Tom Harkin: “when the man who sits right next to me across this aisle over here, the senior Senator from South Carolina, Fritz…”

“when the man who sits right next to me across this aisle over here, the senior Senator from South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, retires at the end of this Congress, this body will lose one of its most distinctive and eloquent voices. We will lose a master legislator, a person who will go down in history as one of the truly consequential Senators of the second half of the 20th century. Of course, we will lose the presence of a great friend, a colleague whose passion and wit burn just as intensely today as when he first entered this Chamber nearly four decades ago. As I said, Senator Hollings sits directly across the aisle to my left, at the desk that was once occupied by another extraordinary individual from South Carolina, Senator John C. Calhoun. But Calhoun was a voice of the Old South, a defender of slavery in the great debates prior to the Civil War. Fritz Hollings, first as Governor, and for the last 38 years as a Senator, has epitomized the New South. Fritz Hollings became Governor in 1958, at the tender age of 36. He immediately set about diversifying South Carolina's textile and farming economy. He planted the State thick with technical colleges. He aggressively recruited new industries to the State. But, most importantly, he set in motion the peaceful transformation of racial relations in South Carolina.”