[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 46 (Thursday, March 11, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1494-S1496]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Remembering Rex Lee

  Mr. LEE. Madam President, I come to the Senate floor today in 
recognition of an anniversary of sorts. My late father, Rex Lee, died 
25 years ago today after an extended and heroic battle with cancer.
  I prefer to remember my dad not as someone who was ill but someone 
who was full of life and healthy for most of his life--in fact, his 
entire life, even while battling with a significant illness.
  Rex grew up in the small town of St. Johns, AZ. It is a really, 
really small town. In fact, we used to joke that he may have been 21 
years old before he realized that the true name of the town wasn't 
``Resume Speed.'' It was a little dot along the highway in eastern 
Arizona. It was a place that he loved, and it was a place where he 
learned to love those dear to him and close to him, a place where he 
was taught in school and in church, where he learned to serve his 
fellow beings.
  He attended Brigham Young University as a freshman in the fall of 
1953, somewhat under protest. He had wanted to attend the University of 
Arizona, like his cousins Mo and Stewart Udall before him.
  His parents told him: You can go wherever you want, but your first 
year needs to be spent at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT.
  He went there and was immediately smitten with the place and 
commenced a relationship that would extend for the rest of his life and 
would significantly impact his life in many, many ways.
  Halfway through college, he left to serve a 2\1/2\-year mission for 
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mexico. During that 
time, to say he became fluent in the Spanish language and the Mexican 
culture would be an understatement. It was a fluency that never really 
left him.
  While I was a missionary many decades later, he used to write me 
letters in Spanish, and even after I had been speaking and studying the 
language for some time, I knew I had to keep my Spanish dictionary 
close to me when I read letters from my dad, written in his adopted 
native tongue, Spanish.
  While serving as a missionary there, he briefly met Janet Griffin, 
whom he would later marry and who was my mother. Janet was the daughter 
of an employee of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Treasury Attache in the 
Mexican Embassy.
  While they didn't interact much then, they reconnected when they were 
both back at Brigham Young University about 6 or 8 months later. It 
wasn't exactly love at first sight for my mom, but it was for my dad. 
They went on to have seven children together, and I am grateful that 
they did. I am the fourth of those seven.
  My dad ended up going to law school at the University of Chicago. As 
it

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turned out, the law suited him well. He liked it, and it liked him 
back. He ended up finishing first in his class at the University of 
Chicago. He clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice White. 
Shortly after that, he joined the Phoenix law firm of Jennings, Strouss 
& Salmon and represented clients, both big and small, individual and 
corporate, mostly civil but also some criminal cases.
  But he loved the law. He loved the opportunity that he had to 
represent clients. He loved the challenge that each case brought him. 
He loved the opportunity to digest large volumes of information and 
condense it down into a single legal brief and then into a single oral 
argument that he could present in court.
  His enthusiasm was so intense that once in a while a judge would pull 
him aside afterward and ask him why he was so intense about the case, 
and he would respond by saying: OK, I will try to dial down the 
intensity next time.
  Little by little, he became more conversant in court, never to the 
point of being chatty or inappropriately familiar, but at a point where 
he felt he was able to have a conversation with the judge and able to 
communicate to the judge the facts and the law of the case in a simple 
way.
  As they were raising their seven children, there were a lot of things 
that were unexpected in life, including seven very loud, rambunctious 
children; including the fact that one day, as he was practicing law in 
Phoenix, he got a phone call informing him that Brigham Young 
University would be opening a law school and they wanted him to be its 
founding dean. I was just 1 year old at the time.
  That is how my family ended up in Utah. We ended up being connected 
to Brigham Young University basically for the rest of my life ever 
since then.
  My dad, in addition to serving as the dean of BYU's law school, 
served as the Assistant Attorney General during the Ford 
administration, over the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. 
And during President Reagan's first term, he served as Solicitor 
General. This is when I had my first real exposure to the law.
  I found during that era of my dad's service that I could miss school 
once in a while if I asked my parents if I could just go with my dad to 
court. He would go into court, and it felt a little bit like sitting in 
an extended session of church in a different language. It may not sound 
exciting, but I was impressed by the majesty of the whole event. As 
much as anything, I was impressed by how much my dad generally enjoyed 
being in court and making arguments. He had a way of making it fun.
  After serving as Solicitor General of the United States, he went back 
to BYU and resumed his teaching career while simultaneously continuing 
to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court as a private practice 
litigator.
  It was during that period of time, in June of 1987, that my father, 
while at the peak of physical condition, an avid runner and marathoner, 
got the news that he had stage IV non-Hodgkin's T-cell lymphoma, a 
pretty deadly and advanced form of cancer. With a young family still at 
home, this hit us pretty hard. We were afraid that we were going to 
lose him.
  Through the able help of some excellent doctors and as a result of a 
fortuitous set of circumstances culminating in him receiving some 
experimental treatment then going on at the National Cancer Institute 
and the National Institutes of Health, they were able to prolong his 
life, and he lived nearly another 9 years. They put him into remission 
within a few months, very nearly losing him in the process, but then he 
came back.
  He had some of the best years of his life after that bout with 
cancer. It was just a couple of years after that that he was asked to 
serve as president of Brigham Young University. I still remember this 
happened shortly after I had been accepted as a freshman at BYU, just 
as I was graduating from law school.
  Later that summer, as I was preparing to enter as a freshman at BYU, 
I got a letter in the mail. The letter was signed by my dad. It was a 
letter that welcomed me to the university and then ended with the 
words: ``I look forward to meeting you on campus this fall.'' So I put 
it on the refrigerator with a Post-it note, saying: ``Dad, thanks so 
much for the really personal note.''
  My dad had a great sense of humor, and notwithstanding his love of 
law and his professional accomplishments, at home, he was just our dad 
and our friend. In fact, calling him just our dad doesn't really even 
do it justice. He was someone who had so much energy and enthusiasm for 
life.
  When we were little kids, he would come home from work, and we played 
a great game. We called it ``run around dad,'' and we didn't know that 
that wasn't necessarily an entertaining game. We didn't know that it 
probably wasn't that fun for him, but we would run around him, and he 
would figure out ways to trip us, and it was hilarious every single 
time it would happen. My mom would watch patiently in the corner, 
realizing that after four or five trips, someone was going to cry, but 
it all worked out OK.
  Our dad taught us to work hard. He taught us to be kind to each other 
and to others, and he did that not just through the profession of his 
faith with words--and there was that. Of course, he was a devoutly 
faithful father and husband, and he taught us to pray and to read and 
love the Scriptures, but he also taught us those things through his 
very actions.
  I remember when I was a boy and decided that I wanted to set up a 
small business enterprise shoveling driveways, and after a couple of 
particularly heavy snowstorms, I wasn't sure whether I could complete 
all of the jobs that I had. He offered to be my indentured servant. I 
graciously offered to pay him, but he said: No, this one is on me. You 
are not going to pay me. You can get paid, in fact, for the fact that I 
am going to work for you. It was a fantastic deal. It was one of my 
favorite memories of my life because he had a lot of other things to 
do, but he chose to help me, not just to teach me to work but also so 
he could spend time with me, and it was a lot of fun.
  He loved amusement parks. He loved roller coasters, and he loved 
being really, really exceptionally, unusually, embarrassingly loud 
while going down said roller coasters. He loved to ride, and he loved 
every aspect of it, even when he knew how it was going to end.
  As my brother Tom once remarked, recalling the circumstance in which 
my brother Tom had asked my dad for the name of a particular tool that 
my dad was using while assembling a swing set, he said: Dad, what is 
that?
  My dad looked at it and couldn't tell whether it was a wrench or 
something else. It was a specialized tool used only for a swing set. My 
dad said to him: I don't know what it is called, but when you need one 
of those, nothing else will do.
  Tom later remarked, that same description can be used of my dad. 
There is not really a single word that you can place to describe him, 
but when you need one of him, nothing else will do.
  During most of the last 6\1/2\ years of his life, he was serving as 
president of BYU. He stayed exceptionally busy. He even managed to 
argue a case or two in front of the Supreme Court every single year he 
was serving as president of BYU, even though during most of that time 
his cancer had come back. It had come back in a slightly different 
form--slower growing but less treatable.
  Notwithstanding the pain that he was enduring and the discomfort 
caused by the treatment, he never lost his optimism, the zeal for his 
work, or his love for his family. He was such a blessing to all of us 
to watch him go through that. We didn't feel sorry for him as much as 
we should have, but part of the reason we didn't feel as sorry for him 
is that unless you really paid attention, you couldn't tell he was in 
pain. He didn't complain about it. It certainly didn't slow him down, 
not at least until the very end.
  I will always remember, as if it were yesterday, the moment when I 
took him to the hospital for what I feared would be the last time, and 
indeed it was. Just a couple of weeks before his death, I was in my 
second year of law school, and my mom and my wife let me know that 
things weren't going well and I needed to go and help my dad get to the 
hospital.
  As we were wheeling him into the hospital that day, I could hear him. 
He was almost unconscious. Once we got him into the hospital, they put 
an oxygen mask over him. His voice was muffled, but he was muffling 
something. I

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listened closely, and because I was, by then, a second-year law 
student, I recognized some of the legal vernacular that he was using, 
and I quickly discerned, based on some of his appellate briefs that I 
recently had read, he was preparing for what he hoped and expected and 
genuinely believed would be his next argument before the U.S. Supreme 
Court. And I thought: Way to go. There to the bitter end, he is ready 
for what is next. He is ready to stand for vindicating the interests of 
his client and for doing his job and doing it well.
  At no moment during any of this, notwithstanding his service in 
education, in government, and the practice of law, and his extended 
church service as a lay minister in my faith, did I ever feel that we 
were neglected as a family. To be sure, he was gone a fair amount of 
time. He was a busy man, but when he was home, he was 100 percent home. 
He was all in. He loved--or at least if he didn't love it, he at least 
had us convinced that he loved being at home and loved working with his 
kids, studying with them, and helping them with their homework.
  When someone serves you that well, that faithfully, and that 
consistently over that many years, it has an effect and a very positive 
one. To this day, I still, from time to time, hear his words echoing in 
my head reminding me to do things as best as I possibly can do them; 
reminding me, as a lawyer, when you are in court, when you have won 
your case and you know you have won it, he said sit down and don't say 
another word; reminding me that when you have got a choice between a 
ten-cent word and a three-dollar word, choose the ten-cent word every 
time if it will do the job; reminding me to be kind to others and that 
you will never regret doing so. He reminded me to give others the 
benefit of the doubt. Those are things that stick with all of us.
  So I know I speak certainly for myself and for my siblings--Diana, 
Tom, Wendy, Stephanie, Melissa, Christie, and my mom Janet--that we 
miss him. The State of Utah and the Western United States and the 
United States of America is a better place because of the fact that he 
was here. I will never forget, on the morning of March 11, 1996--again, 
exactly 25 years ago today--I saw the Sun rising over the Wasatch 
Mountains to our east in Provo, UT. It was at that moment when I 
realized that it would likely be the last time the Sun would rise with 
my father on the Earth. The Sun has risen and set on that same mountain 
range many, many thousands of times since then, but we remain better 
off for the fact that he was here.
  If he were here, I would tell him: I miss you, Dad. I love you, and I 
thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Madam 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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