Dan Coats: “President Jack and Vice President Jim, Leader Bob, and my chairman, Jim Broyhill and friends who I had the very distinct…”

“President Jack and Vice President Jim, Leader Bob, and my chairman, Jim Broyhill and friends who I had the very distinct privilege of serving with in this place, it occurs to me that there are more people listening to me speak now than I ever had when I spoke in the House of Representatives or in the Senate. It also occurs to me that, as someone who did serve in that other body, I could go on for an interminable amount of time. But I am now back in the House of Representatives, and so I am conscious of the gavel coming down behind me within a 5-minute period. So I will be very, very brief. It is a great honor to be honored by your peers. I suspect that this had something to do with my Ambassadorship to Germany, although I cannot quite figure out why I was given this award since, under my watch, we took relations all the way back to the Spring of 1945. It was a challenging time, as Jack said. And I think that one thing I learned for sure was, given the very significant political tensions that existed between our President and the Chancellor of Germany, between our countries, the very rightful sense of disappointment, to say the least, over the lack of support from a friend that we had lent incredible amount of support, including the lives of many, many Americans to liberate that country from the scourge of Naziism. It was a difficult time for Americans to understand how that could happen.…”