Remarks at a Dinner for Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, August 14, 2000

August 5,2000

Well, thank you very much. I've had a wonderful time. When I saw what a big crowd it was, I thought I had come to the wrong place. I thought you were just having a family reunion. [Laughter] I wanted to come here for a long time, and I'm honored to be here for Kathleen. I have said--every time I go to Maryland I say she is the finest Lieutenant Governor in America by a long stretch, but it is clearly true.

You heard Mark say this, but I came here not only because of my friendship for her and so many members of her family but because she did make Maryland the first State in the country to require community service for graduation from high school. That meant something to me. And she and Governor Glendening were out there on the frontlines fighting for gun safety legislation when the NRA was trying to beat their brains out and beat our brains out, and I haven't succeeded in Congress yet, but they did succeed in Maryland in passing sweeping gun safety legislation. And she deserves a lot of credit for it.

And I can say so much else about her, but I admire her so much. And she and her husband and her kids, they're the kind of family that we ought to lift up in America. And I look forward to her elevation, and who knows, maybe someday I'll be knocking on doors for her when she's running for national office. I'd like to do that.

Now, let me say--Ethel, you may have to put me up tonight--[laughter]--and if so, that would tickle me, because Ethel's been sending me these raunchy Valentine cards for years. [Laughter] And I'm completely in love with her, and I keep trying to get some tabloid to write something sleazy about it, and I haven't been able to so far. [Laughter]

But the reason you may have to put me up tonight is, on the way out, Hillary said, "You're going to this fundraiser for Kathleen tonight." I said, "Yes." And she said, "And last week you went to one for Patrick." I said, "Yes." She said, "And a couple of weeks ago you went to one for Teddy." She said, "But it's your wife that's running for Senator from New York in 90 days"--[laughter]--" where it costs $30 million-plus to run." She said, "Maybe they'll just put you up tonight." [Laughter] And then she said she was glad I was going and wished she could be here. But I thank you--thank you, Ethel, for being my friend all these years.

I want to thank Joe Kennedy. I miss him so much in the Congress, and I was reminded of how much I missed him when I saw him up here speaking tonight. And I'd say Mark has a good future, wouldn't you? [Applause] He did a great job over here.

When Ted and Vicki were taking me through the house tonight with Ethel, or all the houses, and Sarge and Eunice and Pat went with us, and Sarge told me in a couple of weeks he was going to be 85 years old, I thought, "Well, Mark, you've got another 40 years to run for office. You don't have to even be in a hurry. It's great." [Laughter]

Let me just say one word, too, if I might, about Senator Kennedy. He has been so good to me and to Hillary and to our family and so wonderful to work with. And when we suffered the terrible disappointment of losing the Congress in the 1994 elections, you know, a lot of people wanted to quit. Some people did quit, because the Democrats had been the majority for quite a long while, except for a 6-year interruption in the Senate. And the thing that I liked most about Ted Kennedy is that he doesn't understand the meaning of the word quit.

You know, he was sort of like me. I woke up the next day, and I said, "Boy, we got a terrible licking. We've got to figure out why it happened and go take it back and keep working for the things we believe in, and in the meanwhile, we could certainly stop them from doing what they're trying to do." And Ted thought it was a pretty good fight.

I cannot tell you what an inspiration he has been not only to me but to people in the Congress, just reminding them that nobody's got a right to be in the majority; nobody's got a right to be in office. But we do if we have the office, a responsibility--we have a responsibility to get up every day and make something good happen. And that's what he does. And I should tell you, I have said many times that there would be no way in the world any well-informed historian could make a list of the 10 greatest United States Senators from the beginning of the Republic in the 18th century without putting Ted Kennedy's name on it. That's absolutely true.

I also want to thank my old friend Brendan Byrne, the former Governor of New Jersey, for being here tonight. And two of my former Ambassadors, Tom Siewert, who was my Ambassador to Sweden, and Elizabeth Bagley, who represented us in Portugal, are here tonight. I thank them for being here. The chairman of our Democratic Convention in L.A., Terry McAuliffe, is here tonight. He's probably the one who has really been copying your license number down. [Laughter]

Let me also say that I first came to this place--not to this compound; I've never been here before--but I first came here 32 years ago with my college roommate. And I nearly drowned, actually, swimming off the waters here. It was just a year after then-Senator Robert Kennedy had filled in for his brother at a meeting that my class at Georgetown sponsored, along with a Massachusetts club. And my roommate, Tommy Caplan, got him to come. And he came with me tonight, and I think that's pretty sweet that after 32 years we're still bumming around together. So I want to thank him for coming.