By Ray Smock
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Robert H. Michel of Illinois who died this week at the age of 93 was the Republican Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 1995 and served a total of 38 years in the House, retiring in 1995. Bob’s entire career in the House was as a member of the minority party during the long ascendancy of the Democrats that lasted forty years.  It was bittersweet for him to announce his retirement in 1994, when the election that year resulted in the Republicans gaining control of the House. By then, however, Newt Gingrich was on the rise and he and the new Republicans that rode to victory that year had a completely different style of militant leadership. Those of us who witnessed the “Gingrich Revolution” could not help but think that Bob Michel would have a difficult time with the new style of leadership had he remained in the House. 

​By Ray Smock
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​In this excerpt from the journal I kept during the years I was Historian of the House, I describe what it was like to be an eyewitness to the counting of the of the ballots of the Electoral College, the final step, other than the inauguration which followed two weeks later, in the process of transferring power from one administration to the next. In the election of 1992, Bill Clinton and Al Gore won 370 Electoral votes to 168 for George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle. That year third party candidate, billionaire Ross Perot, won almost 20 million votes, but did not carry a single state. I have added some additional identifying information in brackets.

“Where are you from?” This was the question so often asked by John Brademas when he would meet someone new. I have never met a more gregarious and delightful conversationalist. He enjoyed meeting people and his opening question was the perfect ice-breaker for an extended conversation.  When I think back on his 22 year career as a congressman from Indiana, the last four of which he served as Majority Whip under Tip O’Neill’s speakership, and his equally distinguished career as president of New York University, which he built into a major research institution, it is easy to say that he was a truly great American, a public servant and an educator in the finest traditions of this nation.  

By Ray Smock

D-Day, the “longest day” of World War II, has been discussed, explained, and commemorated in books, films, magazines, newspapers, and it resided and still resides in the memories of the men who assaulted the beaches that day. Most of them are gone now, faded by the passage of time. My mentor in graduate school at the University of Maryland, the late Louis R. Harlan, was the one who told me about that day. He was there, a junior officer on a troop landing craft off Dog Red, the stretch of Omaha Beach that saw the fiercest fighting and the highest casualties that day on June 6, 1944.

By Ray Smock

​​At Shepherd University’s commencement on Saturday, May 7, I was witness to one of the best commencement addresses I have ever heard in more than a half-century of paying attention to such things. Jim Leach,  former Republican congressman from Iowa, and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who is currently  University of Iowa Chair of Public Affairs and Visiting Professor of Law at the College of Law, explained in powerful terms the threat posed to American Democracy by the hyper-partisan, uncivil nature of American politics in recent times. 

Each year political scientists, historians, and other Congress watchers participate in “grading” Congress in a number of key areas. This survey is conducted by the Center on Congress at Indiana University, under the directorship of the distinguished former Congressman and congressional scholar Lee Hamilton.  It will not surprise readers to learn that Congress’s grades are pretty low.  But this study goes into institutional differences between the House and Senate and also includes a grade for “we the people,” the citizens who elect Congress.  Overall the public does not fare much better in the grading.  Perhaps we do get the Congress we deserve and we will only get a better House and Senate if more citizens engage in the process of voting and understanding in basic ways just what Congress is and does in our system of government. 

By Ray Smock

The Washington Post contained a fascinating obituary in its Feb. 3, 2016 edition, that of Howard Koslow a distinguished illustrator, painter and postage stamp artist who died at age 91. I had the pleasure of working with Mr. Koslow on commemorative postage stamps in honor of the bicentennial of the U. S. Congress in the late 1980s. He designed more than 60 stamps, including a very popular series on American lighthouses.