Remembering Senator Mark O. Hatfield

Floor Speech

Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I rise today to commemorate a statesman and a mentor, Senator Mark O. Hatfield. He took many roles: dedicated public servant, conscientious man of faith, and pioneer for new development in the West. He was born in 1922 in Dallas, OR, a small town not far from our capital, Salem, to a family of modest means. His father was a blacksmith and his mother was a schoolteacher. When he was young, his family then actually moved to the State capital, which gave him a chance, as a teenager, to work as a guide in the State capitol building and to imagine returning one day as a public leader.

He proceeded to study at Willamette University in Salem. During his freshman year, events took a dramatic turn with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Senator Hatfield joined the Reserves and accelerated his studies, so he completed his degree in 1943 and joined the Navy. He proceeded as a naval officer and fought in Okinawa and Iwo Jima, and he saw the devastating aftermath of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, an imprint that, along with his State, caused him to struggle with the appropriate and moral use of force throughout his life in public service. In his own words:

In the war's immediate aftermath, one vivid experience made the profoundest impression on me. I was with a Navy contingent who were among the first Americans to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bomb had been dropped. Sensing, in that utter devastation, the full inhumanity and horror of modern war's violence, I began to question whether there can be any virtue in war.

He elaborates on this process of questioning, this process of challenging, in his book ``Conflict and Conscience.'' In terms of the Vietnam war, he concluded that it did not meet the Christian theologians' test for a just war. After the war, Hatfield went back to Oregon and he started a law degree, but he changed course after a year. He decided instead to pursue a master's in political affairs, and he went to Stanford and completed that master's and came back to Oregon. He started teaching at Willamette University, and in short order he was running for the Oregon House, in 1950, first elected at the age of 28, and then Secretary of State 6 years later at the age of 34, and Governor 2 years later at the age of 36. Through these experiences, Senator Hatfield developed the ability to chart his own course, to determine and follow his own convictions. In 1964, he championed an initiative to outlaw the death penalty. That ballot measure passed, and Governor Hatfield then commuted the sentences of those on death row.

In 1965, in July, he was the one Governor at the National Governors Association to vote against the resolution endorsing the Vietnam war.

In 1995, he proceeded to oppose the balanced budget amendment, and as the Senate historian, Don Ritchie, observed, ``It was one of the most courageous votes I had ever seen. He knew he was sacrificing his chairmanship and his position as a Senator. Few knew then that Senator Hatfield had offered to resign.''

Senator Hatfield also worked hard to build core institutions in Oregon. He was a champion of Oregon Health and Sciences University and built it into a fabulous institution of research and learning. The Mark O. Hatfield School of Government carries on his legacy of leadership, conveying those principles to young leaders who are dispersing throughout the public policy arena. The Marine Science Center in Newport, a tremendous research facility, continues to yield benefits, including setting the foundation for the recent location of NOAA'S research fleet in the city of Newport.

He was an intense advocate of medical research, and he championed NIH, where a building now bears his name. He was a champion for the U.S. Institute of Peace. He felt if there were academies that studied war, there should be acadamies to study peace and reconciliation.

In 1975, he introduced the George Washington Peace Academy Act to further the understanding of the process and state of peace among nations, to consider the dimensions of peaceful resolutions of differences, to train students and to inform government leaders in the process of peaceful resolutions. It took 9 years, but this effort which began as the George Washington Peace Academy Act ended in the establishment of the U.S. Institute of Peace in 1984.

As my senior colleague mentioned, he championed many efforts to protect Oregon's precious wilderness. One of his final projects was to protect Opal Creek, which has been described as 6,800 acres of virgin old growth, the largest span remaining in western Oregon. He said about this:

It is an inspiration. It is a place of educational and spiritual renewal and exploration. To walk among the centuries old fir, hemlock, and cedar inspires tremendous awe and instills, I think, a perspective unlike itself.

My own connection to Senator Hatfield began in 1976, in the spring of that
year, when I went to Salem to meet with Jerry Frank, Senator Hatfield's legendary Chief of Staff, to interview for a possible summer internship in Senator Hatfield's DC office. I will be eternally grateful to Jerry Frank and Senator Hatfield for offering me that internship, for that opportunity to come to our Nation's capital to see government in action. My first responsibility was to open the mail. When you open the mail, you start to understand the dimension, the breadth of political opinion in the breadth of a State.

How readily did many constituents attack Senator Hatfield's Christian faith because they disagreed with him on some policy position. I opened so much mail that said: Hi, my policy position is this and yours is different. So how can you be a man of Christian faith?

Indeed, Senator Hatfield started his book ``Conflict and Conscience'' with just this dimension, a politicization of religion. He puts in it a number of letters that he received. One reads:

Dear Mr. Hatfield,

Your encouragement of antiwar demonstrations and the riots that have come from such demonstration are in fact treason for they give comfort and aid to our enemies. .....

I and a lot of other Christian people are extremely disappointed in your performance in the Senate, for you who claim to be a Christian and have access to our Almighty God should have a better understanding of human nature and the evil in the human heart.

Senator Hatfield talked about the challenge of being a public man of faith and working to take those principles and convert them to public policy in the face of hostility coming from the left or the right. But it was his determination to stay that course, to continue to be a person of reflection and depth in the pursuit of public policy.

That summer, I was assigned to the Tax Reform Act of 1976. The great joy that I had was that it happened to come up on the floor that summer. Back then, before there was television in this Chamber, before there was e-mail, you would come to the floor, if you were working on an issue, and go up to the staff gallery and follow debate, and you would rush down with the other staffers to meet your Senator coming out of the elevators just outside those double doors. Because there were lots of amendments, I got to meet with the Senator many times to describe the debate on the floor here, and to fill in what folks back home were saying about the particular issue at hand.

Then, occasionally, the timing being just right, we would have a chance to walk back and forth. Senator Hatfield loved to walk back and forth outside in the sunshine under the trees between the Capitol and his office in the Russell Office Building. It was while observing those debates that I saw the Senate at its best. There was an amendment from the right side of the aisle that was debated and discussed and voted on an hour and a half later. Then there was an amendment from the left side of the aisle. The amendments were on the issue at hand, such as different tax strategies, and often they were bipartisan in nature. Indeed, you saw that our Senators at that time--most of whom had served in World War II together--could disagree without demonizing each other. This is a tremendously important facet of the Senate that has been lost over the decades since. Indeed, there were many friendly debates between Republicans and Democrats.

My father, Darrell, was a mechanic, and he had one of these debates with his boss who owned the company. When I was offered the internship with Senator Hatfield, Jerry called my father and said, Darrell, I won the debate because Senator Hatfield will work to make JEFF a good Republican. My dad said, no, no, no, I won the debate because JEFF will work to make Senator Hatfield a good Democrat. Neither of us would have broached such a topic.

The conversation wasn't about Democrats and Republicans. It was about the challenges at hand and how you resolve them. It was from that summer that I developed a lifelong admiration for Senator Hatfield and his model of public service. Here is what Senator Hatfield had to say about public calling:

Political service must be rooted in a philosophy of society's overall well-being, with a broad vision of how the body politic serves the people through its corporate structures. The heart of one's service in the political order must be molded by ideals, principles, and values that express how we, in the words of the Constitution, are ``to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the Blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.''

He continued:

Political service must flow out of such a commitment. Convictions about war and peace, about the priorities governing the expenditure of Federal funds, about the patterns of economic wealth and distribution, about the Government's responsibility toward the oppressed and dispossessed both in our land and throughout the world, about our Nation's system of law and justice, and about the meaning of human liberty--these should be at the core of one's desire to seek public office.

It was because of my admiration for Senator Hatfield that when I became Speaker of the Oregon House in 2007, I called him and asked if he would consider coming to swear me in when I took the oath of office. He readily agreed to do so. That was the last public event that my father was at before he passed away. It was one of Senator Hatfield's last major public events.

I so much appreciated the symbolism of a Republican and a Democrat coming together at that moment, and sought to help guide the Oregon House, the same Chamber where Senator Hatfield started his political career to solve Oregon's problems.

It is because of my admiration for Senator Hatfield that when I came to this Chamber I asked for Senator Hatfield's desk. There are 14 names carved into the desk drawer in his desk.

The 13th is Senator Hatfield's. As I looked at the names, I was surprised to discover this desk had never crossed the aisle before. So I think it is symbolic of Senator Hatfield's career of public service, focused on solving problems and working together across the aisle, that his desk made that journey to where it is now.

During those walks back and forth between here and the Russell Senate Office Building, Senator Hatfield paused one day to pull the leaf off a Ginkgo tree. He said: JEFF, this is one of the simplest of God's creations. Why is it that folks can't see the beauty of God's creation in the very simplest of one of his plants?

I held that leaf tightly in my hand, determined to preserve it. Just as we got back to the office, he plucked it out of my hand and said: Well, of course, you don't want to continue to carry that leaf. I didn't have the courage at that moment to say: No, I would treasure that leaf all my life, and then grab it back from him. So I don't have the leaf, but I take that memory of his deep personal faith and conviction.

I was sharing this story with another intern who served with Senator Hatfield in 1985, and he said: Well, let me tell you another story about a tree and Senator Hatfield. On this walk between the Capitol and the Russell Senate Office Building there is a tree that Senator Hatfield planted. It is a Metasequoia tree. It so happens the Metasequoia used to grow throughout Oregon millions of years ago. When people found the fossils and studied them, they concluded the tree was extinct--until the 1940s when they found a stand of Metasequoias growing in China.

Senator Hatfield arranged to have one of these trees planted in that walk. It so happens in 2005, when I was House Democratic leader in Oregon, we passed a bill that made the Metasequoia tree the fossil of Oregon, but we didn't know about this tree Senator Hatfield had planted. But there it is today. It is now 25 years old. It sheds its needles every winter, so people think it is a fir tree that has died. But it comes roaring back to life in the spring.

Now, 25 years into its life, it is equal to the highest of the broad leaf trees on the grounds of the Capitol. In another 25 years the Hatfield tree is going to soar over these Capitol grounds. In so doing, it is going to represent the values he fought for--the courage of one's convictions, the effort to get beyond the bumper stickers and into the nitty-gritty of issues, and to come to a conscientious decision that will take our Nation forward, the determination to be oriented toward solving problems and not to a partisan divide.

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