[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12527-12529]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    HONORING THE LIFE OF JOHN WIRTH

  Mr. BINGAMAN. Madam President, I rise to give a few comments about a 
good friend of mine, John Wirth. On June 20, 2 weeks ago, the life of 
John Wirth, a great American and a citizen of my State of New Mexico, 
ended way too soon. His death brings deep sadness to his family, to his 
friends, and indeed to all of us who knew him and knew his important 
life's work.
  John was an internationally acclaimed scholar in the history of Latin 
America. He taught at Stanford University for many years. His vision 
was for a more integrated world and for a Western Hemisphere in which 
countries work together for the common good of all. Many of his efforts 
were personal, and many of his efforts he pursued through the good 
works of the North American Institute.
  Several weeks ago, I heard former President Clinton describe the 
current circumstances that we confront in the world as a struggle 
between the forces of integration and harmony on the one side and the 
forces of disintegration and chaos on the other. Throughout his entire 
life, John Wirth was a leader in that struggle for world integration 
and harmony. He sought to understand the world in his travels and in 
his studies. He sought to explain it through his teaching and through 
his writing. He applied his very fine mind and good heart to every 
situation, every problem, and the result was one in which everyone 
could have confidence because of the judgment and thought he used.
  His vision, his commitment, his strengthen of character, and bedrock 
decency as a human being served his mission well. The world and all of 
us who knew him are poorer because of his death, but certainly richer 
because of his life. Our sympathy goes out to his wife Nancy, to their 
children, and to all of the Wirth family.
  I ask unanimous consent that immediately following my remarks, the 
remarks of former Senator Tim Wirth,

[[Page 12528]]

which were delivered at his brother's memorial service in Santa Fe, be 
printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

              John Davis Wirth--Remembrances of My Brother

                             (By Tim Wirth)

       Thank you for being here, for coming this morning to help 
     us--John's family--and to help each other--John's friends and 
     colleagues and neighbors--his extended family--as we try to 
     soften the shock and the sorrow of his death.
       In recent years it has become customary to speak of funeral 
     services as celebrations of life.
       And there was much in John's life to celebrate, much of his 
     life that we will hold and cherish in our lives for a very 
     long time to come.
       But this morning I grieve not just because he was my older, 
     much-loved brother, but because he was an exceptional man, a 
     perceptive scholar and teacher and thinker, a visionary, 
     quietly passionate, civic activist, and a devoted husband, 
     proud father, and loving grandfather.
       John saw himself and all of us as citizens not just of the 
     Southwest, not just of the United States, but of a diverse, 
     unique community as big as a continent--as citizens of North 
     America where he saw a future of regional collaboration, a 
     model for the world.
       He was working toward that future when he died. I think he 
     had a very big book in mind, a capstone of an extraordinarily 
     influential career.
       I grieve that he did not live to see the next stages in the 
     process to which he had dedicated so much imagination and 
     energy.
        I grieve for a life cut off far too early.
       In what was supposedly the beginning of retirement, he was 
     actually entering what were becoming his most productive and 
     creative professional years.
       We cannot know what he have lost. We can be sure our loss 
     is beyond measuring.
       I grieve for John's three sons, Peter the community leader; 
     Timothy the conservationist; and Nicholas like his father and 
     grandfather, also a teacher of history. Each in his own way 
     reflects his father's deep public service commitment. He was 
     so proud of all of you, the choices you have made in your 
     lives, the women you were fortunate to marry, the men you 
     have become.
       Most of all, I grieve for his grandchildren--for Alex and 
     Elena and Charlotte and Zoe and for their brothers and 
     sisters who have not yet entered the world that John has 
     left. He had so much to give you--his love, his steady hand, 
     his example.
       He loved the times he did have to share with you--as he had 
     loved earlier times with Peter, Tim and Nicholas. He knew how 
     to share the many joys he took from life, and the many gifts 
     he brought to living.
       From your grandfather you already have a wonderful, special 
     inheritance. Part of it is the joy he took in study and in 
     the quest for excellence.
       Your grandfather valued hard work and discipline, and he 
     was tough on himself, because being tough brought out the 
     best in him--his four, first-rate books of Brazilian history, 
     and the eight other volumes he co-authored or edited.
       His focus, energy and discipline earned him many proud 
     accomplishments, including being named Gildred Professor of 
     Latin American studies at Stanford, and winning the 
     prestigious Bancroft prize for excellence in history. Those 
     qualities--focus, hard work, and discipline--will bring out 
     the best in you when you take his example as your guide.
       Remember, too, the joy he took in fine writing--his own and 
     others'; the joy he gained from music; his utter delight in 
     the first run of a new ski season; and the days he spent 
     matching wits with the wily trout.
       I hope you will share and carry forward his passion for 
     nature and the outdoors, which will translate for you, as it 
     did for him, into care for the beauty of our planet and for 
     the danger that face our fragile environment.
       Of all the gifts he had and all the gifts he would have 
     wanted to share with you as you grow up with his memory but 
     without his presence, his enormous curiosity is the highest 
     of his legacies.
       John always had to know why things worked, and how they 
     connected.
       His curiosity was not idle. It drove him, all through life, 
     to look deeply into any question that animated him and to pry 
     out the reasons behind history and to sort out the 
     connections between past and future. And while it drove him, 
     John's curiosity often drove his family crazy--his 
     stubbornness, sometimes misplaced enthusiasms--all curious, 
     too!
       John had discovered himself as a historian when he was an 
     undergraduate at Harvard, and then from teaching history at 
     Putney. He originally planned to make Asian studies his 
     specialty, and he decided to come back to the west--to 
     Stanford--to become a scholar of the far east.
       However, the spring vacation of his last year in Vermont 
     (before his first class in Palo Alto), he and Nancy took a 
     vacation to Brazil, to stay with some of Nancy's family. This 
     proved to be a voyage of discovery, and it changed the course 
     of his life.
       John became a modern explorer, not a conquistador hunting 
     for El Dorado, but an investigator intrigued by a vibrant, 
     complex culture and a land and people as full of possibility 
     as his own country.
       His scholarship evolved, from Brazilian history, to 
     comparative studies within Brazil to regional economic 
     studies in South America to trying to understand why some 
     countries develop, and others don't. As Susan Herter has told 
     us, he ended up studying North America--Mexico, Canada, and 
     the U.S.--and became the most distinguished continental 
     scholar.
       His last book analyzed transborder environmental problems, 
     especially air pollution. In showing that cooperation could 
     work, John used one central story--how the U.S. and Mexico 
     had worked to clean up two copper smelters on each side of 
     the Rio Grande. He took pleasure in the irony that, 60 years 
     earlier, our grandfather had managed the huge open pit copper 
     mine in Morenci, Arizona, that had fed those two same 
     smelters.
       Beyond love and scholarship and his wide-ranging, 
     enthusiastic curiosity, John was driven all his life by a 
     gnawing desire to reconnect with the life that had been 
     shattered for him during a short six months in 1943 when he 
     was only six years old.
       In that period, illness took our father, the Manhattan 
     project took our home in Los Alamos, and, when we had to move 
     away, the army took John's beloved collie, Tor, to serve in 
     the war effort.
       Separately, those were terrible losses for a child to 
     suffer. They drove him and throughout his life as he has 
     worked to try to understand, to put the pieces back together.
       Only two days ago I found a short piece that John had 
     written about the weight of those early years--one including 
     even the loss of his birthplace, Dawson, New Mexico (in 1936, 
     when John was born, Dawson was a vibrant coal mining 
     community, now it is a ghost town.)
       Writing about his childhood, he said, ``Thus, by age 8, I 
     had already developed a keen sense of life's contingencies. 
     Displaced by the war, single parented, and with a birth 
     certificate from nowhere, I felt the pull and the need for 
     historical explanation.''
       John's ``pull and need'' were scholarly.
       But his curiosity fed a steadily expanding drive to apply 
     his knowledge, and to stimulate inquiry by others, beyond the 
     lecture hall, beyond the campus and into the messy realities 
     of public policy.
       His curiosity led him to see, for instance, the connections 
     between environmental history, which he taught with his heart 
     as well as his intellect, and the immediate pressures on the 
     environment of the Southwest--which he worked to alleviate.
       Curiosity also fired his perception of our continent as a 
     single region--well before most policymakers even thought of 
     it as a single market.
       His thirst to make sense of history fed his skill as a 
     teacher and his vision as a citizen.
       If you, as his grandchildren, take some measure of his 
     curiosity out the door with you every day, your lives will 
     surely have the richness and satisfaction that his had.
       His last, great gift to you is actually one he inherited, 
     lost and regained.
       It is his sense of this place to which he so deeply 
     belonged, to the Southwest, to New Mexico, to Santa Fe.
       His mind traveled far and wide, but his heart was always 
     here. Born in New Mexico, John spent much of his childhood in 
     Colorado.
       For education he went east. He started his school years in 
     New England as a scholarship student at Putney School to 
     which he returned as a teacher, then a trustee, father of 
     three Putney students, and then chairman of the board. The 
     help he got from Putney, and the help he in turn gave to make 
     it an even better school, became a major part of his life.
       But one other school, a school that no longer exists, was 
     probably even more important to him. It was called the Los 
     Alamos Ranch School. Our father, Cecil Wirth, taught there.
       As Bill Carson has reminded us, John's earliest memories 
     were of that oasis on the edge of the beautiful New Mexico 
     desert. His last book, which will be published this fall by 
     the University of New Mexico Press, is a history of this 
     school.
       When some day you read it, you will find your grandfather 
     in its pages. When his childhood ended, your grandfather was 
     younger than Alex is today. Loss upon loss sent him out to 
     find why the world worked the way it did and how to fit it 
     all together.
       In that world, in fact in this church, 42 years ago last 
     week, he married your grandmother. She gave him a wonderful, 
     warm, sustaining love that helped him search, filled so many 
     vacuums, and was his partner in every way. Nancy molded and 
     softened the man whose death we mourn today.
       So, as we grieve, we thank John too for his strong will, 
     exemplary focus and vision, for his energy and legendary 
     enthusiasms, and for his optimism.
       He gave us much and left his own legacy, broad and deep.
       Thank You.

  Mr. BINGAMAN. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

[[Page 12529]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. LEVIN. 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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