JOHN LINDER: “I met Charlie Norwood over 30 years ago. We were both young dentists in Georgia. He was the president of the Georgia…”

“I met Charlie Norwood over 30 years ago. We were both young dentists in Georgia. He was the president of the Georgia Dental Association, and I was a young, newly elected dentist in the Georgia legislature. And his enthusiasm blew me away. Irrespective of what he was talking about, he only had two gears: neutral and full speed ahead. And his enthusiasm would capture you. And the bulldoggedness, the way he would put his teeth on an issue and fight for it without ever backing up was astonishing to me. Charlie did not have a coy bone in his body. From the day you met Charlie, you knew what he stood for on whatever the issue was. Respectfully, he and I differed on the Patients' Bill of Rights. We spent many hours talking about it. He was adamant that I was wrong and he was right. But at no point did he ever raise his voice or show any disrespect for a position that I had taken that was different from his. Charlie loved this institution. He loved the give-and-take of it. He loved the formality of it. We talked one day if he ever had any notion of running for the Senate, and he said he would never survive there. He would never survive not getting something done every day. He treated this institution that he loved with great dignity. When he fought his fights, you knew he was going to fight fair.”