Political Quotes

“October 4, 1957. Many in the Chamber were not alive at that date. I was. I was a teenager, maybe in high school, just starting, or at the end of grade school. But it was a big day in the history of the world, October 4, 1957, because at 7:28 p.m. at night, the Russians launched Sputnik. Sputnik was a basketball-size satellite, and we were concerned because we believed the Russians--then the Soviet Union--had the capacity to drop an atomic or nuclear bomb on the United States, and if they could do it from space, for goodness' sake, how would we defend ourselves? So a mild panic hit America, particularly in this town of Washington, and out of that panic came a pretty good idea, as far as I was concerned. They decided that for the first time in the history of the United States, we would start loaning money to college-age students so they could go to college. The notion was, if we had to fight the Russians or the Soviets in technology, we better have people educated and prepared to do it. So someone who in those days sat down and wrote up the names of these wonderful ideas came up with a great one. It was called the National Defense Education Act. The National Defense Education Act said that those who applied for Federal college loans could borrow money and pay it back at 3 percent interest but not have to pay until 1 year out of college, and then they had 10 years to pay it off. I didn't know at the time, but that turned out to be my ticket to college.…”