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Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, we have heard so many stories about a great man, the Gipper, and none of them are surprising because he was always such a gentle person. I have to share with you that I had the honor, about a month ago, of giving the commencement address at Oral Roberts University. When I did, I used a lot of the 1964 speech ``A Rendezvous With Destiny.'' I said it should be required reading for anyone to graduate at any level in America to read ``A Rendezvous With Destiny.'' It is a speech that changed my life. Ronald Reagan gave it in 1964. I remember I almost memorized that speech. In fact, I still have most of it memorized. As a result of that, the next year I decided, well, if he did it, if he really feels this concerned, I should, too, and I went and filed for office and ran for the State legislature. So that is how I happened to get started.
But that is not as far back as we go. I believe I have had the honor of knowing Ronald Reagan longer than any other Member of this U.S. Senate. In fact, I am sure that is true. Even though I represent the State of Oklahoma, I moved to the State of Oklahoma when I was 8 years old. I moved from Des Moines, IA. We were enjoying the poverty of the Depression at that time. Everyone was poor, not just us.
My dad was an insurance adjuster. Ronald Reagan was a sports announcer for WHO Radio in Des Moines, IA, and they shared the same office. They became very close friends, and they used to play the pinball machine at that time. You guys would not know what that is. I guess they don't havethose anymore. On Saturdays they would play cards for a couple hours. All I know is, it was a room above the drugstore.
But the man I had seen occasionally at that time I thought of as a giant. He was a very large person. We were not all that large. I remember that when I was growing up.
Well, we moved to Tulsa, OK, shortly after that. But we did not lose contact. As the years went by, Ronald Reagan, who my dad affectionately referred to as ``Dutch,'' ``Dutch Reagan''--every time there was a ``Dutch'' Reagan movie we would see it. You see, we never went to movies. In those days, we just didn't go to movies except when there was a ``Dutch'' Reagan movie. It did not matter what it was conflicting with.
One time we went to Durant, OK, in the southern part of Oklahoma. My home was in the northern part. I remember driving on those roads at that time. I say to my good friend from Minnesota, the roads were--if you could average 30 miles an hour, you were doing well. So we drove 5 hours down, watched a ``Dutch'' Reagan movie, and drove 5 hours back. We never would consider missing a ``Dutch'' Reagan movie.
Then, of course, the famous speech took place in 1964. That is when he expressed his interest in politics. But at that time my father had gotten to where he was much better off, our family was. So when ``Dutch'' Reagan was going to run for Governor of California, my father became one of his first large contributors. Again, the friendship had never stopped at any point. So he won.
At the time, after he served in that capacity and ran for President--I know that the Presiding Officer right now knows what I am talking about because he and I were both mayors of major cities back at the same time in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected President. I was the mayor of Tulsa, OK, for 4 years. Ronald Reagan and I were closer together than we had ever been before--I was out in Oklahoma--because he had me do his domestic policy stuff. He would have me on TV. At that time, they did not have CNN and Fox, but they had ``Good Morning America'' and the ``Today'' show. So I would be debating all these liberal Democrat mayors on the Reagan policy, which was the dynamics of the free enterprise system as opposed to the Government doing everything, and they worked beautifully. So I am sure I spent 10 times as much time with him at that time than I do with George W. today, and I am here in Washington. But it was a real pleasure.
Those of us present--and right now I see in the Chamber the Senator from Minnesota, Mr. NORM COLEMAN, and the Senator who is presiding, Mr. Voinovich--all three of us were mayors. We understand what a hard job it is. When I was mayor, I was able to build a low-water dam, and President Reagan referred to it in his speeches as the largest totally privately funded public project in America. That was the dynamics of Ronald Reagan. That is what he thought, that Government should be doing less, people doing more. And it worked.
What a visionary the guy was. When I see things that are going on today and I remember things that he said many, many years ago--right now, we have a serious problem in America. Probably one of our most serious problems is we do not have an energy policy. So we make speeches. All of us make speeches on a regular basis about why we do not have an energy policy and why we should have one. I would like to read to you what Ronald Reagan said. This was in 1979. Listen carefully because this applies to today, but it was 1979:
Solving the energy crisis will not be easy, but it can be done. First we must decide that ``less'' is not enough. Next, we must remove government obstacles to energy production. And we must make use of those technological advantages we still possess.
It is no program simply to say ``use less energy.''
Sound familiar?
Of course waste must be eliminated and efficiency promoted, but for the government simply to tell the people to conserve is not an energy policy. At best it means we will run out of energy a little more slowly. But a day will come when the lights will dim and the wheels of industry will turn more slowly and finally stop.
The answer obvious to anyone except those in the administration it seems, is more domestic production of oil and gas. We must also have wider use of nuclear power within strict safety rules, of course. There must be more spending by the energy industries on research and development of substitutes for fossil fuels.
And on and on and on. That speech very well could have been made today because the problem still exists today. And he knew it was coming.
When he talked about the SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, that was something no one seemed to care about. They did not see there was any great risk facing the American people. Yet he saw that risk. The risk was there. We all know now the risk is very real, even today. So he looked back at the ABM treaty that was put in place in 1972.
He said: This is senseless now. It may have made sense in 1972 when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon put this in, but the policy of mutual assured destruction is not a good policy. So he said: What we will have to do is have a very strong country. And he was quite scriptural. He quoted from Luke: If a strong man shall keep his court well guarded, he shall live in peace. And that is exactly what he was doing in his rebuilding of the defense system of America. We are so thankful he did that in those days. But he was saying we must do away with the ABM treaty. Finally, after all this time, we recognized 2 years ago he was right, and we got rid of the ABM treaty--how prophetic.
Tax cuts, this is something that he gave credit to his predecessors. He said: We do need more money. The best way to get more revenue for Government is to reduce tax rates. He said: That is what President Kennedy did 25 years ago. He said: He reduced tax rates. And keep in mind, that was a Democratic President. And by reducing tax rates, he almost doubled the revenue coming in at the end of his term. It gave people the freedom and money to invest and to breathe and to reinvest in the country. So that is the problem. That is what this President George W. Bush has been trying to do. That is the reason we are out of the recession he inherited, and we are now coming out because we have reduced some of those marginal rates. We know we need to do more. This is what the President did.
If you remember, in 1980, the total amount of revenue that was generated from marginal rates, taxes paid by people, was $244 billion. In 1990, it was $446 billion. It almost doubled in that 10-year period. Yet that 10-year period was the period where we had the largest reduction in taxes, thanks to Ronald Reagan, of any 10-year period or 8-year period in our Nation's history: marginal rates going down from 70 percent to 28 percent. Yet it had the effect of doubling the revenues. This guy knew it, and he did it. That is good advice for us today.
I have mentioned quite often that it should have been required reading for all of our graduates to read ``Rendezvous With Destiny.'' Let me read a couple things to remind us on this very solemn occasion how grateful we are now to have had a President who was so prophetic
In talking about the freedom of our country, he told a story about Castro and how a Cuban had escaped Cuba in a small craft and had floated over to the south shores of Florida. As his small craft came up there was a lady there, and he told the lady about the atrocities of Castro's Communist Cuba. After he was through, she said: I guess we don't know how lucky we are in the United States.
He said: How lucky you are? We are the ones who are lucky. We had a place to escape to.
That is what Ronald Reagan said, that we would be the beacon of freedom, the last place in the world to escape to. If we lose it here, there is nowhere else to escape to.
On the recognition of the dynamics of the free enterprise system, he said:
They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.
He practiced that. It worked. His domestic policies worked.
He was prophetic. He accurately described such things as:
We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.
Ronald Reagan talked about bureaucracy, how difficult it would be for him to cut down the size of Government. He is the one who said, in that very famous speech in 1964, there is nothing closer to life eternal on the face of this Earth than a Government agency once formed. And he went on to explain the reason for it. The reason for it is very simple. Once a Government agency is formed to respond to a problem, the problem goes away, and the bureaucracy stays there. The longer they stay there with nothing to do, the stronger they become. So that happens. He was able to cut that down by reminding people that that problem did exist.
He said in 1964:
Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way that you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.
That was the message he had. You had to be strong. You had to have a Nation that believes in God, and you had to stand up for those things and not lie down and surrender. That is what people were trying to do at that time.
He said in that speech.
There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance.
That was his rendezvous with destiny.
I look at American heroes like the senior Senator from Hawaii who fought so valiantly and is very familiar with what this President did for our U.S. military.
I will say this: The rendezvous with destiny was a very real one. Military historians have looked at us and said there is no way we could have won the Revolutionary War. Here we were, a handful of farmers and trappers with crude weapons and the greatest army on the face of the earth was marching toward Lexington and Concord, and they fired the shot heard round the world.
As Ronald Reagan would reflect on that great speech by Patrick Henry, he said there are three sentences in that speech that answer the questions of military historians, but people have forgotten about it. We are not weak when we make the proper use of those means which the God of nature has placed in our power. Armed in the holy cause of liberty in such a country as that which we possess, we are invincible by any force our enemy will send against us. And besides, we will not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who reigns over the destiny of nations who will raise up friends to fight our battles with us.
Those are the favorite three sentences out of the ''give me liberty, give me death''speech Patrick Henry made.
For me, I think about the honor to be able to stand here in the Senate and, on behalf of the American people and on behalf of my wife and myself and our family of 20 children and grandchildren, to say we thank Ronald Reagan for his sacrifices. We thank God for Ronald Reagan. We thank God for his life. We thank God for allowing us to share that rendezvous with destiny with Ronald Reagan.
I yield the floor.
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