[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 15 (Tuesday, January 24, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Page S72]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            MORNING BUSINESS

                                 ______
                                 

                TRIBUTE TO PATRICK LEAHY AND TIM RIESER

  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize an excerpt of 
this article by George Black, honoring the legacies of Senator Patrick 
Leahy and Tim Rieser, that was originally published in the New Republic 
on December 19, 2022.
  I ask unanimous consent that the following excerpt honoring Senator 
Patrick Leahy and Tim Rieser be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From the New Republic, Dec. 19, 2022]

          For Patrick Leahy, The Vietnam War Is Finally Ending

                           (By George Black)

       For 33 years, the retiring Vermont senator and a top aide 
     have quietly but doggedly been working to bind the many 
     wounds of a war that touched the lives of nearly every 
     Vietnamese family. This is what public service is.
       It was a late afternoon in mid-November, with the nip of 
     early winter in the air, when I visited the Russell Senate 
     Office Building to meet with Vermont Senator Pat Leahy in his 
     spacious yet surprisingly intimate office, with a sofa and 
     chairs arranged near the fireplace. An aide squatted down 
     beside us to add another log to the fire. Leahy's wife of 60 
     years, Marcelle, joined us, carrying a large bouquet of 
     flowers. The couple still convey a strong sense of the people 
     they were in the early years of their marriage--he a small-
     town lawyer, she a nurse at a local hospital. Leahy showed 
     off photos of their three children and five grandchildren. 
     ``I'm not someone who wants to hang the walls with photos of 
     50 great and famous people I've known,'' he said. ``I'd much 
     rather be surrounded by pictures of family.''
       Leahy, who entered the Senate in 1975 and leaves it after 
     48 years in January 2023, is the body's longest-serving 
     sitting member. To most Americans, he is probably best known 
     for his decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee and his 
     opposition to the drive by conservative activists to 
     transform the federal courts into an instrument of their 
     ideological agenda. But I'd come to talk to him about 
     something different, something that rarely if ever makes the 
     cable news circuit: the war in Vietnam, the wounds it had 
     left, and the part he had played in healing them. He's never 
     seen this as a partisan issue, just a matter of simple human 
     decency, being one of those, like Joe Biden, who mourn a lost 
     era of comity in the Senate, in which political adversaries 
     could still reach with respect across the gulf of their 
     disagreements. His work in Vietnam has always been 
     underpinned by that vision, and I wanted to ask him whether, 
     in our current divided state, he could imagine it continuing 
     after his retirement from the Senate at the age of 82.
       Vision alone doesn't get you far in Washington. It has to 
     be turned into legislation, and legislation into dollars and 
     cents. In addition to his role on the Judiciary Committee, 
     Leahy also chairs the Appropriations Committee, which is 
     where the purse strings are untied, and, as he wrote in his 
     recently published memoir, The Road Taken, ``few people 
     really ever sifted through the line items to understand what 
     we were doing was actually making American foreign policy.'' 
     It's also why you can't talk about his work in Vietnam 
     without also talking about his senior aide, Tim Rieser, who 
     has been with him since 1985, and who will retire from his 
     current role in January. Despite his bland-sounding job 
     title--Democratic clerk for the Appropriations Subcommittee 
     on State and Foreign Operations--Rieser has been the master 
     of its arcane mechanics. ``A dog with a bone,'' Leahy calls 
     him. Given a problem to solve, ``He would not stop until 
     every last drop of marrow and morsel of sinew had been licked 
     clean.''
       Since 1989, as the United States and Vietnam were taking 
     their first baby steps toward reconciliation, Leahy and 
     Rieser have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in aid 
     to Vietnam, forcing the United States to take responsibility 
     for what former Senate leader Mike Mansfield once called the 
     ``great outflow of devastation'' from the war: the bodies 
     broken by unexploded bombs; the lives blighted by exposure to 
     Agent Orange; the ongoing threat from ``hot spots'' 
     contaminated by dioxin, its toxic by-product; and now, at 
     last, some long-overdue aid to help Vietnam recover and 
     identify the remains of its war dead. In the process, they 
     have built the scaffolding of a new relationship, in which 
     bitter enemies, in one of the stranger twists of geopolitics, 
     have been transformed into close working partners and 
     military allies.
       Leahy and Rieser have faced no small number of obstacles 
     along the way. For many years, embittered American veterans 
     and recalcitrant anti-Communists in Congress opposed any hint 
     of reconciliation with Vietnam. Progress was often slowed by 
     suspicions on the Vietnamese side and by cumbersome 
     bureaucracies in both governments, and State Department and 
     Pentagon lawyers remain wary to this day of any humanitarian 
     effort that implies an admission of liability. But as Rieser 
     often says, when you run into an obstacle, you redefine it as 
     a problem to be solved, and that process starts with all 
     parties identifying their common interest in finding a 
     solution. There are always common interests; you just have to 
     look for them.
       Full article at: https://newrepublic.com/article/169542/
patrick-leahy-vietnam-war-finally-ending.

                          ____________________