Contact: Sammy McDavid
STARKVILLE, Miss.--The former Indiana congressman and world-affairs authority who helped lead both the 9/11 Commission and Iraq Study Group will speak Monday [April 16] at Mississippi State.
Lee H. Hamilton's 7 p.m. public address in Lee Hall auditorium will inaugurate the university's Lamar Conerly Honors Lecture Series. His topic: "A Balanced View of American Power."
The Indiana Democrat represented his state's 9th District from 1965 until 1999, when he retired to assume his current position as director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
During more than three decades in the United States Congress, Hamilton served as chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (now International Relations) and Joint Economic Committee. In addition, he led the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran, among others.
In recent years, he has continued to be featured prominently in the national and international print and broadcast news media. First, he was vice chair of the federal investigation into the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. Most recently, he co-chaired, with former secretary of state James Baker, the bipartisan group charged with assessing the country's current and prospective situations in Iraq and the Middle East region.
Hamilton is a graduate of DePauw University and the Indiana University law school who practiced law in Chicago, Ill., and Columbus, Ind., before being elected to national office. In addition to professional career achievements, he is a former high school and collegiate basketball star who has been inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
The Conerly Honors Lecture Series is organized by Mississippi State's Shackouls Honors College, the region's oldest and largest. Hamilton's visit is being co-sponsored by the university offices of the President and Provost, divisions of Student Affairs and Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine, colleges of Business and Industry and Arts and Sciences, and Bagley College of Engineering.
The speaker's program is made possible by a major 2006 gift to the honors college from alumnus Lamar Conerly and his wife Tracy of Destin, Fla. A former MSU Alumni Association president and College of Business and Industry Alumni Fellow, he is a 1971 accounting graduate who now heads his own legal firm in the Gulf Coast city.
For additional information, contact Shackouls Honors College director Nancy McCarley at 662-325-2522.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.