Thank you, John. As Nick said, he may be in touch with all of you and if he makes the other decision, he will certainly be in touch with me. John has been with us for two years and he could have said a lot of other things about us that he did not say and we appreciate that. When my mother was introduced to the Foreign Relations Committee after President Clinton had nominated her to be Ambassador to the Vatican, she asked John to present her to the Committee.
Well, right before the presentation, Senator Specter was presenting Tom Poglietta, who was a Congressman from Philadelphia who was being named Ambassador to Italy. He gave some glowing remarks about the Congressman and he finally concluded, he said that the best thing about the Congressman being an Ambassador to Italy is that he speaks fluent Italian. So John gets up and says wonderful things about mother, her accomplishments. He concludes and says, “And Lindy Boggs speaks fluent Catholic.”
So Rob, I am warning you, when you ask a Louisianan to introduce you, you are not quite sure what they are going to say — but thank you, John, very, very much. John and I are joined tonight by many of our colleagues from Patton Boggs. As John said, my partners, my associates, my staff and particular my personal assistants, administrative assistants, are really much more like family than firm in terms of Patton Boggs.
We really do have a relationship which is really, I think, a unique relationship in this town, at least as far as I am concerned. Of course, they have to treat me like family because I have been a grandfather all of this time. I would also like to thank my friend Nick Calio — Nick and I go back a long ways. I remember in the days when he was working with Dirk Van Dongen and trying to basically take care of the wholesalers and distributors of the world. He was at that time worried about forklift drivers. Now he’s an executive — a senior executive at CitiCorp — and I guess he’s now worried about the Bentley drivers. But Nick, thanks very much for all of your work in this dinner, hosting it and thank you very much for having me.
I would like to thank John Vogt and Linda Dooley who actually are responsible for the Foundation and making everything run — John for being the volunteer chairman and Linda for really doing all of the work. Everybody in this room realizes who has done all of the work, and that is Linda. It’s a very, very interesting tribute to Bryce Harlow. He would be very pleased with what this Foundation is doing — bringing the best and brightest young people into a realization of how important public advocacy and public policy are to the future of this country.
I think that what this Foundation is doing is absolutely terrific. What we are trying to do, Linda, is we are actually trying to emulate that a little bit the Patton Boggs Foundation. Last year we gave ten students — seven students at ten different law schools — no, that’s wrong, it’s ten students at seven different law schools — summer stipends for law students who were not going to work in law firms over the summer, but would devote their summer to working in a public policy area.
This summer we’re going to probably do more, so we are actually trying to encourage what you have been trying to do for a long time, and that is to encourage very bright students to get an appreciation for working in public policy. Our motive is somewhat different than yours in the sense that they are law school students and it serves with us as an improvement tool in terms of trying to encourage very bright law school students to participate in public policy.
We hope that they look at us as a place that they may want to practice that policy. I can’t go on with my little talk without talking about a fellow named Rob Portman. I’m a little worried about Rob because he is being introduced by another Louisianan. But Rob Portman was with us in his very early years as a very young lawyer — I think it was ’84 or ’85 or ’86, something of that nature. He got a very good flavor, I think, in that short time with us, of Washington public policy and advocacy.
He then went back home with a clearer desire to participate in public policy. If there is anyone in this room that the fellows of this program ought to aspire to, besides the legacy of Bryce Harlow, it’s Rob Portman. He represents integrity; he represents professionalism and he represents leadership. Those are the basic tenets that our friend Bryce Harlow would recommend to everybody who is in this business.
Now Bob Michael reminds me, when I was in high school, a teenager in high school, my sister Barbara was a year older would say — you know, we go to our friends’ houses and they have beautiful oriental rugs. They have magnificent paintings on the walls. When our friends come to our house, they see Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, Russell Long and every once in awhile, Chuck Allick or Bob Michael. And they also see at the same time Tommy Corcoran, and they also see Lloyd Cutler.
They also see many, many people that you know that have been very important to the public policy advocacy practice in Washington. So I learned at a very young age how important the relationship was between the persons that govern and the persons who advise those who govern. I would watch a Tommy the Cork brilliantly, articulately represent a special interest but always openly and honestly. I would watch a Clark Clifford to the same thing. I learned at a very early age that that’s how this town and this government has to function; has to work.
Bryce Harlow would be the first to say that all interests are special interests, whether you represent a corporation, its shareholders, its employees, its suppliers, you need a government bailout. Whether you represent trade unions or trade associations or whether you represent a group of native Hawaiians who need recognition to protect their cultural heritage. All interests are special in this town and they all need a voice and they all need representation. But what does that mean? That means that we have to do it well. It means that we have to do it openly with public scrutiny and that is basically where we’ve come.
When I first registered to lobby, and I hate to say it was in the late 1960s, I went down myself to the Clerk of the House and I was the 68th person in October of that year to become a registered lobbyist. Well, if you check the Internet today, there re 35,000 plus registered lobbyists. Since 2000, that number doubled from 17,000 to 35,000. At the same period of time, this short period of time, the fees we charge and the income we earned has gone up by more than 100 percent.
We are probably one of the success stories of the American economy — not quite the dot com and I hope not quite the bubble, even though we had a few ripples last year and the year before, but it’s been a phenomenal change that I’ve been watching since I was a young lobbyist. Now, there have been dramatic changes. First of all, you now have instant news, Internet, BlackBerries, cell phones and none of that existed in the old days. You now have most markup securities occurring in sunshine. None of that happened in the old days.
You now have campaign finance, which in the days of the ’60s, was basically done by a handful of people — it was wholesale fundraising. There was the oil industry or labor unions or what have you; they took care of particular candidates. All of a sudden that is now retail fundraising, which has changed the demographics of lobbying in this town.
So we’ve had terrific changes over a very short period of time, terrific growth over a very short period of time, and terrific scrutiny as a result over a very short period of time. So the young fellows in this room who are going to hopefully benefit enormously by the Bryce Harlow Fellowship and who, I think, will be what we need. And that is, as we grow and get bigger and have more scrutiny placed upon us, we need the best and the brightest of you to join our advocacy profession and to become the Bryce Harlow models. Thank you all very, very much.