Larry Lee Pressler

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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 U.S Department of State 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 Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Pressler is noted for being the only Member of Congress to refuse to take a bribe from undercover FBI agents and report the bribe to the FBI during the Abscam investigations in 1980. John Murtha also declined the bribe, but did not report the attempt to the FBI.

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.

Preceded by Frank E. Denholm	U.S. Representative from South Dakota 1975–1979	Succeeded by Tom Daschle
Preceded by James Abourezk	U.S. Senator from South Dakota 1979–1997	Succeeded by Tim Johnson

Persondata
NAME	Pressler, Larry Lee
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	South Dakota politician
DATE OF BIRTH	March 29, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH	Humboldt, South Dakota
DATE OF DEATH	living
PLACE OF DEATH	none

[edit] External link

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