Standing at five foot four, Carl Albert was mighty in stature.

Born in a mining camp, he became second in line to the presidency.

Twice.

If ever you had a hero in Oklahoma that you wanted to emulate in the political world, Carl Albert was really the only person.

When he was six years old.

Carl Albert knew he wanted to serve in the United States Congress.

In 1947.

He realized his dream when he was elected to serve alongside John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

He was probably the last powerful speaker of the US House.

For 30 years.

He was a friend, a coal miners and kings, and was known to all as Carl Albert: Little Giant.

Some men are born to greatness.

Others have it thrust upon them.

But the majority achieved greatness through talent and years of hard work.

That would be the path for the most powerful politician in Oklahoma history.

On May the 10th, 1908, Leona Albert gave birth to a son and named him after her father, Carl.

Most politicians talk about their very humble roots and how they brought themselves up.

Everyone seems to concoct that story.

But his was the real deal.

Carl Albert was born in the shadow of a coal mine.

His father was a coal miner.

It was tough, dangerous work.

And then his mother made his father quit the coal mine and go into farming.

He worked on the farm.

He went to a little schoolhouse at Bugtussle.

While he was in Bugtussle at his country school, that the third district congressman came and talked to their student body.

And Carl Albert said, that's what I want to be when I grow up.

And I remember how I never would let that desire or that resolution leave me.

I kept it until I was in Congress.

Albert was determined to be the best student that he could be.

He always wanted to be number one.

He was reading all the time.

Anyone who was around Carl Albert realized what a great orator he was.

He was gifted in his ability to speak and that stood him well for his entire life.

He realized early on in high school that he had that gift.

And he developed it.

He had an excellent debate teacher.

At the time, there was lots of contests, and he was determined to win them.

On May 24th, 1927, much of the Daily Oklahoman's front page was about Charles Lindbergh landing in Paris three days earlier.

A headline to the side read Carl Albert Goes East.

At 19 years old, Albert won the oratory contest and made the first of many visits to the White House.

Calvin Coolidge posed for a photo with the winners.

He was an orator.

There are a lot of speakers, a lot of debaters, he was an orator.

He is giving one of his speeches and he seemed to grow taller as he gave the speech.

So, you know, he's the little giant from Little Dixie.

The real launching pad in Carl Albert's embryonic career was winning a high school oratorical contest not just in the state, but a national contest with the huge prize, the head of a college scholarship.

But more importantly, a grand tour of Europe, where he and a group of high school students would travel all over Europe and meet some of the most important people in Europe, including heads of state.

He comes off to the University of Oklahoma with $10 in his pocket, gets a job as a waiter in what is now campus corner in Norman.

And already he was doing tutoring.

He was that smart in his freshman year at OU.

He wins a national oratorical contest and had 1500 bucks prize, a lot of money in 1927.

And so he was a big wig on campus He was Phi Beta Kappa and then he became a Rhodes Scholar.

He goes to the University of Oxford.

He gets two degrees in law.

In 1941, he joins the Army as a private now with two law degrees.

He soon is promoted to an officer and he becomes a prosecutor And in his office there was this young pretty girl named Mary.

And so they got married while he was still in the army.

Once they realized who they had somebody with an Oxford graduate, Rhodes Scholar with a law degree that cleaning latrines may not have been the best avenue for him.

It's a classic example.

Here's this short little giant that goes into the Army during World War Two as a private.

And comes out as a colonel.

In 1946, Congressman Paul Stewart from Antlers decided he was no longer going to run for reelection in the third district of Oklahoma, which was the giant swath of southeast Oklahoma.

He went all around the district He handed out business cards.

He talked to anybody, you know, was a very hard campaigner.

Speaker Albert ends up in a tight runoff and wins that first election in 1946 by only 330 votes.

Now nobody ever came close to him for the next 30 years but he barely escaped with a win in 1946.

He never forgot that the only reason he was in Congress was McAlester was bigger than Durant.

And that vote barely propelled him in.

That was the post-World War Two class.

And it was just a very large class.

John Kennedy in that class.

Richard Nixon.

Albert spends a tremendous amount of time on the floor.

So he listens to speeches.

He gets to know other members and he gets to know them really well.

At least how they're going to vote, what their needs are back home.

And Rayburn takes notice of this.

It's a good quirk of geography that the Long-Time speaker of the House, one of the most famous speakers ever, Sam Rayburn, has a district that borders the Red River just south of Carl Albert's district.

So naturally, this kid coming in of his party who's just across the river, he's going to notice him and take him under his wing.

And Rayburn would ask Albert, like, How's this guy going to vote?

How's that person going to vote?

And Albert was like, usually pretty accurate, maybe within like ten votes or so of predicting like how these different votes are going to turn out.

And turns out that's actually very valuable information for the speaker.

When Sam Rayburn saw that he could do that, that's when he rose in power above all the others who had come to Congress at the same time.

You know, he becomes majority leader just a few years after he's there.

Sam Rayburn picked Carl Albert to be his number one assistant.

One of his greatest legacies state-wide is the system of upstream dams and flood control projects that we have in eastern Oklahoma.

Everything south of Lake Eufaula.

Carl Albert and Bob Kerr were buddy buddies but they were independent leaders, two Oklahomans, one from outside of Ada, one from outside of McAlester were the two most powerful men in the US Senate and the US House.

The Kerr-McClellan Waterway is really important, right?

We're trying to make the Arkansas River navigable, and that's something that Albert and Kerr were able to work on together.

When working to find the money.

Albert said it would be cheaper to pave the Arkansas River than to dam it.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Carl Albert was very instrumental working with Bob Kerr in funding and in pushing America's Space Program.

Bob Kerr, of course, was in the room when John Kennedy decided America's going to the moon.

It's a great pleasure to join with the many friends of Congressman Carl Albert in saluting him this evening.

I know of no member of the Congress who has labored with more diligence and more effectiveness for the people of his own district and for the people of the United States.

Albert was actually the last person in the White House to see Kennedy before Kennedy goes to Dallas.

We said goodbye.

And that's the last time that anybody ever talked to him in his presidential office.

Carl Albert's second best friend in the U.S. Senate, became president of the United States.

And what that did for Oklahoma.

We've got a lot of federal funds for our projects that required federal appropriation.

You're one of the most popular Oklahomans that Texas ever produced.

We love you in Oklahoma, and we're looking forward to having you down there.

I think his talents emerge possibly more during Majority Leader, where he turned out to be a very good vote getter.

He was very good about taking care of members' needs, listening to them, respecting them.

And they respected and liked him back.

Major changes were ahead that would reshape the country.

And Albert was at the table when every decision was made.

If there is one thing that Carl Albert gave to the nation, it is the Medicare system.

It really didn't get off the ground in the Kennedy administration.

But after Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, that's part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program which Carl Albert rammed through the house because they were great friends.

Johnson and Albert, President Johnson and Carl Albert were just like that.

He as a Democrat understood the pressure on Southern Democrats, the pressure on border state Democrats.

He knew how hard you could push them.

He knew there were certain votes that they were just not going to take like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is probably the most controversial piece of legislation that Carl Albert pushed through because his own constituents were not for that.

And many of the people who voted for it risked being turned out of office for taking that vote.

No one really ever questioned Carl Albert's integrity in voting to do what's right.

In that third congressional district where I grew up, of course.

It was not a popular decision to vote for the Voting Rights Act.

People might question Why is someone from Oklahoma going to support voting rights?

I think for Albert, it's the right thing to do, right?

He also thought it's the constitutional thing to do.

Carl Albert had in his office a framed group of pens from the Great Society.

Every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson had signed, he gave Carl Albert one of the pens and the speaker had them displayed all there.

And I'm sure Carl Albert was working night and day trying to keep up with Johnson's initiatives and get these things through Congress.

In 1968, Albert was selected to chair the National Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Anti-war protesters surrounded the event and violence outside spilled into the convention hall.

I had to preside over that, over not the roughest one, I think ever.

The threats I had from people both inside and outside the convention hall.

It disturbed him that the focus of that convention came to be riots and just total chaos.

It should have been a smooth convention, but the whole country was in chaos simply because of protests about the Vietnam War and how America was handling that.

It was tough, but he he kept control.

Most of the uncontrolled, discontrol, uncontrollable action was outside the convention, not necessarily inside the convention.

Despite the chaos all around, Albert was able to get the Democratic candidate nominated for the television audience, and he did it in prime time.

It was an impossible situation, and no one could have looked good coming out of that.

I stood with it, got through it.

I was in pretty bad shape when it was over, but we had it done.

On January 21st 1971, Carl Albert was sworn in as the 46th speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

He said kings and queens and emperors and dictators and national presidents from around the world when they came to Washington, D.C., they would come to his office.

And so his influence basically became worldwide.

You could walk into his office in Washington, D.C., and see him at any time when he was Speaker of the U.S. House.

It didn't matter whether he was talking to Queen Elizabeth of England, are one of his classmates or his daddy's old mining buddies from Krebs.

If they came to Washington, he saw them.

When Elizabeth Taylor came to Congress.

He was showing her all around the Capitol.

And he was they were going to do a picture in his office and he was in his chair and Elizabeth Taylor was sitting on the edge of his chair with her arm around him.

And Carl Albert said, do I remind you of Eddie Fisher?

He becomes speaker very shortly when Nixon becomes president.

Okay.

So here is the Democratic Speaker of the House.

And so he knew Nixon since 1947.

So they had a personal relationship.

In 1973, vice president Spiro Agnew resigned.

The speaker was taking a nap in his office when there was a knock at the door.

And two or three of us knocked on the door and went into his office and he was on the couch and roused him and said, Mr. Speaker, You're next in line for the presidency and there are six or seven gentlemen outside the door who plan to be with you for the next few months.

Agnew resigns.

There's no vice president yet.

There was a potential plan was Let's quickly impeach Nixon if Nixon's impeached and then the Senate convicts.

There's no president.

There's no vice president and Albert actually, gets to become president.

Albert wanted nothing to do with this.

He said, this isn't right.

The people elected a Republican.

There should be a Republican President.

That was not sound and thinking, in my opinion.

No.

I never did believe that.

And I would either have been the beneficiary or the person who took it on the chin.

He had joked that he said I could never be president.

You have to see eye to eye with everyone.

I don't see eye to eye with anyone.

Carl Albert told me later that he went to President Nixon and said, Mr. President, I want to support you.

Under the Constitution, the right to appoint a vice president because your vice president has resigned.

I've been reading the news and I cannot get confirmed any of those that you've been saying you've been thinking about.

But let me give you a list of people that are Republican that if you appointed them, I could get their names through the U.S. House of Representatives.

He called Mike and me in late one evening and he says, Well, who do you recommend?

I said, What do you think?

He said, Ford?

I said, Yes, sir.

He said, Well, we're thinking about him.

As the investigation into the break in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel moved closer to the White House.

Pressure was building for the speaker to act.

The Saturday Night Massacre, where the special prosecutor was fired, lit a fire underneath the Democrats to move forward with impeachment.

Everyone wanted to give Albert advice.

You should do it this way.

You should do it that way.

What Albert decided was he was going to let the articles go to the Judiciary Committee.

An already established committee, so no one could accuse the committee of being politically motivated.

There was a great groundswell to have a committee of handpicked people on both sides that would be a stellar committee that would represent the House of Representatives well.

There was a feeling among many members that the Judiciary Committee wasn't up to the job.

It was a group of No-Name people, lackluster in the public arena, and if you put them in the spotlight, they would not acquit themselves very well.

So Carl Albert went against that sentiment.

That he felt strongly that any committee of the House of Representatives has a cross section of members that will do well.

That's who we are, and that's what the public should see.

And that's the fairest way to carry out this very serious responsibility.

I think one of the most important things I did was that I handled successfully the Watergate crisis I sent it to the right committee over the objection of a lot of people.

It came out exactly as I thought it would come out.

And as a result, we got rid of a president that had made a lot of mistakes.

Ford becomes president.

And it's quite some time until Nelson Rockefeller is confirmed as the new vice president.

So twice while Carl Albert from Bugtussle is speaker of the US House of Representatives.

If something had had happened to the president he would have been the president, a heartbeat away.

After 30 years in Congress.

Carl Albert decided to retire.

He was the victim of his own success also because in this 1974 election that brought so many new Democrats to Washington, many of them younger and I think he could see the handwriting on the wall that eventually they were going to want a speaker of their generation and they were going to want a more activist speaker than he was.

I got a call early in the morning and he told me to arrange a session in the House of Representatives TV studio.

He wanted to make a tape.

After long consideration, I have decided to retire from Congress at the end of the present session.

It was tough for him.

You could tell there was a lot of emotion.

So he and Mary moved back to McAlester and they set him up an office down in the federal building, the Post Office Building, as a former US speaker.

And he would do speeches around the country from time to time, he would go raise money for Democratic candidates.

But I think he later believed that he left Congress too soon.

He would go to work every day to the US Postal Office to work.

As a former speaker, he had nothing to do.

You know, they quit contacting him.

They quit asking him his opinion.

Most people lingered in Washington for quite a while before they made their money.

In some cases, they increased their fame in Washington.

There was plenty of work to be done in the lobbying area or think tanks or various places.

He wanted to go home to Oklahoma.

Albert spent 22 years in retirement.

He taught a class at O.U.

He spoke at the Democratic Convention in 92, and he wrote a book about his life.

In 2000, Carl Albert died at his home in McAlester at the age of 91.

He had been kind of frail for several years, and so his death was not unexpected.

But when he died, in 2000, the political world remembered, even though he had been out of Congress for 23 years.

I told several people I hope Carl is in heaven.

And he's looking down seeing this because he just told me that he hardly ever sees anybody anymore.

And today we had the biggest funeral in the history of McAlester.

It was the longest funeral service I've ever been to.

They must have had 12 to 14 presenters at his service.

A true Oklahoman.

His roots were deep in this state.

He never got Oklahoma too far out of him even though he stayed in Washington for 30 years.

The little giant left behind an enormous legacy of service to Oklahoma and the nation.

Longfellow wrote that when a great man dies, the light he leaves behind him lies on the paths of other men.

He brought the House and the Senate together.

He brought the Congress and the president together.

And they accomplished so much more working together than they did arguing with each other.

I know when my time was up I enjoyed my life.

I shot for everything I attained practically from the time I was six years old.

The fact that I have attained these goals as a country boy from Oklahoma, testifies not to me, but to the greatness of the American system and the opportunities the United States of America affords all of its people.