[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 115 (Thursday, July 28, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4992-S4995]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO GOVERNOR SUNDLUN

  Mr. REED. Mr. President, Senator Whitehouse and I have come to the 
floor today to pay tribute to Governor Bruce Sundlun. He passed away 
last Thursday. He was an extraordinary gentleman.
  I think it is particularly appropriate that my colleague is here 
along with me because he was the director of policy for Governor 
Sundlun, and many of the achievements in the Sundlun administration 
were directly attributed to Senator Whitehouse's extraordinary efforts.
  Today, I am here, first, as a Rhode Islander to say on behalf of the 
people of my State how much we appreciate the leadership, vision, and 
determination of Governor Bruce Sundlun. He was elected in the middle 
of the worst financial crisis in the history of our State since the 
Great Depression--a collapse of the private credit union system. He got 
through that crisis as only he could. Then he went on to reconstruct 
our airport, to reform our workers' compensation system, and to make 
lasting contributions to the people of Rhode Island.
  So I come to salute an extraordinary Governor. I also come as a 
colleague in government. When Governor Sundlun was elected to the 
statehouse in 1990, I was elected to my first term in the Congress. I 
was there to observe his extraordinary intellect, determination, skill, 
and his relentless commitment to doing his best to help the people of 
Rhode Island. I saw it firsthand.
  Truly, without Bruce's leadership, we would not have weathered the 
financial crisis of 1991 in Rhode Island. His extraordinary grasp of 
the financial details, his unwavering determination to do the right 
thing, not the popular thing, and his ability to withstand withering 
criticism from all quarters resulted not only in the restitution of the 
savings of thousands of Rhode Islanders, but essentially the repayment 
of the moneys that had to be borrowed to take care of the crisis. It 
was extraordinary work. Frankly, I think everybody in Rhode Island 
rapidly conceded that only Bruce Sundlun could have done it.
  I also come here, like Bruce, as a veteran of our Armed Forces, but 
unlike Bruce, who was a combat veteran. Bruce joined the U.S. Army and 
qualified as a pilot in the Air Corps in World War II. He was brave. He 
was tough. He led his crew with great distinction on numerous bombing 
raids over occupied Europe. In one of those raids, he was shot down. Of 
course, he had the presence of mind to keep the aircraft as steady as 
he could to let crewmen escape.
  Finally, at the last moment, he himself parachuted to Earth. He was 
behind enemy lines without any weapons except his determination, his 
courage, and his determination, again, not only to survive but to 
return to the fight.
  Through an amazing series of breathtaking episodes that read like a 
novel, Bruce would go from village to village and seek out the priests 
in the French village, or Belgian village. He would

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say in fluent French that he was an American flier and needed their 
help. He always received their help. He would be given assistance and 
would be hid for a while. He told me with his great sardonic smile--
that he would find unusual ways to get around. He would go into the 
village at market time when the ladies of the village parked their 
bicycles, and he would take one of them and pedal as fast as he could 
to the next village where he could find another bike. So he covered the 
route through occupied Europe, finally making his way into Switzerland. 
That was a remarkable bit of courage.
  After the war Bruce continued to distinguish himself in business, and 
in so many ways. But one thing is that he left a legacy not just to the 
people of Rhode Island, not just a public record, but he was part of 
the ``greatest generation'' that left an indelible image on the 
soldiers, sailors, aviators, and marines who serve today, a fidelity to 
duty, of courage, and of determination to serve and sacrifice on behalf 
of your comrades and your country. That image continues to sustain our 
forces in the field and this great Nation.
  To Governor Sundlun, to his family, as a Rhode Islander, I thank you. 
As a colleague in government, I thank you. As someone who was inspired 
by your service to this country, I thank you. May you rest in peace.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The junior Senator from Rhode Island.
  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am very pleased to follow Rhode 
Island's distinguished senior Senator with remarks about our friend and 
our former Governor, Bruce Sundlun. As Governor, he served with some of 
our colleagues who are in the Senate today, including Ben Nelson, who 
was Governor of Nebraska, and Tom Carper who was Governor of Delaware. 
They served with Bruce, and he was one of those irrepressible 
characters they remember very distinctly to this day.
  Bruce Sundlun had a remarkable Rhode Island life. He was the son of a 
jewelry store owner, who was the son of an immigrant watchmaker. It 
turns out that he had real athletic talent. He was a track star, 
breaking record after record around Rhode Island. It was as a 
competitor in that era that he first felt the sting of discrimination 
over being Jewish, and that gave him a lasting characteristic to stick 
up for the underdog.
  As I mentioned at his funeral service, he was the opposite of a fair-
weather friend. He became a better friend the stormier the weather got 
around you.
  He went on, with his great generation, to defend our country and 
fight for freedom around the globe in World War II. He was a pilot of a 
B-17, the Damn Yankee, at a time when the life expectancy for bomber 
crews over Europe was not very long. Unfortunately, his aircraft was 
shot down and crashed in Belgium. He was able to survive the crash, 
although, as the pilot, he was the last living person out. When he went 
back to Belgium years later, people who remembered that day remembered 
being astonished at the parachute that appeared out of nowhere just 
above the ground, just before he hit, just in time to save him. But he 
was injured and hid in the manner of the purloined letter. He hid in 
plain sight as troops swept the area looking for the survivors of the 
bomber crash. He laid out in the middle of the field in a deep place in 
the plowed furrow where you could only see him if you got down at the 
end of the furrow and looked.
  As the Nazi's were poking through the hay bales and prowling through 
the sheds and looking under whatever they could find, there he lay more 
or less in plain sight. But still, he was shot down on December 1, 
1943. You can imagine how cold it was lying in that field in Belgium 
while the search went on around him for hours. For the rest of his 
life, he hated the cold. There was no weather that was too warm for 
him.
  I remember when First Lady Hillary Clinton came to speak in Rhode 
Island when he was Governor, he was wearing this enormous black 
sheepskin coat--very thick and warm--as he prepared to step outside of 
the statehouse and go out on the stone deck looking out over downtown 
on a cold winter afternoon. Mrs. Clinton started needling him and 
saying how Jack Kennedy didn't need a coat and it was not really very 
fashionable and people would question how tough he was if he went out 
with this big coat on.
  So he ended up taking off the coat. He went outside into the bitter 
cold, made the introduction of the First Lady, turned to welcome her to 
the podium, and out she came with a smile from ear to ear wearing his 
coat. He loved that kind of exchange with people. I think he immensely 
loved the Clintons. He was one of the first Governors--if not the 
first--to endorse President Clinton, and the Clintons never forgot it.

  Bruce did not get to Switzerland until May 5, 1944. He spent 156 days 
as an American Jewish bomber pilot behind Nazi lines in Belgium and 
France. No greater testament to this man's resourcefulness and drive 
could be imagined than succeeding for that long in that circumstance.
  When he came back from the war, he went to Harvard Law School and 
became an attorney at the Department of Justice. He was an assistant to 
a Rhode Islander who became Attorney General, J. Howard McGrath. He 
began a successful career in the law. It was also at a time when 
President Kennedy came to office representing that ``greatest 
generation''--then a new generation--and he trusted Bruce Sundlun to 
run his inaugural parade, which was the kind of logistics feat that 
Governor Sundlun loved.
  The fact that it snowed like crazy the night before didn't phase him 
a bit. The entire parade went off on schedule and without incident, as 
planned, in very inclement weather because Bruce prepared so well in 
advance.
  He was appointed to the board of COMSAT by President Kennedy. He was 
the longest serving director of COMSAT, a public-private partnership 
that helped open the skies to the space age. His business career was 
remarkable. He took a foundering airline, called Executive Jet, and 
turned it into the largest private and charter airline in the country. 
He took a department store in downtown urban Providence, at a time when 
New England cities were in decline, at a time when cities across the 
country were losing ground to the suburbs that were sprouting up around 
them--he took this dying business, I guess you would say, and he saw in 
that downtown department store a media empire. He went off and began 
buying radio stations and TV stations and created this remarkable 
company, the Outlet Corporation, as a media empire. He also turned it 
into a refuge from time to time.
  In the blizzard of 1978, the State of Rhode Island was clobbered by 
snow. People were trapped downtown for hours and hours, in some cases 
days. He saw to it that the Outlet Company stayed open, that the 
cafeteria kept serving, and that the department store that sold 
clothing gave clothing to whoever needed it. The part of the store that 
sold bedding was spread all over the store so people could sleep on the 
bedding. He responded to a crisis better than anybody I know. It 
brought out his best characteristics, which were certainly necessary 
when he was elected Governor, because on the very first day of his 
administration, he was obliged to close more than 30 different lending 
institutions across Rhode Island, serving more than 300,000 of Rhode 
Island's 1 million population.
  He went from being sworn in, to the receiving line where he greeted 
all his happy supporters and all the welcoming officials and the well-
wishers who came from Rhode Island, and rolled immediately from that 
into a press conference in which he announced they had to close these 
institutions because the deposit insurance provider ended up having 
been crooked and had failed and they could not operate without deposit 
insurance. So they had to be closed. That was a heck of a way to start 
a governorship.
  He also found out that he had inherited the biggest budget deficit 
the State had ever seen, and we could never find a State with a bigger 
percentage deficit than he inherited. The compensation system melted 
down, and every worker's compensation insurer said: I am leaving the 
State.
  A lesser person might have failed under all that pressure. Not only 
did Bruce meet all of those exigencies of the moment, he also worked 
very hard to set a better ethical tone and restructured our State 
government so that it would be lasting because most of those things 
went wrong because of failures

[[Page S4994]]

in ethics in the Rhode Island State Government.
  That was a pretty remarkable added accomplishment on top of solving 
all those underlying problems. He had confidence in Rhode Island and in 
America, and we were in a terrible recession. So he went to work and 
got things done. He built a new airport terminal, he got a new mall 
started that would be built, he built a new hotel that allowed for the 
convention center to go forward and so he built a new convention 
center. He changed the skyline of Providence. He moved one of our 
universities to a downtown campus. He understood that in times of 
economic distress, activity was good and positive activity that brought 
jobs was better still.

  In his personal characteristics, he was a remarkable individual. He 
was relentless, determined, and decisive when issues were presented to 
him. With his staff, he was demanding and abrupt and terse. I asked him 
once why he didn't bother to say hello. When a person got a phone call 
from him, he just started talking at them, and when the conversation 
was over, he hung up without saying goodbye or any pleasantries. I 
said: Don't you think it would go a little further if you said hello 
and goodbye in your telephone conversations? He said: How much time do 
you think I would waste in my entire life? Add up all the times you 
have wasted saying hello and goodbye. Doesn't do anything that is 
productive. He had that kind of attitude. But he was bold and he was 
willing to take big leaps. I guess, back to his early days as a broad 
jumper, he was willing to take big, big leaps.
  As a staff person, he was extraordinary to work for. I have told the 
story of opening day. A few of us were in on that news, but it had to 
be very closely held because it would have created a run on all those 
banks if word had leaked. So even many of his staff people had no idea 
this was going on until he announced it. So that was kind of a shocker 
and made for an interesting time to be a staff person.
  On another occasion, he had a couple of raccoons on his property and 
they were bothering a den of baby foxes. He didn't want the baby foxes 
to be killed by the raccoons, so he took out a shotgun, went down to 
the end of his property and shot the two raccoons. He then climbed in 
the car with his State trooper and headed off to work and, of course, 
he described the exciting episode of his morning and the trooper said 
to him: Governor, don't you realize it is against the law to fire off a 
weapon in the city of Newport? In his customarily brusque and decisive 
way, he said: Well, take me to the courthouse.
  A trial was going on in the Newport County Courthouse, but into the 
trial walks the Governor and he interrupts the trial and tells the 
judge: I would like to plead guilty. The judge, thankfully, said: I am 
not going to accept your plea, I am doing something else right now. 
Plus, you don't have the benefit of counsel. To which he tartly 
responded: I am as good a lawyer as there is in Rhode Island. The judge 
responded: Well, a lawyer who is representing himself has a fool for a 
client, and on your client's behalf, I tell you I will not accept that 
plea.
  So there is the Governor's staff. The phone rings and the message is: 
Your boss is in court trying to plead guilty to a criminal offense. One 
can imagine how that lights up a staff's day. So down we went to help 
take care of that.
  Another day saw the arrival of his daughter. When he was elected 
Governor, Sundlun had three sons--Tracy, Stuart, and Peter. It turned 
out there was also a daughter, and at age 16--in midterm--Kara arrived 
and was recognized as Bruce's daughter from a relationship he had years 
before. She was taken into the family and is now--and was to the end of 
his days--as beloved as any of his sons.
  But that was an exciting day for staff members, when suddenly the 
boss turns up with a brandnew 16-year-old daughter nobody knew about 
before.
  He had five wives, in addition to those four children. He led a rich, 
full, exciting, passionate life, and I miss him very much. He died on 
Thursday. He died very peacefully, with his family around him. He was 
91 years old. I think he probably put about 151 years of living into 
those 91 years, and he left a family who loved him, a State he had 
served incredibly well, and staff members who had their lives changed 
by their exposure to this remarkable, hard-driving, affectionate, bold 
man.
  We are in Washington, as I close, and we are in a situation in which 
one party is holding the economic future of the country hostage in 
order to force changes the American public doesn't want, wouldn't vote 
for, and wouldn't accept if they were consulted on them. But by virtue 
of having, in effect, a gun to the head of the economy, they want to 
force these things, such as killing off the Medicare Program.
  Americans are wildly opposed to that in huge numbers, and when they 
found out that was in the House Republican budget, they rejected it by 
4-to-1 margins. The response to that was to bring back something called 
cut, cap, and balance, which had hidden beneath the slogan an even 
worse cut to Medicare. They didn't learn their lesson the public didn't 
want this, so they insisted on doing even worse and doing it by holding 
the economy hostage.
  That is the kind of thing Governor Sundlun would not accept. He was, 
first and foremost, a patriot. As hard as he worked and as much as he 
challenged everyone around him, he always had the purpose of making 
America better, making America stronger, making Rhode Island better, 
making Rhode Island stronger, and building toward the future. He had 
incredible confidence. The notion of holding an economy hostage and 
threatening the well-being of people to force down their throats 
something they would not want would be completely alien to his 
patriotic character, and it makes me miss him a lot as we are trapped 
in this day.
  The other party appears to be, in large part, acquiescing to this. 
Governor Sundlun's streak of willfulness and determination to do the 
right thing, I think, is missed on the other side of the aisle as much 
as his patriotism and desire to put the well-being of people first is 
missed on the first. So he was a man whose life and accomplishments 
made a great difference in Rhode Island and have great relevance and 
resonance as we stand here today.
  As I said, I miss him very much. He was very important to me, and I 
wish we had his forceful, patriotic, buoyant, and determined spirit 
with us today.
  Mr. President, I mentioned in my remarks the speech I gave on behalf 
of Governor Sundlun, which was delivered at his funeral service. I ask 
unanimous consent to have printed in the Record those remarks.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

Eulogy for Governor Bruce Sundlun as Delivered by U.S. Senator Sheldon 
                   Whitehouse, Sunday, July 24, 2011

       What a man. What a life.
       Bruce Sundlun's accomplishments--as a record-breaking 
     athlete, as a resourceful war hero, as a superb lawyer, as a 
     successful business entrepreneur, and as political leader of 
     our state--would each on their own be significant. You could 
     probably write a book about each. Together, packed all into 
     one energetic life, it makes Bruce Sundlun one of the most 
     accomplished and remarkable men in our state's history.
       And that's not even counting five marriages, four children, 
     three unsuccessful runs for governor, two dead raccoons, and 
     one long escape on the loose, behind enemy lines.
       There's really just no way to fit it all in.
       Let me step into my role as a Sundlun staffer, and ask you 
     to think just of his brief four years as governor. Hit (on 
     Day One of his administration) by an unprecedented bank 
     failure affecting 300,000 Rhode Islanders, and by the worst 
     budget deficit in state history, and by an implosion of the 
     state's entire worker's compensation system, and with the 
     urgent need to restore ethics in government, Bruce was the 
     man for that moment, and swung into his customary decisive 
     action.
       The budget was promptly and fairly balanced and the whole 
     budget process improved.
       Inventive solutions to repay the depositors and clean up 
     the RISDIC mess were found and implemented, and those at 
     fault were made to pay--over a hundred million dollars.
       His worker's compensation reform moved the state from an 
     embarrassment to a model, moving what was then the business 
     community's worst problem completely off the problem list for 
     now going on 20 years.
       As a problem solver, he had no peer.
       And that alone would be pretty extraordinary. But there was 
     that ethics gap. So Bruce wrote Executive Order 91-One, the 
     ethics executive order that succeeding governors renewed 
     virtually unchanged. He reformed our Ethics Commission. He 
     changed the way we appoint judges, to reduce the politics. He 
     changed the way we fund elections, with a public finance plan 
     and donor limits.

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     Through an intense storm of legal and political opposition, 
     he opened up the pension records; putting an end forever to 
     backroom special pension bills. He got our State Police 
     nationally accredited.
       He even cleaned up the Capitol literally!
       All that was extraordinary--but still not enough.
       In the worst economic times the state had seen since the 
     Depression, with a shrinking budget, he decided to extend 
     universal health care to children--and started the program 
     that became Rite Care. Against immense opposition, he built 
     our new airport terminal. He embarked on the Westin Hotel, 
     the Convention Center, and the Providence Place Mall. He 
     finished the Jamestown Bridge and built the Expressway. And 
     even that's not the end of it.
       It was an amazing burst of activity. I will bet that almost 
     every Rhode Islander, almost every day, is somehow touched by 
     something Governor Sundlun did.
       And through it all, he drove his staff crazy. He was 
     irrepressible, impatient, imperial, unscriptable, combative, 
     frustrating, willful, constantly threw caution to the winds, 
     impossible to keep up with--he drove us nuts.
       And we loved him.
       We loved him because he was bold and brave, and was warm-
     hearted and trusting and generous, and because he was willing 
     to throw caution to the winds to do what was right. We loved 
     him because he never once had us make excuses or try to shift 
     the blame.
       That was not his style. ``Never complain; never explain.''
       We all remember his Bruce-isms:
       ``Always touch base with those concerned before taking 
     action.''
       ``How fast would you get it done if the Russians were in 
     South Attleboro?''
       ``When you've won, stop talking, close your briefcase and 
     leave.''
       ``Message to Garcia.''
       ``Who, what, where, when; don't bother me with why.''
       The phone calls, at all hours, that began with no ``hello'' 
     and ended with dial tone.
       The road shows known to his staff as ``Dome on the Roam,'' 
     or more precisely, ``Bruce on the Loose.''
       And sometimes just that big foxy grin.
       We saw that his qualities of friendship and loyalty had an 
     almost physical force; that he had your back even if you made 
     mistakes (no one ever was thrown under the bus); and that he 
     was a better friend the more the chips were down.
       Politics is full of fair weather friends; Bruce Sundlun was 
     your stormy weather friend. Politics is full of people who 
     take tiny cautious steps with their finger up constantly 
     testing the winds; Bruce stepped boldly down the path he 
     thought was right, even if that meant stepping right in it.
       People wonder what lives on after they die. Well, Bruce, we 
     do. And every one of us has been changed: made better, and 
     stronger, harder-working and more resourceful, by your 
     vibrant elemental force in our lives.
       We've gone on to be judges and lawyers, to run state and 
     federal agencies, to become Senators and councilmen and 
     Lieutenant Governors, banking leaders and senior partners in 
     national accounting firms, but none of us ever will be more 
     proud of anything than the simple title: ``I was a Sundlun 
     staffer.''
       Soozie and Marjorie, Tracey and Stuart and Peter and Kara: 
     Thank you. Thank you for sharing your husband and father with 
     our state. For those who loved and were changed by him, I 
     thank you. For those who knew and were touched by him, I 
     thank you. And for those who never knew him directly, but 
     whose lives are better today because of what he did, I thank 
     you.
       As I close, I want to take you back to a scene from that 
     wonderful movie I saw as a kid, ``To Kill A Mockingbird.'' As 
     you'll recall, Atticus Finch takes on the courageous but 
     unpopular defense of a black man wrongfully accused of rape. 
     At the end of the trial, Atticus's daughter Scout--proper 
     name Jean Louise--is up in the gallery of the courtroom, with 
     the black townspeople, who aren't allowed down on the regular 
     courtroom floor. The courtroom floor empties, but they 
     remain, and slowly stand. As Atticus packs his papers 
     together, closes his bag, and walks out, an elderly man leans 
     down to the little girl and says, ``Stand up, Miss Jean 
     Louise. Your father's passing.''
       At the end of this service, as Bruce is taken to his 
     gravesite after 91 years of a life well and fully lived, we 
     will all stand up. And rightly so. A governor will be 
     passing.

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the 
absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alabama.
  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.

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