[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
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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.
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