Remarks of Walter F. Mondale
U.S. Senate Leader's Lecture Series
September 4, 2002

Recognitions

Thank you, Tom, for that very kind introduction. Tom is a wonderful neighbor an old friend, and a gifted leader. We are very fortunate to have him here.

In preparing for tonight, I read the remarks of all the previous speakers in this Leaders Lecture Series. Together they comprise an invaluable history of the modern U.S. Senate. We owe a special thanks to Minority Leader Trent Lott for creating this unique series.

I want to thank our Senators from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone and Mark Dayton -- both friends, and both doing wonderful work -- for being here tonight. Because I said goodbye to the Senate over 20 years ago, it's all the more touching to see some of my old friends - like Danny Inouye, Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, Fritz Hollings, Bob Byrd, Joe Biden, Ted Stevens and Pete Domenici -- still here serving our nation. I especially want to recognize two very close friends and colleagues of mine from those days, Gaylord Nelson and John Culver, and my valiant running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, who is also here tonight.

Above all, I want to recognize my family: Ted and Pam; Eleanor and Paul; and William. Joan and I are very proud of them.

Senate Then and Now

I find it very moving to be back before the Senate. With each step I take here, I'm overwhelmed by memories. I loved this place. It's awesome to meet in this brilliantly restored old Senate Chamber where so much of America's early history was shaped.

When I arrived here late in 1964, I was drawn to this room, often coming alone to spend time here. It had been almost abandoned. I arrived here just as the nation, and the courts, had decided that official discrimination must go. The old deals, we learned, did not work, but instead made us two people -- and in many ways, two nations.

Now our beautiful old Senate Chamber reminds us of our origins… and reminds us that it was in our own time that we finally ended official discrimination, allowed the vote, opened our schools and colleges, united our armed forces, and finally became a truly United States of America.

My first congress, the 89th, was truly remarkable. Our caucus had 68 Senators. [Tom, did you hear that figure?]

We quickly passed one landmark act after another: civil rights, voting rights, fair housing, Medicare, elementary and secondary education, the basic environmental laws, and lots more.

I remember sitting in the senate dining room late one afternoon having coffee with some other new Senators. Hubert Humphrey, now Vice President, was seated at a nearby table. I said in an overly-loud voice, "You know, Hubert has been bragging about his support of these bills for years . But I've only been here three months, and we' ve passed them all. This is easy!" Hubert, who was listening, rocketed out of his seat. Fortunately I don't remember what he said.

My Senate years were the happiest of my public career. I found my sweet spot here. I loved working with friends and colleagues. I loved learning new things. I loved watching my colleagues do their stuff. It reminded me of what Mark Twain once said: that "politicians either grow, or they swell." Eighteen hours a day, every day, it was like mainlining human nature.

Senator and Vice President

I am one of the few, in this Leaders Lecture Series, who has served both in the Senate and as Vice President. I can tell you from personal experience: those two jobs are very different.

Since the start of our nation, the Vice Presidency had been an awkward office, its occupants notoriously unhappy. The Constitution assigns the Vice President only one role beyond being available in times of tragedy, and that is to preside over the Senate and break ties when necessary. Here is a public officer, the only one in our system, who belongs to both the executive branch and to the legislative branch. But in a strange way, since the Vice Presidents were in both branches, they have been treated as though they were in neither.

As David McCullough writes in his masterful biography of John Adams, our first Vice President had nothing to do in the executive branch, so he determined to make the Senate his stage. He made speeches and engaged in debates from the chair. He was shut down by the first Senate with such force that he said, "I have no desire ever to open my mouth again upon any question." He didn't know it at the time, but that's pretty much how it's been for the more than 200 years of Vice Presidents who followed.

Even Lyndon Johnson, perhaps the most powerful Majority Leader ever, found the Vice Presidency a devastating comeuppance. It's wonderfully described in Robert Caro's superb history, "Master of the Senate."

All of Washington, Caro wrote, "understood that Johnson had lost all of his power, so completely that he had become almost a figure of ridicule in the capital."

But at least he kept his beautiful Taj Mahal, now called the LBJ room. It was a suite I knew well. After my election to the Vice Presidency, it was given to me as a transition office. But shortly after I moved in, I received a touching call from Senator Byrd. I thought he was calling to talk about Cicero and the origins of the Senate. Instead, he said, "I want you out of there by January 2nd."

I was prepared to go. And where I went was to an office never previously occupied by any other Vice President in our history - an office in the West Wing, just steps from the Oval Office. I was given that office by Jimmy Carter, who was determined to do more with the Vice Presidency than had ever been done before.

After we were elected, he asked for a written proposal of my ideas about the office. Dick Moe, my Chief of Staff, helped me prepare it. President Carter agreed to all of it. In retrospect, it redefined the Vice Presidency in our government. As someone later wrote, it "executivized" the Vice Presidency.

The changes went beyond a West Wing office. Starting with my Vice Presidency, and continuing, I believe, to today, the Vice President has access to all the information the President receives, including daily intelligence briefings. He has complete access to the President, and to all the Administration's leaders, and a standing invitation to all the President's meetings. He is the President's trouble-shooter, at home and abroad. He helps develop the Administration's legislative agenda, and its budget. He has a key voice in appointments. He is second in the military chain of command, in case of Presidential incapacitation. When other government officers or foreign leaders hear from him, they know he speaks for the President.

In the years since I was Vice President, I have been particularly interested to read and hear how my successors fared in that office. Ronald Reagan's Vice President, George Bush, it was said, was the most powerful Vice President in history. Then Dan Quayle was the most powerful Vice President in history. Then Al Gore was the most powerful Vice President in history. And now Dick Cheney is the most powerful Vice President in history.

All true. Collectively, from Mondale to Cheney, the Vice Presidency of the past quarter-century is dramatically more powerful and influential than it had ever been in the two centuries that preceded it.

The World's Upper Chambers

I have always been struck by how our American Senate - unlike practically every other upper parliamentary body around the world - has gained in power through the years, while other upper bodies have been weakened or eliminated.

Today there is nothing like the United States Senate to be found anywhere else in the world.

Nearly alone among the nations of the world, our Senate shares equal or superior power with the other legislative body. What explains that? Well, of course, our federal system places fundamental importance upon equal representation of the states. But it doesn't end there.

The Power to Debate and Expose

I believe another reason is to be found in our unique Senate rules, which vest enormous power in each individual Senator. When majorities prevail in our Senate, it is only by leave of minorities. Each Senator has the power to debate - to speak, to ventilate, to delay, to be heard, perhaps without limit. Each Senator has the power to expose, and through their committees, the power to investigate and require disclosure.

And, with six years, each Senator has the gift of time. Time to listen to others. Time to think, to read, to debate. Time for courage. Time to risk defeat - and sometimes, knowingly, to accept defeat - for our country and our future.

Closure

As some of you may remember, I was involved in several long and sometimes bitter debates over the cloture rule. When I traveled around the world, I always asked parliamentary leaders how their rules governed the closing of debate. How did they get to a vote? Wherever I went, I always got the strangest, confused response. They couldn't explain it. Somehow, their leadership just called a vote. Of course, every Senator here learns the answer to that question on the first day. It's what our Senate legislative power is all about.

When I first came to the Senate I thought a simple majority should be enough to end debate. I had seen the cloture rule abused in the past, especially on civil rights. The old rules permitted almost endless talk. Many senators were developing a post-cloture filibuster strategy where, even after a successful cloture vote, they could still carry on forever, reading and amending the journal, the chaplain's prayer, filing hundreds of amendments, with no end in sight.

It had to be changed, and it was, to what now is called the Byrd Rule. But to end a filibuster still requires 60 votes, and I believe that is about right. It's a balancing act. You need to be able to close off debate. But you also need to give an individual Senator the power to stop everything in this country, and rip open an issue in a way that no other institution in America can.

It can't happen in the House: their rules of debate are very different. It can't happen via news conferences. It can't happen on talk shows: that's entertainment, not debate. Only the Senate can stop the nation in its tracks. It's the only body in the world that allows it. As George Mitchell said in his lecture in this series, during the Irish peace negotiations, every time he refused to cut speakers off, he explained that he acquired his political training in the United States Senate. "The right of unlimited debate," he said in this room, "is a rare treasure which you must safeguard. Of course, it can be, and it is, abused. But that is the price that must be paid, and the privilege is worth the price."

The Power to Expose

Besides the power to debate, Senators have the power to discover; the ability to investigate, issue subpoenas hold hearings, and to conduct thoroughgoing oversight of the executive branch.

I remember when, as a young Senator, I met with some French officials the day the Watergate hearings began. One of them said to me, "This is such an astounding thing -- that it's possible for a parliamentary body to call the highest officials of the government before them and make them account for their actions. This would never happen in France."

I bet it wouldn't happen in most places. Our ability to demand an accounting has set us apart from the rest of the world. The ability of the Senate to discover all relevant information, despite the resistance of the executive, is an essential check on executive power. In fact, the power to know should be seen as one of the indispensable elements of the Senate's vitality and one of the basic reasons that America is the most powerful democratic country in the world.

The Genius of Our System

What a wonderful world it would be if we didn't need the power to expose. What a paradise we would live in, if trust were never abused.

But our founders knew better. They built our system on this deep insight into human nature: we're not perfect. We are, all of us, mixtures of good and base, lofty and lowly, selfless and selfish. We are capable of sonatas, sonnets, and cathedrals. But we are also capable of greed, paranoia, and a dangerous thirst for power. Shakespeare would have been nowhere without that insight.

As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist #51, men are no angels. From that insight came our system of checks and balances. Instead of pretending that the lesser angels of our nature don't exist, or adopting the conceit of many tyrannies that humankind can be deformed into something new, we created a system of checks and balances that pits ambition against ambition.

While I was Senator, I often looked longingly down Pennsylvania Avenue, and wondered why they had all the power. And then shortly thereafter, as Vice President, I remember looking out a White House window in the other direction, and wondering why the Congress had all the power. That's the way the system is supposed to work.

Threats to the Senate

This evening I've said why I think the Senate is uniquely powerful. But, I see some challenges threatening to undermine it.

First, the threat posed by the assertion of the right to unaccountable government.

Our nation is in a dangerous war against terrorists who no doubt plan to strike us again with cruel force. I know much of your time, as it must be, is directed against this threat.

But there is always the danger that our fears will overcome our faith in the power of justice and accountability. Whenever we have gone down that road, we have hurt the innocent and embarrassed ourselves. One of our Senators (here tonight) nearly died in combat in the service of our country, in World War II, while some of his Japanese-American relatives were locked up in American concentration camps. Martin Luther King was hounded for years by officials who tagged him as a black hate leader, although we now know he helped save our country.

At these times of tension and fear, our nation has had the tendency to believe that our system of justice is too weak to protect us; that our government's efforts should be beyond discovery and challenge by the Congress because the risks are too great.

I respectfully disagree. Justice and accountability always make us better able to face our enemies. Justice strengthens us. In the 1970s, I served on the Church Committee, which investigated and reported on a broad range of abuses against Americans by American investigative agencies, often at the request of our President and top officials. The heart of the matter is always this: how does our nation perform acts that must be kept secret, while yet being accountable to the Congress, to the courts, and to the American people?

The key result of our work was the establishment of House and Senate committees on intelligence, based on our finding that our secret agencies must be accountable to the Congress. I believe Americans are comforted to know that these committees are in business today, charged with protecting the American people from their adversaries. But I also believe that the great disaster of 9/11, a year ago next week, warrants the creation of a special committee on 9/11. The proposal for this broader, government-wide effort is supported by the victims' families, the American people and Majority Leader Daschle.

There are ample precedents for such a committee, charged with establishing a full record of what happened, together with recommendations to improve our ability to anticipate and prevent future terrorist attacks.

I think the committee might review the powerful model established by Richard Russell when he conducted closed hearings in the famous Truman-MacArthur dispute. While the hearings were closed, each day a declassified transcript of the days hearings was made available to the press. The public could follow the debate while essential secrets were protected. We need something like that today so that the American people can be better informed.

Second, the pressure of big money in politics and its power to compromise and destroy public trust threatens the Senate.

I never met a Senator who liked the hours, and sometimes the humiliation, that campaign fundraising takes. I believe the need to raise big money has diminished the stature of the Senate and of all public bodies. As Senator Byrd has said: it has made us full time fundraisers and part time public officers. Now you have passed a good campaign reform act that begins to close some loopholes. But we must keep at it. As Lincoln once said about public trust, "with [it], nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."

Third, the transformation of news into entertainment, and politics into entertainment, also threatens the Senate.

Journalism used to be about bringing important information to the attention of citizens, and about getting the story straight. Now it seems to be about shouting to get the attention of consumers. Broadcasters used to acknowledge that they have a public interest obligation in exchange for the license that the public has temporarily granted them. Now they act as though they own the spectrum, and owe the public nothing for it in return except profit for shareholders.

Every Senator knows what I'm talking about. You can make a thoughtful case, and with the blessed exception of CSPAN, it will disappear into thin air. It seems that the only way you can get noticed by the mass media is to make sensational charges, to take an extreme point of view, to polarize, to personalize. As a result, not only has news become entertainment; so has politics become a branch of show business.

Another speaker in this series, President Gerald Ford, put it this way:

"The more political parties try to make themselves over into the vehicles of entertainment, the smaller the audience. Perhaps the answer is to stop making politics more like television and, instead, make television pay more attention to politics."

More Than Its Rules

Finally, the threat to the Senate's powers posed by incivility.

The Senate is more than its rules. There are only 100 of us here at one time. You can't live cheek by jowl with people, the way you do in the Senate, without getting to know an awful lot about them. You see people who are really special: I think of Phil Hart -- a saint - and Mike Mansfield, who was so special, always, and my old friend Hubert.

I think the word "greatness" is overused, but there are people who seem to develop this extra capacity for breadth and decency over their lives. The longer I was here in the senate, the more those sorts of things meant to me, and the more I found myself listening to others with different points of view, and wondering whether I was always right. I don't think I was any less committed to my causes. But as judge Learned Hand once said: "The spirit of liberty is to be found in the notion that you might be wrong." Our beloved U.S. Senate allows something special to come out of anyone who enters the place. It doesn't elevate everyone, but it permits it.

I've heard from many that the Senate has changed since I left it, that the debates are harsher, more partisan, that there is less time to think, less time to meet together socially; and some fear that basic civility has been shattered.

If that is true, the Senate could lose the essential capacity, in good times and in bad, which has enabled it to serve the deepest needs of our nation. I profoundly hope that has not, and will not, come to pass.

When America was first imagined, John Winthrop said it should be "a city on a hill." He didn't mean Capitol Hill. But he might have. The city on this hill is in your hands. May you have the wisdom and the power to protect it always. We really need it.

Thank you very much.

 

 

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