrible problems facing the Nation. Ronald Reagan didn't speak with doubt and uncertainty about the future; he spoke with strong and passionate certainty that things would get better if we all worked together. Unfortunately, optimism will only get you so far--so when the time came for him to take the oath of office, he knew he had a lot of work to do. He often referred to our economic problems as the ``misery index.'' We were in the middle of a time of high unemployment, high interest rates and high inflation. The Nation seemed to have lost its self-confidence and no longer believed that it could dare to do great things--and succeed. The experts all seemed to say that there was little if anything that one person could do to change things and reenergize the Nation. Once again, Ronald Reagan proved the experts wrong. It seemed almost overnight things changed. There was a renewed sense of confidence in our shared destiny as a nation, a new feeling of hope and opportunity about the [[Page S525]] future, and a return to the spirit of America that had been lost. In just a short time, with his words and his actions, he inspired a generation to look to the future with the kind of confidence that comes from our belief in and commitment to the principles upon which our Nation was founded. I remember those days very well. I was the mayor of Gillette, WY, and when the National League of Cities held its national meeting the President flew to California to speak to our group. I had a chance to meet with him again and enjoyed having an opportunity to speak to him. He was the greatest ambassador for the West and our Western way of life that we have ever had. He understood rural life and because of it he understood the problems of our rural communities. He also understood public service for what it is--service--and he continued to see himself as a public servant throughout his career and his life. I always thought the years he spent living on his ranch in California were responsible for his passion for speaking the truth, regardless of whether or not it was politically expedient to do so. It is a trait that people in Wyoming appreciate and expect from their leaders. It quickly led to some of his best moments. I believe we all have strong memories of Ronald Reagan speaking by the Berlin Wall, taking advantage of the occasion to challenge Mikhail Gorbachev to ``tear down this wall.'' He then went counter to the advice of his staff and referred to the Soviet Union as the ``evil empire.'' For Ronald Reagan, life was that simple. If it was the truth, it must be said for there are two kinds of people in the world--the good guys and the bad guys. If the good guys worked hard and were willing to sacrifice and do whatever it took to succeed, they won. In Ronald Reagan's world, we were the good guys and, during his Presidency, more often than not, we won. Still, no matter how harsh the rhetoric may have seemed, his political opponents always knew that it wasn't personal--it was principle based. That is why, after all that he said, he was still able to form a friendship with Mr. Gorbachev. Our two countries were two of the biggest superpowers in the world and he knew he would have to find a way to keep the lines of communication, trust and understanding open between them, a necessity that gave way to another of his trademark lines, ``Trust but verify.'' Over the years he turned many a phrase that reflected the strength of his character, his sense of humor and more. He had a unique way of expressing complex truths in simple sentences that held great meaning by virtue of their simplicity. Because of his trademark one liners and other famous remarks, he has often been called the Great Communicator, a title that caused Reagan to remark ``I never thought it was my style that made a difference--it was the content. I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things.'' Ronald Reagan did communicate great things and he communicated them in a number of ways--most importantly by the way he lived his life. There is an old saying that reminds us that we can play it safe and take the well worn path or we can dare to go where few have gone before and blaze our own trail in life, leaving a path for others to follow. Such was Ronald Reagan's philosophy and by so doing he helped to give us an example of what was possible for us as individuals and for our Nation. In the end, Ronald Reagan will be remembered for many things. He found a cure for an ailing economy. He helped to bring an end to the Cold War. He did all of that and so much more but he also did something else that was to prove to be far more important. He helped us to regain our spirit as Americans. He helped us to regain that great pride we had always had for our heritage. He helped us to believe in ourselves again and in our ability to serve as the leaders of the free world, a title we were always meant to carry. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, it is a title we have carried proudly and with purpose ever since. Through his words and his enthusiasm for life and living, the Great Communicator was able to infuse our country with optimism, patriotism and an unashamed hope for a better tomorrow. Thanks to him, the United States of America became a brighter, better place for us all to live as the impact he had on the world around us continues to be felt to this day. Ronald Reagan's burial site is inscribed with the words he delivered at the opening of his Presidential Library. ``I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph and that there is purpose and worth to each and every life.'' As in so many things in life, just like the old show business adage reminds us, he left us wanting more. And that is why he will never be forgotten by those who knew him and those who remember how he touched a generation for the better just by the great strength of his character and the warm gentleness of his soul. Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I am proud to honor Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth. President Reagan was a man who inspired millions of Americans to serve their country and fulfill its promise as the shining city on a hill. His genial demeanor, resilience, no- nonsense approach to governing and rock solid principles attracted flocks of young Americans to the Republican Party, and I am proud to include myself in that number. I was fortunate to have grown up and come of age politically just as President Reagan was in office. His words and deeds inspired our entire country to take pride in our patriotic values and the free market principles that have made America exceptional. He also comforted us during moments of national tragedy. And his willingness to speak out against communism--as both a bankrupt economic system and an immoral violation of human dignity--was a ray of sunlight to those living in its darkness. I will never forget my parents' reaction the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Having lost their country to Fidel Castro's communism, they had spent 30 years divided from their homeland, friends, and relatives--just as the Wall had done to millions in Europe. Especially for my parents' generation of Cuban exiles, whose hopes and dreams were shattered by communism, the Wall's fall was a historic event they questioned would ever come. It was a day of celebration and rekindled hope that all lands within communism's grip would soon be free as well. Ronald Reagan helped bring about the change that made communism's fall possible. By joining with other world leaders like Pope John Paul II, he seized the opportunity to highlight communism's failures. In doing so, he helped make millions of oppressed people more self-aware of their intrinsic dignity, more confident that their pursuit of freedom was justified, and more hopeful that they were not alone in their struggles. In commemorating Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday, we also remember the work that remains to be done to tear down other oppressive walls that still stand. America's responsibilities in this effort cannot be underestimated. Economically, we cannot allow Washington's borrow-and-spend binges to diminish our free enterprise system, nor can we allow our debt to make our commitment to freedom and human rights subservient to our debt holders. Militarily, as Ronald Reagan said, ``Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.'' A free and secure world requires a strong America led by our brave men and women in uniform. America's commitment to the defense of our allies should never waver. Diplomatically, we must not confuse a desire for security and the promotion of democratic values as mutually exclusive goals. The United States and the world owe a great debt to Ronald Reagan for his decisive leadership, adherence to conservative principles and inspiring example during a tumultuous period. And we owe a special debt of gratitude to his wife Nancy for her efforts to keep his memory and legacy alive. Now the question before us is whether we are going to do as Ronald Reagan did and ensure that future generations can inherit the single greatest society in all of human history. I, for one, am fully committed to honoring Ronald Reagan's legacy by standing up for the principles that defined him and have made America exceptional for more than two centuries. [[Page S526]] Mr. HOEVEN. Mr. President, today, when our country faces enormous challenges--both domestic and international--we have an opportunity to recognize President Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Today--when we need big doses of optimism and a renewed faith in America--the memory of Ronald Reagan tells us that our challenges can be met and our obstacles can be overcome. I remember the Reagan era well. The late seventies and early eighties were tough times. I had just finished college and returned to North Dakota, and America was clearly hurting. It was the era of stagflation--stagnant economic growth and inflation, all at the same time. It was an era of fuel shortages, long lines at the gas station, and sticker shock when you got to the pump. A few years later, America was emerging from that recession and the country was on the mend. We could see light on the horizon. President Reagan told us: ``It's morning again in America.'' And it was. It was also the era of the Cold War. For more than a generation, the Soviet Union had kept Eastern Europe and its own people under its heel, and threatened the West with belligerent rhetoric and an arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 1987, at a time when much of the world was resigned to a tense doctrine of coexistence, with a literal and figurative wall between us, President Ronald Reagan would have none of it. He stood at the Berlin Wall, and challenged: ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' And made it happen. In some of our Nation's darkest hours, President Ronald Wilson Reagan was there to remind us that we are a great nation and a great people--a nation kind and generous beyond measure, when deserved, but tough and enduring when circumstances warranted. He knew that believing in ourselves was vital, and then working together to get the job done. That is a lesson worth remembering, today, 100 years after the birth of one of America's greatest presidents. We can--and we will--build a brighter future for ourselves and for future generations. We will continue to truly be that shining city on a hill--a beam of light and liberty for the world. Mr. LUGAR. Mr. President, I have had numerous opportunities to comment on the amazing life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan. He had bold ideas and the courage to see them through. He was the true embodiment of the American success story. I have often referred to the fact that he was charismatic, determined and consistent, and he enjoyed a remarkable batting average of being right. It has always been a point of great pride to me that my voting record was supportive of President Reagan's positions more than any other Member of the Senate. As the Senate commemorates the 100th anniversary of President Reagan's birth, I want to share with my colleagues and the public a speech I wrote when President Reagan was given the Hudson Institute James Doolittle Award. It was November 22, 1991, and it was a tumultuous time for Washington and the world. Yet you could still see the sparkle in the President's eyes and his warmth and good humor. What we did not know was that President Reagan's effort to end the Cold War was quickly coming to fruition. Within days, on December 1, Ukraine would vote to break away from the Soviet Union, and on Christmas Day, Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of the USSR. During his Presidency, when President Reagan decided to renew arms control negotiations with the Soviets, he had the wisdom and political strength to ask the Senate to form an official observer group so that there would be understanding and support for any treaty coming out of the negotiations. As cochair of the Arms Control Observer Group, I worked closely with Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and began a partnership with him that continued for many years. Subsequently, after the failed coup against Gorbachev in the summer of 1991, we heard from Soviet officials we had met that they were worried about the control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal as political events unfolded. By that November when President Reagan was being honored, Senator Nunn and I succeeded in passage of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Act. Thanks to his leadership and vision, President Reagan helped build the foundation for the Nunn-Lugar Program. Now thousands of missiles and warheads, any one of which could have destroyed my city of Indianapolis, have been eliminated. The success of the Nunn-Lugar Program is a clear derivative of President Reagan's legacy. Thank you, President Reagan. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the speech I wrote in honor of President Reagan when he received the Hudson Institute James Doolittle Award. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: Address by Senator Richard G. Lugar in Honor of President Ronald Reagan (November 22, 1991) President and Mrs. Reagan, Governor Du Pont, trustees, scholars and friends of the Hudson Institute--We are assembled at the Hudson Institute's James H. Doolittle Award luncheon to Celebrate the Patriotism, personal courage, and strategic wisdom which has made the United States of America historically unique. I am grateful to Governor Du Pont for the extraordinary public service he gave to the Congress of the United States and to the State of Delaware and for the remarkable years of public witness he has given as a champion of market economics and vital federalism. I admire the strength of his ideas, the skill of his advocacy, and i am grateful for the constancy of his loyal friendship. I thank the Hudson Institute for giving me this opportunity to visit with President and Mrs. Reagan. It was my privilege to sit beside Mrs. Reagan during several White House and Republican Party events and to understand the strength of her ideals and her hopes for our country as she worked thoughtfully with the President, day by day, to make those dreams come true. I begin with mention of dreams, hopes, visions because the service of President Reagan to our country can only be approached by understanding how wide he cast the net of potential achievement. President Reagan actually believed and articulated that our country had a special destiny, that no barriers were insurmountable because we are Americans. He actually believed and said that the Soviet Union was an Evil Empire, that its political and economic institutions were disintegrating, and that if its leadership and people knew the alternatives which our country presented, they would choose democracy and market economics. President Reagan was prepared to invest an increasing portion of our national treasure in military defense with the certainty that we would negotiate successfully with our adversaries from a position of strength. He shocked foreign policy and defense specialists by proposing that all intermediate nuclear missiles be destroyed, a negotiating position labelled universally as a bizarre arms-control non- starter. He affirmed the staying power of NATO by deploying Pershing missiles to Germany and cruise missiles to Italy even after the Soviets declared that such deployment would end all arms control negotiations and stimulate Soviet nuclear buildup. Add to this President Reagan's startling proposal that the United States should develop a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect our country against incoming missiles fired upon us. He contended that we should and could try to defend ourselves against the so-called balance of terror. He proposed to President Gorbachev that the United States and the Soviet Union ban all nuclear weapons. In fact, he was confident that if he could take Gorbachev on an extended tour of America that Gorbachev would want to shape the Soviet Union into many of our successful traditions. Meanwhile, President Reagan knew that substantial new growth must occur in our domestic economy to pay for the special leadership role he had envisioned in foreign policy. He was confident that substantial cuts in individual marginal tax rates and a host of investment incentives would establish and sustain the longest peacetime prosperity we have ever enjoyed. Our prosperity underwrote the magnificent gains in free and fair trade which he championed and world wide wealth grew abundantly. When Ronald Reagan stood on a balcony of the Reichstag in Berlin and challenged Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, he could see white crosses just below where courageous persons seeking freedom had lost their lives in that pursuit. Everything still appeared to be so locked up and grim, and sophisticated observers were barely patronizing in comment on his Berlin Wall challenge. When Germans hacked the Wall down in November of 1989 and Eastern Europeans drove authoritarian communists from positions of power, many scholars and journalists applauded President Gorbachev as Man of the Decade. These awards revealed virtual ignorance of the actual history of Europe in the 1980s and a deliberate attempt to ignore the very public words and leadership of Ronald Reagan for eight years. The Evil Empire crumbled, the Berlin Wall and other walls fell, all of the intermediate nuclear force weapons were destroyed exactly in three years as the INF Treaty provided, and the United States became the [[Page S527]] only superpower with the strongest economy and the ability, uniquely, to extend military authority around the world. All of this occurred because President Reagan persuaded the Congress and his countrymen to build our armed forces, to build our economy through the growth incentives termed ``Reaganomics,'' to maintain the successful strategies of our NATO alliance, to utilize military force to support foreign policy as required, and to commence Strategic Defense Initiative research. We now know that the Soviets were much weaker than experts estimated. We now know that they could not keep up the pace and that desperate attempts to do so led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire and then to the collapse of the Union, itself. President Reagan advocated two more things which were inspiring and critically important in world history. First, he rejected the Brezhnev Doctrine--the idea that territory which socialism has occupied can never be reclaimed. When he advocated this roll back of the Iron Curtain, he created deep anxiety and alarm among most international foreign policy advisers who loved liberty a lot, but loved stability even more. U.S. Stinger missiles shipped to the expert ministrations of the Mujadahin in Afghanistan were a major instrument of the Soviet roll back, and the world watched in awe as the Soviet troops withdrew to a smaller socialist world. Second, President Reagan enunciated a new policy in a statement sent to Congress after the Philippine election and revolution. He stated that henceforth, we would oppose tyranny of the left and tyranny of the right, that we were for democracy developed by the people who sought to know and enjoy democracy and human rights. This statement was severely criticized by experts who suggested that in the ``real world'' a good number of dictators were friendly to the U.S. and certainly useful in waging the Cold War against communism. In articulating his vision on the roll back of the Iron Curtain; in identifying with nations all over the world who applauded our passion for building democratic institutions; in celebrating human rights and free market principles; in all of these areas, Ronald Reagan was far ahead of the prevailing wisdom. Yet he ultimately brought other leaders in America and around the world to his point of view in a relatively short interval. Surely the spirit of the Doolittle Award strongly commends not only being courageous, and being on the right side of history, but performing these deeds in a very public way which instructs and inspires others. Some of us have learned much from President Reagan as we have watched him speak and act. He is charismatic, he is determined and consistent, and he enjoys a remarkable batting average of being right. We now have an important responsibility to make certain that our children comprehend the greatness of his presidency, his optimism about the particular uniqueness of our future opportunities in this country, and the foundations for world peace which his leadership established and which we are charged to build upon. We now also have the opportunity today to correct the historical mistake made a few years ago in designating Mikhail Gorbachev ``Man of the Decade.'' It has to be a high moment in each of our lives to be able to present to President and to Mrs. Reagan even a small fraction of all of the tributes which well up in our minds and hearts today. On behalf of all of your friends assembled to celebrate your life and service, President Reagan, it is my honor to announce that you are the recipient of the James H. Doolittle Award and to express the unbounded gratitude which we have come here to demonstrate today. Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, I rise today to join with my colleagues in this august Chamber, especially Senators Feinstein, Hatch, and Webb, members of the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission, as we pause to pay tribute to the indelible legacy of one of America's truly great Presidents, Ronald Reagan, who would have turned 100 years old on February 6, 2011. It is indeed fitting that as this month of February is filled with historic birthdays of transformational Presidents like George Washington, who founded our Nation, and Abraham Lincoln, who preserved it, that we honor the President who reignited its spirit, Ronald Reagan. A friend of freedom, a foe of tyranny, and always--always an advocate for America, President Reagan inspired our Nation eloquently and powerfully to recapture and reaffirm our founding ideals of individual freedom, common sense, and limited government. He reminded us with unshakable optimism that America, as the great experiment in self- government, had planted an eternal stake along the timeline of human history as, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, ``the last best hope of Earth.'' Many of my colleagues will be sharing their own personal remembrances of this threshold figure whom we rank as among the most rarefied of American Presidents. What I recall is a President who brought his passionate belief in the ideals of America to bear in advancing our Nation and projecting the hope of freedom as a force for good in the world and a leader who was, contrary perhaps to conventional wisdom, not averse to consensus-building in implementing his vision for this country. Like those rising to speak in this venerable Chamber today, I remember well the arduous challenges facing our Nation in 1980. At the time, I had just completed my freshman term as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Internationally, our country was precariously mired in the Cold War, and reeling from the Iran hostage crisis. On the domestic front, our economic vitality had been sapped by double-digit inflation, hampered by interest rates that would soar to 21 percent, stifled by massive tax burdens including a top tax rate of 70 percent, and idled by an energy crisis, exemplified by half mile long lines at the gas pump. Against that backdrop, President Reagan arrived in Washington with an unflagging conviction that the greatest untapped potential lies in the American people themselves. And by embracing hope, not resignation, he charted a course for America that led to greater prosperity and security. As Commander-in-Chief, President Reagan was steadfast in his uncompromising foresight and ultimate success in building up our military, and displayed unequivocal mettle in confronting the world's only other superpower, laying the foundation for victory in the Cold War. With peace through strength, Ronald Reagan called America to a purpose he described in his own hand in 1980. He wrote: ``I believe it is our pre-ordained destiny to show all mankind that they too can be free without having to leave their native shore.'' And nothing evoked that immutable faith in humanity and belief in the possibilities for a better future more than his demand at the Brandenburg Gate forever etched in our memory: ``Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'' Two years later, that wall did crumble, and not long after, so too did the Soviet Empire. President Reagan battled to reduce the size of the Federal bureaucracy--to return tax dollars to the families who had earned them and disseminate power out of Washington and back to local governments. And I well recall meeting with President Reagan numerous times to discuss issues as far ranging as the MX missile, the budget, women's issues, or the impact of proposed trade policies on traditional Maine industries such as potatoes or lumber. And I can attest to the fact that, as a problem solver on every front, President Reagan understood that in order to bring to fruition his core principles and also ensure he could be resolute in implementing his vision for the country, he had to make it happen with persuasion and openness. After all, it was President Reagan who believed ``if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I'm trying to get . . . I'll take that and then continue to try to get the rest in the future.'' In the end, President Reagan's deeds and words summoned America's resolve and essential goodness, and his steady hand guided this great land in working to foster liberty and kindle the fires of freedom that have always made America as President Reagan said better than anyone-- ``a shining city on a hill.'' On the occasion of his 100th birthday, we express our eternal gratitude to President Reagan for his timeless leadership of our Nation which he aptly described in his first inaugural address as ``the breed called Americans.'' Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll. The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll. Mr. MANCHIN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. McCaskill). Without objection, it is so ordered. ____________________