Thursday, May 21, 2009

U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Floor Statement on Bill Shipp
Remarks as Delivered on the Senate Floor

Madam President, I know most Members on the floor remember a song of about 25 years ago called: ``The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia.''

Well, on Tuesday of this week, a beacon of light in journalism did go out in Georgia, when Bill Shipp, a gifted political writer, announced his retirement after 50 years of reporting in the South.

Bill Shipp is a remarkable character. It is said that all of us are replaceable. I am not sure Bill Shipp is replaceable. He began his writing in Georgia as a political columnist for the Atlanta Constitution.

Starting in the late 50s, he covered the late Ivan Allen and the late Dr. Martin Luther King and the Governors and the politicians of that era from George Wallace to Lester Maddox, to Jimmy Carter, to Carl Sanders.

He wrote about the transition of the old South to the new South. And in Washington, he covered the Civil Rights Act in the middle and late seventies. He was a writer whose perception was keen, whose wit was sharp, and whose pen was even sharper.

For 32 of his 50 years I was in elected office in Georgia. I can make a true confession: When he wrote a column, you went to the paper and you read Bill Shipp first. There was a reason for that. If you were going to be the victim of the day, you might as well go out and find out what he was going to say about you. But if you were not the victim of the day, you could relish in seeing some other politician being skewered by that pen.

Bill Shipp had a profound effect on journalism in our State. For years he reported for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, but after a number of years he started his only publication whose title was: ``Bill Shipp's Georgia.'' Never has there been a more appropriate name for a newsletter, because, in many ways, Georgia's politics was Bill Shipp's possession.

Bill Shipp wrote about politics in such a way that he changed politics in the South. While I would never accuse Bill of having editorialized in a news article, the tone and tenor of the direction of Bill Shipp's perception of what was right and wrong could help to lead debates to a positive conclusion in an otherwise period of discourse and trouble.

I love Bill Shipp for many reasons--one, because he and I have had the pleasure of living in the same county for the last 40 years. The other is, I have learned a lot from him. I always appreciated him. In politics, Bill Shipp is the equivalent of Helen Thomas at a Presidential press conference. When a Georgia politician has a press conference, Bill Shipp is there. When it is time for questions, he always has one. And when it comes time to roll the grenade in the middle of the room, Bill Shipp will do it. He did it to me and to others.

Bill Shipp is a gifted friend, a man for whom I wish the best in his retirement. I think, finally, of those days on Ivy Grove and Cherokee Road in Marietta where he and Tom Watson Brown and George Berry would sit at 5 in the afternoon, have a libation, and discuss the next day's column that Bill would write. Bill Shipp is a treasured asset of our State, a man who has contributed greatly to the growth of the new South and the new Georgia, a man whose contributions to journalism are preeminent in our State, and a friend to whom I wish the very best in his retirement.