Thank you… Well how do you follow that? Pat is exactly right; he and I are interchangeable. Just a day or two ago as I was walking through the corridors, I heard someone explaining to the tour group that he was guiding. He said, now that’s Senator Biden and that’s Senator Collins, oh and here comes Senator Roberts. As I walked by I just took it and went on by, that it is amazing how often people think we’re the same. Al Simpson I can understand [LAUGHTER] because Al’s a little closer to my height, but I’m more then happy to be mistaken for Pat Roberts because that makes me much more humorous then I really am.
I am particularly honored by this award because Bryce Harlow was indeed not only one of my friends, but one of my mentors. When I came to Washington in 1963 and then went downtown as a lobbyist in 1964, timing was bad. I was a lobbyist at a day when lobbyists didn’t earn as much members. Now it’s, of course, the time to go the other direction, but it was a very different town in those days and the lobbying community, particularly those of us who represented corporations, was very small.
Most of the lobbying was done by trade associations and companies that would open Washington offices, didn’t do it very often. The community was small enough that we all knew each other, we all spent time with each other and we would trade information. We would sit down and swap stories, swap rumors and I got to know Bryce in that circumstance. Also, when we would get together on occasion for recreation, Bryce and I were the only two that didn’t play golf.
So we would sit and talk while everybody else was out on the golf course and I would sit at his feet – figuratively, not literally – and learn from this man whose, as you saw in the pictures, experience went all the way back to President Eisenhower. He invented the Congressional relations function in the government. He was the first real Congressional relations officer a President had and he filled that function for Eisenhower and during the Democratic period between Eisenhower and Nixon.
I had staffers on the White House staff for Democrats say, whenever we need to know something, we call Bryce Harlow and ask him, even though he was out of the White House and he was obviously a Republican operative. His reputation was so strong that he had that kind of relationship with Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, prior to going in with Nixon. So I took every opportunity I could as a very young man to try to get as much knowledge and as much information from this man as I could.
Now to illustrate how things worked in that world, we had a group very creatively known as the Breakfast Group because we met for breakfast. And it was once a month affair, we met over at the U.S. Chamber. There were 20 of us that belonged to the Breakfast Group and they were the 20 Fortune 500 companies who had Washington reps. And we would be briefed by the official of the Chamber who dealt with our kinds of issues and I remember he got hired to go to work for Armstrong Cork and we voted him in as a member and then voted to close the membership because 21 was getting too big.
And that was the size of the group and of course Harlow was a member of that group. We invited him to come back to our regular monthly breakfast group meeting to report to us about what as going on in the White House. He had just joined the Nixon administration; it was in the first month of the Nixon administration. He came in and regaled us with the tales of what was happening and as Pat as indicated, his tremendous analysis of what was going on. Pat had it exactly right; Bryce Harlow’s analysis was always right on.
And then he said to me, “I want to see you after.” Well, that was a little bit ominous, but as we sat there at the end of the breakfast, Bryce said to me – not necessarily these words, but this was the message – “If I have to give up my cushy corporate job to serve this administration, so do you. Go get measured for a suit, go over to the Department of Transportation. Show up; you’re going to be John Volpe’s head of congressional relations.” And I did. Now we had had a conversation before. I had made it clear I wanted a position in the Nixon administration.
And we had tried several other places that didn’t work for one reason after another. But I went over to the Department of Transportation and ran their congressional relations operation for two years. Bryce would have us come into the White House every Saturday and with a little bit of cross-fertilization of intelligence as we would each tell what was going on and get a feel for what was going on from the representatives in the other departments, always under Bryce’s very calm, quiet tutelage. And he would see to it that everything was on track.
After I left the administration and had my own shop, I remember pitching our services to a new client. And I was going through my background and experience, the fellow cut me off, he said, “Look. The position you held at the Department of Transportation is a patronage job. Who’s your patron?” And I said, “Bryce Harlow.” He said, “Oh. Well, under those circumstances then you probably are pretty good.” That was all the interview we needed, that Bryce Harlow had enough standing in this town that to be one part of his patronage was to be sufficient to get the client that you needed.
Now a lot of things happened; a lot went under the bridge after that. Let me close with this story. I left Washington in 1974, just two weeks before Richard Nixon did because Washington in 1974 was not a fun place for Republicans anymore, particularly Republicans who had served in the Nixon Administration. Like Nixon, I went to California. I went to work for Howard Hughes as the Director of Public Relations which is a little like being the medical advisor to the Christian Science Church. [LAUGHTER – APPLUASE]
I had a career. I became an entrepreneur by force of circumstance. Mr. Hughes died without telling anybody where he’d put the will and the relatives showed up from Texas and started firing all the Mormons. So I had to go create a company because nobody else would hire me. But while I was in that circumstance in California, I happened to read a piece in the paper about Bryce Harlow retiring. And I thought, you know, this man was an important man in my life. He probably has forgotten me.
But I haven’t forgotten him and I wrote him a little note, wishing him well on his retirement. I heard from him and then stayed in touch with him. And I heard of his very difficult health problems. Always a man of good humor, he called it Califano’s curse. It was emphysema. For those of you who didn’t know, Joe Califano was the member of the White House staff who was pushing tobacco legislation to try to stop people from smoking. Bryce always smoked Lark cigarettes and he explained to me why and there are only a few of you in the room who will understand.
He said, with a secretary named Studebaker, what else could I smoke? [LAUGHTER] You see the few who are old enough to remember the Studebaker Lark, alright, that was one of their cars. Not a very good one, but it was good joke. So on one occasion when I was in Washington on business for the firm that I was involved with at the time, I had a little extra time and I thought, I’m going to see Bryce. He was at the Arlington Hospital and I went there and said I’d like to see Bryce Harlow.
And they said, oh he’s in room such and such. I went down the hall and walked into the room and I was in the wrong room because the man lying there in the bed asleep, was clearly not Bryce Harlow. So I went back to the nurses’ station and said, pardon me, where is Bryce Harlow? And she gave me the same room number. And I thought, well. I went into the room and he was still asleep, his face was so puffed from the cortisone that they were giving him, that I didn’t recognize him.
He woke up before I could leave the second time and acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world for me to be there. He had had no notice at all that I was coming but he looked at me and said, well, hello. And the real Bryce Harlow was still there. We had a delightful visit. We reminisced a little about Watergate. I had gone to lunch with Bryce after Nixon had been re-elected and the two of us had talked and I said, “Bryce, the President has said that no one connected with the White House had anything to do with this break-in and that’s not true.”
And I won’t go into the details, the reason why I knew that was not true, because that’s a very painful period of my own experience. But, he said, “What are you talking about?” And we visited back and forth about this and he said, “Bob, this is going to blow over.” He said, “A few weeks; a few nasty editorials in the New York Times.” I said, “Bryce, it is not going to blow over. I’m too close to it. I know there are people on the White House staff at a high level who were involved. I don’t know who they are, but I do know that’s what it is and to save the presidency, you’ve got to find out who they are and fire them. The President has got to fire them.”
He said, “I’ve been in this town 27 years, I’ve never heard anything like that.” I said, “Bryce, the President’s going to be impeached if you don’t do that.” He said, “That’s amazing.” Alright, back to the hospital bed. It’s been – I don’t know how many years – and Bryce said to me, “You remember that lunch we had?” And I didn’t until he mentioned the Watergate connection and I said, “Yes, Bryce. I remember that luncheon.” He said, “After that lunch, instead of going to my office, I went to the White House and I gathered the senior staff.”
Now that’s an interesting thing for a lobbyist to do, but Bryce had enough clout that he could do that. He said, “I gathered the senior staff and I said to them” – and this made me feel very, very good. I said to them, “I’ve just had lunch with a Washington old-timer whose judgment I trust, who has told me the President will be impeached if we don’t find out who on the White House staff had engagement in Watergate.” He said, “It doesn’t matter how high they are, it doesn’t matter how important they are, we must find out who has violated the standards of integrity and been involved in this thing and they must be discharged.”
And then he said, “Bob, they all agreed with me and every one of them was guilty.” [LAUGHTER] Well, that was my last interview with Bryce. He said, “President Nixon was here yesterday. He came in kind of the same way I did, I suppose, and then he told me of his visit with President Nixon. This was a man who never lost perspective, who never let the problems that he faced in his health diminish his good humor or his determination to do the right thing. This was a man who took me at a time in my youth when I needed the sort of advice that he could give me and spent the time to act as one of my mentors.
To be honored with this award in his name is one of the pleasures of my entire Senate career and I thank you all.