[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 17265-17266]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 17265]]

                        TRIBUTE TO PETER MARUDAS

  Mr. SARBANES. Mr. President, my longtime Chief of Staff, Peter 
Marudas, retired recently from public service. It has been both an 
honor and privilege to work with Peter these many years. He


has been not only a superb member of my staff, but also among my 
closest and dearest friends. I consider myself, and the citizens of 
Maryland, fortunate to have benefited from his service, counsel, and 
commitment to the highest standards of conduct and ethics.
  In addition to his many years of service in the United States Senate, 
Peter's illustrious career includes service for several other public 
officials, including three former Baltimore City Mayors: Theodore 
McKeldin, Thomas A. D'Alesandro III, and Kurt Schmoke. While working at 
the highest levels, Peter has remained a down-to-earth, committed 
public servant, known for his exuberant good humor and generosity.
  The attached Baltimore Sun article of August 18, 2001, accurately 
reflects not only Peter's individual and unique personality, but also 
the admiration and esteem in which he is held by all who are privileged 
to know him. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From The Baltimore Sun, Sept. 18, 2001]

                           Hail and Farewell

                          (By Carl Schoettler)

       National television cameras catch Peter Marudas, Sen. Paul 
     S. Sarbanes' chief of staff, and Allan Greenspan, chairman of 
     the Federal Reserve, head to head in deep confab at a Senate 
     banking committee hearing about a year ago.
       Marudas immediately starts getting calls: What did he tell 
     you? A hiccup from Greenspan can jump-start the stock market, 
     up or down.
       Marudas laughs. He likes telling this story.
       He and Greenspan were talking about jazz.
       As a young man, Greenspan played clarinet, flute and a 
     little sax in New York jazz bands, including one led by 
     Leonard Garment, who became President Nixon's White House 
     counsel. Marudas is a lifelong and knowledgeable jazz fan.
       A couple of months earlier, Marudas had asked him, ``Who do 
     you think is the best saxophone player?''
       Greenspan replies, Ben Webster, a mainstay of the Duke 
     Ellington band.
       ``That's really an aficionado,'' Marudas exclaims. ``You 
     got to know jazz to say that.''
       So the next time Greenspan comes before the banking 
     committee, Marudas gives him a Ben Webster tape. And the two 
     are recorded for TV posterity talking about jazz, not G-8 
     economics.
       Bringing Greenspan the Webster tape exemplifies Pete 
     Marudas' style: kind, thoughtful, generous and politically 
     astute. For nearly 35 years, Marudas has brought his 
     particular, perhaps unique, political acumen to Baltimore, 
     Maryland and national politics. Now, he's bowing out.
       The farewells began Wednesday as he celebrated his name day 
     at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation. It was 
     the Feast of the Dormition, the Assumption in most Western 
     churches. Marudas' name in the church is Panagia, which is 
     roughly Greek for ``Our Lady,'' the Virgin Mary. He's a 
     devout Orthodox Christian and of course active in church 
     politics.
       Thursday he celebrated his 64th birthday, basically working 
     in his Washington office, although well-wishers flooded the 
     Sarbanes switchboard with birthday wishes and goodbyes.
       Friday was his last day at work and the end of his own 
     remarkable chapter in Maryland politics.
       ``It's an existential decision,'' he says of his 
     retirement. ``We got the senator re-elected in the fall and 
     he's now a chairman, which is what we were working for all 
     the years. The Banking Committee, you can really do a lot 
     there, the predatory lending business, you know, and just the 
     integrity of the capital markets.''
       He still had a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on his 
     office wall yesterday as he got ready to leave. ``I got 
     Truman, Roosevelt and Jefferson. And I have a labor union 
     organization picture from the C.I.O., `March with CIO to 
     Victory.' Well, we [See Marudas, 8d] owned this bar where all 
     these U.A.W. workers came in, when I grew up in Detroit,'' he 
     says.
       As a kid, he spent his summers in Baltimore where his uncle 
     ran a dry-cleaning shop on Light Street in what is now 
     Federal Hill, and he had relatives who lived in Brooklyn. 
     Another uncle ran a restaurant in Curtis Bay.
       ``The first political event I ever attended was in the 1952 
     campaign,'' Marudas says. ``The Democratic candidates always 
     kicked off their campaign in Detroit on Labor Day.''
       Adlai Stevenson was the presidential candidate.
       ``My cousin and I got up real early, 5:30. Our mothers 
     packed our lunches. We took the bus down. We were right down 
     in front. Walter Reuther [the leader of the United Auto 
     Workers union] introduced Adlai Stevenson,'' Marudas recalls.
       ``I was 15, my cousin was 12 or 13. It really made an 
     impression for me. Stevenson was a man of such dignity.''
       As a college student at the University of Michigan, Ann 
     Arbor, Marudas attended a lecture by Reuther, who spoke on 
     labor economics.
       ``He was a real force. He put the U.A.W. on the progressive 
     side of the political spectrum,'' Marudas is remembering. 
     ``You had people who came up from the South, white and black, 
     where down there they had nothing to do with each other. They 
     worked together as shop stewards. We saw all that going on. 
     It really was something.
       ``You look at society: Wherever you have free trade unions, 
     they're one of the essentials of a free society.''


                           new deal democrat

       He says it twice during a couple of long conversations. He 
     remains an unreconstructed Roosevelt New Deal Democrat, with 
     perhaps overtones of Adlai Stevenson.
       ``He's very strong democrat with a small `d','' Senator 
     Sarbanes says. ``He's a good Democrat with a big `D'. But 
     more importantly he's a democrat with a small `d'.
       ``He doesn't have an ounce of meanness in him, at all,'' 
     Sarbanes says, with obvious fondness in his voice. They've 
     been personal friends longer than they've been political 
     colleagues. ``He's really very generous and respectful with 
     people. He really accords people their dignity.''
       The two met when Marudas was covering City Hall for The 
     Evening Sun. Marudas had studied journalism and earned a 
     master's degree at Ann Arbor. He came to Baltimore to work on 
     The Evening Sun in 1963.
       Sarbanes, who had been working for Walter Heller, the 
     chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Presidents 
     Kennedy and Johnson, came back to Baltimore to become 
     executive director of a commission to revise the city's 
     charter.
       Although Marudas grew up in Detroit and Sarbanes in Easton, 
     Marudas says their roots were in the same province in Greece, 
     Laconia, in Sparta.
       ``Our villages are 15 or 20 miles apart,'' he says. ``We 
     got to know each other, became personal friends and then our 
     careers came together in `71.''
       Sarbanes had been a congressman about nine months when 
     Marudas joined him in Washington.


                          first political job

       Somewhat paradoxically, Marudas' first political job was 
     for a Republican, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who had been 
     governor of Maryland and was in his second term as mayor of 
     Baltimore. McKeldin was a liberal Rockefeller Republican of a 
     type virtually extinct in today's GOP.
       One of McKeldin's aides was leaving and he called Marudas: 
     `` `The Governor'--we called McKeldin the Governor then--
     would like you to take my place.
       `` `Me!' I said. Then I thought he's got less than a year 
     to go. I went home and talked it over with my wife and my 
     mother-in-law.''
       His wife, Irene, has been perhaps his closest advisor. 
     They've been married for 39 years.
       ``I thought, Baltimore is the sixth largest city,'' he 
     continues. ``It will be a chance to get a look at the inside 
     of government and maybe come out again and pursue a career in 
     newspapering.''
       He worked for McKeldin for 10 or 11 months.
       ``He was a quick learner,'' says Gene Raynor, the former 
     head of the state election board and an astute political 
     observer in his own right. ``He became a master of precinct 
     politics in the Byzantine world of politics in Baltimore City 
     in the mid-'60s. There were not many people around who 
     understood it as well as Pete Marudas. If I were a candidate 
     anywhere in this state I would seek out Pete for advice.
       ``Paul is a kind of brainy guy, very, very smart, very, 
     very brainy,'' Raynor says. ``But he was in the clouds. 
     Marudas was right down to earth. They complemented each 
     other.''
       Thirty years ago, a somewhat wistful McKeldin told an 
     interviewer. ``He [Marudas] was the best in history. If only 
     I had had him earlier in my career.''
       The same reporter who quoted McKeldin said a half-hour 
     interview of Marudas stretched into a 90-minute discourse on 
     Baltimore, the nation, Greece and the Orioles.
       Marudas has not changed much over the years. He's an 
     animated talker whose conversation moves by digression. His 
     conversation veers happily from local to national to 
     international politics like a bumper car in an amusement 
     park.
       Today, you'd certainly have to add the Mideast and the 
     Balkans--and jazz.


                            some tough years

       Marudas stayed on with Thomas A. D'Alesandro III after 
     McKeldin left the mayor's office. They were tough years for 
     Baltimore and the nation.
       ``I was thinking what I have been through and seen,'' 
     Marudas says. ``In the summer of '67, Newark and Detroit 
     exploded. We felt we got through that summer. In '68, we had 
     the assassinations. We had the urban disturbances. We had the 
     Catonsville Nine trial. We had the [George] Wallace campaign.
       ``Then the war came in. Kent State, Johns Hopkins, they 
     lost control over there. We

[[Page 17266]]

     had to helicopter [Charles McC] Mathias, then an anti-war 
     member of the House of Representatives, to speak to the 
     students. We had all those demonstrations. We didn't have 
     what I'd call a normal year until '71.''
       That's when D'Alesandro decided not to run for a second 
     term and Marudas went to Washington to work for Sarbanes.
       ``He brought one outstanding faculty as far as service to 
     me as mayor and I think maybe to Sarbanes as senator,'' 
     D'Alesandro says. ``He could sense sincerity or baloney.
       ``He was almost like my alter ego. I sort of found in him 
     somebody who thought like I thought. And he sort of read me, 
     in the sense he knew the things I was interested in. He 
     encouraged me in some things and cautioned me in other 
     things.
       ``And never had a hidden agenda. You knew you were getting 
     a real honest critique . . . And if we made a decision 
     against him he went along. He sang the song.
       ``I don't ever remember his trying to take credit for 
     anything. Everything was for me as mayor and Sarbanes as 
     senator . . . I loved the guy.''
       And Sarbanes tells roughly the same story.
       ``When you draw advice and counsel from Peter,'' he says, 
     ``the bottom line is always do the right thing.''
       He laughs.
       ``If he thinks you're going in the wrong direction he'll 
     tell you in no uncertain terms. And he'll keep telling you if 
     you keep moving in that direction.''


                           prized discretion

       Marudas' discretion is also legendary, highly prized by his 
     bosses, but sometimes irritating to council members at City 
     Hall. He's the reigning master of obfuscation.
       Former Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke remembers council members 
     complaining that they often did not understand what Marudas 
     had just said.
       ``That was Peter being creatively enigmatic,'' Schmoke 
     says. ``That was his trademark.''
       Marudas picks up his own narrative thread: ``I go over to 
     Washington, saying maybe we have all this stuff behind us and 
     in a couple of years we're into an impeachment. And Sarbanes 
     is on the Judiciary Committee and he offers the first article 
     of impeachment as a junior member.''
       Perhaps inevitably he thinks the Nixon impeachment was 
     justified and Clinton's was not.
       ``You don't impeach a president for a lack of personal 
     judgment,'' says Marudas, who read every single constituent 
     letter on the Clinton impeachment received in Sarbanes' 
     office. ``He has to have violated his constitutional oath. 
     Then you have to have really very strong constitutional 
     grounds, not some flimsy excuse.''
       He returned to Baltimore again in 1987 for a stint as a 
     seasoned senior member of the administration of Schmoke.
       ``I always wanted to work for someone younger than me,'' 
     Marudas says. ``My grandfather always said when you're young 
     learn from the old. When you're old learn from the young.
       Schmoke actually had been an intern in Sarbanes' office in 
     the House of Representatives. He's as effusive in his praise 
     of Marudas as the other politicians.
       ``If I were designing a course at a public policy school, 
     and including a description of the effective staff person,'' 
     says Schmoke, ``I'd model that person on Peter Marudas.''
       Everybody asks if Marudas can actually leave politics 
     behind. Sarbanes expects to be able to call on his advice 
     when he needs it.
       But right now Marudas plans to go to a wedding in Detroit 
     with his wife, Irene. He'll listen to a lot of jazz. And 
     he'll do a lot of dancing. He and Irene love dancing, 
     especially salsa.

                          ____________________