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I had missed this Kerry speech and went to Thomas to get it because the comments on a thread I can't find said it was sweet - which it is. It is also an amazingly generous statement. It also gives details on things Kerry did - that others ended up getting credit for. (I now understand Bono's comment on AIDS in Africa). So - this is worth reading both because it is sweet and because it brings up Kerry's work. From Thomas: Mr. KERRY. Madam President, one of the best things about the Senate and the character of this place and the opportunity it provides all of us is we are privileged to work with people as our experts on our committees and our aides who, even more than many of us, dedicate decades to this institution and to the causes that bring them to public service. They do it selflessly, never seeking the headlines but always trying to shape those headlines, making contributions that are most often left in the unwritten history of this institution and of the country. The fact is, though, as my colleagues know, it is these individuals and their commitment that really writes that history and makes an unbelievable contribution to the country as a whole. One such person I have had the privilege of working with for the entire time I have been here, for 22-plus years. No one is a more dedicated, harder working, more idealistic, passionate, and effective example of that special kind of public service than Dr. Nancy Stetson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who is retiring this year after over 25 years of remarkable service--groundbreaking service, really--to the Senate . As a young and idealistic doctoral student, Nancy first came to Washington to work on her thesis and to ask the question whether a single legislator could make a difference in the shaping of American foreign policy. Her subject was Senator ``Scoop'' Jackson and the long record that he amassed in the Cold War through the legislation that to this day bears his name, the Jackson-Vanik waiver. Nancy found that on Capitol Hill, despite the Historians' fixation on the rise and fall of the imperial Presidency, one Senator can make a lasting impact on America's role in the world. But it has really been for her role to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and to me personally that I want to pay her tribute today. She began working for Senator Pell from her beloved home State of Rhode Island and, then, of course, for Chairman Biden. I really inherited her in a sense from Senator Pell because when we came into the majority in 1986, Senator Pell was a chairman who believed in delegating responsibility. I was then the chairman of one of the subcommittees that had jurisdiction over the GPO's PDFState Department budget and a number of issues that sort of brought Nancy to me.
So there she was, one Senate staffer with a lot more knowledge on how the committee and the Senate worked than I had. She was committed, dogged, and determined to make this kind of impact or to affect the life of a Senator life who was trying to make that impact.
So I ask my colleagues to consider the legacy of this remarkable staff person. Among her many proud accomplishments as a senior aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the South Africa sanctions bill and the normalization of relations between America and Vietnam that culminated in the signing of the United States-Vietnam trade agreement in the last Congress.
I am also particularly proud of Nancy's work as the principal architect of the Vietnam Education Foundation and the Vietnam Fulbright Program. These are two programs that we worked on during the 1990s together, but it was really her sense of the possible and her willingness to do a lot of the detail work that helped to bring them to maturity.
Working with a very close friend of mine, a Vietnam veteran from Massachusetts, we helped to shape, and she helped to shape, what is now the largest Fulbright program of the U.S. Government, the program with Vietnam. We have students from Vietnam studying at Harvard in Massachusetts and likewise professors and others going from Harvard to Vietnam to help train their new technicians and leaders of the future.
I think Nancy and I both believed for the years we spent in a war that became so controversial and tore this country apart--which set out as our goal to transform a country, Vietnam--that this was the best way to complete that task; that the war in a sense had not ended, and there was a way to try to ultimately make peace with Vietnam, with ourselves, and build a new future for that country and for ours.
This Vietnam Education Foundation and this Fulbright program have been instrumental in helping us to do that. And today, Vietnam is simply a transformed, extraordinarily different country. It was an innovative policy, and it was a master stroke of public diplomacy for which Nancy deserves enormous credit. Without her vision and her perseverance, we would not be able to talk today, in foreign policy, in terms that say that Vietnam is not just a war but a country. It became a country because of this kind of effort and this kind of outreach in the consciousness of Americans.
We have a relationship today that we could have never imagined when so many of us were in uniform so many years ago. It is no exaggeration to say that entire effort of normalization also was part of Nancy's craftsmanship. And I will talk about that in a moment.
In addition to the normalization with Vietnam, Nancy contributed enormously to global health issues and to some of the most significant policies of any industrialized country against diseases of poverty. Her work on malaria, TB, and AIDS, where she fought to significantly increase the U.S. contribution to the Global AIDS Fund, were among her proudest accomplishments. People across the world today literally owe their lives to Nancy's work.
I remember when we began that effort, Senator Helms was then chairman, and a lot of people said: You are never going to get anything through this committee. Well, with slow and steady work, we not only got it through the committee, we got Senator Helms, to his credit, to be one of the principal cosponsors of this effort.
Together with Senator Frist, we drafted the first original comprehensive plan on AIDS that passed the Senate and which became the centerpiece of how we are approaching particularly Sub-Sahara and Africa today, but really our global efforts to try to deal with this scourge that is growing, I might say notwithstanding those efforts, for lack of global initiative and effort to focus on it.
Over the last 22 years in the Senate , Nancy Stetson and I traveled to many parts of the world. We went to Latin America, to Central America, to East Asia, to the Middle East, to dozens of countries on more trips than I can count. And I will tell you something. Nancy has the ability to win the ``Amazing Race,'' for those of you who have ever seen it. She secured meetings with heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, and unsung health advocates in some of the poorest countries of the world.
She pulled me and other staffs through the wilds of Myanmar, negotiated travel to remote areas of Vietnam, handled the logistical complexities of visiting Indonesia, Cuba. She gave up weekends, holidays, and vacations. And on trips she would stay up into the night, preparing for a press conference or a speech or a policy statement, and convincing the hotel business centers to open at 2 a.m. in Hanoi or Bangkok.
She gave up her 50th birthday. We celebrated it in New Delhi. It is hard to overstate the long hours, the incredible effort, the passion, and the personal sacrifice that Nancy has put into working for me and for her country.
She was indefatigable, and I am incredibly grateful. I might add that on occasion there were some very tricky moments in Vietnam when we were trying to open prisons and open the history centers in order to resolve the issue of POW-MIA, and it required some delicate negotiations. For American soldiers to be reentering Vietnamese prisons and communities by helicopter was an emotional leap for the Vietnamese to make. Nancy built wonderful relationships with leaders, with those people who could make those doors open. And, indeed, they did. I am grateful to her for that.
She was incredibly loyal, brilliant, blunt, honest, absolutely smart as a tack, and wiley. She always asked the questions that needed to be asked of me. Time and time again, when I failed to ask the right question before a witness at our committee, I could always expect that tap on the shoulder and the passing of a note, a reminder from Nancy of what really should have been said or really should have been asked.
Part prosecutor, part conscience, part intellectual, on matters of foreign policy, I was proud to think of her as an alter ego. And I hope that in some of my better moments, if there were a few, she thought the same of me.
She could step in as a surrogate Senator at the drop of a hat, and I mean that literally. When a massive fire took the lives of six of our firefighters in Worcester, MA, immediately--I was in Asia at the time in Myanmar and about to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi--and I immediately canceled all my meetings and flew back to be in Worcester. But Nancy stayed there and soldiered on and went to my meetings for me. In Burma, meeting with dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, she was herself living out her own commitment on the diplomatic stage with poise and with courage and with intelligence that I think is a credit to the Senate .
Nancy's first love was Africa. She started her career focusing on it. Many years later, she returned to work on the devastating health issues plaguing the continent now. She had a knack for seeing reality quicker than most. She was never swept up by the headlines or the political sales pitch.
She was prescient in seeing the disastrous path that has played out in Iraq for what it is and for helping me to devise a policy going forward. She has never been afraid to act on her conscience.
Nancy is headed now to Massachusetts to become the vice president for health policy at the New England Health Care Institute. Her Senate family will miss her more than we can ever properly express. Even as we wish her good luck and much happiness in her new endeavor, I hope she knows she is not going to escape my badgering e-mails or 3 a.m. phone call from Baghdad or Amman to mine her thoughts.
I have worked with Nancy longer and probably more closely than I have worked with just about anyone in my time in the Senate . As I mentioned, we traveled the world together. Although she may not realize it--I may not have said it in so many words in those long flights to Asia or back, or during the many long hours and late nights here in the Senate --I know in my heart I could not have done it without her energy, without her drive, her grit, her tough-mindedness, and her loyalty.
She has worked long and hard without ever getting the credit she rightly deserves for the amazing things she accomplished in her time in the Senate . So I just want to say thank you to this special woman for her contributions to this institution and to our country.
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