Larry Pressler

Larry Pressler
United States Senator from South Dakota
In office January 3, 1979 – January 3, 1997
Preceded by	James Abourezk
Succeeded by	Tim Johnson
Born	March 29 1942 (1942--) (age 65) Humboldt, South Dakota
Nationality	American
Political party	Republican

Larry Lee Pressler (b. March 29, 1942) is a U.S. Republican politician. He holds the distinction of being the first Vietnam veteran to be elected to the United States Senate.

Born in Humboldt, South Dakota, Pressler is a graduate of the University of South Dakota, Oxford University (as a Rhodes Scholar), the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and Harvard Law School. He became a lawyer, and then served in the Vietnam War in the United States Army from 1966 until 1968. After serving for several years in the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer he was elected to the House of Representatives from 1975 to 1979. He was a Senator from South Dakota from 1979 to 1997, and was chairman of the Commerce Committee from 1995 to 1997.

Pressler is noted for being the only member of Congress to refuse to take a bribe from undercover FBI agents and then to report the bribe attempt to the FBI during the Abscam investigations in 1980. John Murtha also declined the bribe, but expressed interest in later opportunities. Pressler was also the key sponsor of the Pressler Amendment which prohibited Pakistan from developing a nuclear weapon. When President George H.W. Bush determined that Pakistan had developed such a weapon, aid and many commercial relations to Pakistan were cut off.

In 1996, Tim Johnson defeated Pressler, who was running for a fourth term in the Senate. Pressler was the only incumbent Republican senator to lose reelection that year. After his reelection defeat, Pressler passed the New York bar and worked as a lawyer there, serving on several corporate boards and as a visiting professor and Senior Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the Thomas Hawkins Johnson Visiting Scholar at the West Point Military Academy, where he lectures on international relations and has advised cadets seeking Rhodes scholarships and other graduate fellowships.

Pressler attempted a political comeback in 2002 by running for the South Dakota's open at-large House seat. However, he was defeated in the Republican primary by popular Governor Bill Janklow, who went on to defeat Democrat Stephanie Herseth in the general election. Pressler was since appointed as an official observer of Ukraine's national election in December of 2004.

In the ten years since leaving Congress, Pressler has served as a senior adviser to Salomon Smith Barney and to Monticello Capital. For six years, he was a senior partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of O'Connor and Hannan; and he subsequently formed his own law firm, The Pressler Group. He makes frequent trips to India as a member of the Board of Directors of Infosys Technologies Ltd in Bangalore. He has lectured at over 20 universities in China, India and the U.S. Pressler lives and works in both Washington, D.C., and New York City.

He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa National Association, the Bohemian Club of California, the Century Club and the Harvard Club of New York, the Cosmos Club and the Metropolitan Club, the Vietnam Veterans Association and the American Rhodes Scholars Association.

External links

• Larry Pressler at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• Voting record maintained by The Washington Post

Donate to Wikimedia