[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14097-14098]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                        REMEMBERING JAMES FOLEY

  Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I would like to honor James Foley, a 
proud son of New Hampshire, whose life was guided by love--love for the 
humanity he devoted his life to documenting, love for his family 
members who worked tirelessly to secure his release, and love for God 
who brought him strength and comfort, even in the darkest moments.
  The entire Nation was saddened to hear the news about Jim. It was 
with a heavy heart that I joined the Foley family and a crowd of nearly 
1,000 on August 24 at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish in Rochester, 
NH, to memorialize Jim and reflect upon how he chose to live his life.
  As we here pause to remember Jim, we cannot allow those responsible 
for his death to fill us with sorrow and despair. Though the sense of 
loss remains, through Jim's life we may hope to rediscover a sense of 
optimism and goodness--the same feelings that motivated him as a 
journalist to search for humanity in the world's darkest and most 
dangerous places.

[[Page 14098]]

  When I think of Jim, I will remember his fierce passion for his work 
and for the people whose stories he lived to tell. I will remember the 
interminable spirit of his parents, Diane and John. And I will remember 
how New Hampshire, and Americans across the country, came together to 
support the Foleys.
  Jim Foley's life began in Wolfeboro, a small New Hampshire town on 
the shores of Lake Winnipesauke. He graduated in 1992 from Kingswood 
Regional High School, where classmates remember him as light-hearted, 
but also caring and eager to see the world. As the oldest of Diane and 
John Foley's five children, James developed a strong sense of 
responsibility for others.
  Jim was known in his family for running late because wherever he went 
he ran into friends and colleagues who wanted to stop and catch up with 
him. Jim's uncommon kindness earned him the trust and friendship of 
people across the United States and the world.
  Jim's compassion for others and his desire to learn their stories is 
what motivated his life's work. According to his parents, Jim's 
exposure to the poverty of inner-city Milwaukee while attending 
Marquette University led him to realize that people are often shaped by 
events and circumstances out of their control, and that it was within 
his power to tell their stories.
  He carried this mission with him throughout his life and used it as a 
basis for his work in conflict zones.
  After graduating from Marquette, Jim started down the path that would 
turn him into the successful journalist he became. He first taught 
history for 3 years at middle school in Phoenix, AZ, a world away from 
his upbringing in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire.
  Eager to learn how best to turn his experiences into compelling 
stories, he went on to complete master's degrees in writing and 
journalism at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Northwestern 
University. Classmates of Jim's at Northwestern recall that when one of 
his professors assigned him to cover a neighborhood in the Lower West 
Side of Chicago, Jim decided to move there, a telling decision for a 
future frontline journalist.
  Jim later gained experience in conflict reporting while covering U.S. 
military operations as an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
but he worried that being removed from the local population detracted 
from his reporting to people back home.
  When a wave of popular revolutions swept the Middle East and North 
Africa in the spring of 2011, Jim knew that he needed to bear witness 
to this incredible phenomenon from the perspective of those living 
through it.
  Jim left for Libya, where he provided critical stories on the Libyan 
civil war until he was captured and imprisoned for 44 days by pro-
Gadhafi forces.
  Others who were detained with Jim tell stories of his unending 
selflessness toward his fellow prisoners--how he shared food, blankets 
and an endless stream of jokes to help everyone cope with a difficult 
and scary situation.
  Furthermore, when Jim returned to the U.S. after his release, he was 
frequently asked to tell the story of his capture and detention. 
Instead of focusing on his own experience, Jim used the publicity to 
raise money for the family of a colleague who had been killed in the 
attack that led to Jim's capture. It was Jim's nature to care more 
about others than he did about his own personal successes or accolades.
  In his reporting from Libya, Jim discovered that his passion was in 
helping the world relate to those in the middle of unimaginable 
conflict, and he would soon return to the region, this time to Syria, 
where Bashar al-Assad was escalating his brutal tactics of repression 
to maintain control of the country.
  It was in the Syrian chaos that observers began to talk about rise of 
a group of militant Islamists calling themselves the Islamic State of 
Iraq and Syria, the same group that would later hold Jim hostage for 
637 days alongside a handful of other innocent journalists and aid 
workers.
  Thanks to a message Jim passed to his family through a fellow 
prisoner who was released, we know that his close relationship with God 
and his family provided him with strength in captivity.
  In the letter, he thanked his family and friends for their thoughts 
and prayers, and recounted treasured memories from time spent together. 
Most strikingly, he spent most of his words offering encouragement and 
support to those he loved. Even in the most trying circumstances, Jim 
Foley refused to abandon his core concern for others over himself.
  We will always remember Jim for his compassion and devotion to the 
lives and stories of others, even in the most difficult conditions.
  We are all proud to call James Foley our fellow American.

                          ____________________