And I speak here for many others who loved Robert Kennedy as well. How proud our remarkable mother is of what he did and of this recognition. And if … - Ted Kennedy

Then there will be the Jeffords amendment, which is a sense of the Senate that does not impose unfunded mandates, of which we are in strong support. Finally, there will be a Gorton amendment to the school-to-work legislation. The Senator from Washington would provide tax credits for the hiring of summer youth. We are in opposition to the Gorton amendment, and there will be a motion to table the amendment. We have tried to work this issue out. There may be changes in the Summer Youth Program, but this amendment would not really provide any kind of accountability, no assurance that at the end of the summer these young people would continue to work. We do not know how decisions would be made as to which companies would be able to get the approval of the young people. So we recommend tabling the Gorton amendment.

Incremental measures won't suffice anymore. We need to succeed where Teddy Roosevelt and all others since have failed. The conditions now are better than ever. In Barack Obama, we have a president who's announced that he's determined to sign a bill into law this fall. And much of the business community, which has suffered the economic cost of inaction, is helping to shape change, not lobbying against it. I know this because I've spent the past year, along with my staff, negotiating with business leaders, hospital administrators, and doctors. As soon as I left the hospital last summer, I was on the phone, and I've kept at it. Since the inauguration, the administration has been deeply involved in the process. So have my Senate colleagues—in particular Max Baucus, the chair of the Finance Committee, and my friend and partner in this mission, Chris Dodd. Even those most ardently opposed to reform in the past have been willing to make constructive gestures now.

Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam. Indeed, it is fair to say that Britain stands toward peace in Northern Ireland today where America stood in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s. The parallel is uncanny. When President Kennedy died, only 120 American soldiers had been killed in action in Vietnam between 1961 and 1963. This week we learned that 128 persons had died in Northern Ireland in the two years of bitter violence that has gripped that land since British troops first arrived in 1969. We know that the years from 1961 to 1963 were only an early chapter in the American horror of Vietnam. We know the tragedy that unfolded there in later years: 45,000 Americans have now died in the war; hundreds of thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers have been killed; millions of innocent civilians have died and millions more are homeless refugees in their own country.