Summer Anniversaries

Ahhh...the summer of 1995. The summer of Brave Heart and Apollo 13. My last college summer. My last non-adult summer. Three years of college and college life had given my face a kind of puffy, Chris Farley look.

I was interning in the U.S. Senate for William V. Roth (R) DE. I met him several times. A bit of a dullard if you ask me. He had been in the Senate forever. The people of Delaware voted him out in 2000.

It was a hot summer, the kind where you'd be relieved to get off the street and onto a air conditioned DC Metro. I lived in a great dorm in GW, had an efficiency all to myself, right down the block from the M Street Fridays. We would sit on the concrete terrace from which you could see the OEOB and close down the joint on Fridays and Saturdays. Often my friends and I would meet there after work.
We were quite a bunch. One of us is an author/professor, two are lobbyists, another is back home in Texas.

I worked for a guy named John Marshall, he put me in charge of some project about pesticide regulation. I talked a lot with the American Farm Bureau but honestly the project never really went anywhere. I still wasn't that motivated. I needed adult supervision. I was years away from leaving my slacker stage.

So for me it was a summer of office scut work. Lots of making copies, lots of deliveries and data entry. You can imagine. To stay awake I kept the TV in office, yes I had one, tuned to the senate floor.

One of the raging debates in the senate that summer was the war in Yugoslavia. I had my office TV tuned the Senate feed and one afternoon a visibly pissed off Bob Dole came to the floor and announced that the UN safe haven in Srebrenica had been over run by Serb militia. The Dutch peace keepers were powerless to stop them.  After pushing the Dutch aside the Serbs massacred 8,000 Bosnians.

Dole was furious and announced the next week the senate would have a debate and vote on lifting the arms embargo to Yugoslavia. The brain  child of the UN, the embargo prevented weapons sales to all sides, including, you know, the people being set upon by the Serbs.

The Clinton administration was  opposed to the move. Maybe negotiations hadn't had enough time to play out? I kid.

Joe Biden, yes Joe Biden was the most passionate advocate of lifting the embargo. 'A nation has the right to defend itself!' he thundered all week.

The vote passed 67-33, enough to override a veto from President Clinton. My buddy and I went to the senate gallery to watch the vote. We had fun explaining the procedures and amendments to befuddled mid-western tourists. Only one Republican voted against the bill, Mark Hatfield who also scuddled the balanced budget amendment earlier that year. My buddy and I cursed him.

This week the Bosnians were commemorating the massacre. The Serb president had the nerve to show up. He was booed and pelted with rocks. He should have been lynched.