Floor Statements

Mr. President, I announce that the Joint Economic Committee will conduct a hearing in Room 628 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Wednesday, September 22, 2004, from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Mr. President, last week, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, I spoke about the forged documents that have recently surfaced regarding the National Guard service of President George W. Bush. In that speech, I linked the Boston Globe with CBS News and described both organizations as having been duped by the forgery.

I was in error as far as the Boston Globe is concerned. Not only were they not duped by the forgery, they have been diligent in reporting the discrepancies in the documents. Accordingly, I apologize to the staff at the Globe for my misstatement.

The responsibility for the error is entirely my own. I relied on stories I heard or read which linked the Globe to CBS on this topic. I did not have my staff check the details before I made my speech. I should have known better, and will do all I can to make sure I do not repeat such an error in the future.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I might proceed as if in morning business.

Mr. President, if I might reminisce for a moment as a predicate for what I am about to say. I go back to a time in my career when I was the center of considerable national press attention. The occasion was the 1970s. The issue was Watergate. I will not bother to describe why I was there; I will just tell my colleagues of a phone call I received one night just before the ``Evening News with Walter Cronkite'' came on CBS.

A reporter called me to say that Dan Rather was going to be speaking about me that night, and he read to me the piece that had been written for Dan Rather to give on the evening news. Frankly, it terrified me because if it had been delivered in just the way it was read to me on the phone, it would have destroyed my business, destroyed my career, made it impossible for me to continue to represent the various clients I had in my public relations and consulting firm.

I said that to the reporter. I said: This is terrible, it is not true, and you will destroy my career. We had a brief conversation about the details of what it is he had in his report, and he said, well, I see your point, I will do the best I can, and hung up at about 10 minutes before the news broadcast was to begin.

As anyone can understand, I watched the news with great interest that night, and Walter Cronkite began by saying: Tonight, Dan Rather has important new information about the Watergate scandal that he will be bringing us from Washington. It was about 20 minutes after the hour when he got around to Rather, and Dan Rather then gave a report, mentioned me by name but said the things that I had said to the reporter, along with some of the things he had already prepared. It was not a pleasant experience for me, but it was nowhere near what it sounded as if it would be some half hour before.

Within 10 minutes after the news broadcast ended, the phone rang again at my home, and it was Dan Rather. I thanked him for paying attention to the points I was trying to make, and he said: Well, you had a strong advocate, referring to the reporter who had been talking to me. Then he said: I have been in this town long enough to know the difference between a legitimate news story that has somehow come out and a situation that is being laid on me for the purpose of getting the information forward. He said: Mr. Bennett, this was not a legitimate news story. This is something that was laid on me by someone who obviously wishes you ill. Who do you think your enemies might be in this situation?

We then had that discussion. That is neither here nor there, but obviously I always will remember that time. We do remember the times in our lives when trauma comes upon us. I remembered it fondly, with respect for Dan Rather and his willingness to listen to something other than the preconception that had been handed to him, and for his journalistic instinct to tell him that this just might not be a legitimate story, this just might be something that someone was feeding to him for a purpose and a hidden agenda.

We now know about the great controversy that has surrounded the documents that have come forward with respect to President Bush's service in the Texas National Guard. I regret, from my personal experience, to find that this newsman whom I have respected all these years is in the center of this particular controversy. It would seem to me that this time, Dan Rather's instinct has failed him. The instinct that told him some 30 years ago, again in his words, that ``something was being laid on him'' deserted him this time. It is very clear that documents were forged, they were laid on him, and this time he bit.

I do not join in the chorus that is arising on talk radio and elsewhere that he must somehow be driven from the air. I don't think he deserves that. But I do think this is a cautionary tale and we need to spend a little time talking about it because it represents a new phenomenon in the information age where someone has used information- age technology to forge documents and then insert those forged documents and the false information they contain into the political debate at a time that is crucial.

This is the first indication I know of where we have seen that sort of thing,

a deliberate attempt on the part of a forger to change the course of an election and a situation where respected organizations, such as the Boston Globe and CBS News, have been conned by that forger and have become unwitting participants in foisting a forgery and a fraud upon the electorate.

I believe I am something of an expert on forgery. In this same period of time, back in the 1970s, I worked for Howard Hughes. I was working for the Hughes organization when we had two of the most significant forgery attempts of the last century. The first one was the autobiography of Howard Hughes. The second one was the will of Howard Hughes.

We now know, looking back, that the autobiography of Howard Hughes was written by a man named Clifford Irving, who had never met Howard Hughes, never spoke to him, never had any contact with him at all. But, perhaps a parallel to today's situation, two very respected and prestigious national organizations bought the Clifford Irving forgery, paying $1 million to Clifford Irving for that manuscript. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company was going to publish the book, and Time-Life, the publishers of Time and Life magazines, now part of Time Warner, was going to publish excerpts from the book.

I won't go into the details of that, but I do remember very clearly when the leading investigative reporter for Life magazine came into my office to discuss the Howard Hughes autobiography, and I said to him there is no way in the world that Howard Hughes has ever met Clifford Irving. That is absolute, provable, irrefutable. Clifford Irving and Howard Hughes had never, ever met each other.

The reporter said to me: That may be true. Irving is probably lying about how he got the manuscript, but the manuscript itself is genuine. The evidence is overwhelming.

I said: What evidence?

He said: The handwriting experts. The handwriting experts have looked at the handwriting on the note that Clifford Irving put forward-- supposedly written by Howard Hughes--validating the manuscript, and he said the handwriting experts are unanimous, Howard Hughes wrote that note.

Now we know, of course, Howard Hughes did not write that note. Clifford Irving wrote that note.

In the course of his trial, one of the prosecutors said to Clifford Irving: Is it really possible that you were the man who wrote that note? Is it really possible that you had the skills of forgery so that you could write something that would fool the best experts in the country on handwriting analysis?

Clifford Irving took a legal pad, wrote out a letter from Howard Hughes to this particular prosecutor, signed it ``Howard Hughes,'' and handed it over to him. The prosecutor had it framed and it is hanging on his wall.

One of the major lessons I learned from that experience is that the experts can be wrong. The experts can be fooled. A good forger who concentrates in the right area can, in fact, come up with forgeries that can get by some forensic experts.

I don't think that is the case with the forgeries with respect to President Bush's Texas National Guard service. I think the forgeries are fairly clumsy and the expert that CBS has quoted validated only the signature and not the document as a whole.

But the thing I have learned from dealing with the Hughes forgeries, the fake autobiography and the fake will, is that one must look at a forgery not only for the forensic side of it but also for the content and ask this fundamental question whenever something magically appears: Why did this appear at this particular time?

If, indeed, Howard Hughes was planning to write an autobiography, why did it appear just after there was a major shakeup in the Hughes organization and there was a tremendous amount of publicity about Howard Hughes' reclusiveness? Isn't that coincidence a little bit too close?

The will that would have left hundreds of millions of dollars to a service station attendant in the state of Utah, why did that appear just as the press was reporting that Howard Hughes had died without signing a will? What caused this to come forward at just that moment? Isn't that content suspicious? Doesn't that suggest that somebody has an agenda that is not just a coincidence?

The third area of forgery with which I am familiar says exactly the same thing. I had friends with whom I went to college who were killed by the forger-murderer Mark Hoffman. Mark Hoffman earned his living over decades forging documents that had relationship to the Mormon Church.

Looking back on it, now that Hoffman is in jail, we should have recognized, once again, the great coincidence that these documents would come forward at just the right time. There would be scholars who would be speculating as to whether the founder of the church had any connection with folk magic, and suddenly, at just the right time, documents saying that he did have connections with folk magic began to appear. We now know they were forged. They came from Mark Hoffman. They were created out of whole cloth.

But they seemed logical because of the context in which they came.

The application of that to these documents relating to President Bush is obvious.

Why, if these documents have been sitting in the records of the Texas National Guard for all of these years, did they suddenly come forward with exactly the right amount of validation of the accusations that are being made by President Bush's opponents at just the right time in the campaign when the Kerry campaign seemed to need a little boost?

That alone, once again, in historic context, says be on your guard. That alone should have alerted Dan Rather's journalistic instincts that this is not really a legitimate leak. This is something somebody is laying on him for the purpose of their own agenda.

The rest of the press has gone in after all of the forensic evidence.

I looked at it with great interest because of my background in forgery. I agreed that the memos that are purported to be true do not fit with the memos that are written in the Texas National Guard. I agree that the typeface is suspect. I agree there can be no explanation other than forgery for the fact that someone sat down at a modern computer and recreated the memo exactly. You cannot do that with memos that are typed on typewriters. You have to go back to the original typewriter to recreate a memo and have it match exactly.

I agree with all of the forensic evidence, and I agree that there is absolutely no question that this is a forgery.

But instead of wallowing in the delight of having caught the Boston Globe or CBS in their gullibility, having caught them in the mistake of having bought this whole thing, let us ask the more fundamental question: Who did it? Who is concerned with the campaign to such a degree that they are willing to falsify documents and peddle them to national media organizations?

I have heard three explanations. There are people who have speculated on this. Frankly, the speculation in its own way can add to the poison of this situation.

The first speculation I heard was that it was done by supporters of President and Senator Clinton. As they put it, the Clinton supporters want to make sure Kerry didn't win so that the 2008 nomination would be open to Senator Clinton, and they are the ones who forged the documents and then put them forward in a way that they knew would be embarrassing to the Kerry campaign.

The second speculation is that Karl Rove did it; that the Republicans are the ones who did this; that this is a Republican dirty trick; that they are so anxious to destroy Kerry they are willing to forge documents and foist them onto an unsuspecting CBS and Boston Globe.

The third explanation, to me, is the only one that makes any sense, which is that there is an overzealous Kerry supporter, or, if you will, a Bush hater who is really stupid. This was a really dumb thing for someone who supports Senator Kerry to have done.

I cannot believe it was done by anyone in the Kerry campaign because they are smarter than that. But very often in politics we have the experience called up from my father when someone was trying to help him in the campaign: I can take care of my enemies, may the Good Lord save me from my friends.

But someone who wanted Bush to lose and Kerry to win said if the documents to support the charge on the National Guard issue aren't there, I will see that they are there. I will do it anonymously. This will be my contribution to the campaign.

It is a really stupid thing to do. But I believe that is the explanation of where this came from.

Stupidity trumps Machiavelli almost every time when you are looking for an explanation.

However, I think everyone ought to focus on finding out who did it. Until we do find out who did it, we will continue to poison the atmosphere with the suggestion that maybe the Clintons did it, maybe Karl Rove did it, or the Republicans played a dirty trick. We know there are other forces at work.

We owe it to clear the atmosphere by finding out who it is that forged these documents.

Back to my own history, we cleared the atmosphere with respect to Howard Hughes when we found out and made public the fact that the H.R. Hughes to whom the million-dollar payment was made by McGraw Hill was, in fact, Clifford Irving's wife. She opened a Swiss bank and told them her name was Helga R. Hughes, and asked McGraw Hill to please make the checks out to H.R. Hughes. And then Clifford Irving's wife deposited them into her account. Naturally, the signature card that endorsed the check H.R. Hughes matched the signature card in the bank because Clifford Irving wrote them. Once we knew that, then the air was cleared.

The air was cleared with respect to the Howard Hughes will and who wrote the will. When Melvin Dumar, the service station attendant who would have inherited $100 million from Howard Hughes, exclaimed he knew nothing about it, yet was surprised when he came forward and was confronted in court by the fact that his thumbprint was on the will inside a sealed envelope when the will was found. Again, the air was cleared, and there was no more mystery as to where this came from.

The air was cleared with Mark Hoffman and all of the documents that he forged when the murders occurred and we found out that he was trying to cover up his forgery by killing people who were in a position to expose him.

The air needs to be cleared here. We should not just stop at snickering at newspapers and television stations that seem to have been taken in. We should go deeper than that and find out who actually did it. Then we can lay to rest the conspiracy theory that says it came from all of these other places.

I end as I began by saying, over the years, I have always had a warm spot in my heart and a great sense of respect for Dan Rather because of the way he treated a story in which I was a principal some 30 years ago. I know he is a journalist with the highest professional standards. I extend to him my regrets at this time that his journalistic instincts failed him, and he didn't realize this was one that was being laid on him in the hope that he would be taken in. I hope he will recover from this. I know at some point he will recognize that he was taken in and step forward and make that acknowledgment clear.

With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I came to the floor to speak on another subject, but after listening to the Senator from Massachusetts I want to try to respond to some of the comments he made.

There is no question that we have a health care crisis in this country. There is a great deal of disagreement as to why. There is no question that the issue is tremendously complicated and does not lend itself to a solution with a single silver bullet. I am interested at the suggestion that the silver bullet to solve the rising health care costs is to allow drug reimportation. We have had that suggestion made here this morning. I would like to talk about that for a moment.

The evidence is that drug importation or reimportation, whichever phrase you choose, does not, in fact, produce major savings, except on an anecdotal basis; that is, one senior here or there might receive a significant benefit but overall the benefit of importation is very limited.

A recent London School of Economics study shows that parallel trade in drugs in Europe where they have importation back and forth across the borders has resulted in a savings of less than 2 percent by consumers. A World Bank study found that parallel trade in Sweden cost consumers as much as it saved them after accounting for reshipping and repackaging costs as well as profits for the traders.

So to stand here and say, whatever the decibel level, that we can somehow solve the problem if we just adopt the reimportation legislation that is being proposed is to go in the face of previous experience. I would be willing to adopt this just to prove the point if there were not a downside connected with it that our friends on the Democratic side do not talk about.

I have a sister-in-law who is a very aggressive shopper. She is a senior. She is very familiar with the Internet. She makes sure she gets the best deal in every circumstance. She takes prescription drugs and gets on the Internet and discovers that she can find a price cheaper on the Internet, if she buys overseas, than the price she can get at her local druggist.

She came to me and asked: Bob, is this a good idea? Now, I am not one of your constituents. I don't want a political answer. I am your sister-in-law who is trying to save money, and I want the truth. Is this a good idea for me to get my prescription drugs in Canada where the prices are so much lower?

I said to her: Based on what I know, if you get on a bus or a plane and drive to Canada and walk into a Canadian drugstore and buy the goods over the counter, chances are you will get reliable drugs at a lower price, and that will be the thing for you to do. On the other hand, if you get on the Internet and order these drugs to be shipped to you across national boundaries, there is no guarantee whatever that the drugs you will get will be the drugs you think you are getting.

Indeed, if we are going to talk anecdotal evidence, as we have been in the Senate, there are plenty of examples of people who have gotten on the Internet, gone to a Web site that appears to be in Canada, purchased drugs in Canada at a lower cost, and said to themselves: Aren't I a hero for being able to lower my drug costs so much.

Then when the drugs arrived, they found that while they may have been transshipped from Canada, they were produced in Bangladesh or Nigeria or wherever else in the world. There is absolutely no guarantee the drugs they are buying at such attractive lower prices are, in fact, the drugs that are outlined on the label of the bottle or box they receive.

Indeed, one of the interesting things that has started to happen is not only are we seeing degradation of the quality and accuracy of drugs being shipped across borders as a result of Internet sales, the Canadians themselves are beginning to lose control of the quality in their pharmacies. There are so many different sources of drugs now available that even within the network of drug distribution points within Canada, they cannot be sure of the purity and state of their drugs.

I am interested that there are those in the Senate who have said the drug companies are making enormous profits, and all we need to do is cut out those profits, lower the price of drugs, and everything will be fine, and at the same time they are insisting we have to have more research. What has lowered the cost of health care on a per person basis? It is the introduction of new wonder drugs. Where did the new wonder drugs come from? They do not come out of the air. They do not come as a result of Federal legislation. We cannot pass a bill in the Senate that says there will be a new drug that will solve this, that, or the other problem. Drugs come as a result of research.

We talk about the profits of the drug companies. I am not here to carry any water for the drug companies, but I have been a businessman long enough to know that profits that show up on a balance sheet or a profit-and-loss statement do not automatically go immediately into the pockets of the Donald Trumps and the Warren Buffetts of the world. Profits get retained in companies. There is an accounting term for it called retained earnings.

What do companies do with those retained earnings? They invest them in research. It takes roughly $1 billion to determine whether a new idea for a drug will produce a drug that works. A company has to have enough financial strength that it can put $1 billion into research to produce one drug.

That is expensive enough. You can spend millions of dollars on a drug that does not work before you know it is not going to work. So the amount of profits they will make on the drugs that do work not only have to recover the cost that it took for the drug that does work, but it has to recover the millions again and again for the drugs that do not work.

To suggest there is a silver bullet to the rising health care costs, and that the silver bullet can be found in beating up the drug companies and buying drugs from Canada, is to demonstrate vast ignorance of the way the free market really works.

Let me make, again, the standard statement that I make over and over in the campaign. I am not questioning the patriotism of my friends across the aisle. I am questioning their wisdom and their judgment and their decisions, but I am not questioning their patriotism. We hear that over and over again.

Finally, we hear the drug benefit that was passed in this body denigrated again and again on the Democratic side of the aisle, the do- nothing program, the program that did not do anything for senior citizens, and the cry that has gone out to the point that I find many of my constituents believe this program is so complicated that nobody can figure it out, and nobody can get any benefit from it.

Senator Hatch and I put together a series of town meetings across our State. We gathered seniors. We said: Here is how it works. We walked them through how to get on the Internet and order drugs. Then we said: If this is too complicated for you, you are not Internet friendly. Get your grandchild to get on the Internet, and they can make it work. If you do not have a grandchild who can make it work, call 1-800-Medicare, and the person who answers the phone will get on the Internet for you and make it work.

We took seniors out of the audience, asked what drugs they are currently taking, then, on the Internet, we checked it. They came back and said: We are going to save 45 to 50 percent of our drug costs, and this was easy. This was simple.

Talk about misleading the American people. Those who stand in the Senate at a high decibel rate attacking this bill are misleading the American people. Senator Hatch and I found with our constituents this program is easy to deal with. It will save up to half of your drug costs right now, and it is the law. You do not have to wait for an election or for an eruption to have this come to pass.

I hope my friends on the other side of the aisle will not be offended when I disagree with them when they say: The President has lied. The President has misled. That is election year rhetoric that we should learn to ignore, and spend our time on the reality, which is this Congress, under this President, has, in fact, done significant things. And if we will just level with the American people as to what we have done, they will find that it is easy to navigate, and it will produce significant financial benefit.

Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute and to extend my congratulations to a great Utah company, North American Exploration, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary of service to the mining industry. For the last 25 of these years, North American has been head- quartered in the City of Kaysville in my home State of Utah.

Over the last four decades, North American has provided mineral exploration and mine development services on countless projects throughout Utah and the Mountain West, producing jobs for hundreds of Utahns in the process. North American is typical of so many small businesses that are truly the silent engines behind our economy.

As a former businessman myself and as a member of the Senate Small Business Committee, I am well aware of the challenges involved in building and managing a successful enterprise. North American has been very fortunate to be aided in this endeavor by the leadership of Jay Gatten, who has been their chief executive since 1979.

So let me conclude by again offering my congratulations to Jay and Tora Gatten, Brian Vinton, and the rest of the North American team for the successes they have enjoyed and by offering them every best wish for continued prosperity.

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation with my friend and colleague Senator Dodd to temporarily extend the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. Senator Dodd was the author of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA, which was enacted in 2002, and I am joining with him in a bipartisan effort to extend this critically important legislation this year.

As a result of the devastating attacks of 9/11 and a nonexistent terrorism reinsurance market in its wake, TRIA was enacted to provide a temporary economic safety net to our private insurance market. This temporary backstop helped economic growth get back on track after the shock of 9/11. Under current market conditions TRIA is essential to the continued growth of nearly every sector of our economy--transportation, energy, real estate, construction, travel and tourism, lodging, health care, financial institutions, public entities, manufacturing, and retail.

TRIA came into existence for a very simple reason: hundreds of thousands of American jobs--and billions of dollars in business transactions--hung in the balance due to uncertainty in the insurance markets. The September 11 attacks fundamentally altered the way insurers looked at terrorism risks. As a result, the insurance market for terrorism dried up; coverage was unavailable; many types of financial transactions were unable to proceed; hard-working Americans suddenly found themselves economic victims of terrorism.

With broad, bipartisan support, Congress enacted TRIA in November 2002. TRIA was designed to be a temporary, 3-year program to bring stability and functionality back to an essential sector of the commercial insurance marketplace which ceased to exist after 9/11.

Fortunately, TRIA is working as intended. Terrorism insurance is available to all businesses at a reasonable cost. Under TRIA, in the event of further terror attacks, private insurers will cover tens of billions of dollars of terrorism-related risk. TRIA acts as a backstop to the private commercial property-casualty insurance system and provides some market certainty by establishing statutory caps for insured terrorism losses.

TRIA has enabled billions of dollars of real estate and other business transactions previously stalled to go forward without threatening the solvency of the commercial enterprises involved or their insurers. A recent Mortgage Bankers Association, MBA, survey of its 40 largest commercial/multifamily mortgage banking firms revealed that a substantial majority of those survey respondents believe that TRIA has made terrorism insurance both more available and less expensive. Failure to extend TRIA with the uncertainties that still exist in the insurance marketplace would likely have an adverse impact on the commercial real estate market by recreating the pre-TRIA environment that had led to rating agency downgrades of commercial mortgage-backed securities due to lack of adequate terrorism insurance.

TRIA does not currently expire until year-end 2005--which may cause some to wonder why we are introducing legislation today to extend the program by 2 years now. In truth, the economic safety net that TRIA provides will begin to fray as early as this fall if Congress does not act. Because insurers are now required to make terrorism coverage available throughout the life of the program--a decision rendered by the Treasury Department earlier this summer--there is a very real mismatch between TRIA's hard end-date and the commercial insurance policies that will be written in the next few months.

TRIA currently has a ``hard'' end date, which means that the backstop expires December 31, 2005. However, insurance policies that rely on TRIA are written every day of the year, generally for a 12-month term, although some commercial property policies covered by TRIA are multiyear. Therefore, policies written after January 1, 2005, will have a coverage term that extends beyond the life of the TRIA Federal backstop. As a result, insurers will have no choice but to evaluate every policyholder considered for coverage during this period as if the backstop does not exist for part of the coverage period.

Because commercial insurers must make terrorism coverage available for policies written at any time during 2005, insurers and policyholders will be exposed to risk that they continue to be unable to carry during the part of the coverage term that runs beyond TRIA. Policyholders, state insurance regulators and insurers understand that this potential mismatch between policy periods and TRIA's expiration makes it absolutely critical that Congress acts this year to extend TRIA beyond December 31, 2005.

Failure to extend TRIA beyond its current sunset date of December 31, 2005, will create tremendous uncertainty and potential market upheaval for both commercial policyholders and insurers beginning as early as this fall, when annual policies for coverage starting after January 1, 2005, are considered and negotiated.

Insurers and their policyholders already are beginning to negotiate terms, prices and provisions for policy contracts that will renew beginning in January 2005 and extend into 2006. Unless TRIA is extended in 2004, policyholders whose coverage extends into 2006, and their insurers, will not know whether TRIA's financial backstop will exist for the full term of their coverage. This will make it difficult, if not impossible, to accurately price such coverage and is likely to dramatically reduce the availability of terrorism insurance to business consumers. Such an outcome can only harm the economic recovery underway.

A full 2-year extension this year will help avoid destabilizing the insurance market, and, in turn, the national economy, and will enable Congress, insurers, businesses and Government officials to gather all available relevant data--including market data from all three years of TRIA as insurer deductibles rise from 7 percent of prior year commercial premiums in 2003 to 15 percent of such premiums in 2005. Congressional action now will avoid a premature expiration of the Federal backstop in 2005 and help ensure the economic recovery maintains its pace.

I am happy to.

Madam President, one of the things that has struck me since I have been in the Senate is that during debate in the Senate, particularly during morning business, Senators seem to have no sense of history. They seem to create a crisis out of the moment and have no sense of placing their statements in any kind of historic context. This is an opportunity for missing what really is happening. If you do not place something in its context, you do not understand it properly. For that reason, I have decided to talk a little bit about the debates that have been going on with respect to the economy, where the economy is, where the economy is going.

Let me take listeners back to the election of 1992. I have particular focus there because that is the election in which I was first chosen to come to the Senate. During that election, there was a lot of conversation about the economy. We were in a recession, everybody said. We are in a terrible slowdown, everybody said. In fact, as we now know, looking at it in historic context, things were on the rise. There had, in fact, been a recession, but we were in recovery during the election of 1992. It just did not feel like a recovery.

That is one of the historic lessons we should all learn. The sense of where we are is almost always lagging events. That is, we have a feel that we are in a recession when, in fact, we are in a recovery. On the flip side of that, we can have a feel that we are in a recovery when we are, in fact, in a recession. It is because things take a little while to sink into the consciousness even though they are going on in reality.

In 1992, then-Governor Clinton and I, running, obviously, for different offices, both were faced with an electorate that felt the economy was in trouble. We both talked about what we needed to do to get the economy out of trouble. Then, when the normal course of the business cycle brought the economy back, the temptation on the part of all politicians was to take credit for that, as if the recovery that was taking place in 1993 and 1994 occurred solely because we had been elected. That is very satisfying for a politician to want to do. It does not happen to be intellectually accurate, but it is something everybody does.

As I say, I was elected in 1992. In 1993, I joined the Banking Committee. As a member of the Banking Committee, I had the occasion to listen to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board when he came before the Banking Committee to make his report on the state of the economy. I remember very clearly because the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan, had been appointed by a Republican President and was viewed as a Republican

holdover, some of the Democratic members of the Banking Committee were very critical of him at the time. They said: If this is a recovery-- voices dripping with sarcasm--where are the jobs? I remember charts being held up in the Banking Committee to confront Alan Greenspan to say, if it is a recovery at all, it is a jobless recovery. Where are the jobs? Greenspan was subjected to heavy criticism from Democratic members of the Banking Committee because somehow it must be his fault that there was a jobless recovery.

Looking back, again in the context of history, we know that the creation of jobs is always what the economists call a lagging indicator. That is, a recovery starts; it takes hold; the jobs that had been lost in a recession are always the last thing to come back in a recovery.

The jobs started to come back in 1994, in 1995. The Clinton administration took credit for that: We did it; the only reason the jobs came back is because Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992. The Republicans had an answer to that: No, we did it; the only reason the jobs came back is because Newt Gingrich became Speaker in 1995. In fact, of course, the business cycle was well entrenched, the recovery was underway, and the jobs came back, probably without regard to who was President or who was Speaker. It was part of the standard business cycle.

Then we got into that period of boom, and everybody was excited that the boom was going to go on forever. I remember asking Alan Greenspan in one of his other appearances before the Banking Committee, as we were talking about the continual rise in the economy: Mr. Chairman, have we repealed the business cycle? Is the business cycle over, and we are never going to have another recession?

Chairman Greenspan smiled that wry smile of his and said: No, Senator, we have not repealed the business cycle, and there will be a correction, a recession--call it what you will--at some point in the future. We cannot predict when and we cannot predict how deep, but it will be there.

The point of this in political terms is that President Clinton and the Congress that was elected with him in 1992 inherited a strong recovery tide in the economy. However much we took credit for it ourselves, we really had little or nothing to do with it.

Now, let's go ahead 8 years to the election of 2000. In the election of 2000, it felt as if the economy was still enormously strong. Remember, I discussed our feelings of how things are going usually lag reality. In fact, we now know that the economy started to slow down in 2000. We now know that gross domestic production growth, which is the main measure of recessions and recoveries, was dropping sharply in the last two quarters of 2000, but it did not feel like it. The layoffs had not started yet because businesses were hoping this was temporary. Employment was still up, and we talked about this enormously strong economy we were having.

Looking back on it now, we know that the President who was elected in 2000 inherited a slowing economy headed toward recession, in contrast to the President who was elected in 1992, who inherited a strong recovery headed toward a period of great growth. Naturally, in the political world, that President was blamed for that slowdown. It all happened on his watch, so it was all his fault.

Interestingly enough, I recall that in the election of 2000, there was one candidate who spoke of the coming slowdown, and he was attacked for trying to talk down the economy for political purposes. That was Governor George W. Bush of Texas, holder of a Harvard MBA, who could see the signs that this slowdown was coming and talked about it during the campaign, only to be attacked by his political opponents for his pessimism.

But he inherited a slowing economy, a slowdown that started in 2000. The GDP went negative in the first quarter of 2001 and hit its worst point in the third quarter of 2001, simultaneous with September 11 and the hit that gave to the economy.

So we did have a recession. It was advertised and forecast by the economic information that preceded it, and the President and the Congress have been struggling with that recession and the recovery that has followed ever since.

It is interesting to me that even though that recession was shorter and shallower than the recession that had occurred 8 or 9 years before, the rhetoric on the Senate floor referred to it as ``the worst economy in 50 years.'' We were told this President was ``the worst President since Herbert Hoover.'' No sense of history, no understanding of the reality, no connection with the real data--but that kind of rhetoric has been used on the floor of the Senate.

It is also interesting that the same attack that was made when Bill Clinton was a fresh President was made again with respect to this recovery: Where are the jobs? The same questions I heard thrown at Alan Greenspan by the Democrats on the Banking Committee have now been thrown not at Alan Greenspan but at George W. Bush: Where are the jobs? Once again, economic history shows that jobs are the lagging indicator, that jobs come at the end of the turnaround and not in the middle of it. And now, exactly on time where economic history would indicate, the jobs have started to appear.

All of a sudden, the argument that this is a jobless recovery no longer holds any water. We have increased jobs for 10 consecutive months. In the months of March, April, and May, we added more jobs to the economy than were lost in the 3 months following 9/11. We had the disaster of 9/11 and 3 months of a loss of jobs. As the airline industry went into the tank, the hospitality industry and others were shattered by the 9/11 situation. We lost a tremendous number of jobs. In March, April, and May of 2004, we added more jobs than were lost in that corresponding 3-month period following 9/11.

So now we do not hear about the jobless recovery any more. Now the rhetoric has shifted to ``the middle-class squeeze.'' I heard one Senator on the Senate floor stand here and say: Property taxes in my State have gone up so high the middle class cannot handle it--to which I want to say, you mean George W. Bush is responsible for the fact that property values in your State have gone up, and your State legislature has responded to that by reassessing property and raising property taxes in your State? That is the President's fault?

Well, in today's political atmosphere, of course, it is the President's fault. Anything that happens is the President's fault.

The point I want to make is, in historic terms, just as President Clinton inherited an economy that was on the rise because of forces that were in place prior to his election, just as President Bush inherited an economy where the forces were on the decline prior to his election, the next President, the one who will be inaugurated on January 20, 2005--whoever he may be--will inherit an economy that is strongly on the rise where all of the economic indicators are up and where the groundwork for a significant period of growth and prosperity has already been laid. Whoever that President is will take credit for that growth, even though the groundwork for it has been laid prior to his inauguration.

Now, I will say that if that President is George W. Bush, he might be entitled to some of that credit. But the fact is, the combination of the actions in monetary policy by the Federal Reserve Board and in fiscal policy by the Congress of the United States has been responsible for creating the atmosphere of economic growth and strength the next President and the next administration will preside over.

I repeat what I say here often: We politicians need to have a greater sense of humility and reality and understand we do not control whether the economy is good or bad. If we could control that, the economy would constantly be good. What politician of either party would deliberately preside over policies that make the economy go bad and the voters get mad? If it were up to the Congress to say, ``Do this, and the economy will be good'' or ``Do that, and the economy will be bad,'' every Congress, regardless of ideological stripe, would always say, ``Let's do what makes the economy good.''

So maybe it is time to visit just a little bit about what causes the business cycle. It is not elections. Recessions are caused by one of two general categories of events. One which we cannot control is outside shocks, such as 9/11, such as the oil shock that set off the recession in the 1970s. Recessions are

caused by shocks that are outside our control.

Or the second general category: They are caused by a series of mistakes, mistakes that business men and women make. They make decisions about purchasing stock and then discover they have too much inventory. They make decisions about going into a market and discover that the market will not work, and they have to lay people off. They make decisions about the future of their product and then discover the product will not sell, so they have to cut back.

When the number of decisions that are wrong exceeds the number of decisions that are right, in an $11 trillion economy, you get a recession. The recession is the way those mistakes are paid for. The recession is the way the impact of those mistakes are corrected.

Perhaps the most dramatic one I can think of was the recession of 1958 where the automobile industry collectively made a series of major mistakes. They assumed the boom they had in previous years--1955 model year, 1956 model year, 1957 model year--was going to go forward, and then suddenly they discovered they had huge amounts of inventory on their hands, as people did not buy cars at the same level they had projected. As a consequence, the automobile industry started to shut down until the inventory got sold off. That meant the steel industry, the aluminum industry, the glass industry, the rubber industry, all had to shut down because they were not building cars, and we had one of the most difficult recessions we have had in the postwar period in 1958. The recession was the way you corrected those mistakes. It did not have anything to do with who was elected President or who was elected to the Congress; it was caused by a series of bad business decisions on the part of people in the automobile industry.

Look at the recession we have just gone through. What did it come on the heels of? Yes, 9/11 was there. Yes, there were some outside shocks. But it came after what we called the dot-com bubble. A lot of jobs were created in companies that were not earning anything. They had no income other than selling stock on the stock market. People got caught up in the froth of the dot-com bubble: This is going to be a great future; we are going to buy the stock, and we are going to get rich.

Somewhere along the line somebody said: But where are the earnings? When it dawned on people these companies with these brilliant projections and plans had no earnings, shareholders decided they did not want to hold those stocks anymore. The dot-com bubble burst. The stock market collapsed, and we were on our way toward a correction or, if you will, recession. It had nothing to do with who got elected.

But this point I want to make: Maybe we in government can't create economic growth. Maybe it doesn't matter who gets elected in terms of economic power. But we can certainly do dumb things that can hurt it. The Federal Government can't create jobs, but the Federal Government can mess up the economy in such a way that jobs are destroyed.

How do we do it? One of the ways that we disrupt the economy, and we do it regularly, is by our tax policy. We can create an atmosphere where it is easier for the economy to grow, or we can create an atmosphere where there are penalties in the form of taxes when the economy grows.

I have told this story before about my own experience founding a company and making it grow in what some have called the decade of greed. When Ronald Reagan was President and the Congress created a situation where the top marginal tax rate was 28 percent, oh, what a tremendous windfall for the rich to have the top marginal tax rate at 28 percent. What they don't realize, those who talk about how terrible this was, is that the enormous economic growth we had in the 1980s, and indeed on into the 1990s, in my view, was spurred by the fact that a company like ours, starting with four employees and growing ultimately to 4,000, was able to finance that growth because we were able to keep 72 cents out of every dollar we earned.

When the Clinton administration came in, and the Congress responded to his call, the top marginal tax rate went effectively to over 40 percent, which meant a starting business was able to keep only 60 cents out of every dollar that it earned and had to go someplace else to finance its growth rather than from internal funds.

I have made these points before. I have learned in the Senate there is no such thing as repetition because on the other side of the aisle we get the repetition day after day about how terrible the economy is.

I say again, in conclusion, the next President, whoever he is, will preside over a strong and robust economy. The groundwork for that reality has been laid during the last 4 years. Whoever takes credit for it in the next 4 years will be taking credit for work that was done prior to his taking office.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, as the debate on the Defense authorization bill began, I announced my intention to offer an amendment to that bill with respect to the nuclear penetrator, or, as it is known around here, the RNEP. I have been dissuaded from offering that amendment by the arguments of some of my friends who insist it is unnecessary because it would be simply a statement of existing law. I wanted to be sure that was the case, and therefore I sought assurances from both the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense. I have handed the letters from those two Departments to my friend from Michigan. I ask if I could reclaim those letters so I might quote from them.

Linton F. Brooks, who is the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, wrote me on June 15, and he says the following things:

. . . let me state unequivocally this Administration has no

current plans or requirements to conduct an underground

nuclear test.

That is important to understand, that the administration has no plans to conduct an underground nuclear test of any kind.

With respect to RNEP, he says:

. . . I know you are concerned that the ongoing RNEP study

could lead to the resumption of underground nuclear testing.

The RNEP study will not require an underground nuclear test.

That is a very firm, unequivocal statement.

He goes on to talk about possibilities, and he says:

Should the President support, and the Congress approve,

full-scale engineering development of RNEP, the

Administration does not intend to conduct a nuclear test.

From the beginning, we have operated under the assumption

that resuming testing to certify RNEP is not an option. . . .

Those are firm assurances from the Department of Energy. But I wanted to be sure this was not just Ambassador Linton Brooks' attitude, so I had a conversation with Paul Wolfowitz at the Department of Defense. Dated June 23, he sent me a letter reaffirming what Administrator Brooks had said and makes it clear that the Department of Defense agrees there will be no nuclear test with respect to RNEP under the current administration.

So I am heartened by these assurances I have received from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy that there is no plan or requirement to conduct an underground nuclear explosive test of any kind, and I accept these assurances. But here in the Congress I have those to whom I look for guidance on these matters. I want to be sure that should some future administration decide to change the policy that has been outlined by the Bush administration, that the present law would hinder future administrations from conducting these same tests without there being a vote of Congress; particularly with respect to RNEP, that there would be no underground nuclear test without a congressional vote.

I have asked the Senator from Arizona, who is an expert on these matters, if he would agree. I also discussed it with the Senator from Michigan, who is the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee.

If I may, Mr. President, I ask the Senator from Arizona, Mr. Kyl, if he agrees that under current law, a vote from Congress would have to occur before a test could be conducted on RNEP?

I thank the Senator from Arizona, Mr. President.

I would now like to address the same question to the Senator from Michigan, with his great background in the area of law concerning this.

Does the Senator from Michigan agree that under current law, a vote from Congress would have to occur before a test could be conducted for

I thank the Senator from Michigan. I thank the Senator from Arizona.

On the basis of their assurances, along with the written assurances I have received from this administration--two Departments speaking--I will not offer my amendment.

Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent those two letters be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I intended to come to the floor to speak about Iraq. I will do that. But I must make a comment or two about the speeches that have preceded mine with respect to the economy and what is happening.

I remember 4 years ago when the Presidential election was in full heat. One candidate said the prosperity that we have been experiencing is starting to slow down, and the economy is showing signs of being at the end of the business cycle and heading toward a recession. His political opponent said he was trying to talk down the economy for political purposes.

Well, it turns out he was right. We started a slowdown in the economy in the last two quarters of 2000. We ended up with a recession in the first three quarters of 2001. He was not trying to talk down the economy just for political purposes. He was telling the truth. This was, of course, Governor George W. Bush of Texas.

The fact is, the economy is doing extremely well, and there are those who are trying to talk it down for political purposes. This is the fact, no matter who is elected President. Whether it is George W. Bush, John Kerry, Ralph Nader, or the Libertarian, or whoever else may be out there seeking the Presidency, he or she will inherit an extremely strong economy come January of 2005. And whoever it is, if it is not George W. Bush, will take credit for that strength and say: See, because I got elected everything is now wonderful.

In fact, the business cycle does not operate that way. The business cycle does not pay attention to election days; it pays attention to long-term policies put in place. We had the recession in the beginning of 2001 because of economic pressures that built up in the nineties. We have the recovery now taking hold in 2004 that will come into play through the balance of this year and strongly into next year because of policies that were put in place over the last several years. You cannot turn the economy around by a single election. You have to put policies in place and see them go forward.

It is very interesting to see those particular items President Bush's opponents are now focusing on to say this is terrible, this is terrible, this is terrible. They have changed now because the items they used to be focused on as the bellwethers of economic activity have turned positive. They cannot use the old measuring sticks they said were so important to make the case that the President's economic plan is a failure because those measuring sticks have all turned positive and now indicate the President's policies were the right ones, so they pick up new measuring sticks and find an opportunity to blame President Bush.

I am fascinated to know that the increase in property values in New Jersey in the last few years is President Bush's fault; that when the New Jersey officials increase property taxes to go along with that increase in property values, it is President Bush's fault, and so on and so on. We will hear more of that in the months to come. Let us remember that the economy responds to a whole series of pressures. No President can wave a magic wand and create jobs, as one candidate is promising to do. Let us realize on that measure, which the President's opponents no longer use, jobs are being created now at a faster rate than the President's opponent is promising he would do if he became President. If you like the rate that the Democratic presumptive nominee is proposing for job creation, you have to like the record of George W. Bush because jobs are being created at a faster rate right now than that proposed rate.

Well, Mr. President, I rose to discuss Iraq, and I will do that in the time I have remaining. How much time do I have?

Mr. President, there is an old statement which has become enshrined in our society now as the alcoholic's prayer. It goes like this:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot

change, the courage to change the things I can, and the

wisdom to know the difference.

I suggest that as we face the world today as the world's strongest power economically, militarily, culturally, educationally--in almost every category--we should view our responsibilities through the prism of the alcoholic's prayer: Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As I listen to the debate on Iraq, as I listen to the partisan and political comments, many of them well-meaning and properly addressed, I pray for the third leg of that saying--the wisdom to know the difference between the things we can change and the things we cannot because many of the things being raised with respect to our situation in Iraq are things we cannot change. Many of the complaints are against things we can change, but we are not because we are wallowing in complaint and self-criticism when we should be moving ahead.

Let me give you an example. The first question we need to address with respect to our military activity in Iraq and elsewhere in the region is this: Are we engaged solely in a military exercise with respect to Iraq or are we, in fact, in a world war against terrorism? We need the wisdom to get the answer to that question and know the difference because the difference is vast.

I am one who believes that we are, in fact, engaged in a worldwide war against terrorism. We must have the serenity to accept the fact that war is not going to go away if we ignore it. There are many who say there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11; therefore, we should spend all of our time going after those who dealt with 9/11 and not pay any attention to Iraq. Well, that may have been a legitimate argument prior to the time we went into Iraq, but it is now irrelevant because we are there. We are there because this body, with over 70 votes, gave the President our support for going in there; and the United Nations, by a unanimous vote in the Security Council, gave the President support to go in. This body and the United Nations overwhelmingly, along with the House of Representatives, said this is the right thing to do. We did it, and we must accept the fact that we are there, and complaining about maybe we made a mistake doesn't change the reality that we are there.

I am one who thinks we made the right decision. I am happy that David Kay, the inspector for weapons of mass destruction who went into Iraq, thinks we made the right decision. When I talk to audiences in Utah, I say: How many of you know that David Kay discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Everybody raises

his hand. Then I say: How many of you know that David Kay said, based on what he discovered, that Saddam Hussein was more dangerous than we thought? Well, we didn't know that. But that is a fact that we must recognize and have the wisdom to go forward in the face of that fact.

Now, if indeed we are engaged in a worldwide war on terror, that means that our being in Iraq is not only for the sake of the Iraqis, it is for the sake of Americans. Some say we have no business being there, it is not our country, we don't care. Well, one of the realities we have to face is we are involved in the world whether we like it or not. Those on the campaign trail who are saying bring the troops home are the same people who are saying stop buying at any retailer who purchases goods abroad. Those who are saying don't have anything to do with any company that has any employees abroad do not realize the fundamental truth that America is involved in the world whether we like it or not, and we cannot withdraw. We cannot become isolationists. We cannot hide behind our two oceans militarily or economically.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the ``evil empire'' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not. We must have the wisdom to recognize that fundamental truth and act accordingly; we must have the courage to act according to the truth.

I went to Iraq with the leader and my colleague Senator Ensign from Nevada and spent a day with the commanders there. You can say that in one day in Iraq, what do you learn? Obviously, you don't learn everything you need to in one day to know the whole situation, but you learn a whole lot more in one day in Iraq than you do sitting in America reading the newspapers.

I learned the forces that are opposed to us in Iraq have as their goal civil war and a failed state. Ultimately, what they want to have happen is for the Iraqi government that is being created now to fail. They want the Iraqis in anarchy. They want the economy destroyed. Why would they want such terrible things? They think out of that chaos they can seize power and come back into control.

Most who are involved in this insurgency are former supporters and officers of Saddam Hussein. They are hoping that through chaos they can recapture that which they could not hold in the face of the American military incursion into that country.

Grant us the wisdom to know the difference between a difficult situation and an impossible one. There are those who are saying Iraq is Bush's Vietnam. I do not think Iraq is Bush's Vietnam because Bush did not go into Iraq with the same motives that President Kennedy went into Vietnam, with the same naivete that President Kennedy and President Johnson pursued Vietnam.

We should have the courage to change the situation in Iraq by persistence, by holding the course steadily, and by recognizing that there are people in the Middle East who do want freedom.

There are pessimists who say: No, come on, Bennett, you say to accept the things you cannot change, and one of the things you cannot change is that the Muslim people do not want freedom.

I refuse to accept that. Maybe I do not have the wisdom to recognize the difference, but I refuse to accept that.

Having visited with some of the Iraqis, I have found some who said they clearly do, most particularly the new Prime Minister Allawi. We visited with him. He struck me as a very clear-headed, careful guy who fully understood the situation.

As we were finishing our conversation, I said to him: Accept our thanks for your willingness to put your life on the line for this effort.

His life is in jeopardy. Two ministers of his government have already been assassinated, and he is clearly the chief target of those who would plunge Iraq into civil war.

I was interested in his answer. When I thanked him for his willingness to risk his life to make this government work, he looked at me and responded: It is my country.

There is an Iraqi leader willing to risk his life for his country. We have the responsibility, I believe, to do everything we can to help him.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I intend to oppose the Kennedy-Feinstein amendment even though I am sympathetic with many of the arguments they make. I am in agreement with the idea that this is a feasibility study only and that the study should go forward, but my primary concern is that there be no nuclear testing of this particular device or any aspect of this particular device while the study is going on.

It is my understanding that is part of the law accepted previously, but I want to make it absolutely sure. For that purpose, I intend, following this vote, some time during the debate, to call up my amendment which makes it clear that there can be no nuclear testing under the cover of a study of the RNEP as it is so called. That amendment is offered not only for myself and my colleague from Utah, Senator Hatch, but we are joined by Senator Collins of Maine and Senator Domenici of New Mexico.

I wish to make it clear that my goal is to see to it that there be no nuclear testing in the name of the study unless there is a specific congressional vote with respect to that testing. I do not believe it will be necessary, but if some future administration 5, 10, 15 years from now were to decide they needed to do some nuclear testing, that there was a compelling case to do that, I want that future administration to have to come to the Congress and make the compelling case to the Congress. My amendment goes in that direction with that as its goal.

That is correct. As I said, Senator Hatch, Senator Collins, and Senator Domenici have cosponsored the amendment, and there are some others who indicated they will as well.

Mr. President, I thank the chairman for his courtesy and look forward to working with him and Senator Levin to see if we can indeed get this amendment adopted.

Mr. President, on the passing of former President Reagan, my mind, like everyone else's, goes back to a personal experience--not one that I had with Ronald Reagan himself because I did not know him that well, but in 1976, I was being interviewed for a job in the Reagan campaign for President. The individual, the former President's campaign manager at the time, who was conducting the interview, went through all of the specifics of the job he wanted me to take. The interview went very well. I seemed to have the credentials they wanted, and it was clear that a job offer was sitting there on the table. But I was a little troubled, even though things were going well, because I wanted to make something very clear.

I did not know Ronald Reagan. I had met him, but I did not know him. I only knew the caricature of Reagan which was out there in the media, which was that he was a rigid, ideological, hard-line conservative who would never, ever budge from an ideological position. So I said, in the spirit of full disclosure in this job interview, I want to make one thing clear. I said: I am not a true believer.

The individual conducting the interview smiled a little and he said: That's all right, neither is the Governor.

That was my first glimpse into what made Ronald Reagan a truly successful politician. He was a politician of absolutely firm resolve, there is no question about that. There were things he believed and he believed with such passion that he would never, ever deviate from them. But there were also some things he realized could be compromised that did not require an absolute, hard-line ideological stance, and the great genius of the man is that he had the wisdom to be able to discern which issue fell into which category, which issue was one in which there must be no compromise, and which issue was one where he could, in the

words of former Senator Dole, take 80 percent of the deal and be happy with it. That requires a degree of wisdom and sensitivity that very few of us possess. Ronald Reagan possessed it, and that was the core of his genius.

In the words of the country music song, he knew when to hold them and when to fold them.

On the issue of the evil empire, that was a time when he would hold them. On the issue of the evil empire, he would give no quarter, and he was criticized firmly for that, even within his own administration. The story is told of a meeting where members of the administration were discussing how they would deal with the Soviet Union in a certain situation, and after one point of view was presented President Reagan turned to the individual and said: If you believe that, what are you doing in this administration? He was that firm in his determination that the Soviet Union was, indeed, an evil empire and had to be confronted as such.

But when the confrontation truly came and the Soviet Union found they were up against an immovable object in Ronald Reagan and they began to maneuver, then he could see the areas in which 80 percent was good enough. He could discern the difference between where he had to stand absolutely firm and where he had to negotiate. He skillfully exploited all of those differences in such a way that the ``evil empire'' first ceased to be evil and then ultimately ceased to be an empire.

I find one of the great ironies of history the fact that upon his passing, on the pages of the New York Times, Mikhail Gorbachev is quoted in praise of Ronald Reagan. The man whom Reagan outmaneuvered, outnegotiated, and ultimately forced from office was singing his praises at his passing. That is an indication of how good Ronald Reagan was at the job of being President of the United States.

We have all talked about how optimistic he was, how filled with hope he was, what a congenial fellow he was, what a great communicator he was. And all of that is true and all of that is right and proper in this eulogy. But we should not allow ourselves to forget in these discussions of his wonderful qualities how effective a President he was. We live in Ronald Reagan's America. Indeed, we live in Ronald Reagan's world. He is more responsible for the kind of America we have today than any other man. He is more responsible for the kind of world in which we live than any other man.

That does not mean he is solely responsible, by any means, because there are many people who have affected America and have affected the world for good and ill, and no one man can be solely responsible for what happened. But he is more responsible than any other individual for the kind of country we have and for the kind of world in which we live--and both are substantially better than that which he found when he became President.

Let us look back for a minute at what America was like when Ronald Reagan became President.

We think of the Great Depression and how devastating that was as an economic event in our lives. When Ronald Reagan came to the Presidency, we were in the midst of the great inflation. I remember it very clearly. I was delighted in that period--absolutely delighted--to be able to get a bank loan, so I could meet payroll in the business I was running, at an interest rate of 21 1/5 percent. I remember talking to my banker who said to me, Today the Treasury auction has sold 30-year Government securities at 15 percent. It was absolutely stunning. The great inflation was destroying value, destroying confidence, and created what is the most serious recession we have had since the Great Depression--the double digits of the 1980s which occurred in Reagan's Presidency but were the consequence of the great inflation that went before. This President stood absolutely firm on his economic policy that was being ridiculed, that was being castigated, that was being sneered at; and his message to the country was stay the course. We did stay the course. His party lost a lot of seats in that next election, but he stood firm. Along with Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve, they squeezed inflation out of the economy, created an economic situation where today as the heirs of that enormously difficult but significant effort we find the time when interest rates are at their lowest in 20, 30, or 40 years.

I remind people who derided Ronald Reagan as the playboy, lifeguard, football player with no intellectual base that he was the only President of the United States who had a degree in economics--classic economics, Keynesian economics--and he viewed the world in Keynesian terms and set an economic course that produced the base of prosperity we live in today. Yes, he was an optimist. Yes, he was a politician of joy. Yes, he was a pleasant fellow. But he was an enormously successful President in his domestic policies.

During his Presidency, the American economy grew as measured in terms of gross domestic product as much as if it had acquired the entire economy of Germany. We added as much gross domestic product--that is as much output in the American economy--during the time he was President as the entire economy of Germany.

Let us not forget that contribution as we remember and properly celebrate his sterling personal qualities.

Internationally, of course, we have talked about that. Other Senators have talked about that. But let us remember once again at the time his policies were very controversial, at the time his policies were derided by the wise men, at the time they said he was a cowboy who was going to set off all kinds of danger internationally, and at the end of his Presidency, as I say, the ``evil empire'' was no longer evil and very quickly it was no longer an empire. And instead of setting off dangerous international consequences, what he did by standing firm on his resolve was transform the world by ridding it of its greatest threat. That was not bad for a B actor who presumably didn't know anything beyond what was on those 3-by-5 cards.

The best summary comes from one of his staffers who wrote a book. The staffer was named Dinesh D'Souza. He wrote a book called ``Reagan,'' and the first chapter of that book is entitled, ``The Wise Men and The Dummy.''

In that chapter, D'Souza said when Reagan came to the Presidency, it was widely assumed among all the liberal wise men in the country that he was a dummy. The untold secret is the conservative wise men felt the same way. The conservative wise men thought he won the Presidency because he was a great actor: He looks good on television, but we can't allow him to make any of the decisions. He is a front, and we will put together the conservative agenda. Then we will have him as our puppet to go out and sell it to the American people, and we will have the best of all possible worlds.

Well, as D'Souza records, at the end of the day, on every major issue that came before the Reagan Presidency, it turned out the wise men were wrong and the dummy was right. And the dummy, because he was President of the United States and because he understood the proper use of power and he exercised it with tremendous skill, had views that prevailed, and we are the beneficiaries of his wisdom.

At this time of his passing, I do not mourn because Ronald Reagan has been released by death from a tremendously debilitating, frustrating, and ultimately tragic situation. Ronald Reagan is now in a better place that does not require us to mourn but to rejoice. This time is a time to celebrate, a time to be grateful, and a time to thank Providence for giving America at this time in its history this particular statesman, the one who knew when to stand with absolute resolve, when to be willing to make the deal, and possess the innate wisdom to know the difference.

We live in Ronald Reagan's America. Indeed, we live in Ronald Reagan's world, and we are all better off for that fact.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.