[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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