Max Baucus: “let me read you the opening line of a story in this morning's Missoulian: Phil Tawney, a staunch wildlife supporter…”

“let me read you the opening line of a story in this morning's Missoulian: Phil Tawney, a staunch wildlife supporter, environmental activist and a Democratic party mainstay for more than two decades, died in Missoula, Monday afternoon of complications from leukemia. It is a short, stark, sentence. It gets the essential facts. It is good journalism. But this time, it leaves out everything. Phil Tawney was a big man. A man whose soul was great enough to unite and transcend opposites. In Phil, passion for the great cause, united with reason and judgment in the details of legislation. Deep concern for the future joined with great joy in the present. Boundless idealism, met practical, hands-on knowhow. As much as any person I have known, Phil represented what I believe is best about Montana. If you knew Phil, you were inspired by his love of Montana, his idealism, his integrity, and his courage in battling the leukemia that took his life. Phil's Montana was Normal Maclean's Montana: A land of vast open spaces, and mist hanging in narrow mountain passes; of biting winds in the winter and dazzling sun in the Big Sky summer; of the elk hunts Phil took each fall; of snow that crunches under your boots, and muscular fish hanging at the bottom of streams so powerful that even a man as big and strong as Phil has trouble keeping his feet. Phil did as much as any Montanan of our time to preserve this land for his children and ours.”