Political Quotes

“Not a small intellectual feat, equal to my understanding of some of the amendments themselves. Sir, I am going to make two quick comments. One is anecdotal. I was involved with the negotiation of the Long-Term Cotton Textile Agreement under President Kennedy in 1962. This was a major effort. It was done at the behest of the Southern mill owners and operators, the producers of cotton textiles, and also of the trade unions that represented the garment trades, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, now formed with another union into UNITE. It was a precondition of getting the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the one major piece of legislation of President Kennedy's first term. It came and went on to produce what we know as the Kennedy Round. That sequence of long negotiations, most recently was the Uruguay Round, which produced the World Trade Organization. There is another round coming up, we hope, in the aftermath of the Seattle meeting. Years went by, and I found I was Ambassador to India. On an occasion, in meeting with the Foreign Minister, I said to him, just curiously: Do you find that the quota which India received in the American market of cotton textiles is onerous? It had now been a decade since it was in place. I asked: Is it a trade restriction that is particularly of concern to you? Because if it was, I was required to report it back to Washington. The Foreign Minister said: Oh, no.…”