John Kerry: “I am extraordinarily grateful, not just for the yielding by my colleague from Delaware, and my friend of many years…”

“I am extraordinarily grateful, not just for the yielding by my colleague from Delaware, and my friend of many years here, but I am also very grateful for the comments he just made. I appreciate enormously his acknowledgment of the work that has gone into this legislation from the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Frist and I did start this effort a number of years ago. In fact, we chaired a major bipartisan, frankly apolitical, completely nonpolitical effort nationally, bringing together most of the people involved in this issue for a long period of time to solicit from them their thoughts about the best way to try to put together, for the first time, a comprehensive approach to the issue of AIDS. The reason for wanting to make it comprehensive, obviously, is that everything else was failing. There was and is a sense of implosion in continents and countries as a consequence of what is happening. No country ever had the capacity to provide as much leadership or to provide as much resource as the United States of America to help to deal with this issue.”