Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I look across the Senate and see Senator McCain's desk silent, draped in black, under a vase of white roses, and it breaks my heart. I am here to say my farewell, and I have a bit of a predicament, which is that I am a very ordinary man, here to try and give tribute to a very extraordinary man.

John McCain was an extraordinary man--extraordinary in his suffering and resilience, extraordinary in his ideals and principles, extraordinary in his courage and devotion, and extraordinary, too, in the devotion he engendered.

We met when I was a new Senator and he already a legend. His battles for campaign finance reform and against corrupting earmarks were legendary. He could make a point here on the Senate floor with legendary drama and punch and declarative force. He could also be unreasonable, and he took a completely unreasonable liking to me. Our politics did not match. I could offer him nothing. Yet he befriended me, and, as so many colleagues know, John's friendship was a treasure.

John showed courage in many ways, but he showed real courage in friendship. When an attack was mounted on one of Hillary Clinton's staffers, he came straight to the floor to defend her publicly. When someone attacked the character of Senator Obama at a political event, he said: No, I know him. He is a good family man.

Loyalty attracts loyalty, and John was loyal. We traveled a lot together--to Afghanistan and Iraq, to Munich, Mali, Mongolia, and Macassar, to many, many places but, most poignantly, to Vietnam.

My dad served 5 years in Vietnam. He told me about his colleague, Admiral McCain, whose son was a POW, who had been shot down and wounded terribly but refused early release. As a boy, I went with my father to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon the night our POWs returned from captivity. John had left straight from Hanoi and did not pass through Tan Son Nhut, but I witnessed how frail and ill and pale and battered his fellow POWs were as they clamored out of the helicopters into the glare of the TV lights.

I was ready to revere any man who had been through that, and to find that this man was so friendly and cheerful and feisty and irreverent-- that put me irrevocably into the McCain fan club. I noticed I was not alone. One telling measure of a man is his staff. John attracted people of exceptional talent and ability, who became so devoted they would walk through fire for him.

John attracted the admiration of foreign leaders, not just from great powers but from remote and struggling countries. When we traveled in Libya, John was received like Lafayette. He had been there when it counted, when freedom there was in the offing. He was beloved in Ukraine. He had spoken at the Maidan when freedom there was in the offing. He spent an icy New Year's Eve with Ukrainian troops on their frontline.

In Vietnam, John was revered. I don't know any celebrities, but I do know what traveling with a celebrity is like because I have traveled with John McCain in Vietnam. The statue that stands in Hanoi by the lake where he was shot down calls him an air pirate, but he was treated everywhere as a hero. And you had to know he liked the air pirate thing.

Wherever we went in the world, he wanted to meet with prisoners, with the opposition, with whoever was pursuing freedom for their country. John McCain was America's most vigorous and loyal ambassador of freedom.

He was fiercely proud that one place he was not welcome was Russia. Putin had banned him. ``No more holidays in Siberia,'' John laughed. Mark my words, one day even Russia will turn toward freedom, and when it does, John McCain will be revered there.

John made a big difference in a great many ways, but the one I want to close with is the Senate.

Senators are often stuffy. John was not. If there was ever a Senator entitled to take himself seriously, it was John. Yet he didn't. He effervesced the stolid Senate, to the occasional annoyance of some of our colleagues. Here, too, John engendered lifetime loyalty and affection and respect. Lindsey and Joe and Kelly were his great amigos--none greater than Lindsey, but many of us loved him well.

Millions of Americans saw John McCain give the famous C-SPAN thumbs down that put an end to repeal and replace. They probably did not see what happened next. Having just cast what was a devastating vote for many of his colleagues, he went back to his seat. From my seat here across the Chamber, I saw John's colleagues gently start moving toward him. They may have hated his vote, but there was nevertheless this gentle flow of bodies moving to stand around and near him. His friend Dan Sullivan of Alaska was one who came down from the back row just to stand near John in the aisle. Hate the vote; love the man. This place can be complicated.

John could be annoying. In Munich, accepting an award for John, his beloved Cindy said: ``I love him--most of the time.'' His temper could be explosive. I read once of a man nicknamed for a South American volcano because he ``constantly fumed and regularly erupted,'' and I thought of John. He loved a good fight and was eager to pile in. ``A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed,'' he would say.

An extraordinary man is not a flawless man, and in his full humanity, John gave the rest of us mortals hope. You need not be perfect to try to be extraordinary. Well, he was extraordinary. I think we all found in him qualities of affection, principle, courage, and drama that were extraordinary. And at the end of the day, as compass needles turn toward true north, you knew where he would be pointing.

I will quote some of his last public words here:

Though the true radiance of our world may at times seem obscured, though we will suffer adversity and setbacks and misfortune--never, ever stop fighting for all that is good and just and decent about our world and each other.

I will never forget and will always treasure our friendship, but what I will revere is the way John McCain pointed true north at what was good and just and decent about our world and each other.

His hero, Robert Jordan, in ``For Whom the Bell Tolls,'' said, as he died, ``The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.'' We hate very much, John, that you have had to leave it. God bless you.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source