John Fitzgerald Kennedy: He Speaks To Us Still

Floor Speech

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Ms. PELOSI. I thank the gentleman for calling this Special Order. Congress has adjourned for the Thanksgiving holiday, but I thank you for staying so that we can acknowledge and observe the 50th anniversary of a great loss for our country.

My colleague, Mr. Larson, spoke so beautifully about what happened on November 22, 50 years ago, and how your mother reacted. You could have been speaking for every family in America.

Certainly, we took special ownership of President Kennedy, as the first Catholic President, but everyone who enjoys firsts understands that that pioneer action, that courage, that success that he had was not just about him being the first Catholic President, but embracing the people of our country more fully.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, 50 years ago, tragedy struck the heart of a Nation in Dallas, Texas. Fifty years ago, President Kennedy was taken from us, suddenly and unexpectedly, and the entire Nation was shaken and mourned.

As you said, we don't want to dwell on that sad day. We want to spring from it and talk about what went before and what has come from the legacy of President John F. Kennedy.

Today, 50 years later, we rise on the floor of the House to pay tribute to him as a leader on the anniversary of a tragedy, with a focus on many victories.

Here, in this Chamber, President Kennedy served. Can you imagine? I take great pride in the fact--all of us who serve here do--that President Kennedy began his Federal service in office in the House of Representatives. His grandfather, Honey Fitz, also served in the House. His grandnephews served in the House. So it has been a Kennedy family tradition to serve in the House of Representatives. He did so as a proud member of the Massachusetts delegation.

I rise to honor the life, legacy, inspiration, and achievements. I rise to salute an extraordinary leader for our country and the world.

I feel emotional about it, listening to Mr. Larson describe the events of the day and the weekend that followed. The beautiful family dignity that Mrs. Kennedy and the children demonstrated have made a mark on our hearts. We are so pleased that, as the President said last night, as we are here, Caroline is drawing crowds in Tokyo.

As a student, I had the privilege of being there when President Kennedy was inaugurated. I had the privilege of meeting him as a student in high school in Baltimore, Maryland, when my father was mayor. I spent an evening with him because my mother couldn't attend a dinner. She said she couldn't attend, but it enabled me to attend in her place as the First Lady of Baltimore. So I had the privilege to be sitting with President Kennedy and to be dazzled by his presentation to the United Nations Association of Maryland Dinner honoring Jacob Blaustein, a leader in our community. My father was mayor, and I was very lucky.

So on other occasions during the course of his campaign, I had the privilege of being in service to that campaign in terms of, one time, we had a show called ``Senator Kennedy Answers Your Questions.'' I was in college at the time, and I was one of the people answering the phone and hearing the questions. All of the questions were about seniors and health at the time. This was before Medicare, and it was an important issue for the President.

In any event, on that happy day on January 20, 1961, I had the privilege of being there in the freezing cold to hear the President's inaugural address. His stirring address still echoes in the hearts of those who were there and in all others who heard his call to serve. He appealed to the energy, the faith and the devotion that will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

What inspiring words. Perhaps the most significant of all, he ushered in a new era with a simple, yet powerful, call to start anew, declaring, ``Let us begin.''

So we began to answer the call to carry forward the torch to ask what we could do for our country. We began to get America moving again, and we began an era that would recast America's future, that would set us on course to address so many of the challenges facing us 50 years ago and still confronting our Nation today.

As I reference his ``ask not what you can do for your country,'' everybody knows that that was an important part of the President's call to action in that day:

Citizens of America, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

It is memorized by students all over the world--when he delivered it, it was so stirring--but what I remember is the very next sentence.

In the very next sentence, he says:

To the citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for mankind.

It was just so beautiful. No wonder one of his first actions would be to establish the Peace Corps, a renewed beginning in witnessing the creation of the Peace Corps--a group of Americans serving as ambassadors of goodwill worldwide. It was then started under the leadership of Sergeant Shriver's brother-in-law. To this day, each Peace Corps volunteer is a tribute to President Kennedy.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of being in Massachusetts under the auspices of the Kennedy Library, where we had observed the 50th anniversary of the President's signing of the Equal Pay Act into law--legislation he called a first step to ending the unconscionable practice of unequal pay, this agenda the President had imagined of equal pay for equal work for women in the workplace. He also established a commission on the status of women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt. Its recommendations were: raise the minimum wage; equal pay for equal work; child care as an initiative, both public and with tax credits.

So forward thinking. So much of it is still left to be done 50 years later, but it is part of the vision. Again, with great women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Esther Peterson and others, they were with him as he signed the bill. Today, as I mentioned, that battle continues. If President Kennedy were here, he would certainly beckon us to do more to take the next step, which we have done.

When women succeed, America succeeds--with legislation to have respect for women's work in the workplace and to raise the minimum wage, as 62 percent of the people who get minimum wage are women. There is equal pay for equal work. There is paid sick leave and child care, which is an important part of President Obama's agenda.

As for the fight for equality even in the workplace, President Kennedy became the first President to call civil rights, above all, a moral issue, Mr. Speaker, he said, to remind us it was long time past to keep the promise of freedom. So he put forward a civil rights bill to right the wrongs of history. In his name and in the wake of his death in the years that followed, under the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson, the Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Yet, still today, the march to civil rights is not finished completely; and in the time of the present, it remains our moral obligation to preserve, expand, and strengthen voting rights. That is our challenge now in the House--equality. So let us begin.

There are so many other things that we witnessed. It is hard for people to imagine now how impossible it sounded when the President said: a new beginning and bold action and exploration and of the commitment and the promise to be the first to honor. He said, if we are to honor the vows of our Founders, we must be first, and therefore we intend to be first. It was a commitment and a promise to invest in science and innovation. When he said, in 10 years, we would send a man to the Moon and be back safely, it seemed impossible; but it happened even in a shorter period of time. He laid out his vision to do what was hard and unthinkable; but by the close of the 1960s, as we know, two American men walked on the Moon and returned safely home. So many other people were part of that success.

Our beginning ignited the fires of all kinds of innovation that our country has benefited from. Even though he wasn't there to see all of the legislation through, he had his vision; and he was an inspiration for others to get the job done.

So many times we all quote President Kennedy because he was so quotable and because he was so wise, and what he said resonates and is timeless. So, when I had the privilege of speaking at the groundbreaking of the Institute of Peace, I quoted what President Kennedy said at the American University in 1963.

He said:

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already more than enough of war and hate and oppression.

He went on to say:

We shall be prepared if others wish it; we shall be alert to try to stop it; but we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just.

So remarkable.

Again, it would take hours for us to truly mention all of the accomplishments--the Moon shot and all the things about the Test Ban Treaty. The list goes on and on.

The fact is that a person came into the life of America from a family--and it is hard to imagine any other family in America that has had or who has made as great a contribution to the well-being of our country as the Kennedy Family, starting even with Rose Kennedy's father, Honey Fitz, but then coming through to even now the service in the Congress of Joe Kennedy, a grandnephew of the President. We also had the privilege here of serving with Patrick Kennedy.

So I will end where I began, in taking pride in the fact of President Kennedy's association with this House of Representatives, of this people's House, and to say that I am so happy that I had the opportunity to see him so many times. I will just close with one thought.

We were at the convention in Los Angeles. I was with my parents. We went to a restaurant after the President's speech at the stadium. It was the first time

a President had accepted the nomination at a stadium. There were tens of thousands of people there. The speech was fabulous and great, and we went to this restaurant called Romanoff's because I said to my father and mother that I wanted to go to a Los Angeles-type restaurant. It turned out to be a Los Angeles-type in that it was very expensive. It was more expensive for shrimp cocktail than it would have been in Baltimore, Maryland, where we were from.

So my father said, How did you find this place? This is the most expensive restaurant I have ever been in.

I said, That is probably true, but it is an experience.

It costs so much more for a shrimp cocktail here than in Baltimore, Maryland; and he goes on and on.

In another few minutes, the doors of the restaurant open, and in comes President Kennedy from the speech. He came right over to the table.

To my father, Thomas D'Alessandro, he asked, Tommy, how did you like my speech?

Of course, my father told him, and then he asked me how I liked his speech. Imagine that. Then he went on with his entourage to have his celebratory dinner.

After that, price was no object as to the cost of the restaurant. The prices kept coming down in my father's view.

Again, I was lucky many different times to have the opportunity to have some conversation with the President. So, when that horrible thing happened that day for our country, everybody took it very personally.

Perhaps part of his legacy is the sacrifice that he made for our country--the inspiration that was intensified by that sacrifice. May we always, always remember it; and may we always remember what he said, that the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

May God bless the memory of President John F. Kennedy and his family. May we draw strength from his legacy and his vision. May God always bless the country he loved and led--the United States of America--and all who serve it.

With that, Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Larson again for calling this Special Order. I am honored to be here with him and with our distinguished whip, Mr. Hoyer.

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