On the recordApril 26, 2018
I thank my colleague from Houston for joining us tonight to honor the life of this great woman, Barbara Pierce Bush, who, as my colleague mentioned, was a national leader in literacy, focused her efforts as First Lady on building literacy in the United States, and, in fact, in a televised event, an event that really, I think, symbolizes who Barbara Bush was and how big her heart was and the way she treated everyone that she met. It was an event celebrating the bicentennial of the Constitution where Barbara Bush met a man named J.T. Pace, who was a 63-year-old son of a sharecropper, who had only recently become literate and able to read. And he was scheduled to read the Constitution's preamble out loud in front of a large audience, Barbara Bush instinctively understood that he was very, very nervous. She quietly slipped up alongside him and asked him if she could help him read it out loud while standing next to him. Mr. Pace was very grateful and said, yes, of course. And soon they went up on stage together and began reading out loud the preamble of the Constitution. As Barbara Bush detected that Mr. Pace became more comfortable in reading in public, she continued to lower her voice until only his voice could be heard. And he suddenly realized that he was reading the preamble to the Constitution in front of this huge audience on his own.…
