[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 80 (Thursday, May 31, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E939-E940]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               100TH BIRTHDAY OF SENATOR HENRY M. JACKSON

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                          HON. NORMAN D. DICKS

                             of washington

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 31, 2012

  Mr. DICKS. Mr. Speaker, today would mark the 100th Birthday of Henry 
Martin Jackson, who served for six terms in the House of 
Representatives prior to a long and successful career in the United 
States Senate.
  Since the day I came to Washington as a young legislative aide to 
Washington's other legendary Senator, Warren G. Magnuson, I admired 
Senator Jackson's dedication to the job as well as the personal 
connection he made to generations of our state's citizens. He set a 
high standard for all of us charged with representing the views of our 
constituents because he knew so many of them personally.
  Senator Jackson, known to all as ``Scoop,'' is remembered as a 
``strong-on-defense'' Democrat, and he clearly was that: the consummate 
Cold War Liberal in the Truman/Kennedy tradition.
  What many observers may not realize is that Scoop was also the 
longest serving chairman in the history of the Senate Interior and 
Insular Affairs Committee--from 1963 until 1981. As chair of that 
committee, later renamed the ``Energy and Natural Resources 
Committee,'' Scoop Jackson sponsored or co-sponsored the 1964 National 
Wilderness Act, the 1965 Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, the 
Redwoods National Park Act of 1968, the North Cascades National Park 
Act of 1968, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968--and that was 
in just the first few years of his chairmanship.
  His signature achievement--the National Environmental Policy Act of 
1969--has been emulated by more than 80 countries. With the Alaska 
Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, both Canada and Australia have 
embraced it as an example. The list goes on--from the Alpine Lakes 
Wilderness Act of 1976 to ANILCA--the Alaska National Interest Lands 
and Conservation Act of 1980. During the Scoop Jackson era, there was 
more wilderness and more national parks preserved for future 
generations than at any other time in American history.
  Looking back on history, it is clear that Scoop Jackson's greatest 
achievements

[[Page E940]]

revolve around preserving and enhancing our natural heritage. These 
were achievements that flowed from his formative years in the Pacific 
Northwest and his understanding of our commitment as lawmakers to 
future generations.
  Scoop also demonstrated that while politicians measure their lives in 
getting re-elected, statesmen measure their lives in getting things 
done. He stood then as he stands now as a profile of the virtues of 
taking risks and of putting service before self.
  So on the occasion of Scoop Jackson's 100th Birthday I would like to 
submit a very meaningful and poignant remembrance of Senator Jackson 
written this week by his son, Peter. It was published in the Herald 
newspaper in Everett, Washington--the same paper that young Scoop 
Jackson delivered around the town in the 1920s.

                    [From the Herald, May 27, 2012]

                  Scoop Jackson Never Forgot His Roots

                           (By Peter Jackson)

       My father. When he was a boy, Henry M. ``Scoop'' Jackson, 
     who later became a U.S. senator and Democratic presidential 
     candidate, watched a Fourth of July parade as an actor 
     dressed like an American doughboy pitchforked a caricature of 
     Kaiser Wilhelm II.
       Scoop was someone who survived smallpox. He was someone who 
     first learned to navigate Everett's washboard roads in a Ford 
     Model T. (He even got to see Roald Amundsen, the famed polar 
     explorer and pride of Norway.)
       It's ancient history, yes, but history just a lifetime 
     removed.
       On May 31, he would have turned 100. His example, work, and 
     legacy rest with the city he loved.
       In the 1920s, Scoop spent his teen and pre-teen years 
     delivering the Everett Herald to speakeasies and brothels. He 
     made friends that lasted generations, memorizing their 
     addresses only to rattle off street names to their 
     incredulous descendants decades later. All the while, Everett 
     was a town, poet Gary Snyder wrote, ``where shingle weavers 
     lost their fingers in the tricky feed and take of double 
     saws.''
       Today we recognize a certain gravity to place, especially 
     in the American West. It shapes our values, cuts our 
     attitudes, and defines our politics. Life in Everett in the 
     1920s and '30s was hardscrabble, but it was also anchored in 
     a spirit of community. The city of smokestacks became Scoop's 
     version of Norman Maclean's Missoula. To paraphrase Maclean, 
     the world is full of bastards, the number increasing the 
     further one gets from Everett, Washington.
       Writer Tony Hiss calls the transmission of ideas and 
     experiences through generations ``the great span.'' The span 
     has a telescoping effect, a reminder that the post-colonial 
     American West is still very young.
       Everett was Scoop's touchstone, the city of his birth and 
     his death, the city with dirt under its nails. Scoop never 
     bemoaned Everett's dishwater skies or the throat-sting from 
     the pulp mills. Everett and the Pacific Northwest were 
     always, for him, a radiant place.
       I still picture him in the flat light of an Everett winter, 
     legs braced like a gunslinger, chatting up every millwright, 
     legionnaire and housewife strolling down Colby. He'd gesture 
     in the sky with an imaginary pen or rattle off the street 
     address of someone's uncle or aunt, a number memorized during 
     his paperboy days.
       As a U.S. senator, he emphasized constituent services to 
     such a degree that for years after his death in 1983, 
     Everett-ites would knock on my mom's door, asking for help 
     with a Social Security check or a military-academy 
     appointment. Mom would invite them in, serve them coffee, and 
     gently explain that Rep. Al Swift's office would be delighted 
     to help.
       My mom, Helen Hardin, was the linchpin to Scoop's success. 
     She was as animated and funny as he sometimes was not. She 
     demanded that he smile and wear clean shirts. She breathed 
     life into his unfinished work when, less than a year into his 
     sixth term, he suddenly died.
       My mom saw, as we all did, that Scoop's often complex 
     political vision was rooted in a kind of Lutheran realism, a 
     belief in the permanence of human nature and the impermanence 
     of politics. For Scoop this translated into a uniquely 
     consistent vision: Haranguing oil executives (liberals made 
     happy, conservatives irked) while bashing the Soviets and the 
     Fidel Castros of the world (conservatives made happy, 
     liberals irked).
       Implicit with tackling the big ideas was the notion of a 
     long, twilight struggle. Political dividends don't yield 
     returns for years, or decades even. Scoop shared President 
     Kennedy's belief, borrowed from Dante, that ``the hottest 
     places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great 
     moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.''
       Scoop was a believer in the primacy of ideas--big ideas. 
     Over his 43 years in Congress, as faith in government 
     whipsawed from New Deal optimism to Reagan-era mistrust, 
     Scoop never yielded on government's progressive mission.
       This meant big dams as well as big parks. In the process, 
     he would embrace causes that upset or delighted a variety of 
     interests, but he didn't weathervane or rely on a swarm of 
     consultants to navigate his way.
       Over time, Scoop became a politician and a statesman. 
     Politicians measure their lives in getting re-elected. 
     Statesmen measure their lives in getting things done. He 
     managed both.
       When Scoop, a nickname given him by his sister in honor of 
     a Tom Sawyer-ish cartoon-strip character, was born in Everett 
     in 1912, Everett was barely 20 years old. Both of his parents 
     had emigrated from Norway. Pieter Gresseth, who changed his 
     name at Ellis Island, was born three years after the U.S. 
     Civil War. Scoop's mom, Marine Anderson, was slightly older.
       For a time, along with Swedes and Germans, Norwegians were 
     the vanguard of Washington's post-colonial settlers. The 
     Norse were weaned and influenced by the Jante Law, a sense 
     not that everyone is equal per se, just that no one is better 
     than anyone else. Suck it up. Don't be a braggart and accept 
     life on life's terms.
       My paternal grandparents were part of the great Norwegian 
     diaspora which, unlike other ethnic dispersals, never quite 
     made sense. There was no political or economic disaster to 
     flee. My grandparents received the promotional brochures 
     brandishing the American West, and they bit. They discovered 
     a near-identical climate and a land that blended nature with 
     labor. After a time, they happened upon Our Savior's Lutheran 
     Church in Everett and the stolid Rev. Karl Norgaard, who 
     conducted his sermons in Norwegian. For them, the Pacific 
     Northwest was Norway, only more so.
       As a kid, I remember watching as my dad waved at ghost 
     buildings downtown and conjured what stood before. He pointed 
     to the pavement at Colby and Hewitt avenues and said that is 
     where his father, a newly minted Everett cop still trying to 
     master English, picked up drunks by the scruff of their work 
     shirts and pitched them onto the back of a horse-drawn police 
     wagon.
       Many of us play the ghost-building game today. We point to 
     the veined marble that hems Union Bank and say, ``that's the 
     old Friedlander's Jewelers.'' We point to the corner of 
     Broadway and Hewitt and long for Sam's Western Wear.
       From the time he was a Herald paperboy to his 30 years in 
     the U.S. Senate, Scoop demonstrated that in life each of us 
     can enlarge or diminish our roles. But to diminish the public 
     sphere is to commit an injustice, a sin of omission.
       Scoop was also a human being, and he'd laugh at any 
     mattress-sale heroizing. Imagine an ordinary man who 
     accomplished extraordinary things because of hard work, the 
     vagaries of life, a supportive community, identifying good 
     mentors, and marrying well.
       Of course, there were things that as a son I never told 
     him. I never told him that I was proud that he put the kibosh 
     on Norman Vincent Peale's anti-Catholic bigotry in 1960. I 
     never told him that I was grateful for his sponsorship of the 
     North Cascades and Redwoods National Park Acts. Like many of 
     his elbow-throwing constituents, I was skilled at 
     highlighting his real or perceived missteps.
       Decades from now, kids who stare vaguely (or end up 
     pitching snowballs) at the newly unveiled Scoop bust at Grand 
     Avenue Park don't need to know his name. Memories cloud and 
     history falls away. All they need to know is here was a local 
     kid, a child of immigrants, who worked hard, stayed true to 
     his principles, and did his best to make his community and 
     his country a better place.
       They can do the same.

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