[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Pages 1375-1377]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO NANCY STETSON

  Mr. KERRY. Madam President, one of the best things about the Senate 
and the character of this place and the opportunity it provides all of 
us is we are privileged to work with people as our experts on our 
committees and our aides who, even more than many of us, dedicate 
decades to this institution and to the causes that bring them to public 
service.
  They do it selflessly, never seeking the headlines but always trying 
to shape those headlines, making contributions that are most often left 
in the unwritten history of this institution and of the country.
  The fact is, though, as my colleagues know, it is these individuals 
and their commitment that really writes that history and makes an 
unbelievable contribution to the country as a whole.

[[Page 1376]]

  One such person I have had the privilege of working with for the 
entire time I have been here, for 22-plus years. No one is a more 
dedicated, harder working, more idealistic, passionate, and effective 
example of that special kind of public service than Dr. Nancy Stetson 
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is retiring this year 
after over 25 years of remarkable service--groundbreaking service, 
really--to the Senate.
  As a young and idealistic doctoral student, Nancy first came to 
Washington to work on her thesis and to ask the question whether a 
single legislator could make a difference in the shaping of American 
foreign policy. Her subject was Senator ``Scoop'' Jackson and the long 
record that he amassed in the Cold War through the legislation that to 
this day bears his name, the Jackson-Vanik waiver.
  Nancy found that on Capitol Hill, despite the Historians' fixation on 
the rise and fall of the imperial Presidency, one Senator can make a 
lasting impact on America's role in the world. But it has really been 
for her role to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to me 
personally that I want to pay her tribute today.
  She began working for Senator Pell from her beloved home State of 
Rhode Island and, then, of course, for Chairman Biden. I really 
inherited her in a sense from Senator Pell because when we came into 
the majority in 1986, Senator Pell was a chairman who believed in 
delegating responsibility. I was then the chairman of one of the 
subcommittees that had jurisdiction over the State Department budget 
and a number of issues that sort of brought Nancy to me.
  So there she was, one Senate staffer with a lot more knowledge on how 
the committee and the Senate worked than I had. She was committed, 
dogged, and determined to make this kind of impact or to affect the 
life of a Senator life who was trying to make that impact.
  So I ask my colleagues to consider the legacy of this remarkable 
staff person. Among her many proud accomplishments as a senior aide on 
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the South Africa sanctions 
bill and the normalization of relations between America and Vietnam 
that culminated in the signing of the United States-Vietnam trade 
agreement in the last Congress.
  I am also particularly proud of Nancy's work as the principal 
architect of the Vietnam Education Foundation and the Vietnam Fulbright 
Program. These are two programs that we worked on during the 1990s 
together, but it was really her sense of the possible and her 
willingness to do a lot of the detail work that helped to bring them to 
maturity.
  Working with a very close friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran from 
Massachusetts, we helped to shape, and she helped to shape, what is now 
the largest Fulbright program of the U.S. Government, the program with 
Vietnam. We have students from Vietnam studying at Harvard in 
Massachusetts and likewise professors and others going from Harvard to 
Vietnam to help train their new technicians and leaders of the future.
  I think Nancy and I both believed for the years we spent in a war 
that became so controversial and tore this country apart--which set out 
as our goal to transform a country, Vietnam--that this was the best way 
to complete that task; that the war in a sense had not ended, and there 
was a way to try to ultimately make peace with Vietnam, with ourselves, 
and build a new future for that country and for ours.
  This Vietnam Education Foundation and this Fulbright program have 
been instrumental in helping us to do that. And today, Vietnam is 
simply a transformed, extraordinarily different country. It was an 
innovative policy, and it was a master stroke of public diplomacy for 
which Nancy deserves enormous credit. Without her vision and her 
perseverance, we would not be able to talk today, in foreign policy, in 
terms that say that Vietnam is not just a war but a country. It became 
a country because of this kind of effort and this kind of outreach in 
the consciousness of Americans.
  We have a relationship today that we could have never imagined when 
so many of us were in uniform so many years ago. It is no exaggeration 
to say that entire effort of normalization also was part of Nancy's 
craftsmanship. And I will talk about that in a moment.
  In addition to the normalization with Vietnam, Nancy contributed 
enormously to global health issues and to some of the most significant 
policies of any industrialized country against diseases of poverty. Her 
work on malaria, TB, and AIDS, where she fought to significantly 
increase the U.S. contribution to the Global AIDS Fund, were among her 
proudest accomplishments. People across the world today literally owe 
their lives to Nancy's work.
  I remember when we began that effort, Senator Helms was then 
chairman, and a lot of people said: You are never going to get anything 
through this committee. Well, with slow and steady work, we not only 
got it through the committee, we got Senator Helms, to his credit, to 
be one of the principal cosponsors of this effort.
  Together with Senator Frist, we drafted the first original 
comprehensive plan on AIDS that passed the Senate and which became the 
centerpiece of how we are approaching particularly Sub-Sahara and 
Africa today, but really our global efforts to try to deal with this 
scourge that is growing, I might say notwithstanding those efforts, for 
lack of global initiative and effort to focus on it.
  Over the last 22 years in the Senate, Nancy Stetson and I traveled to 
many parts of the world. We went to Latin America, to Central America, 
to East Asia, to the Middle East, to dozens of countries on more trips 
than I can count. And I will tell you something. Nancy has the ability 
to win the ``Amazing Race,'' for those of you who have ever seen it. 
She secured meetings with heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and 
unsung health advocates in some of the poorest countries of the world.
  She pulled me and other staffs through the wilds of Myanmar, 
negotiated travel to remote areas of Vietnam, handled the logistical 
complexities of visiting Indonesia, Cuba. She gave up weekends, 
holidays, and vacations. And on trips she would stay up into the night, 
preparing for a press conference or a speech or a policy statement, and 
convincing the hotel business centers to open at 2 a.m. in Hanoi or 
Bangkok.
  She gave up her 50th birthday. We celebrated it in New Delhi. It is 
hard to overstate the long hours, the incredible effort, the passion, 
and the personal sacrifice that Nancy has put into working for me and 
for her country.
  She was indefatigable, and I am incredibly grateful. I might add that 
on occasion there were some very tricky moments in Vietnam when we were 
trying to open prisons and open the history centers in order to resolve 
the issue of POW-MIA, and it required some delicate negotiations. For 
American soldiers to be reentering Vietnamese prisons and communities 
by helicopter was an emotional leap for the Vietnamese to make. Nancy 
built wonderful relationships with leaders, with those people who could 
make those doors open. And, indeed, they did. I am grateful to her for 
that.
  She was incredibly loyal, brilliant, blunt, honest, absolutely smart 
as a tack, and wiley. She always asked the questions that needed to be 
asked of me. Time and time again, when I failed to ask the right 
question before a witness at our committee, I could always expect that 
tap on the shoulder and the passing of a note, a reminder from Nancy of 
what really should have been said or really should have been asked.
  Part prosecutor, part conscience, part intellectual, on matters of 
foreign policy, I was proud to think of her as an alter ego. And I hope 
that in some of my better moments, if there were a few, she thought the 
same of me.
  She could step in as a surrogate Senator at the drop of a hat, and I 
mean that literally. When a massive fire took the lives of six of our 
firefighters in Worcester, MA, immediately--I was in Asia at the time 
in Myanmar and about to meet with Aung San Suu

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Kyi--and I immediately canceled all my meetings and flew back to be in 
Worcester. But Nancy stayed there and soldiered on and went to my 
meetings for me. In Burma, meeting with dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, she 
was herself living out her own commitment on the diplomatic stage with 
poise and with courage and with intelligence that I think is a credit 
to the Senate.
  Nancy's first love was Africa. She started her career focusing on it. 
Many years later, she returned to work on the devastating health issues 
plaguing the continent now. She had a knack for seeing reality quicker 
than most. She was never swept up by the headlines or the political 
sales pitch.
  She was prescient in seeing the disastrous path that has played out 
in Iraq for what it is and for helping me to devise a policy going 
forward. She has never been afraid to act on her conscience.
  Nancy is headed now to Massachusetts to become the vice president for 
health policy at the New England Health Care Institute. Her Senate 
family will miss her more than we can ever properly express. Even as we 
wish her good luck and much happiness in her new endeavor, I hope she 
knows she is not going to escape my badgering e-mails or 3 a.m. phone 
call from Baghdad or Amman to mine her thoughts.
  I have worked with Nancy longer and probably more closely than I have 
worked with just about anyone in my time in the Senate. As I mentioned, 
we traveled the world together. Although she may not realize it--I may 
not have said it in so many words in those long flights to Asia or 
back, or during the many long hours and late nights here in the 
Senate--I know in my heart I could not have done it without her energy, 
without her drive, her grit, her tough-mindedness, and her loyalty.
  She has worked long and hard without ever getting the credit she 
rightly deserves for the amazing things she accomplished in her time in 
the Senate. So I just want to say thank you to this special woman for 
her contributions to this institution and to our country.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
  Ms. STABENOW. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, may I inquire as to how long this 
presentation will be?
  Ms. STABENOW. No more than 10 minutes.
  Mr. BENNETT. I have no objection.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The Senator from Michigan.
  Ms. STABENOW. I say thank you very much to my distinguished colleague 
from Utah managing the floor.

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