Barkley served as keynote speaker before a mock political convention conducted by students at Washington and Lee University on April 30, 1956. The seventy-eight-year-old politician had recently returned to the US Senate as a junior senator. He stated at the end of both his life and his speech: “And I am glad to be a junior. … For I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty.”