Senator Dennis DeConcini, born in Tucson, Arizona, attended local public schools, and received his bachelor’s degree and law degree from the University of Arizona. The scion of a prominent southern Arizona political family, Senator DeConcini was first elected to office as Pima County Attorney in 1972 and served in that office until 1976.  In the latter year, he was elected to the U.S. Senate and served three successive terms (1977 to 1995).

 During his tenure he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee (where he chaired the Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government), the Subcommittee on Defense, Energy, and Water Development, and the Subcommittee on Foreign Operations.  He was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopolies, and the Select Intelligence Committees, which he chaired in 1993-1994.  In 1995, shortly after he retired from the Senate, President Bill Clinton appointed him to the board of directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation.  In 2006 Governor Janet Napolitano appointed Senator DeConcini to the Arizona Board of Regents.   

Dennis DeConcini:
I’m highly honored to be part of the Goldwater Lecture Series. He was an icon and celebrity when I was a young boy living in Tucson interested in politics because my father was and Barry Goldwater was somebody that, you know, you just couldn’t equal.  Here’s a man came from a very prominent family up here, but became a national figure after his first term, after six years in the Senate.  And that’s quite exceptional.  Now we have one from Illinois, Mr. Obama, who seems to be going on the same path of celebrity and notoriety, but Goldwater had a following that was -- even included Hillary Clinton in those days, as you will recall.

Dennis DeConcini:
So you know, it’s a pleasure to be associated with the Senator and I know there’s a number of people here who worked for Senator Goldwater when I was there.  He was a distinctive -- very, very highly integrity man that felt his principles were correct, even if they weren’t. And I mean that because Goldwater would argue his case and make his point time and time again.  And on the Senate floor, if you debated with Senator Goldwater, and he felt that it wasn’t going his way, he would just leave and that’s a very good tactic when you think about it because, you know, when you’re not succeeding someplace you want to come back and often when you do come back with whatever strengths you have, sometimes you lose it.  Not Goldwater.  He would just fold up and rarely did he lose any battles on the Senate floor, particularly when he was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Dennis: DeConcini:
So, I also want to thank Jack August. I met Jack through a staffer of mine, Virginia Turner, who lives in Flagstaff now and works for Governor Napolitano.  She worked for me in my Phoenix office and she lived in Prescott and knew Jack for a long time and introduced me and I said that, you know, you should write a book.  I said, well, it just so happens when I left the Senate in 1995, I was gonna write a book.  And I said, man, you’ve gotta write a book.  And I didn’t have anything to do.  I just hadn’t decided where I was gonna settle, so I started writing a book and I’m in -- my writing a book, you dictate into a little tape recorder, all your thoughts and then you go through different processes and different chapters of your life and in the Senate.  And I did that.  I did four chapters.  And I started reading them and I thought, you know, this is a little bitter.  I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s the let down after coming off the Senate 18 years or if it was the Keating incident or it was just kind of the Senate had changed, which it had immensely since I was there, when I first came.  There was more bitterness and more consternation than I ever saw before when I first came there, even with Jimmy Carter who had his problems. 

Dennis DeConcini:
Whatever it was, I set it aside.  And then I went into the lobbying business and did a few other things with my family real estate business and then I had the fortunate experience of meeting Jack.  And that’s an experience.

Dennis DeConcini:
And you all know him, so you all can attest to that and Jack said, yeah, I want to do something about this.  So, he read these four chapters and we did some interviews together and Jim McNult – McNulty, the former congressman, from Tucson had done an oral history of my mother’s family which is in this book and I’m very proud of that.  And Jack researched that and substantiated and then he did the greatest thing is he -- the things that I did write out, if he couldn’t spell the words, he found somebody who could.

Dennis DeConcini:
And so, there are a few misspelled words in there, but they were very, very, very minor.  I think Christine Suter had a lot to do with correcting that down at the University Press.  And talking about my mother’s family which Jim McNulty did this oral history, I was very blessed coming from a Catholic Mormon family.  Put that together.

Dennis DeConcini:
My father came from northern Michigan in 1920 to Tucson with his father.  He was 21 years old and actually his father had already come here and he was going to come here and his father died here in an automobile crash down on the Nogales highway with my grandmother and my aunt and another couple.  He was the only one who died in the automobile accident and my father came out and kind of took over the family.  They moved here because really because of Prohibition.  My grandfather was a saloon keeper and a hotel operator in Iron Mountain, Michigan which once was in the iron range which was a great economic boon there and he ran a saloon and my mother, my grandmother ran the hotel and my dad shined the shoes and did work there and learned his work experience, but Prohibition came along, he moved to Wisconsin because it was still a wet state for awhile and they lived there and then after that he sold his hotel and he moved to Arizona. 

Dennis DeConcini:
My mother, however, was born here.  She was born in central Arizona which is over by Safford, Thatcher in Graham County and her grandmother, her mother, my grandmother, came down in a covered wagon in about 1886 or ’87 from Utah.  And they were some of the first Mormon settlers to settle in the eastern part of Arizona.  And I’m very proud of that because my mother was the only one of seven children, only four lived, that ever went to and she was the youngest one, that went to college and she came to college here and she met my father and here I am with my two brothers and sisters.  So, that marriage was an interesting, almost phenomenon.  

Dennis DeConcini:
When you were a Catholic in those days and I don’t know how it is today, and you married outside your Catholic faith, your spouse to be had to sign a contract or you couldn’t get married in the church.  And my mother signed that contract, but they didn’t get married in the church then.  My dad said, well, that’s okay.   But she finally signed this contract, promising to raise my brothers and my sister in the Catholic faith and she did, God bless her, she died at 96 a couple of years ago and she used to get us up in the morning and get my dad who was kind of, I call an Italian Catholic. You go to church when you need to cover yourself, you know? 

Dennis DeConcini:
But he believed in the church and Jesus Christ, what have you, but he just didn’t practice it a lot, but he said you’ve got to be a good Catholic, Dennis, ‘cause that’s how you’re gonna get to heaven.  And that’s where we all want to go.  And so he -- my mother used to get us up and my brother and myself, we’d get dressed, any my dad, and we’d go off to St. Peter and Paul’s church in Tucson and my mother would go down to the Mormon Temple.  And in the summertime, I’d spent many years in the actual farmhouse that my mother grew up in, in Thatcher, Arizona with her sister, her older sister who was 14 years older and was an aunt, of course, of mine and just, she loved me for some reason.  I guess I was cute.

Dennis DeConcini:
But she was so nice to me and her husband, Mark Claridge.  And so I grew up with this kind of integration and when I went there to spend 6 or 8 weeks in the summer, sometimes they would take me to the Mormon church.  And I liked the Mormon church.  They sang really good songs and they had great food afterwards, where the Catholic church, you know, all you got was the little host and then that was it, you know? And a lecture usually in the case.  It’s changed in a lot of Catholic churches now. 

Dennis DeConcini:
So it was really an experience that I remember so well and my mother converted and you know how converts are.  They always are the really the strength of the religion they take on and my mother was no exception to that.  She converted.  It had nothing to do with my father.  It was a good friend of hers that was Catholic and she converted and she raised us as Catholic.  I’m most grateful to that Mormon lady who married an Italian who just about Italian American who almost got ostracized from her family, as she said early on, they wouldn’t talk to her because, first of all, she married an Italian American.  That can’t be good.  Secondly, she married a Catholic.  That can’t be good. And third, she moving to Tucson, Arizona, a big, big city from this little town of central Arizona. 

Dennis DeConcini:
As it was, my dad was a phenomenal friendly person who it ended up his inlaws just took on, took him on and I think they told me many times that the only Democrat they ever voted for was my father and me.  Now maybe they kept that a secret and they told other Democrats that, but my father ran for Supreme Court and statewide and my aunt Zola Claridge was the head of the Republican party for Graham County.  Now there weren’t too many Republicans over there, but she was the head of that party and she used to help my dad when he ran and when I ran, she did the same thing.  And my mother used to say, “Evo, ” that was my dad’s name. She says, “Evo, my relatives over here in Graham County, they love you more than they love me. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And there was some truth to that.  They just liked my father so much because he was a considerate man that sat down and listened to them and knew something about Arizona history and knew something about their family that he had researched.  He was – had been a judge on the Supreme Court and Superior Court and Attorney General of Arizona, which leads me to believe, leads me to why I’m in politics and that’s why.  We grew up in a family, my older brother Dino and I, grew up in a family that taught politics.  It was good.  There was nothing negative about it.  If you didn’t like somebody on the political realm, well, you just disagreed with them.  But never were they called bad names like they are today if you sit around a table or at a Starbucks or at a bar and you’ll hear names that you can’t believe are referring to your President of the United States or a past President!  Whether it’s Carter or Clinton or Bush I, you hear things that shock me today. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And it’s just part of the society we’re in.  We weren’t raised that way.  We were raised with great respect for every political office holder, even those that my father didn’t agree with and he talked about that to my brother and I and he kept telling us about being involved in the community.  Not that you had to run for office, I wasn’t picked out and said, Dennis, you’re going to be the one to run for office, but you should be involved in it and that’s what we did and that’s one of the ways we communicated and got close to my father. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And my mother was the same way.  She was the original sponsor of the League of Women Voters in Tucson, Arizona which was something like, Oh my God!  These women want to, they want some equality, you know?  They want to express their opinions?  And my mother used to drag Dino and I down there to these meetings and they talked about issues and I didn’t pay much attention to it, but I thought, this is really neat.  All these women here, there were no men.  Some boys and girls that came with their -- they were talking about issues, about bond issues, about equal rights for women at that time, about voting, about expressing your opinion, about moving into the professions. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And so that brought us to, as we got into college my parents said, you gotta go to school.  You gotta do good in school.  You gotta get a degree and then you gotta work like hell, if you want to amount to anything.  And that work ethic was just kind of drummed into my brother, my older brother and I all of our lives.  And it was good.  It was a good thing.  It made us think that there’s a value here in what you put down and the sweat that you give and the efforts you give that there is a return for that work. 

Dennis DeConcini:
Part of that work was always community service.  You have to do something to give back.  My father was very successful in the real estate business, almost by accident partly because of politics.  Governor Sid Osborn appointed him to the Superior Court in Tucson, excuse me, he was elected to the Superior Court in Tucson and Governor Osborn appointed him to the Attorney General of the State of Arizona and when there was a crisis going on, and then he ran for the Supreme Court of the state which was an elected office at those times.  He was elected.  He had some real estate and water companies down in Tucson and he kind of, what we’d call it today, put them in a blind trust.  He just stopped all the operations and did nothing with the real estate.  And so after about 10 years, he came back to Tucson he had to retire, the Supreme Court justices were making $13,500.00 in 1952 and he had my brother and I who he wanted to help get through college, so he retired and went back to Tucson and the real estate had increased immensely and he opened up a practice of law again.  So, we were benefits of that and my father always told us, you’ve got to give back.  Whatever you get from society, you should give something back and if you don’t get anything from society, don’t hold it against society, just work harder. 

Dennis DeConcini:
Now that’s not always a good solution.  ‘Cause if you’re a poor person without education and somebody says, well why don’t you just work harder?  And then you’ll get there.  It -- that isn’t always the case.  He used to take my brother and I to the Salvation Army down on the south side and we would walk in there and see these poor, poor people and he would say, never forget these people Dennis, Dino.  Don’t forget these people.  We’d go up and he’d give them a dollar or he’d sometimes serve food down there with my mother.  So, it was an experience that you can’t replace and it’s something that lives inside you.  So, public service was a natural for me and I did have trouble in school as Jack said. Nobody understood why. 

Dennis DeConcini:
In the first grade, I must have been a cute little boy because the sister gave me A’s every or 1’s or 2’s or whatever they gave you in those days at the Catholic church, until the end of the year, when she told my mother, well he can’t read. So I’m going to flunk him.  And so she was so mad, my mother, God bless her.  She was so mad at this nun, I thought she was going to swear, but she didn’t do it in my presence and so she yanked me out of that school and then the next year I had to repeat first grade at a public school.  So I was this big and the other kids were this big.  It was kind of embarrassing and finally she got me tutored for the third grade where I did learn to spell.  I could spell any word that I could read and memorize.  If I didn’t -- hadn’t memorized it, I couldn’t spell it and so I was able to get through school and overcome that with a great deal of help from family, of course.

Dennis DeConcini:
Going to the Senate, you know, was something that I always knew I was gonna be in politics.  I always knew I was gonna run for office.  I didn’t know that I would get elected for sure, but I always had my eye on running for Congress of the United States.  And that’s because Morris and Stewart Udall, the Udall brothers had served had law offices in my father’s office.  Their father, Levi Udall, was a Supreme Court judge with my father.  So we knew the Udalls and they were the stars of the southern Arizona political legal realm when I grew up. So, I saw these young men as good lawyers, fine people, good families, hard working and they were members of Congress.  So I always thought that was where I was gonna go.  And the thing I always wanted to be was Attorney General of the State of Arizona because my father was Attorney General and I thought, wouldn’t that be a great thing to do?  What a great job.  You can practice law and then also do public good. 

Dennis DeConcini:
That didn’t come about and the congressional seat that I was gonna run for, that only didn’t come about because Morris Udall, who was our Congressman then, couldn’t make up his mind.  That was in 1976.  Jimmy Carter was running for President.  You recall the Governor from Georgia?  And he was an unknown as Bill Clinton was, in 1980 or when did Clinton first run?  In 1990, 1992. Nobody knew Clinton like nobody knew Carter.  Morris Udall was well known and was running hard and was doing quite well.  And when he was in the final primary was in Michigan, had he won that, he might have gone on.  He just got beat barely and he couldn’t make up his mind whether to run for his house seat, to run for President and maybe Paul Fannin wasn’t going to run and maybe he should run for the Senate and some people gave me good advice. One was Raul Castro, the Governor of Arizona, who I had been his campaign manager.  I was then County Attorney. 

Dennis DeConcini:
The other one was my father.  And he said run.  Just announce and run.  Like, oh, nothing to it, you just walk over there and say, Okay, I’m gonna run for the Senate now you know, and I said, okay Dad, that sounds good.  And so I thought about it and I did.  And fortunes happened to fall in my direction and Congressman Udall didn’t like that too much at the time ‘cause he wanted that option open and by the time he had lost the primary in Michigan, I already had lined up the democratic people, the party people and judges and what have you to support me.  So I was very fortunate in timing and I guess that is one of the things that always is -- they say about real estate, location, location?  I think timing has a great deal to do with political success and I happened to fall into the right time. 

Dennis DeConcini:
Morris Udall, of course, I don’t know if any of you knew him very well, but he was just a tremendous lawyer, a trial lawyer.  A tremendous Congressman that had visions of the environment long before any of us even thought there was anything wrong with our air or our water.  Morris Udall was out there on these issues.  He was an early person to turn around on the Vietnam war, which turned out to be correct.  His vision, I thought he was wrong at first, I thought oh, you can’t back out of that thing, but he saw a lot that didn’t see.  He ran for Speaker of the House and he thought that he was gonna be Speaker of the House and one of old stories is, he went into the caucus and he lost the speaker and they asked him. The press asked him and he said, “Well, you know, Congressman, you thought you had the votes.”  He says, “What’s your statement?”  Well, he said to the press, he says, “You know the difference between a cactus and a caucus?”  Which is -- the caucus is what elects you.  He says, “Well, in a caucus…” excuse me, “In a cactus, all the pricks are on the outside.” 

Dennis DeConcini:
And I’ll leave that to your imagination.  What was inside the caucus.  And that was national press.  He’s written a book about being you know, too funny to be President which is a great book on his stories.  If -- I’ve read it several times, I go back and read those stories and trying to tell jokes when you’re on the same podium with Morris Udall was a very difficult for me.

Dennis DeConcini:
In the Senate I did charter a middle ground because that’s what I believed.  And I tried to work with both Democrats and Republicans.  I had some successes.  I had some failures. When I came to the Senate and I thought – I used to think just a few years ago, maybe it’s just ‘cause I’m older and it seems a bit more acrimonious and difficult and mean spirited back there, but I talk to members of the Senate all the time that are there now and that have left, it has changed, unfortunately.  There’s less of a comod – a camaraderie spirit there that you can work together and disagree on an issue very strongly and still maintain some relationship and discussion of…of other issues that you might…might agree on.  That’s unfortunate.  I think it’ll, you know, turn around eventually.  I think the voters turn those things around.

Dennis DeConcini:
I think this last election, this is just my opinion, the Democrats didn’t win it, the Republicans lost it because of that problem of demonstrating that they weren’t really paying attention to their issues and…and they got carried away with some scandals and some other problems that happened.  And the Democrats had the same experience in 1994 when they lost the House of Representatives for the same -- some of the same reasons.  I was there.  I saw it.  I saw the arrogance of the Democratic chairman.  I saw the misuse of the Ethics Committee and the expenditures of funds that were questionable and nobody taking any issue on it.  And just taking care of yourself instead of staying with your constituency.  So, I have great faith in our system that it will come back.  And will come back through this message that, you know, people send you there to do a job and to be fair.  That doesn’t mean you agree on everything, but you don’t have to be mean and bitter.  And unfortunately, there’s so much of that in both the Senate and the House. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And I think the House is far, far stronger leaning in that direction than the Senate, but you can see it today.  The positions the Democrats take or the Republicans take, it doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of hope that, hey, maybe we can work something out.  It leaves you that if you don’t do this my way, then you’re unpatriotic or you’re sending troops into -- to get slaughtered or whatever the issue is.  And that isn’t good for the country.  But I’m an optimist.  I always am and I think our system is, you know, there’s nothing like it.

Dennis DeConcini:
I don’t know if you saw a statement by Tony Blair, the other day he was in Con – he was in the House of Parliaments and he was being criticized about his support of the American foreign policy.  And that’s a big issue now, as you know, in the UK because the war is unpopular and he’s taking a big beating and he said, “I -- you know, how can you be such a supporter of America?  You know, they have a policy of arrogance.”  And on and on and on.  And you know, some of the arguments that were being made there, I said, yeah, there is a little truth to that and he said, “Well, you know,” to the members of Congress and if you saw this, please excuse me but I love repeating it.  He says, “There are two people in civilization of the UK that we owe so much to more than anybody else.  One is Jesus Christ.”  Which kind of surprised me to say that because he brought us a moral value.  Whether your Christian or your not, to our society in the UK.  And the other is the American GI who brought us freedom.  And if you’ve ever watched the House of Commons when they have those debates, there’s always these back benchers who go, oh! Oh!

Dennis DeConcini:
Nothing was said.  And it was just still.  And he sat down and there was some applause.  And it, you know, it makes me feel good about my country, our country, even though we’re going through a very difficult time now with this, with the war and with the problems that we see in Washington, DC so I’m an optimist.  So the glass is half full and not half empty as far as I’m concerned.  With that Jack, I’ll be glad to answer any questions or any comments that you have. I hope you buy the book, I need the money!

Dennis DeConcini:
Yes?  Yes sir?

Audience Member:
Once I heard you talk and you stated that you did not care for the line item veto.

Dennis DeConcini:
That’s right.

Audience Member:
Can you expound on that?

Dennis DeConcini:
Well, yes sir.  Are you all familiar with the line item veto?  Line item veto is today when a bill passes, an appropriation bill or even if it’s an authorization bill, a President either has to sign it, not sign it or veto it.  And those are the only three options.  The line item veto permits the President to strike certain paragraphs or certain amounts that are in the bill and I have not ever been a big follower of the line item veto and I guess I’m truly in the minority today. I don’t see anything wrong with Congress directing how money should be spent.  Now, it has to be transparent and not done at the time of conference when nobody sees it, as has been the case, which is part of the problem with the Republican House of Representatives putting things in there after the bill had actually been agreed on by both houses, putting something in there.  And the press exposed that.  But if you have transparency, it seems to me the Congress has a duty to tell the executive how to spend that money. 

Dennis DeConcini:
Now, you can’t argue, a bridge to no place in Alaska for 200 people at 250 million dollars, there’s no explanation, there’s no justification.  But can you justify the Barry Goldwater Engineering Building?  Now just known as the Barry Goldwater Building at ASU campus that I wrote into the law?  I think you could because they needed that building, the State of Arizona didn’t have the money and the federal government was spending money on buildings that I didn’t think, in my judgment was the proper place to spend the money.  One of them was a courthouse in St. Louis that has a revolving dome on top, showers and fireplaces in every judge’s chambers, excuse me judge.  That, you know, was just exorbitant.  We cut that out in Congress and so the line item veto would have permitted the President to cut that appropriation out and that’s why I oppose it and that’s -- it hasn’t passed because Congress wants to preserve that.

Dennis DeConcini:
Now today, in today’s world in Washington, to get off your question just a little bit, the earmarks and line items is a hostile situation today.  You know, you’re not supposed to do that.  That’s un-American.  How can you do that?  It’s wasting money.  Well, you look at the defense budget, just the defense budget or you look at the budget and the appropriation that is put forward by the administration, whether it’s Democrat or Republican, for Homeland Security Office.  You see money there you can’t believe.  You might remember some years ago when they had the thousand dollar toilet seats?  And the ashtrays and the hammers in the defense bill?  That’s what happens.  Who’s going to do anything about it?  Only Congress can yes or say no.  We’re not going let you spend that money.

Dennis DeConcini:
You look at the expenditures in our defense bill this year because of the war and the lack of oversight and this is Congress’s problem.  It’s the Administration’s problem for not doing something about it themselves, but Congress has failed to do the oversight and I think that’ll change.  I think that it should.  I didn’t mean to expound too much.  Now, I appreciate anybody else’s view on that because they say, well, you know, give the President the line item veto, he’ll balance the budget.  But he’s going to balance it his way.  And if that means, don’t fund the Department of Education, like Ronald Reagan wanted to do, he would strike it.  He couldn’t do that without vetoing the whole bill.  Sorry.

Audience Member:
Time limits – how do you feel about time limits given your time you served?

Dennis DeConcini:
Limit. Yeah, limiting terms.  Term limits, yeah.  Well, I was a big fan of term limits when I ran.  I was -- felt that people stay there too long and I think they still do. I don’t know the answer to it because I ran for three terms when I said I was only gonna run for two, ‘cause I thought I maybe could do a little bit more and then I thought about running for a fourth term and I said, you know, I need to step back and think about this and decided not to. You know, I’ve really got mixed emotions.  The idea is so good, so good because it demands turn over and brings new blood into the system.  But so many people don’t want to run for office.  In my opinion.

Audience Member:
It’s so bad, it turns good people off.

Dennis DeConcini:
Yeah, it’s so people don’t want to run for office so you don’t get, in my judgment, the quality of people by putting on term limits.  I think in getting at my age, I probably should think this one out a little closer, maybe there should be an age limit you know, we have some people who are 90 years old and they have not lost their faculty in the United States Senate, but it would be a lot better and I know them well and respect them immensely if they retired. It’s hard for them.  It’s hard for them and to me there is some younger blood that could come in and that’s just my observation. If I had to vote yes or no, I probably would not vote for term limits because I’ve seen it work here in our state and in the city and the county down in Tucson and Pima County and I just don’t think it brings the best people.  But that’s kind of a change on my position.  Yes, yes? 

Audience Member:
You’re nomination of…

Dennis DeConcini:
Linda.

Audience Member:
 [inaudible] Nobel Peace Prize.  Could you tell us a little bit about your [inaudible]?

Dennis DeConcini:
Well, I thank you Linda, very much.  Linda knows more about me than I know about myself because she did the papers down at the University of Arizona some three thousand, twenty-two hundred boxes or twenty-eight hundred boxes and you can actually – Linda, thank you.  I went down there the other day, you can actually find stuff in there if you want look.

Dennis DeConcini:
You know, I was fortunate to get appointed to what’s known as the Helsinki Commission.  The Helsinki Accord was signed in 1974 in Helsinki, Finland and by all the NATO countries and by then the Soviet Union and Mr. -- can’t remember the Secretary General of the Soviet Union then, signed on behalf of all the republics of the Soviet Union.  And I believe there were 16 then.  And it was the magnificent articles.  Gerry Ford, President -- former President Ford was the leading proponent, a supporter of this, and brought it to bear where we were going to acknowledge certain basic human rights, such as the right to express your view and not be penalized.  The right to choose your religion, the right to disagree with your government as long as you didn’t do anything violent and that was signed.  As a result of that, the Congress of the United States created a commission and it was called the Helsinki Commission which was to monitor the compliance with all of the nations that had signed.  Including the United States.  And we had some hearings about the United States and the Bracero Program and some of the human rights accusations towards minorities in our country, but the primary effort and the whole purpose turned out to be towards the Soviet Union so, we in the Helsinki Commission would visit as many nations as they would let us visit, particular in the then Soviet Union and we’d go to these countries and try to communicate with the dissidents and those that were being persecuted. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And that’s how I got started in it.  And I got really carried away because on it I just, I got immersed in it because of the abuse the Soviet Union was putting Jewish Soviets, citizens putting them in jail and discriminating them against and also some Christians.  There just weren’t as near as many Christians in the Soviet Union then as there were Jews and it was terrible.  So I would go there and I would go seek these people out and [inaudible] was one when they started to break away that was a, you know, was just a man that had more courage than I would ever have in two lifetimes to stand up to those kind of repressions.  And I met with him and he had a revolution there. I met with -- I went to every one of the Soviet Unions, all of the stans, met with all these people and saw the change. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And it encourages you so much as an American for the investment that we make, even though sometimes we oppose it and it’s wasteful in foreign assistance.  The amount of money that AID spends in, call it propaganda, but education of what a democracy is all about, it makes you very, very proud to go there and they show you something or they tell you about Radio Free Europe or Radio America, Voice of America coming to them and when we, the United States was involved in the splitting up the Soviet Union started to split up, we were deeply involved with Poland.  And the American government, through it’s -- the intelligence, the CIA and other intelligence branches, we put all kinds of propaganda into Poland to support Lech Walesa.  And as you know he had a strike and wasn’t killed and had a strike of ship builders that turned that government around.  The United States really – and he says that to me and says that to people today – if it wasn’t for the United States putting in this information and how did we get in there?  We got it in there through the Catholic Church, believe it or not.  Presses, paper, ink so they could print the propaganda they wanted to put out in opposition to the Communist thing. 

Dennis DeConcini:
So, you know, that was a, those are experiences that you can’t, you can never equal meeting Lech Walesa, before he was elected President and him telling me that story, thanking the American people for doing that sort of effort and I remember him saying to me once, he said, “I know, I know in your country, a lot of people don’t like foreign aid, they think it’s wasteful.”  And I said, “Yes, some of it is.”  But he said, “This is what happens to that foreign aid.”  And it was a small amount, it was like 12 million dollars in one year that we spent there.

Dennis DeConcini:
So, you know, I had that opportunity. The Helsinki Commission was a European with the United States and Canada idea of bringing human rights and equality to all the citizens there.  I tried with my friend Steny Hoyer who was the co-chairman on the House side, it was a joint committee, to do this in Africa.  And he and I went down there thinking that we could convince these African leaders, a couple of dictators and what have you that, you know, why don’t you give up this power and adopt a Helsinki Commission that can oversee human rights and you know, they look at you like, I remember Moy, President Moy in Kenya looking at me and he was a dictator there, looked at me and he says, “Why would I do that Senator?” And so I said, “Well, because your people will have, you know, more availability and have rights to protect themselves.”  He says, “I protect the people in this country.”  I said, okay. That didn’t float down there, but thank you, Linda, for the question.  Yeah, Jack?

Audience Member:
Last year we had Sandra Day O’Connor as our first speaker in our judicial and legal history series and I’d like you to comment on maybe the first time you met her and state for us maybe a little bit about her being appointed to the Supreme Court, what you recall from that.

Dennis DeConcini:
That’s one of my favorite stories, when Sam Goddard was elected Governor of Arizona, I was just a young budding lawyer that had worked for him and his father, my father and he were good friends.  When he came up here the Attorney General, Sam Goddard was a Democrat, the Attorney General was a Republican, I think his name was Smith, one of his deputies was Sandra O’Connor at the time and if you’ve read her book, she – and she couldn’t find a job any place, no law firm would hire her.  So she worked for prosecutors and attorney generals ‘cause they would hire her. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And so they brought me up here as a young lawyer to do legal research for the Governor that they weren’t sure would be done the way they wanted it done with a Republican Attorney General.  So I did all this research, mostly on extraditions and some trade agreements and executive orders and what have you.  And Sandra O’Connor happened to be the deputy who was appointed by the Attorney General to represent the Governor.  So we met, we met a lot of time and we went over a lot of things.  We had a lot of things that we agreed on.  I just wanted her to prove it or what have you, but then the Governor had an idea that he wanted to replace members of the parole board whose terms had not expired and I felt that he could do that.  And there was a statute that maybe led you to that belief. 

Dennis DeConcini:
So, I was assigned the job of, you know, substantiating that legally.  So I did it, I did a great job, if I do say so myself. I researched cases in different states and everything else and, of course, we asked for an opinion from the Attorney General and Sandra O’Connor wrote the opinion and said, no, you can do that!  These terms are sent by Constitution and the Legislature and you can’t do that.  So, I argued with her and talked to my boss, Sam Goddard, and he said, well, you know, what can we do?  Do you think you can appeal over her head?  And I said, sure.  We’ll go to Attorney General Smith and we’ll just lay it out and we’ll convince him. So we did.  And I had a meeting with the Attorney General and unfortunate for me, he invited Sandra O’Connor to come in to the meeting.

Dennis DeConcini:
I was hoping I could just be there by myself and say, Mr. Attorney General, please give me this so I can keep my job, you know?  I couldn’t do that with Sandra O’Connor in the room and after all, Mr. Attorney General, my dad was Attorney General, you can do this for me, but no, I never got that chance.  So I had to make the legal argument to the Attorney General that I had researched and he was very nice and I remember he -- you know, thanked me and everything else and, of course, he upheld Sandra O’Connor’s opinion which was absolutely right.

Dennis DeConcini:
And so, at that time my wife and I were, she was active in the Junior League of Phoenix and Sandra O’Connor, so we saw the O’Connors on a social basis once in awhile and then I saw her and knew her when she was in the State Senate and I appeared before her committee once and there and she was always very friendly and so when Justice Marshall resigned, I -- was it Marshall?  No --

Audience Member:
Justice Potter Stewart.

Dennis DeConcini:
Potter Stewart, thank you.  That’s -- we almost made that mistake in the book.  Yeah.  When Potter Sewart resigned, I came to this brilliant political conclusion, I’m gonna write a letter and I’m gonna give it to the press and the letter’s gonna go to Ronald Reagan saying why don’t you appoint Sandra O’Connor?  So I did that.  On my own without anybody urging me to do that. So this was a great idea, so I did it and I was so surprised at the press reaction, particularly in Arizona.  It was just terrific and even outside Arizona.  So, I thought well, maybe there’s something here, you know? 

Dennis DeConcini:
And so I went to talk to Barry Goldwater and I said, “Barry, this is what I’ve done.”  And he said, “Yeah, I read about it.”  I said, “You know, I can’t, I don’t have any influence with the Reagan White House.  He says, “I do.”  And while I was sitting there in his office, he tried to call President Reagan.  And he didn’t get him at the time, but he talked to him later and he told me, Judy Eisenhower can confirm or deny this, that he talked to the President and said, you should interview Sandra O’Connor and that is in my interpretation is how she got interviewed and once you interviewed Judge O’Connor, she was a judge then, there was little question that she was so outstanding and what have you.

Dennis DeConcini:
So, when Ronald Reagan nominated her I took up the cause, of course, being from Arizona.  I took her around to every member of the Judiciary Committee, Democrat and Republican. My wife and I had a big tea for all the wives of the Senators and some Senators came, 94 I think, wives of the Senators came because we knew it was important to make sure the wife was on board with the Senators and we had a dinner for her as did Strom Thurmond and during the hearings, it was a what they call, I guess, a slam dunk, Diane McCarthy testified.  I set up the witnesses for her on her behalf and the abortion issue as it always is on nominations, was important and it was a big issue there and I got Diane McCarthy and Tony West and Art Hamilton who were all prominent legislators to come back there, who also happened to be pro life and testify how, you know, this was a great judge, what have you, you know, it -- the interesting thing is many of my colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee kept asking me, “You know her real well, don’t you?”  I said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.  Said, I remember Strom Thurmond grabbing me, he says, “Are we gonna be safe with her?” And I said “Yeah, Strom.  Trust me, trust me, Strom, we will be safe.” 

Dennis DeConcini:
And Senator Grassley and Senator Denton, they had real qualms about her so it was an interesting thing, the right side of the aisle was more questionable about O’Connor’s credentials of being the true conservative that we were representing she was, than the left side because the Kennedy’s and Metzenbaum, man!  Were they were so happy.  First of all, it was a woman.  First of all, they had researched her.  They had looked at her opinions.  They had seen her votes in the Senate and they saw not somebody way off to the right, somebody a little off or close to the center.  And of course, I think she’s one of the remarkable individuals in our whole country today.  She’s done so many good things from that court, not only in her decisions that I’ve read, and many of them, but in her involvement with the community and certainly enhancing women and their being in our society and the dignity that women deserve and just don’t always get and she’s such a great, great spokesperson for that.  Yes, sir?

Audience Member:
 Could you please comment on our politics regarding the gathering of human intelligence?

Dennis DeConcini:
Yes sir. The, you know, we have capacity in the United States and a few other of our allied countries second to none in intelligence when I was Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, we had a fellow by the name of Aldrich Ames who was a spy who had spied for the Soviet Union then and then for Russia afterwards and he disclosed about twenty some different undercover agents that were killed as a result of that.  Human intelligence is the people on the ground, the people actually in the other camp drawing the intelligence for you. And intelligence organizations don’t generally want to do a lot of that.  They know they have to do some. 

Dennis DeConcini:
What they like to do is the technology -- technological gathering of intelligence.  And we are second to none in the world for that.  With our satellites, we can see license plate numbers.  We can count how many weapons are unloaded on a -- off a truck into a cave in Afghanistan or wherever.  We can see pictures of people.  We even now, it used to be classified, can look through buildings and see people and detect who they are from a satellite or an airplane.  And we have the capability of signal intelligence, which is the hearing.  We listen to people all over the world.  Can’t do that in the United States without a warrant, but you -- we do that all over the world. And during the Cold War, during the Cold War, Mexico was one of the biggest centers for our intelligence gathering as was Nairobi, Kenya, because the Soviets had huge installations there and we had huge installations.  We didn’t need court orders to listen to the -- what they were doing.  And so the signal intelligence is very, very important. But of course, if you’re listening to world leaders, ministers, military leaders in, you know, 40 countries, you got a lot of material coming in.  It’s got to be translated.  Somebody has to look at it and analyze it.  So you have to have really good people to do that. 

Dennis DeConcini:
But then the human intelligent, your question, is the most important because you not only have somebody – and I use this hypothetically, question, you not only have someone who is part of the government of, say, Egypt and maybe sitting there in the cabinet meeting with Mr. Mubaric or Mr. Abbas or whoever it is, listening to what the decisions are.  They are coming out and they’re telling you.  They’re giving it to you through the channels that you have.  Now when you have human intelligence, you can’t just rely on one because if that person turns and is giving you misinformation, then you are not getting what you want to get.  So you have to have two.  You have to have a verification.  So, if you are in a cabinet of a foreign country, getting information from human intelligence, there’s a clerk there, there’s a cabinet member there, there’s a deputy cabinet member there, whoever it is that is gathering that information, being paid by the United States to spy on their country and then they feed that to us, we have to have somebody else to verify that human intelligence. 

Dennis DeConcini:
That’s very costly.  It’s not costly dollar-wise, it’s costly political-wise because if you get caught spying on the Israelis trying to get information from the Israelis, one of our big allies, or from even Egypt, a strong ally.  It’s embarrassing to the country.  So, to have the deniability position, we deny it.  Oh, we wouldn’t do that to you.  We would never do that to you.  Like the Israelis have done with us.  Oh, no!  We wouldn’t spy on you.  You’re our friends.  Well they did.  And there’s no question about it. And I don’t blame them.  I understand where they’re coming from, but that human intelligence is what we have failed seriously and obviously in the Middle East today, we witnessed that by misinformation that the President didn’t have, human confirmation of weapons of mass destruction and many, many other things there.  And they were relying on that and I know a couple of those people, ex-patriots who had relatives and were getting information and feeding it to the CIA and the DIA and it wasn’t confirmed by a human person that we had verification and confidence in.  And it’s a big problem and it takes a real commitment and I was hopeful and I don’t know whether it’s happening or not, but I was hopeful that Mr. Negroponte, being appointed to coordinate all intelligence would really do something about that.  I’m under the impression, from the little information I have that that has not really occurred. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And then you have different human intelligence. You have human intelligence on military matters, like the defense department.  Defense intelligence generally want to know how many troops you are, what kind of command system, what kind communication system you have.  How can you interfere with that and how can you verify it.  So you have human intelligence there in some of those military units of your adversary or your friend gathering that information, so you’re feeding it back.  You have to have confirmation. And then you have the CIA that does the foreign intelligence, not the military intelligence.  And they’re the ones that are trying to get information from the ministers and from the government officials and from the intelligence people and sometimes the military people.  And then you have the FBI who has authority to do espionage.  Which means spies from other countries that are in our country and it’s a very difficult thing to coordinate.  Because if you have CIA working on an agent and has an undercover person say, in Russia or China or someplace getting your information, it’s good information, you then get in another human intelligence, so you verify it, so you’re really confident with it.  Then all of a sudden, that agent moves to the United States to the embassy at China and now, you have to turn that over to the FBI.  So the FBI takes over the case.  Now they’re supposed to coordinate with the CIA, but that’s where they don’t do it and vice-versa.  When that agent leaves and goes out back to China, then the CIA will start following him.  So, there’s really a disconnect of our intelligence and it was there when I was there.  We did a lot of oversight hearings.  John Warner, Senator from Virginia, was my ranking member.  A wonderful man.  He knew a lot about military ‘cause he was Secretary of the Navy.  We worked and tried to correct that and we did not.  We did not.  And I don’t think it’s been corrected yet.  Although, I am not privy to exactly what’s going on.  Yes, sir?

Audience Member:
Senator, on a number -- not on a number, I’m thinking of Panama and maybe one or two other incidences, important cases that split the Senate pretty much down the middle and you were the 100th senator to make up your mind.  Was that by design or…?

Dennis DeConcini:
Well, as the book says, I had a learning disability so it took me a long time to get there. Well, no, it usually was not on design.  The Panama Canal was certainly not on design because I had campaigned against, quote, giving that canal away.  Written letters about it and was – went there totally confident I was not going to vote for that.  No matter what.  And when I got back there, of course, they came to me and wanted me, I said, no, I’m not gonna vote for that.  And I went – we had hearings on it. I saw the representations that the Carter Administration was making about what was in that treaty and they were telling the public and the Senate that we had the right to use military force in there any time that the United States thought that the canal was threatened.  So, I -- there was enough information from Panama said they didn’t agree to that.

Dennis DeConcini:
I went down to Panama, I met with Dictator Torrijos and I asked him that question.  Just flat out.  We were in a table about 15 us, a big round table.  I’ll never forget it for – I’ll tell you an anecdote about that one too. And so we were talking about it and I asked him about that and he said, no.  No, but we would invite you if the canal is in danger.  We will invite you to come in and then you come in like any other nation.  You can’t go to Mexico just because you want to go, unless you want to declare war and you don’t want to do that.  And so, I came back then and started espousing that the Carter Administration was making misrepresentations.  So they were losing some votes and they came back to me and said, well, what would it take?  I said, “Well, it would take an amendment to the treaty for me to consider and that amendment was very clear in my mind, that we would have unilateral rights.  It took a long time.  During even the debate on the floor, whether I was gonna vote for it or not.  And so that’s why I became kind of a last vote and three other Senators came with me because of my amendments. 

Dennis DeConcini:
And that did happen on a number of occasions.  It happened on some you know, appropriation bills that I used to, not sure how much I could tolerate of expenditures over an amount that I thought was justifiable and I would work hard.  It happened on Bill Clinton’s budget vote.  I was the deciding budget vote there.  And you know, that wasn’t by des – well actually, that one, I should say, probably was by design because I told the President, President Clinton, I could see the politics going on here and it was pretty unanimous Republicans against it because they didn’t like Clinton and I wasn’t that great about Clinton, but I felt it was unfair politically and I told the President myself, I said, Mr. President, if you need my vote, I will give it to you because I think you’re entitled to a chance here.  Your first budget effort to do anything about this deficit, I’m willing to take the political risk.  I was crossing myself and hoping that I wouldn’t want to do it because at the time I was running for office and they needed the vote and so I gave it to them and it turned out to be the right vote, in my opinion. 

Dennis DeConcini:
So, there was a number of times like that, but many, many Senators will end up in that position.  There are the -- the Senate’s divided in those gener – most issues that have got their minds clearly made up and everybody knows where they are.  If it’s a labor issue or health issue, you know where Kennedy is. If it’s an issue of more federal control over something, you know where Orin Hatch is, from Utah.  It’s just pretty clear.  That’s kind of where it goes.  It’s those that are in the middle that make the difference.    

Dennis DeConcini:
Now, having said that, you have Orin Hatch and Ted Kennedy working together and the reason we have a bill here, I mean a law in this country that mandates spousal and parent relief from their employer when they want to take care of a sick relative, is because Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch made that bill happen.  And it was a compromise on both sides.  Kennedy wanted full pay, full benefits, for I don’t know how many weeks.  And Hatch said, no, but we should give something because Hatch knew a lot of single family households who needed time off to take care of their kids.  And he was willing for the government to get involved.  So that’s when it works well.  When you can see something coming together like that and I witnessed that.  I wasn’t part of that negotiations and that can happen when you have – when you don’t have people in the center they can sometimes put it together.