Latest / BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback / Episode 480 : The Brief Journalism career of our Host, Randal Wallace : "On Packwood - Politically Speaking" and The Forum Newspaper at Lander University (Special Edition) - Dole 21

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Episode 480 : The Brief Journalism career of our Host, Randal Wallace : "On Packwood - Politically Speaking" and The Forum Newspaper at Lander University (Special Edition) - Dole 21 · BOB DOLE : 1995 Clinton's Comeback

• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Chapter six.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Packwood, Clinton, and Kavanaugh.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: The very first opinion piece I ever wrote in college had to do with the case of Bob Packwood for the student newspaper at Lander College in 1995.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Packwood was one of those senators I most admired.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: He could give a speech on tax reform and make it absolutely fascinating.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: He was the original maverick in the Republican Party.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was an environmentalist who fought to protect Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area, the deepest river gorge in North America.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was extremely pro-women's rights, including equal pay for equal work, and he was for he was pro-choice on abortion, a position that we differ on.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And he wrote the first legislation on it ever introduced in the Congress before Roe v.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wade was even decided.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: He was also interested in rewriting the tax code and was the man Bob Dole had entrusted to manage the financial plans he proposed through Congress as they were gearing up for the 1996 presidential election.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: His loss to the presidential hopes of Bob Dole cannot be overstated.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Bob Packwood was the equivalent of a legislative Stonewall Jackson to a Robert Dole playing the part of a legislative Robert E.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Lee.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: As Lee said of Jackson after Chancellorsville, where Jackson lost his arm and was killed, he has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Dole had to have felt the same way.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Packwood was one of Dole's field generals, capable of arguing on the floor for any finance bill in depth and able to defend the party's position no matter the uh complexity of the issue.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The loss forced Dole to try to run the Senate, the Finance Committee, and run for president all at the same time.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the stakes were high as the case uh against Senator Packwood mounted.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Originally, as the chairman of the Lander College Republicans, I was asked to write a defense of Senator Packwood, which is what the following op ed was, mixed with a little sarcasm.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: I planned to represent Packwood's side just as the story took a huge turn and the senator was forced to resign.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I then decided to make a case defending the senator and poking holes in the way he had been uh treated by the process in 1995.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: As the old saying goes, if you don't have uh the facts, argue the law.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have the law, argue the facts.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have neither, scream really loudly.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I wrote.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: September 20th, 1995, the forum newspaper at Lanter University on Packwood.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: After 33 months of investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee finally reached a verdict on the sexual misconduct case of Senator Bob Packwood.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody should feel good that justice was finally served on Packwood, or maybe not.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing that I learned over the summer with no cable TV is that reading and discovering facts for yourself can put a whole new light on a subject.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Having read this summer, for example, several long books on former President Richard Nixon's life and career gave me a more positive opinion of the man and a vastly more positive view of him than my professors or the TV pundits had ever offered.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe in the case, in this case, a little looking into the facts might be done before the condemnation occurs.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you look into the career of Senator Bob Packwood or watch the worried uh reaction of the coverage on the financial channels on the day that he was resigned, you'll find a highly qualified for that position that he held as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: A leading authority on the entitlement programs, he was the man who was going to lead the Republican agenda through the committee.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: However, unlike many Republicans, including Senator Roth, who was most likely to be the new chairman, he believed in curtailing spending before cutting taxes.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, making sure it can be paid for first.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: With the moderate leadership is appeared for the first time a common sense approach by the chairman was going to guide us through a real budget reform tax and tax reform effort.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Medicare, Medicaid reform, and many more very important parts of the agenda, which may well now get bogged down in the partisan nitpicking Washington is famous for producing.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a real chance for reform may be lost.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Roth, it has been said, is a died-in-a-wool, non-compromising conservative who does not have Packwood's skill to get a bill out of committee or the legislative skill to get whatever does come out passed.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like Bob Dole is going to be real busy running everything in the months to come.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And ladies, let's not forget that this man that the liberal feminist loved to hate has been for many years the best friend they had in the new majority Republican Party.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: His employers, his employees, are both the highest paid on the Hill, and they are also 60% women, including his chief of staff.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: He voted against Clarence Thomas, you may remember him, the other guy the feminist all hate, and he wrote the very first bill to legalize abortion in the United States.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Without anybody's help, I might add.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: A position opposed by most of his own party.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's been a woman's champion on many less controversial women's issues as well, and once said that women are a vital resource to the country.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Most of you may be saying, So what?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: The guy's a jerk and he got what was coming to him.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'd beg to differ with that uh conclusion as well.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at the case against Senator Packwood, a case that cost him a very distinguished 27-year career, it ain't all it's cracked up to be.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: In no case that I read about did a woman say that once rebuffed, the senator approached her again.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: One even worked for him for seven more years.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The accusation that he deliberately doctored his diaries, his own personal diaries at that, were never actually handed over to the committee.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: Packwood, after losing the case in the Supreme Court, turned over the diaries to the Justice Department, complete, and they were then given to the Ethics Committee.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: The altered tapes went to his own lawyer in an attempt to prevent leaks.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine that, worried about leaks in Washington, D.C., totally unjustified.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: The third uh count, when reviewed by the Justice Department, remember them, that group of legal eagles headed by Janet Reno, found absolutely no criminal conduct in the attempts to get his wife a job.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Let me write that again.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing illegal.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: The man went to friends he had known for 15 and 35 years to help get her a job, and as he said, for a fair day's work for a fair day's pay.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: The other part of this case that troubles me greatly was the loss of due process for Packwood under the law.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: The ethics committee stood up and self-righteously called the evidence unseemly, overwhelming, and credible.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, how did they come to that decision?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: When Senator Bryan was asked, did you personally interview any of the women who made the accusations?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: His answer was, you are missing the point.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: What point?
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Did Senator Bryan cross-examine the accusers?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Did Senator McConnell or Senator McCowski or any of the other members of the committee ask a single question of a single accuser of Senator Bob Packwood?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Guess what the answer to that question is?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Guilty or not, that is the point.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: They voted to expel a member of the United States Senate after reading depositions.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Ethics Committee Chairman, Mitch McConnell, said on the subject of open hearings that he did not feel they were needed to reach a just verdict.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: They apparently did not feel it was necessary to interview any witnesses either to reach a just verdict.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: They then stated that Senator Packwood waived his rights to open hearings twice.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: He did do that.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is true.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: However, that was before the committee decided to release the evidence they felt was relevant in the case.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Relevant to the case against Packwood, that's what.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: They also said they gave Packwood a list of his d accusers.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, could you imagine the field day they would have had if he actually had personally called any of these women?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: You would have to have called a uh it reason number four to throw him out of office.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Senator Bryan talked about the historic first of this case in the press conference they held.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time a committee had to subpoena documents uh from a senator.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time a committee had to fight in court to get its hands on subpoenaed documents.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time a committee had recommended punishment of a senator for sexual misconduct.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: But it had some first the senator failed to mention also.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first time a Senate Ethics Committee tried to get its hands on a fellow senator's personal and private diary.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was the first Senate Ethics Committee investigation of this magnitude to be conducted entirely behind closed doors.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: This was also the first time a United States Senator was recommended for expulsion without first committing treason, as Waldo P.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Johnson did in 1862, or without first being convicted of a crime, as was the case with Democratic Senator Harrison Williams in 1980 during the ABS gam investigation.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was also struck by the high and mighty uh gloat glee of Senator Packwood's number one foe, Senator Barbara Boxer of California.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: She was the one on the tube trying to make take credit for the whole downfall of Packwood.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Quote, I I put pressure on this case and kept it from being swept under the rug.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, was I and just about everybody else to calling in to C-SPAN on this day, the only one who wanted to know why she had been, she had not pursued the Paula Jones case in the case of Mary or the case of Mary Joe Copecney.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to mention one as old as the ones of the accusations against Packwood.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure that President Clinton and Senator Ted Kennedy would fit in her moral crusade and on those cases as well.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I also wondered when she gets off talking about morality, she stated, We in the United States Senate have a code of ethics, and you must live up to that code.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, about the last time I checked, if you or I wrote 147 balance checks to the tune of who knows how much money, we would be under the Greenwood Jailhouse.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Mrs.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Boxer got promoted from the United States House to the United States Senate.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: So so much for great moral or her great moral argument.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: The point in this case were not as cut and dry as they appear.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: He may very well have been guilty of the charges, but we will never know because he is gone.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: He nor any member of the Senate face the accusers in this case.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: He was forced to resign, not so much for the crimes he committed, but the problems he presented.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: In an election year, his hearings would have been a disaster to all the incumbents in Washington who might have been perceived as not getting it that sexual harassment is wrong.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Bob Packwood bit the dust, abandoned by the feminists he'd reached out to his entire career, abandoned by the Republicans who would go no further in a soon-to-be election year, cut adrift to end a magnificent 27-year political career in disgrace with no chance to recover.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Randall Wallace.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now that op-ed opened up doors for me in college.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: It got me uh an offer uh to start writing for the uh student newspaper, which allowed me to start uh writing a political column in the forum.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, then write uh stories, and I ended up majoring in mass communications for my second college degree and spent two years as a student staffer uh on the newspaper.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it is actually an article that I'm very proud of having written.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: Though the running joke at college from one of my professors, Rufus Gleason, was why say in a few words what you can say in a few thousand?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: A line I have used over and over through the years.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: But as time has come uh has moved on, I did come to a conclusion about the case of Bob Packwood.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I was wrong.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: While I still admire the senator's amazing record and obvious uh talents as a speaker and legislator, the case against him was overwhelming.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: When I went back and and watched the old uh videos, I I I saved the pain of the women involved is very real.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: As much as I wanted to believe in Packwood at the time, the evidence was impossible to ignore.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was as many as 18 accusers.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I still think my article had valid points in it as to the way the procedure played out, but overall, clearly, the case was strong.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's all from my book, Always Vote Your Conscience, Don't Take It Percent, Don't Fight the Same Old Battles over and OG.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Available at Amazon.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the first book that I wrote, and it is 545 pages long, and so one of the lessons I learned uh from my new book that's coming out, uh the the uh the one on the uh the lessons of the cold war was don't write too long of a book.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: But this started my uh journalism career uh very briefly uh that I had.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: I actually I actually went back and and pulled some of them because I have a uh uh a little scrapbook of the articles and stuff that I wrote.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the first one I actually wrote was titled No Time for Lunch.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Bag it.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was about bring you lunch to to uh uh on campus.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But I started in February doing a couple things because I had just moved over to get my mass communications degree.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: We covered, I you know, I got to cover all this stuff from bag lunches to Dr.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hess discussing her trip to India to an event.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this is something that you only can do at a small college, at a small newspaper, and that is I covered Congressman Lindsey Graham, his trip back to Greenwood, and there's a picture of me and another student uh there with Senator Graham for his event.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in this, in this article, I'm the guy that wrote the article.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pictured in the paper with the senator, with the congressman then, and I'm chairman of the College of Republicans.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's almost like Myrtle Beach having uh the uh Mark Garner, who was the mayor of Myrtle Beach, and he owned the Sun News.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was the kind of deal I had, I guess, while I was there.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: But I I I loved every day that I was at Lander University and working on the on the forum newspaper, who, by the way, had a story about our podcast when we hit number one a couple of years ago.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and what I thought we would do during the rest of this season, because I I I went I went there and started writing stories occasionally for the paper in February.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time the Packwood story was hitting, hitting it big in September, it was, I mean, it was a long 33 months, as you could tell by our uh our special series on him.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so uh I was asked to write this defense or an op-ed about him, which which is what we just read.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: And and um then they talked to me about having the political column, and I got very active in the paper.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote that political column from September, October of 1995 all the way through till I graduated in May of 1996.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so we ended up, I wrote some stuff about uh, you know, the usual college articles, you know, the first uh annual, I'm looking at scrapbook now, you know, the first annual Student Life Awards banquet.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, I wrote that article, but we started doing a column called Politically Speaking.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that I've always considered the on Packwood thing to be the first of those columns, but we wrote one about the moderates leaving Congress and you know, uh one about the College of Republicans recruiting people, but we also uh about the the the situation when the federal government shut down.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and and what I'm gonna do as we move on uh through this Bob Dole series and and the and the campaign in 1996 is when we get to that point, I'm gonna um I'm gonna read the iPeds into the show because I'm I'm proud of them, and announce here that we're gonna be reviving politically speaking that column on my Substack pages.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna invite you to go to Randall Wallace at Substack and um and and follow us there, and we're and we're gonna be doing these political columns um uh on on the Substack under that title, politically speaking, because um I'd like to bring that column back and get back at it.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: I I I enjoyed journalism probably as good as anything I ever did other than politics.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I uh and I didn't follow it as a career because I was planning on following a career in politics and was working on campaigns.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I graduated in 1995, Bob Dole still had a few months left, and Senator Thurman was we had the race into November.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and the Thurman race was one that we were all circling the wagons about because even though Thurman was enormously popular in South Carolina, he was 94 years old during that election, and so it was all hands-on deck.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a state senate race with a gentleman down here in in Oreed County named Phil Render, who was running against uh first-term incumbent Luke Rankin.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: And now Phil Render would go on to serve at the Merle Beach City Council, and he's still on City Council, came back after the election in 2025 that we covered on our sister podcast, uh Grand Strand Politics.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so anyway, you know, I just I got out of it, and uh and I I have some regrets about it because I I I enjoyed it.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: I probably need a lot of work on grammar and spelling, but I I enjoyed uh my time writing for the student newspaper and doing the TV productions.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we and we're gonna show you the um, or we have shown you already, the the Lander College Republican uh recruitment video that we put together where we got Bob Dole and Phil Graham and Lindsey Graham to all speak with us.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um I did want to read this to you, though, because out of all those political columns that we wrote, I got a response only from the Bob Packwood one and from Dr.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Tannenbaum.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Dr.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Tannenbaum was the political science professor at Lander, one of them, one of the two.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Hess was the other one, and um and then we had several people in the history department.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: They kind of they kind of were political science people too.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he wrote a response and it said, let me read it to you, it says, Dear editor, uh, we're better off without Packwood.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Randall Wallace is one of those students with whom it is a pleasure to talk and exchange ideas.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope he will not take amiss this critical response to his defense of Senator Packwood in the September 20th Forum.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: In his letter, Wallace mistakes the report of the Senate Ethics Committee for a court verdict.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: The report, adopted unanimously by the six senators from both parties, called upon the Senate to expel Packwood from its ranks.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Had Packwood not resigned, then there would have been a trial.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: Packwood would have been able to confront his accusers, and senators would have been uh sitting in judgment as a jury.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: The outcome of those proceedings, had they taken place, would mightily have be called, rightly be called a verdict.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: The committee report was uh merely like an indictment, stating that uh there was sufficient reason to call for a trial.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: But Packwood chickened out of the trial and resigned first.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: I interpret his resignation as the political but not legal equivalent of a plea of guilty as charged.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Randall Wallace's letter contains an unstated assumption with which I agree, the executive uh moralizing exuberance with which some Americans approach political matters, exhibited especially but not uh exclusively by the religious right, this moralizing exuberance would have have us all judge each other by uh revealed religious truths very narrowly interpreted.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: If Wallace agrees with me on this point, then well and good.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: But Packwood's behavior was not primarily an offense against, say, the Ten Commandments or any other moral.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Code, nor was it merely verbal harassment.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: He assaulted staffers as they worked, uh, real flesh and blood people who never knew when Packwood might turn on them.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Both they and the Senate as an institution are better off without Packwood there.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Tannenbaum.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so I I thought it was kind of neat that I had a college professor answer me back.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that column, uh, you know, I was proud of it.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I look back on it now and and think that uh, you know, maybe uh I wasn't in the right.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh though I still think, and having now done this 12-part um special series on Bob Packwood uh and the scandal, I still come away very uncomfortable with the diary tampering um charges and the the jobs for Georgie, uh which was his ex-wife, because this stuff was all referred to the Justice Department.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you hear Senator McConnell and Senator Bryan and Senator McKulski and Senator Smith.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: Ted Stevens didn't really say a lot, and I think that was largely because he and and Packwood were very good friends, but he was on the committee and he voted to expel him, so that speaks volumes.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um but uh I do think that um that they referred us to the Justice Department, and the Justice Depart department never touched it.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we we mentioned that in our series.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I think that says something too about whether he did do anything that was illegal in those instances.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it comes to the charges from the women, um they're reprehensible.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh about the only defense that there really is is the man was an alcoholic and he doesn't remember them.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that and he apologized over and over and over again.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: There were no charges that went back that were uh recent at that time.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: They were all 12 years or older.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them 25 years, as I pointed out in the op ed, but um you know, there's a price you pay for that kind of behavior, and it's and it's it was pretty reprehensible.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I was proud of that, and it and it opened up an opportunity for me to do something that I'm so I look back on now, I'm so thrilled I got to do, which was right for the student newspaper, and be a part of the Lander College, the forum newspaper, you know, and and um and here we are now doing this history show and doing this uh uh uh I guess you could call it kind of journalism of some descript, and we've done a lot of some current things on the show.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and now I'm about to start bringing the politically speaking uh uh column back on Substack, and uh and I've had a good time, you know, and I I I can remember when I lost my city council election, I had no clue what I was gonna do, and I was very down about it.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: My mother was sick, my uh my father died, and um and I have really from the time I wrote my book, my first book, um, which was actually my second book, but my first book on this has been writing and and covering this stuff and putting together these history shows has been a real joy.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're about to at the end of the run on the subject matter for uh this show, but um I've really enjoyed it.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I really enjoyed the uh the the opportunity to write for the student newspaper, and it would not have happened without me getting to cover the Bob Packwood story being requested by the students, you know, put by the by the editor of the paper.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, we wrote a lot of uh of stuff uh, you know, about uh the the president and and uh the codge Republicans getting to meet Dole.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I just going flipping through some of them now here.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I uh I and and you know, some of the footage that we said we're exclusive footage that you are gonna see or listen to were videos that I made because I had control, I had camcorders that I could go to, Phil Graham's event when uh he came and spoke to the third Republican uh district, Wendy Graham's event at Hodges at the ladies' house, uh Elizabeth Dole's, which will be later in our timeline.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she had a speech in Greenwood.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: I filmed all that because I was a mass com major and I had control of the uh camcorders.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I could I could get the camcorder and come and film stuff.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so that's where that footage came from.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Bob Dole's announcement at his at the headquarters in Columbia.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: I got the only footage of that.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I loved it.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: I had a great time.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: I had great professors at Lander College.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna hear uh Robert uh Stevenson is still there uh uh teaching the uh the newspaper.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's how they ended up I ended up with that story about my podcast that was in the Lander Forum.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh I I don't know.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just proud of it, I'm proud of my time at Lander.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when I left, we had a column.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was the staffer of the year for two years of exemplary service at the at the forum, Lander University Student Newspaper.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh politically speaking, with Randall Wallace, the last column was not politics this time, it's a farewell to Lander.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: We might read that down the road.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um But anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this rambling uh edition of our show.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back at my very, very brief flirtation with journalism and uh and working for the student newspaper, all brought on by Senator Bob Packwood.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're wondering why I had this ocean of material to do a 12-part series on Bob Packwood, granted, I grabbed some of it that was available for the like his speeches, but all that material I saved uh in those uh hours that I knew I had to write this op-ed piece because the the turn on Bob Packwood was very quick.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the ethics committee w had said they were coming back, we were gearing up, I was gearing up to write a defense of Packwood, figuring that he would be charged and to be censured, to be a big debate about censure, or that he would lose his chairmanship, that they would charge him with that, and there would be a big argument or whatever about that because Packwood was very well connected, and he was Bob Dole's right-hand man.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: And when it came back expulsion, that was like a nuclear bomb going off.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh, and so all of a sudden I had to uh to write this uh column and I had this habit of videotaping things, and boom, there you go, I ended up with all this material, and uh I've used it a couple times for that column, and now for this podcast, and uh and here I am talking about it again.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, but uh with some enthusiasm about having um the opportunity to to be involved with the student newspaper and with journalism way back in the 1990s.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: And again, uh I guess for all intents and purposes, the the big thing here is we're announcing, and we want you to come to our Substack page, that politically speaking, we'll be back and we'll be we'll be trying to write and keep up and get more involved with uh covering today's uh events and and and uh political battles that are going on uh because we're still involved to some extent, and this show is a history show, but you know, we're getting ready to move on from our World War II generation, and uh, and then we'll be, you know, we don't I don't know exactly what the format will be for this show.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: So with that, I appreciate you tuning in.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we will be back with uh Bob Dole, 1995, and covering Bill Clinton's comeback as we move in and much closer to the 1996 presidential election.