[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 19]
[Senate]
[Pages 25537-25539]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            A FOND FAREWELL

  Mr. GRAHAM of Florida. Mr. President, my 18-year tenure in the Senate 
has capped an extremely satisfying personal experience with great 
rewards and gratification of public service. These have been some of 
the most significant influences on my life. The greatest influence, of 
course, has been my family.
  I was born into a family with good values and an admiration for 
education and an interest in politics. In February of 1936, my mother 
and father made two significant decisions. First, my father, who was a 
mining engineer by education and a dairy farmer by occupation, a man 
who had become extremely distressed at the level of underworld 
corruption in Dade County, FL, decided to run for the Florida State 
Senate to represent that county on a platform of cleaning up underworld 
corruption.
  The second decision my parents made in February of 1936 was to have a 
baby. I was the happy result of that second decision. My mother says 
that I came by my political instincts from the womb, that she spent her 
whole pregnancy going to political activities and that I became 
addicted.
  Throughout my public career, I have had the love and support of my 
partner of 45 years, Adele. No person in public life could have a more 
loving, a more caring, and a more contributing partner than I.
  At one point, Adele used to be nervous in public settings. Today, I 
wish I had her calm, her persuasiveness, her effectiveness in public 
settings. Together, we have had the privilege of raising four wonderful 
daughters, two of whom were born after our first election to public 
office.
  All of those qualities have been enhanced during my Senate years, 
including the addition of 11 grandchildren. On Thanksgiving Day I 
shared a special tradition with 9 of those 11 grandchildren when they 
joined me here at this desk on the Senate floor and observed and 
critiqued my skills--and lack of skills--as I carved my name into the 
Senate desk.
  The second greatest influence is my home, the State of Florida. I 
thought I knew a lot about Florida as a native and as a two-term 
Governor, but I have learned so much more during the last 18 years. 
Since 1974, I have been taking different jobs, jobs alongside fellow 
Floridians, and as of last Thursday I have done 406 of these workdays; 
214 of them have been done since I became a Member of the Senate. Even 
though my day job is 1,000 miles away from where many Floridians live, 
these workdays have been an important part of maintaining a close 
relationship with my fellow Floridians and reminding me what our 
priorities should be on their behalf here in Washington. Workdays and 
my experiences in Congress have taught me ways in which the Federal 
Government affects the lives of typical Americans and, most acutely, 
Floridians.
  I come from a State which is marked with dramatic growth in a very 
fragile environment, with a close affiliation with the countries to the 
south of the United States, a State in which one out of five of our 
citizens is over the age of 65, and therefore programs such as Medicare 
and Social Security take on a very special significance. How we conduct 
a law-based immigration system with humanity intimately affects many of 
our people, as does the obligation to use power responsibly. All of 
these issues I have learned about at greater depth during my service in 
the Senate.
  What I have also gained in my three terms here is an appreciation of 
the institution of the Senate and the unique role it plays in balancing 
our Government in order to avoid excessive power falling into the hands 
of any one person or governmental institution.
  One of our greatest responsibilities as Members of the Senate is to 
assure an independent judiciary. I am especially pleased that I was 
able to join my Florida colleagues in the Senate in establishing and 
maintaining a bipartisan, merit-based process by which we recommended 
and confirmed applicants for the Federal judiciary.
  Particularly, I am gratified by the work I did with former Senator 
Connie Mack. As a Democrat and as a Republican, we forwarded 
outstanding judicial candidates to both Democratic and Republican 
Presidents. Because this process was based on judicial merit, Florida 
nominees have been uniformly and expeditiously accepted for nomination 
and confirmation.
  I also came to see the Senate as our country's best graduate school, 
offering access to private seminars with the best and the brightest, 
supplemented by outside organizations such as the Aspen Institute's 
congressional program and the InterAmerican Dialog's Focus on 
Hemispheric Issues.
  Finally, Mr. President, as with you and your father, I came to 
appreciate the people of the Senate. Simply put, I enjoy being around 
politicians and the people who love politics, including my staff and 
the family of the Senate, and including the journalists who cover our 
activities. I value my relationship with each of my colleagues, and I 
wish I had the time to tell a story about each of you.
  Mr. President, your father was one of the first people I met when I 
came into the Senate. We had a number of things

[[Page 25538]]

in common in our background and quickly formed a friendship which was 
one of the most significant parts, particularly, of my early years in 
the Senate. My grief at his loss is diluted by the knowledge not only 
that he has been followed by his son, but that his son is a person of 
such exemplary qualities as you represent.
  I would also like to single out one of my colleagues, a non-
Floridian, as representative of the over 200 people with whom I have 
served during my tenure in the Senate. Senator Jay Rockefeller has been 
very special to me. We served as Governors at the same time. Jay, as 
much as anyone, encouraged me to run for the Senate.
  I especially treasure the relationships I have had with my 
congressional political mentors such as Congressman Danny Fascell and 
Senator, later Congressman, Claude Pepper, and my Florida colleagues in 
this institution: Lawton Chiles, Connie Mack, and Bill Nelson.
  Bill Nelson is a man I have known for over 40 years. In each stage of 
his life he has been committed to public service and to excellence in 
the execution of that public service. It has been a joy for the last 4 
years jointly representing our 17 million constituents with Bill. I 
greatly admire his contributions to Florida and to the Nation. I wish 
to Senator Nelson a long tenure in the Senate. Florida and America will 
be better places because of his service.
  I am also hugely grateful to those who have been willing to share 
this journey with me, the tens of thousands of people who have worked 
with me in my successful statewide campaigns, and the over 1,000 people 
who have joined me in public service in appointive or staff positions. 
I regret that I do not have time today to name all of them, but 
illustrative of all of them I will mention a few: Buddy Shorstein, Ken 
Klein, and Buddy Menn, all of whom have served as chiefs of staff in 
the Senate; Gary Smith, Dick Burroughs, Charles Reed, Jay Hakes, and 
Tom Herndon, who served in a similar position when I was Governor of 
Florida; Mary Chiles, Ellen Roth, Lula Rodriguez, Susan McGinn, and 
Lydia Mount; Al Cumming and Bob Filippone; Mark Block, John Provenzano, 
and Paul Anderson--these wonderful people and a thousand more who have 
shared this joyful experience in public service.
  Winston Churchill once declared:

       Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the 
     end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

  My friends, the Senate needs to regain its tradition of controlled 
partisanship; in other words, placing country before party. Another of 
my Florida political mentors, former Governor and Senator, Spessard 
Holland, once said that it was the jet airplane that caused the 
greatest change in the culture of the Senate.
  Prior to the jet airplane, Senator Holland and his wife would come in 
the first week of January to Washington, would settle in the hotel 
where they would live while they were here, and they would spend the 
next 6 to 7 months doing the business of America. While they were doing 
that, they would spend time with the families of their colleagues. They 
would become more than just occasional colleagues. They would become 
genuine friends.
  It was out of that development of relationships across regions and 
across parties that the Senate came to earn the title of ``the world's 
most exclusive club.'' And it was the club where the essential bond was 
that of common respect.
  The jet airplane began to change that, because instead of staying 
here for a 5-day workweek and then a weekend of personal relations with 
the families of their colleagues, it became possible for each Member of 
the Senate to leave on Friday to return to their home State for 
whatever request was made of them. The Senator knew that and the 
requesting organization knew that. So it became a matter of political 
necessity to respond.
  The effect of that was not only did the work of the Senate extend 
from 6 to 7 months to today's 7th of December--we have been in session 
now for 11 months and 1 week--it also meant that those weekends of 
personal relationships were largely lost.
  My No. 1 suggestion in this post-jet airplane age is that we try to 
get back to the tradition of spending more time together as families, 
as Americans, rather than as Republicans and Democrats. For instance, 
rather than holding our traditional partisan retreats in the spring of 
the year, huddling as reds and blues, we should go to a retreat as a 
whole Senate celebrating the families of this great institution.
  I point to the pending intelligence reform bill, which I hope we will 
pass in the next day, as an example of what can be done when we 
recognize that an issue is so important to our Nation that we must work 
together to understand the problem and then develop solutions which are 
driven by pragmatism, not ideology.
  I suggest we apply the lessons that are being learned in developing 
and forming and passing intelligence reform to some of the challenges 
that are before us now such as reform of Social Security and Medicare, 
and reform of our energy policy that we as a nation would be well 
served.
  Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1940:

       I do not believe that the common denominator of our great 
     men in public life has not been mere allegiance to one 
     political party, but the disinterested devotion with which 
     they have strived to serve the whole country--and the 
     relative unimportance that they have ascribed to politics 
     compared with the paramount importance of government.

  The Congress should also spend less time looking at the rearview 
mirror for the accidents behind and more time looking out of the front 
windshield.
  Since I have served there for a decade including 18 months as 
chairman, I would cite the Intelligence Committee as a prime example of 
this institutional failure to focus ahead. Prior to September 11, the 
committee spent an inordinate amount of time examining a series of 
mistakes, of acts of treachery and of bureaucratic turf fighting. What 
we failed adequately to do was to look forward to the threats and 
challenges that our intelligence agencies needed to address before 
those threats and challenges resolved into a tragedy. We desperately 
need to apply this principle of looking out the front windshield to our 
accumulative deficits, budgetary deficits, trade deficits, 
transportation and public utilities deficits, education deficits among 
them. These deficits are challenges which this generation, unlike our 
forefathers, is ignoring because they are tough and managing them now 
has political downsides. But it is wrong, it is immoral to let our 
grandchildren do the heavy lifting because we have refused to do so.
  We need to learn again the principle of federalism that our 
forefathers laid out for us. I come out of a Jeffersonian philosophy 
believing that the best governmental decisions are most likely to be 
made by those closest to the citizens who will be affected by those 
decisions. I recognize the importance of a national response to truly 
national issues and to the protection of the civil rights of all 
citizens. But America's great contribution to political thought has 
been federalism, the sharing of responsibility between a central 
government and our 50 individual States.
  I am concerned that this appreciation for federalism has too 
frequently been situational. We at the Federal level, the national 
level, determine what outcome we wish to secure and then support either 
centralization or a distribution of power based on what has a better 
chance of achieving the goal we seek. We would be well advised to 
resist this temptation.
  Daily we are learning from the headlines of Ukraine and Iraq and 
other countries such as America with a diverse population which are 
struggling to secure peace and prosperity. These foreign countries 
remind us of how difficult it is to hold to the model of federalism 
unless we are prepared to treat it with respect even when it may result 
in a different outcome than we would personally prefer.
  Finally, we should support the institution of the Senate. Its 
procedures and prerogatives are not arbitrary but reflect a 
responsibility to balance a complex government which is designed to 
protect the freedoms of the people against the temptation of government 
becoming authoritarian.

[[Page 25539]]

  I would like to give special recognition to Senator Robert Byrd. 
Frankly, when I entered this institution, Senator Byrd and I had some 
disagreements over how we thought the National Government should 
address its priorities. But over the years, I have come to gain 
increasing respect and admiration for his defense of the institution of 
the Senate precisely because it plays such a crucial role in protecting 
our individual freedoms.
  Mine has been a wonderful life, an exciting and unpredictable 
journey. But it is a journey that is not ending but, rather, taking a 
different course. I am planning to travel especially in Latin America 
to teach, to write at least one more book, to continue my years of 
interest in relations within the Western hemisphere and in modernizing 
America's intelligence capability, and finally to fulfill our 
responsibilities to future generational leaders through the creation of 
an institution that instills the values of public service of such great 
Floridians such as LeRoy Collins, Reubin Askew, and our former 
colleague Lawton Chiles.
  These are things that excite me, that inspire me and to which I am 
convinced I can make a better contribution as a private citizen at 
this, the end of the beginning of my life.
  Four years after he left the Presidency, President Harry Truman said:

       I have seen a great many men in public life, and one of 
     their besetting sins is to stay in office too long.

  I decided that I would not be guilty of this common failing, and that 
I should make way for younger men.
  I extend my congratulations to the man Floridians have chosen as my 
successor, soon to be Senator Mel Martinez. I wish him the very best in 
his new role. Mel is a friend. He is a good man who has served Florida 
and America in many different positions of responsibility. I know the 
Senate will welcome him to his new home in the Senate.
  We Floridians have high expectations for Senator Mel Martinez and for 
those who will be serving in the 109th Congress and beyond.
  Goodbye, Mr. President.
  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. ALEXANDER. Mr. 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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