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Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I first want to thank my colleague and friend Senator Smith for her beautiful remarks and for her friendship with Dick to the end.

I am sure you hear his voice all the time when you are trying to make decisions, and having that kind of person that is so grounded, not just in Minnesota but in his values that he brought with him to Washington and that he brought with him to the Vice President's office, couldn't be more important, and especially at a time like this.

I just kept thinking, as Senator Smith spoke, about how Dick cherished history instead of trampling on it like we have seen right now. He understood that you could learn from history and that history can teach you lessons that help guide you when you have to make decisions in the now.

As Senator Smith mentioned, Dick was born in Duluth, not actually far away from where my dad grew up, in Ely. So there was a lot of good stock up there. He was the son of Russell and Virginia Moe, and he grew up surrounded by the values that define our State: hard work and service to others, and especially northern Minnesota.

He then goes on to the University of Minnesota and gets his start in a big way by running the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, and he helped to lead that party to victory, time and time again, because, like I said, he was grounded in doing the right thing, but he also was a mastermind of how to win elections and how to follow up for people and get things done.

That is the path that led him to my mentor, Walter Mondale, whom we all miss very, very much. I literally got to see Mondale at his highest peaks, when he was Vice President and I was an intern in the office, hired by Dick when he was Chief of Staff.

And then I got to see him back in Minnesota, where he was, literally, working at the law firm with me, and I saw him in grocery lines, where he would engage in long discussions with the clerk at the grocery station on how we could get, say, peace in the Middle East or what we should be doing about an economic crisis.

And Mondale had that same thing that drew Dick Moe to him, and that was a grounding in the people that you represent.

So we all know what a great job he did running that office and his Norwegian sense of humor--I know those words don't always go together, but it was a very dry sense of humor--and just this belief in decency.

Senator Smith recounted how Dick helped Fritz prepare for that meeting with Jimmy Carter. And I had one interesting perspective on how prepared Walter Mondale was for that meeting.

When I actually went to Plains, a few years back, and met with President Carter and Mrs. Carter, what they told me, over the pimento and cheese sandwiches that the former First Lady made, was that it was Walter Mondale that knew that her name was pronounced ``Rosalynn'' and not ``Rosalynn.'' And I have a very strong feeling that Dick Moe drilled that into Mondale's head when running down there. And Carter actually said that really stood out because a bunch of the candidates mispronounced his wife's name.

Among other things, as Tina explained, this was a model that they, after getting elected, embarked on, and Dick Moe became Vice President Mondale's Chief of Staff. He crafted that 11-page memo that redefined the Vice Presidency, giving an active role in shaping policy, and he also served on President Carter's senior staff, which was very unique.

That is when I got to be an intern at that time. I still remember writing in, sending in my letter, and interviewing over the phone. I have this cherished picture in the Vice President's home backyard that Dick Moe is in with all the interns, which included me and Tom Nides, who went on to be our Ambassador to Israel. It was quite an intern class, and he was there. I remember it was the first time I ever had lobster; so it is very memorable to me.

I was so eager when I got there to do these policy memos that I had talked to Dick about and write all of these very smart ideas for them. And they, in fact, assigned me to do the furniture inventory of every piece of furniture in the Vice President's office and write down the numbers on a spreadsheet and make sure that they were all there and turn it into some government office. And I literally crawled around on the floor for 2 weeks, checking serial numbers on desks and chairs.

So the first thing I learned from all that is that Walter Mondale and his Chief of Staff, Dick Moe, were scrupulously honest, and nothing was missing and, second, was to take every job seriously. I often share that with young people, including the interns in the Capitol.

That internship that Dick Moe hired me for was my first government job in Washington, DC, and this was my second. So I remind them: Take those internships and the people you work with and the relationships, even if they are fleeting, that you form as you are meeting people and getting to know them, because they are oftentimes the key to your future. And never complain about what assignments you get.

So Dick Moe believed in preparing the next generation of public servants. I think Senator Smith's story of that just really says it all. And then, in his later years, when he is not feeling as good, he takes that time to be such a mentor to her.

So we talked about the longest serving president for the National Trust for Historic Preservation--a 17-year tenure. He led the efforts to rebuild so many historic neighborhoods in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. Working on restoring President Lincoln's cottage is such an amazing thing. To think it had not been restored, but Dick Moe knew how important that was.

I don't think he saw preservation as nostalgia. I think he saw it as honoring our country and honoring the Americans that had served.

There was a lot about that book, ``The Last Full Measure,'' that I just love, and it is now recognized as the definitive history of the First Minnesota Regiment, which, as we know, fought for the Union in the Civil War, before Minnesota was even a State.

There had been another book, the historical novel ``The Killer Angels,'' which, OK, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975, but Dick felt it did not correctly account for the bravery of the Minnesotans in the First Minnesota, and he more than righted that wrong.

So that story that I have often quoted around our State about the 262-member First Minnesota Regiment, which held the line against 1,600 Confederate troops while desperately needed reinforcements were brought in on the Union side, is truly worthy of the book that Dick wrote.

I went with a number of Senators, including Senator King and a number of Republican Senators, to take a 1-day deep dive on the Gettysburg battlefield site, Monday. It was led by the head of the War College and another veteran member of that War College. And we went to that site.

We first talked about Maine and the historic story of Maine, and then we went to the Minnesota site, which is a very big monument, but it is not nearly as much visited.

The head of the War College, at the time, actually started to shed a tear when he told the story because he said, as Dick knew, the story of the First Minnesota was a story like no other.

They asked them to hold the line--262 men, 200--and they didn't pause. They went and did it. And we saw that open field. And 215 of them were struck down by bullets, an 82-percent casualty rate, the highest percentage of casualty suffered by any Union regiment in a single engagement in the entire war.

That sacrifice, which Dick researched and captured, is summed up by a Churchill quote:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Those ragtag soldiers that didn't even have proper uniforms, that were farmers, that were laborers, that were part of a regiment from a State that wasn't even a State, stood up when it couldn't be more of a difficult burden, and they didn't hesitate, and they did their jobs.

That is what Dick honored with that story, and it is something I think we all should be thinking about right now. What is truly sacrificed? What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to stand up for your country?

So Dick's wife Julia and his kids Alexandra and Andrew, and the granddaughters, we send our love and gratitude. Our State is so much better and our country is so much better because of Dick Moe. He showed us, and clearly Senator Smith, that public service is worth it, that this devotion to history is not just some ancient thing in a dusty book. It matters to now.

He showed us that the ties that bind us--whether it is small towns and historic preservation of buildings, like Lincoln's Cottage--mean something in the now; that history matters. And I think we all need to remember that today.

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