Tribute to the Honorable Ernest F. Hollings

TRIBUTE TO THE HONORABLE ERNEST F. HOLLINGS

Mr. INOUYE. Mr. President, it has come to my attention that Mr. Mark Shields, whose syndicated column appears in more than 100 newspapers, including The Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times, paid tribute in a recent column to our dear friend and colleague, the Honorable ERNEST F. HOLLINGS.

That column was most insightful, as it examined the character of Senator FRITZ HOLLINGS, who, unfortunately, has announced that he will not be seeking reelection to the U.S. Senate after nearly four decades of service in this Chamber.

I hope that throughout the history of our Nation there will always be a FRITZ HOLLINGS. As Mr. Shields noted in his column, FRITZ HOLLINGS "was a leader of uncommon courage and uncommon candor." Indeed, FRITZ HOLLINGS'
leadership, courage, and candor will be sorely missed.

I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Shields' column, as it appeared on September 5, 2003, in The State, one of the newspapers in Senator Hollings' home State of South Carolina, be printed in the RECORD.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

A CANDIDATE WITH THAT RAREST OF ATTRIBUTES: CANDOR

(By Mark Shields)

On Oct. 6, 1983, in a televised debate among Democratic presidential candidates, one candidate said the following about the 1,800 U.S. Marines whom the Reagan administration had then sent to warring Lebanon: "If they were sent there to fight, they were too few. If they were sent there to die, they are too many."

Less than three years later in Beirut, just before dawn on Oct. 23, a terrorist driving a truck loaded with thousands of pounds of explosives plowed into the Marine barracks and killed 241 Americans.

That same presidential candidate went on Nov. 4, 1983, to Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League school with an advantaged student body, and shocked the undergraduates: "I want to draft everyone in this room for the good of the country."

He was not advocating the "old Vietnam-style draft, where if you had enough money, you were either in college or in Canada." His campus audience gasped at the man's discomforting bluntness: "Conscience tells us that we need a cross-section of America in our armed forces. Defense is everybody's business .    .    . everybody's responsibility. A professional army is un-American. It is anathema to a democratic republic—a glaring civil wrong."

You like candor in your political leaders? This Democrat truly brimmed with the stuff.

That July, to a Washington gathering of the National Council of Senior Citizens—a group with political clout in its membership and Social Security and Medicare benefits on its agenda—he refused to coddle.

Instead, in the face of runaway federal budget deficits, he reminded the seniors, not of the obligations owed to them, but of the seniors' own obligation "to your children and grandchildren." He, alone, would say, "If I'm elected, I will freeze your cost-of-living adjustments for a year."

To a Capitol Hill meeting of defense contractors, pleased and prosperous with President Reagan's doubling of the Pentagon budget, the candidate, himself a combat veteran of World War II, had been frank: "If I'm elected president, I will freeze the
defense budget at 3 percent real growth and do away with the MX (missile) and the B-1."

Exempted from his proposed spending freeze? Food stamps and assistance to the disabled.

We in the press corps are forever lamenting the lack of candor in our political debates and the lack of courage in our presidential candidates, who are unwilling to ask us to sacrifice even the slightest personal comfort for the national well-being.

But when we do encounter the brand of straightforwardness that this 1984 Democratic candidate practiced, we do not applaud or praise it. Doubts are predictably recorded about "the discipline," the "presidential temperament," even the rashness of the fellow.

That's mostly the press treatment Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C., received when he ran for president and publicly said all of the above and again, earlier this month, when he announced that he would retire after 38 years in the Senate.

True, Hollings gave us a lot to work with. While President Bush was furiously trying to publicly distance himself from the disgraced chief of Enron, Hollings quipped, "I did not have political relations with that man, Ken Lay."

That was a take-off on a discredited disclaimer by President Clinton—of whose then-improving poll ratings, Hollings had quipped, "If they reach 60 percent, then he can start dating again."

When his own presidential campaign failed, Hollings reported that "Thomas Wolfe was wrong—'You can go home again.' I know. That's what the people of New Hampshire told me to do."

But let it be recorded that in 1963, when the states of Alabama and Mississippi, governed respectively by George Wallace and Ross Barnett, were battlefields of bloodshed and bayonets in the struggle for civil rights, a young South Carolina governor delivered a much different message to his state and its Legislature: "(T)his General Assembly must make clear South Carolina's choice, a government of laws rather than a government of men. .    .    . We of today must realize the lesson of 100 years ago, and move on for the good of South Carolina and our United States. This should be done with dignity. It must be done with law and order."

Fritz Hollings was no plaster saint. His tongue was sometimes too sharp. His temper was sometimes too short. But his departure will leave a lonesome place against the sky. He was a leader of uncommon courage and uncommon candor.