[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 39 (Monday, March 10, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1484-S1485]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                                SCOUTING

 Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask that a copy of my remarks 
to the Wilson County Friends of Scouting Luncheon in Lebanon, TN be 
printed in the Record.
  The remarks follow.

                         Lessons From Scouting

       Thank you very much. In a little book I did a few years ago 
     called Lamar Alexander's Little Plaid Book, it has lots of 
     rules in it and one of them is ``If you want a standing 
     ovation, seat a few friends in the front row.'' So, thanks to 
     the front row for that. And, thanks to Rob, my friend, for 
     inviting me here and all of the others of you who did, and 
     for the terrific job you do as aldermen and for your 
     friendship. Jason Flannery, Peter Williston, Chris Crowell, 
     Bobby Kane, Quin Cochran, thank you for your remarks, which 
     will come a little later. Representative Mark Pody is here, 
     and Mayor Hutto and Mayor Craighead and Mayor Jennings all 
     are here. It's exciting to be in Lebanon and to hear about 
     all of the good things that are happening here.
       I had a great friend Alex Haley, the author of Roots, who 
     once heard me make a speech and he came up afterwards and 
     said, ``Lamar, may I make a suggestion?'' And I said ``Well, 
     of course, Alex.'' And he said ``Well, if when you start, 
     instead of making a speech you would say `Let me tell you a 
     story,' people might actually listen to what you have to 
     say.'' So let me tell you a few stories from scouting.
       I was about 13 years old. It was in a hot summer over in 
     East Tennessee. But, when you're in scouting and you go up in 
     the Smokies, you learn that it drops about five degrees every 
     thousand feet, so by the time you get to the top of Spence 
     Field Mountain on the Appalachian Trail, it's pretty nice. 
     So, our explorer scout group had gone up there one August 
     day, and we'd loaded up our packs with Bisquick and bacon and 
     all the things that you cook for breakfast because that's 
     when all of the blueberries were ripe on Spence Field and we 
     were going to make blueberry pancakes the next morning.
       We stayed in one of the trail shelters along the 
     Appalachian Trail--we'd done that many times before--with our 
     explorer scout leader, Dick Grave, who later was the head of 
     Alcoa in Tennessee, and went to bed that night. At about 3 
     a.m., I noticed someone rustling around--these trail shelters 
     had an open front--fire out front, and then three sides were 
     closed. I was sleeping down on one end and I noticed some 
     rustling around in the middle around where our packs were. 
     So, I thought it was one of the boys getting up and I looked 
     over there and there was a bear. Well, I woke everybody up, 
     which didn't take long, and we did the only thing you do in a 
     circumstance like that which was, we climbed up on top of our 
     trail shelter with our aluminum pans and our cooking 
     utensils, and we beat the cooking utensils on the aluminum 
     pans and shouted unprintable things at the bear, who took all 
     of our packs, including what we had for breakfast, down to 
     the spring in front of the Spence Field Shelter. I learned a 
     lesson about not sleeping with your breakfast bacon on top of 
     the Smoky Mountains when the bears are around.
       That's not the only thing I learned in Boy Scouts. About 
     the same time, about the same age, when the weather was just 
     as hot, we went spelunking in Monroe County in East 
     Tennessee. That means you go down in caves. And if you have 
     been down in caves, you know that they're all about the same 
     temperature--I forget, but it's about 57 degrees, something 
     like that, but it was a hundred degrees outside. I decided, 
     which thirteen-year-old boys will do sometimes, to try 
     something I'd been told I couldn't do, which was to have a 
     chaw of tobacco. So, I took it down into the cave with me, 
     got down in there, and with a couple of other boys, we tried 
     it. Then, we came back up to the top in 103 degree weather, 
     which made us as sick as I have been in my entire life. And 
     so ever since that day, I've never even thought of having a 
     chew of tobacco. I learned that lesson in Boy Scouting as 
     well.
       I learned how to go on a snipe hunt in boy scouting. 
     Essentially, you take a bag, and you're told you sit out 
     there all night with the bag open and you'll catch a snipe. I 
     learned a lesson there as well.
       I learned a lesson when my father, when I was twelve or 
     thirteen, drove me the day after Christmas with two other 
     explorer scouts not much older, maybe a year or two older, 
     and just dumped us out on Newfound Gap at about 5,000 feet in 
     the Smokies with three feet of snow on the ground and said 
     he'd pick us up in Gatlinburg at the end of the day. The 
     three of us walked up to the top of Mount LeConte, and then 
     down, and we got to Gatlinburg. It wasn't very easy, but we 
     learned a lot about the importance of getting to your 
     destination on that day.
       I was at Camp Pellissippi, which was our scout camp nearby 
     Maryville and Knoxville and I learned a little bit about 
     authority. We had a camp director named Kyle Middleton. He 
     must have been 7'10'' tall, at least he looked that tall to 
     us, and we would all assemble in the amphitheater at the 
     first day of Camp Pellissippi, and Mr. Middleton would stand 
     up in front of us. Actually, we all called him ``Kyle,'' I 
     don't know why we would do that, he was so familiar, but I 
     think it was because he told us to, and this is what he'd 
     say. He said, ``Camp is now open, and we have one thing we 
     need to get straight. I think I'm in charge. Does anyone here 
     think I'm not?'' And, of course, none of us did, and we 
     learned a little bit about the importance of authority. I 
     joined the order of the arrow there. I learned about how to 
     make a fire with flint and steel. One of my friends from 
     Maryville, a couple of years older than me, would have been 
     the first person ever to walk the entire Appalachian Trail 
     through my area, from Maine to Georgia, but he made the 
     mistake of getting all the way down to Virginia (he started 
     in Maine), and he called his father in August and his father 
     said he had to come home and go to college. So I learned the 
     importance of education.
       And even in Cub Scouts, we learned lots of lessons. One of 
     the most vivid was when we were playing baseball and knocked 
     the ball through the upstairs window of the neighbor's house. 
     And, we all looked at each other wondering what to do until 
     Bill Ernest, I'll remember this until I die, said, ``What we 
     should do is go tell Mr. Smith (or whoever it was) what we 
     did.'' So, we all trooped up to his house and knocked on the 
     door and said, ``Mr. Smith, we just knocked a baseball 
     through your upstairs window.''
       For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America have 
     talked about leadership, have taught lessons of community 
     service. There are 110 million scouts in the world in 185 
     countries, and 2 million Eagles. There are 9 Eagles in the 
     United States Senate. There are a million adult volunteers in 
     the Boy Scout movement. It is the largest and most prominent 
     youth organization in the world. Its job is helping to turn 
     boys into men.
       Looking back, I realize how much I took for granted, all 
     the time that our volunteer scout leaders gave to us. I know 
     there are a lot of volunteers here in the room, but we just 
     thought the world was made that way, that Mr. Studley--Joe 
     Studley--and Mr. Miller, that they just had all this time to 
     give to us. And because we grew up at the edge of the Smoky 
     Mountains, close to the great American outdoors, just like 
     you do in Middle Tennessee, we were out there all the time. 
     Almost every weekend or every other weekend, we were hiking 
     or camping or learning about the great outdoors. They taught 
     us to love the Great American Outdoors, and as important, 
     they taught us not to be afraid of the Great American 
     Outdoors.
       Today we have fewer parents who take their kids into the 
     Great American Outdoors and I don't think it's because the 
     boys are afraid of the outdoors. I think it's because a lot 
     of the parents never had the chance to be in scouting and to 
     know what to do in the outdoors. I still remember the Scout 
     Law. I imagine most of you can say it: ``trustworthy, loyal, 
     helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, careful, 
     thrifty, brave, plain, reverent,'' I remember that. And I 
     remember the motto, ``Be Prepared.'' That's a good lesson in 
     life whether you're preparing for a piano concert or whether 
     you're running in a Republican primary. Over the years I've 
     tried to apply those rules to whatever I was doing in life, 
     and I've found it hard to improve on the Boy Scout lessons.
       I've put my love of the outdoors to work as a senator, 
     trying to protect the parks, trying to keep the air clean, 
     trying to keep enough open space so that our children and 
     grandchildren can enjoy the outdoors as I did. And I've tried 
     my best to teach my boys and girls, or as Honey likes to say, 
     ``our boys and girls,'' our family about the outdoors and to 
     help teach those grandchildren as well.
       Some people say that it's naive in this tough world that we 
     live in to take the simple Boy Scout lessons, like to walk up 
     and say, ``Mr. Smith, I just knocked a baseball through your 
     window and I take responsibility for it.'' That's the right 
     thing to do but some people say it's naive in the 
     sophisticated world in which we live.
       Well, let me close with a story that suggests it's not 
     naive at all. Shortly after I graduated from law school, I 
     had the privilege of working in the White House for a man 
     named Bryce Harwell, who had also worked for President 
     Eisenhower. He was President

[[Page S1485]]

     Eisenhower's favorite staff member. He was a diminutive 
     little fellow who took shorthand, gave good advice, wrote 
     good speeches, and everybody loved him. And he told me this 
     story about President Eisenhower's cabinet meeting. The 
     Eisenhower cabinet was meeting one day in the cabinet room in 
     the White House right off the Oval Office where the president 
     works, and they had a particularly difficult decision to 
     make.
       Now, Eisenhower as we know, was a sophisticated man. He was 
     a five-star general. He was in charge of our troops during 
     World War II, the Allied forces, in fact. He was president of 
     a university, he was the head of NATO and now he was the 
     president of the United States. He was a sophisticated fellow 
     who knew how to operate in a tough world, who even knew how 
     to win world wars. So he put an issue on the table, and asked 
     the cabinet members what to do. The secretary of state said, 
     ``Oh, Mr. President, as a matter of foreign policy, we should 
     do x.'' The secretary of the treasury was next, and he said, 
     ``No, Mr. President, we couldn't possibly do that; that would 
     damage the economy.'' The secretary of defense said, ``No, we 
     couldn't do either one of those two options, because it would 
     hurt our military strength.'' And so all the way they went 
     around the table and down the line, every single member of 
     the cabinet pointing out a problem with the option based on 
     how it would affect their particular department.
       So, finally, President Eisenhower asked this question of 
     his cabinet: ``What would be the right thing to do?'' The 
     secretary of state said, ``Oh, Mr. President, the right thing 
     to do would be x,'' and the secretary of the treasury said, 
     ``Mr. President, that's right, the right thing to do would be 
     x.'' And so said the secretary of defense and the secretary 
     of commerce and on down the line. So the president, this 
     sophisticated man who had won the world war asked that 
     question, ``What would be the right thing to do,'' heard from 
     his cabinet what it would be, turned to his press secretary 
     and said, ``Mr. Hagerty, then go out and tell the press that 
     that's what we'll do.''
       The moral of the story, I think, is whether you're a Cub 
     Scout who's just broken a window, or whether you're a Boy 
     Scout trying to learn about life, that the lessons you learn 
     in scouting are lessons that are good for the rest of your 
     life. And another lesson, and I think particularly for this 
     group today, as we honor and salute the volunteers and the 
     supporters and the scouts in Wilson County, and those in the 
     Walton Trail district, is that it's hard to think of anything 
     more important that you could be doing with your time and 
     with your money for your community and for our country than 
     teaching these lessons of life that help these boys become 
     men. Thank you very much.

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