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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, I rise today with my colleagues to pay tribute to a special friend and our former colleague, Senator Kohl of Wisconsin.

I was fortunate enough to be able to serve with Herb Kohl during his service in the Senate and have been equally fortunate to know his wonderful family.

I have been listening to my colleagues describe Senator Kohl, and I thought that I would describe him in a way that Herb Kohl would never describe himself as being. That is because he was too modest.

The fact is, Herb Kohl was really the embodiment of what we Jews know as tikkun olam, which is a belief that all of us have a responsibility to leave our world and our communities better off than we found them. Herb did that day in and day out, living his life always trying to boost the well-being of those less fortunate.

As my colleagues have been saying, Herb Kohl didn't need to go into public service, but what we are all saying today is that public service desperately needs people like Herb Kohl: a successful businessperson, passionate about improving his home State of Wisconsin and his country through public service.

When most people think of a U.S. Senator, my guess is they have an image of somebody who loves to hear themselves talk, puts out a blizzard of news releases, tweets every day, and aims to take credit for lots of stuff. Herb Kohl was just the opposite of all that.

For example, at home in Oregon, I always make a point of going to Boys & Girls Clubs to shoot baskets with the kids in the summer. Again and again, I would encounter young people around lunchtime who came to camp ravenous and got two lunches right away. They weren't just hungry; they had had nothing to eat but a candy bar since the day before.

Local Boys & Girls Clubs helped kids get substantial, nourishing meals, and they are always trying to find ways to get extra food to kids in need, particularly as the week comes to a close and many kids are facing a weekend in the summer not knowing where their next meal would come from.

I assume my colleagues know this. It wasn't until years after I had been going to shoot hoops in the summer with the Boys & Girls Clubs--it wasn't until years later that I found out that Herb Kohl, our Herb Kohl, was giving generous support to those Boys & Girls Clubs for years. But did he say a word about it to my colleagues, to me? We talked basketball all the time, but he never talked about how he stepped in to help all those future hoopsters. And that was Herb Kohl in a nutshell. He would see a need for his community, and without any fanfare, without any notice, without any press releases, Herb Kohl didn't act like a Senator; he just acted in the spirit of tikkun olam. He stepped up. He wanted to help. He never asked for an award, never saw himself with a picture of himself in a blue suit and a red tie getting some kind of award.

A number of Senators over the years--and I think this echoes what my colleagues have said--they said that Herb was very nice to them and very polite. I heard Senator Klobuchar talk about work on antitrust stuff. But a lot of colleagues would come up to you and they would say our first name and they would say: But I haven't really had a lot of extended conversations with Senator Kohl. Now, we know it was not because he was unpleasant or wished somebody ill but because he was very private, putting in the work each day to make good on his pledges to Wisconsin families and so many others.

All of us read the really wonderful, gracious obituary for Senator Kohl in the New York Times. One of the reasons I wanted to come to the floor today was to mention a couple of things that they didn't even manage to get into that wonderful obituary. It was terrific. But let me give some examples.

My background is working with the Gray Panthers, working with the elderly. I was thrilled to be able to work under him when he was chair of the Aging Committee. When it came to seniors, no issue for Senator Kohl was too small or too insignificant for him to tackle. He tackled end-of-life issues and long-term care, addressing unemployment among older workers, protecting seniors from financial abuse, tried to help them save for retirement. All of us could go through this laundry list of accomplishments. Not all of those ideas might have been on the front page of the paper, but they represented the quiet and thoughtful workhorse that Herb Kohl was.

Older Americans had no better ally than they did in Senator Kohl. Through all the partisan infighting, he always worked on those senior issues because he saw that as ground that was exempt from all the pettiness that drives so much of politics.

I will close with this: I was especially appreciative that Senator Kohl, in his quiet way, had the vision to look down the road at big challenges. For example, he talked to me often--and I am sure my colleagues as well--about how the guarantee of Medicare had evolved over the years. In other words, Senator Kohl knew that Medicare was not a voucher, that it wasn't some piece of paper, some snippet of paper; it was a guarantee of Medicare. He also knew that it had evolved over the years. It is still continuing with the prescription drug benefit. He knew the program inside out, and Senator Kohl would always say to me: Let's just keep figuring out how to update the Medicare guarantee, protect the elderly, and promote choice and alternatives without compromising the protections that older people deserve.

Let me just say to my colleagues, as chair of the Finance Committee, if you walk into the Senate Finance Committee room today and you talk about the issues relating to Medicare and Medicare Advantage and them spending $6 billion on garbage advertising, Herb Kohl was telling us years ago there were supposed to be guardrails for that, there were supposed to be protections for that. That was Herb Kohl--thinking down the road as well as helping people today.

So I am really pleased to be here with my good friends, and I will just close with one last point. I think one of my colleagues talked about it. Senator Klobuchar knew that the Senate was kind of a community, and I suspect that there are a few people in the House today who understand that as well. But when staff was working late at night-- they might have a bill or an amendment or something or maybe they would be working on a project where staff was helping the bigger campus community--and it would get to be 8 or 9 o'clock at night and people were kind of hoping that somehow, out of the sky, a pizza would arrive--not with Herb Kohl. When it got to be 9 o'clock, we got ourselves a real dinner, and nobody knew where it came from, but a handful of us did.

Until his last days, Herb Kohl practiced tikkun olam. That is why you have some of my most thoughtful colleagues--the Senate is made up of a lot of people, but I have just been here a few minutes, and I heard Senator Baldwin, Senator Klobuchar, and my partner from Oregon, Senator Merkley. These are the kind of people who also represent the best of public service. That is why all of us are here--because our hearts are heavy today because we so admired him, we so appreciated him.

I send my love tonight to Sid and Dorothy and Lisa and the whole family because they continue to represent the ideals Herb Kohl stood for.

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