Contact: Ben Nagel
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State University Libraries' inaugurates the 2014-15 Morris W.H. (Bill) Collins Speaker Series with a Sept. 10 address by a well-known Oxford author and former federal prosecutor.
John Hailman's presentation, "My Life with Senator Stennis," will begin at 2 p.m. in Mitchell Memorial Library's John Grisham Room. Free and open to all, the program and a following question-and-answer period will focus on the 1973 attempted robbery outside Stennis' Washington, D.C., home in which the DeKalb native and Mississippi State alumnus nearly died from two gunshots.
In addition to speaking, Hailman, who served as legal counsel and assisted with the case, will be donating a four-volume copy of the official transcript of the trial to the library's Special Collections. He also was legal counsel to Stennis when the senator chaired the Armed Services and Ethics committees during the Watergate era.
Hailman's public service career includes 33 years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in Oxford.
He was an inaugural Overby Fellow in Journalism and adjunct professor of law at the University of Mississippi who began his career as a journalist and columnist at the Washington Post. He later was a nationally syndicated wine, food and travel columnist for Gannett News Service, where he was featured for 15 years in 100 daily papers.
Hailman is a Millsaps College graduate who holds a master's degree from Tulane and law degree from the University of Mississippi, and was a Graduate Fellow in Trial Practice at the Georgetown University Law School. He also attended the Sorbonne and National School for Magistrates, both in Paris, as well as the Université Laval in Quebec.
He is author of "Thomas Jefferson on Wine" and "From Midnight to Guntown," both published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2009 and 2013, respectively. His latest book, "The Search for Good Wine," will be released by the Jackson-based publisher in October.
Hailman has taught law at UM for more than 20 years, as well as at the FBI Academy and the Justice Department's prosecutors school, among numerous other career distinctions.
In addition to the campus library system and its Congressional and Political Research Center, the Collins Speaker Series is sponsored annually by MSU's John C. Stennis Institute of Government, Starkville-based Stennis Center for Public Service Leadership and the student Stennis Montgomery Association. A memorial to the first Stennis Institute executive director, the program was created to bring leading public figures to campus to engage in close, personal discussions about their lives and careers.
For more information on the series, visit http://library.msstate.edu/collins. For more information about Mississippi State, visit www.msstate.edu.