The publication is reproduced in full below:
MORNING BUSINESS
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TRIBUTE TO PATRICK LEAHY AND TIM RIESER
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise today to recognize an excerpt of this article by George Black, honoring the legacies of Senator Patrick Leahy and Tim Rieser, that was originally published in the New Republic on December 19, 2022.
I ask unanimous consent that the following excerpt honoring Senator Patrick Leahy and Tim Rieser be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
For Patrick Leahy, The Vietnam War Is Finally Ending
(By George Black)
For 33 years, the retiring Vermont senator and a top aide have quietly but doggedly been working to bind the many wounds of a war that touched the lives of nearly every Vietnamese family. This is what public service is.
It was a late afternoon in mid-November, with the nip of early winter in the air, when I visited the Russell Senate Office Building to meet with Vermont Senator Pat Leahy in his spacious yet surprisingly intimate office, with a sofa and chairs arranged near the fireplace. An aide squatted down beside us to add another log to the fire. Leahy's wife of 60 years, Marcelle, joined us, carrying a large bouquet of flowers. The couple still convey a strong sense of the people they were in the early years of their marriage--he a small- town lawyer, she a nurse at a local hospital. Leahy showed off photos of their three children and five grandchildren.
``I'm not someone who wants to hang the walls with photos of 50 great and famous people I've known,'' he said. ``I'd much rather be surrounded by pictures of family.''
Leahy, who entered the Senate in 1975 and leaves it after 48 years in January 2023, is the body's longest-serving sitting member. To most Americans, he is probably best known for his decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee and his opposition to the drive by conservative activists to transform the federal courts into an instrument of their ideological agenda. But I'd come to talk to him about something different, something that rarely if ever makes the cable news circuit: the war in Vietnam, the wounds it had left, and the part he had played in healing them. He's never seen this as a partisan issue, just a matter of simple human decency, being one of those, like Joe Biden, who mourn a lost era of comity in the Senate, in which political adversaries could still reach with respect across the gulf of their disagreements. His work in Vietnam has always been underpinned by that vision, and I wanted to ask him whether, in our current divided state, he could imagine it continuing after his retirement from the Senate at the age of 82.
Vision alone doesn't get you far in Washington. It has to be turned into legislation, and legislation into dollars and cents. In addition to his role on the Judiciary Committee, Leahy also chairs the Appropriations Committee, which is where the purse strings are untied, and, as he wrote in his recently published memoir, The Road Taken, ``few people really ever sifted through the line items to understand what we were doing was actually making American foreign policy.'' It's also why you can't talk about his work in Vietnam without also talking about his senior aide, Tim Rieser, who has been with him since 1985, and who will retire from his current role in January. Despite his bland-sounding job title--Democratic clerk for the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations--Rieser has been the master of its arcane mechanics. ``A dog with a bone,'' Leahy calls him. Given a problem to solve, ``He would not stop until every last drop of marrow and morsel of sinew had been licked clean.''
Since 1989, as the United States and Vietnam were taking their first baby steps toward reconciliation, Leahy and Rieser have channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Vietnam, forcing the United States to take responsibility for what former Senate leader Mike Mansfield once called the
``great outflow of devastation'' from the war: the bodies broken by unexploded bombs; the lives blighted by exposure to Agent Orange; the ongoing threat from ``hot spots'' contaminated by dioxin, its toxic by-product; and now, at last, some long-overdue aid to help Vietnam recover and identify the remains of its war dead. In the process, they have built the scaffolding of a new relationship, in which bitter enemies, in one of the stranger twists of geopolitics, have been transformed into close working partners and military allies.
Leahy and Rieser have faced no small number of obstacles along the way. For many years, embittered American veterans and recalcitrant anti-Communists in Congress opposed any hint of reconciliation with Vietnam. Progress was often slowed by suspicions on the Vietnamese side and by cumbersome bureaucracies in both governments, and State Department and Pentagon lawyers remain wary to this day of any humanitarian effort that implies an admission of liability. But as Rieser often says, when you run into an obstacle, you redefine it as a problem to be solved, and that process starts with all parties identifying their common interest in finding a solution. There are always common interests; you just have to look for them.
Full article at: https://newrepublic.com/article/169542/
patrick-leahy-vietnam-war-finally-ending.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 169, No. 15
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