“You read all of those lengthy reports,” another delegate said to me. 

            “It’s good that you think I do,” I responded with a smile.

            I tell my staff and my students to keep my testimony and letters to one page.  As Thomas Jefferson said, “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.”

            “Trust but verify,” my colleague said later in the meeting, quoting Ronald Reagan on dealing with the Soviets.

            “In this town,” I said, “it’s trust but codify.”  (Pass a law that puts it in the Maryland Code)

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            What we need in the United States is not division.  What we need in the United States not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.

             On the night that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, Robert F. Kennedy spoke those words at a political rally in an African-American neighborhood of Gary, Indiana.

               President Reagan’s speech after the Challenger disaster and President Clinton’s after the Oklahoma City bombing have been widely mentioned as models for what President Obama should say in Tucson. 

                The talking heads on MSNBC this morning discussed Bobby Kennedy’s speech.  It is as powerful today as it was that night. 

Tuesday, January 11