[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 14 (Monday, January 25, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S126-S127]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING PAUL SARBANES
Mr. LEAHY. Madam President, all of us in this body mourn the recent
passing of former Senator Paul Sarbanes. Those of us who served with
him have known him as one of the finest and most accomplished Senators
with whom we have served. And what a great pleasure it was to work with
him, on so many issues.
In addition to his impressive legislative accomplishments, Paul
Sarbanes was one of the Senate's keenest interrogators and one of the
Senate's finest orators. In the Senate community, most of all we knew
him for his wit, for his warmth and kindness, and for his decency.
I would like to call to the Senate's attention an insightful
remembrance of Senator Sarbanes by Paul Glastris that was published
this month by the Washington Monthly.
I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Washington Monthly, Jan. 1, 2021]
Remembering Paul Sarbanes
How wit, integrity and expertise made America's first Greek American
Senator a behind-the-scenes Washington power player.
(By Paul Glastris)
There have been many fine tributes to former U.S. Senator
Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, who passed away December 6 at age
87. These encomiums invariably note the near universal high
regard he enjoyed in Washington for his intelligence,
integrity, humor, and accomplishments--the latter consisting
mostly of liberal legislation he managed, via his other
attributes, to get Republicans to support. They include,
while a young House member, the articles of impeachment
against Richard Nixon and, in the Senate, the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act of 2002, which toughened regulations and created
government oversight of corporate accounting practices after
the Enron debacle. He also served on the Senate Foreign
Affairs Committee for decades with Joe Biden and was a boss
and mentor to a number of the president-elect's senior
advisors, including Antony Blinken, his nominee for secretary
of state.
But I want to focus on another set of his deeds, ones
associated with his role as the leading Greek American in
Congress. They begin with what has come to be known as the
``Sarbanes Rule.''
The rule dictates that ``any Greek American awards dinner
should conclude on the same day it begins.'' The Senator
devised this dictate after patiently sitting through
countless such dinners. They would go on interminably due to
the fact that the organizers, wanting to acknowledge as many
benefactors as possible, would bring to the podium a speaker
(usually a wealthy Greek-American businessman) whose job it
was to introduce another such speaker, who would then
introduce another speaker, who would finally present the
award to the person who would then speak, typically at some
length (these are Greeks we're talking about).
Since multiple honors were bestowed on any given evening,
the result was awards ceremonies that began with cocktails at
6 PM but wouldn't end until well after midnight. At which
point the priest would give the benediction, the color guard
would march the U.S. and Greek flags out of the ballroom, the
bouzouki band would come out, and everyone would dance for
several more hours. Having attended these events regularly in
DC from the 1990s until COVID-19, I can attest that after the
Senator introduced his rule about a decade ago, the
proceedings tightened considerably, with the dancing
commencing at a more civilized 10 PM.
It was at one of these dinners that I got to know Sarbanes
personally when my late wife Kukula found herself seated next
to him. She asked him what kind of cocktail he liked and went
to the bar to fetch it. The two of them spent the rest of the
evening animatedly chatting about foreign affairs--Kuku, a
journalist and the daughter of a diplomat, had strong and
informed views on the subject. Our hosts Manny and Marilyn
Rouvelas must have noticed, because the next year the place
cards showed that Kuku was again seated next to the Senator.
When she saw Sarbanes walk into the ballroom, she went to the
bar and, remembering his drink of choice (it was one of her
superpowers), had it waiting for him when he arrived at the
table. He was charmed and delighted; she felt the same about
him. For years thereafter the two of them were annual dinner
mates. There were far more powerful people in the room than
Kuku, but the fact that Sarbanes was content to spend the
evening talking with her told me everything I needed to know
about his character.
``Unlike many of his contemporary officeholders, Mr.
Sarbanes was uncomfortable with the backslapping, glad-
handing and grandstanding that often go with public office,''
his Washington Post obituary reads. ``He avoided the social
and party circuit in the nation's capital and rarely spent a
night in Washington, preferring instead to drive home to his
wife and children in Baltimore.'' At these Greek dinners,
however, Sarbanes was in his element. While other politicians
would drop by (it was a target-rich donor environment), he
would stay for hours, chatting with the scores of people who
would come to the table to meet him, then eventually excusing
himself to work the room, table by table, shaking every hand.
The way he brought order to those dinners with his Sarbanes
rule is a small illustration of what made the Senator
effective and respected in Washington. Born to Greek
immigrant restaurant owners in 1933, Sarbanes earned
scholarships and degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard.
He had an intellectual gift for getting to the heart of
knotty problems and formulating wise solutions with a wit
that put his colleagues at ease. He deployed this genius
throughout his career, often in the service of selling
unpopular but vitally necessary policies like the return of
the Panama Canal. As former Democratic Senate leader Thomas
Daschle told the New York Times, when ``trying to persuade
the caucus to do something difficult, I would use Paul to
bring it home, to close the argument.''
In the Greek American community he is most remembered for
spearheading--along with another young Greek-American
congressman, John Brademus--a 1974 House effort to cut off
U.S. arms sales to Turkey after that country invaded and
occupied the independent majority-Greek-speaking nation of
Cyprus. The Nixon and Ford administrations fiercely opposed
the legislation because Turkey, a NATO ally, shared a
militarized border with the Soviet Union. But Sarbanes,
Brademus, and others in the newly-activated Greek American
community countered on not only moral but legal grounds: U.S.
statute, they correctly noted, specifically required the
administration to cut off arms sales to any country that used
such weapons offensively.
Several of the multiple House votes to pass the embargo and
then override a presidential veto succeeded by only a one-
vote margin, recalls Andy Manatos, then an aide to Senator
Tom Eagleton, who was successfully championing similar
embargo legislation in the Senate. ``It would never have
passed in the House without the esteem Paul and John
enjoyed,'' says Manatos, now the dean of Greek-American
lobbyists, adding that Sarbanes and Brademus were two of the
three Rhodes Scholars then serving in that body.
The Turkish arms embargo--the first time in modern U.S.
history that Congress successfully overturned the White House
on a major foreign policy issue--lasted three and a half
years before the Carter administration managed to get it
repealed. But it was replaced by an agreement in Washington
to sell arms to Greece and Turkey on a 7-to-10 basis in order
to achieve a military balance in the Aegean, an agreement
Sarbanes vigorously defended for years after.
Being seen as a fierce advocate for your own minority
ethnic constituency can be risky for any politician seeking
higher office. Sarbanes managed to pull it off in 1976 when
he became the first Greek American elected to the U.S. Senate
(he would be followed by Paul Tsongas and Olympia Snowe). He
was hardly a radical on the issue. ``I met today with a
number of Cypriot foreign ministers'' he would joke to
friends after rebuffing, say, a group of Greek diner owners
demanding he take stronger actions than the Cypriot
government itself wanted. But over the subsequent decades,
through constant study and engagement with experts on the
region, he built a reputation as the man to see on anything
regarding the Eastern Mediterranean--from Turkish air threats
to Greek territory in the Aegean to the besieged Greek
Orthodox patriarchate in Istanbul. Greek prime ministers
sought his counsel. So too did U.S. presidents, secretaries
of state, and senior diplomats. ``In that cerebral way of
his, he would analyze the whole situation and explain to
people what to do, who to talk to, what to be careful of,''
recalls Manatos. ``He was hands down far ahead of anyone else
in Congress in his thinking about these issues.''
People underestimate, especially in the age of Trump, the
degree to which knowledge can be power in Washington.
Sarbanes did not. He ``studied issues himself rather than
rely on staff talking points,'' recalls John Sitilides, who
worked with the Senator as a GOP staffer on the Senate
Banking Committee before starting the Western Policy Center,
a security think tank focused on the Eastern Mediterranean.
His mastery of substance gave Sarbanes ``the freedom to argue
and discern based on his own knowledge,'' says Sitilides,
which in turn earned him the confidence of Senators on both
sides of the aisle. That kind of power is typically witnessed
only by insiders, though public glimpses of it can sometimes
be caught. Nick Larigakis, executive director of the American
Hellenic Institute, notes that Sarbanes could be ``relied
upon to ask the tough and probing questions'' on issues
important to Greek Americans at confirmation hearings for US
ambassadors to the region--an effective way to keep Foggy
Bottom on its toes.
If Sarbanes' mind was legendary, so too was his rectitude.
He managed a 40-year career in politics--from his first
election to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1967 to his
retirement from the U.S. Senate in 2007--without a hint of
personal scandal. That's no small feat for someone who rose
through the often-corrupting culture of Maryland politics
(Spiro Agnew, another Greek American politician from
Maryland, was not so careful). Sarbanes enjoyed a 48-year
marriage to his wife Christine, who passed away in 2009.
[[Page S127]]
And he was famously averse to raising money, even for his own
campaigns. (His son John Sarbanes, who represents his
father's old congressional district, has carried on that
tradition by sponsoring the House's leading campaign finance
reform legislation.) Indeed, much of the Senator's career
success was due to his savvy longtime chief of staff Peter
Marudas, another Greek American who could not only go toe to
toe with Sarbanes on the issues but ably manage the more
transactional demands of his office.
Joe Biden has spoken optimistically--naively in the opinion
of many--about his ability as president to work productively
with Mitch McConnell and other Republicans on substantive
issues. To the degree he honestly believes that, it is
because he has done so in his own career, and watched others,
like Paul Sarbanes, do so as well.
After the Senator died, Biden tweeted: ``Paul Sarbanes and
I served together on the Foreign Relations Committee for 30
years. There was no one sharper, more committed, or with
firmer principles. And he, too, returned to his family nearly
every night. They meant the world to him. Rest In Peace,
Paul.''
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