On the recordFebruary 24, 2010
This is a very human institution, and it's affected very much by our personal relationships with one another. Very frankly, for the first 20 years that Jack and I served on the Appropriations Committee, we were often adversaries. There were some issues that we differed on. He was, as has already been said, very much old school, and I was more of a reformer. In fact, when I ran for the chairmanship of the committee against a senior member of the committee, Jack managed the campaign of my opponent and, unfortunately, he did a pretty good job. After I was elected, we had pretty much an arm's-length relationship for a couple of years. But if you care about your country, and you care about this institution, you swallow your differences and you learn to work with everybody. Jack and I soon had developed a solid working relationship, and we became allies on a host of issues. One of our most important was our view of the war in Iraq and how to get out of it; and another was our concern about the dubiousness of our continued involvement in Afghanistan if we didn't have a better ally in that government to rely upon.
