Larry Pressler

Larry Lee Pressler (born March 29, 1942) is an American lawyer and politician from South Dakota who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1979, and United States Senate from 1979 to 1997, as a Republican.

In 1961 he was selected as one of four 4-H members to attend the World Agricultural Fair in Cairo, Egypt.

At the 1962 National 4-H Club Congress in Chicago, Illinois, he was one of two recipients of the national citizenship award and also selected to meet with President John F. Kennedy on March 4, 1963.

In 1963, he defeated Steve Byrnes with 1,014 to 909 votes and was elected as president of the University of South Dakota's Student Association to serve until 1964.

He graduated from the University of South Dakota in 1964 and was later awarded the Rhodes Scholarship.

Pressler attended St. Edmund Hall at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and received a Bachelor of Arts.

He returned to the United States and in 1966 completed his Master of Public Administration degree at Harvard University.

He joined the United States Army and served in the Vietnam War from 1966 until 1968.

After returning from Vietnam as a first lieutenant, he served for several years in the United States Department of State as a Foreign Service Officer.

During the 1968 House elections Pressler considered running for the Democratic nomination for the 1st Congressional District, but chose not to run.

In 1970 he became the business manager of the Harvard Law Record.

He later attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Harvard Law School where he graduated in 1971.

In 1974, he filed to run for the Republican nomination in the 1st District on the last day possible and later won it, but the South Dakota Republican Party told him that he would not be given any campaign funds.

Despite the Watergate scandal hurting the Republicans nationally in the 1974 elections Pressler was one of six Republicans to gain a seat held by the Democrats.

In April 1975, he was accepted as a member of the Congressional Rural Caucus, later supported having open committee meetings for the House Republican Conference, and throughout the year he served as assistant minority leader to Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes.

On April 2, 1975, he was hospitalized at the Bethesda Naval Hospital to be treated for diverticulitis and had surgery in December for it.

Later in the month he cosponsored legislation to create a House select committee to reinvestigate the assassinations John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the attempted assassination of George Wallace.

On July 30, the House voted 214 to 213 to increase its salary from $42,500 to $44,600.

Pressler and eight other members of the House stated that they would not keep the raise given to members of Congress.

During the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, he criticized the rivalry between President Gerald Ford and former governor Ronald Reagan which he stated would hurt moderate Republicans as both Ford and Reagan were pushing their conservative stances.

In March 1976, Jack Anderson and Les Whitten claimed that multiple articles written by Pressler had been copied in their entirety from The Washington Post and other newspapers.

Pressler denied the charge of plagiarism, but admitted that a January 1976 article had "accidentally" included excerpts from The Washington Post.

After winning reelection in 1976 with almost eighty percent of the vote, Pressler stated that he was interested in running for Senate in 1978.

In 1978, he was elected to the United States Senate, succeeding retiring Democratic incumbent James Abourezk and becoming the first veteran of the Vietnam War to serve in the Senate.

He served in the Senate from 1979 to 1997 and was chairman of the Commerce Committee (1995–1997).

While in the Senate, he also served on the Science and Transportation Committee, Foreign Relations Committee and European and Asian Subcommittees.

He briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, campaigning on Vietnam veterans' issues.

During a sting operation conduced as part of the Abscam investigations in 1980, Pressler refused to take a bribe from undercover FBI agents and reported the bribe attempt.

In a front-page story, The Washington Post reported:

"Thanks to the FBI's undercover 'sting' operation, there now exists incontrovertible evidence that one senator would not be bought. Preserved among the videotape footage that may be used as bribery evidence against a number of members of Congress, there is a special moment in which Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD) tells the undercover agents, in effect, to take their sting and stick it. Pressler, according to law enforcement sources was the one approached member of Congress who flatly refused to consider financial favors in exchange for legislative favors, as suggested by undercover agents posing as Arabs. At the time he said he was not aware that he was doing anything quite so heroic."

In an overall review of the Abscam cases, Judge George C. Pratt praised Pressler, writing that, "Pressler, particularly, acted as citizens have a right to expect their elected representatives to act. He showed a clear awareness of the line between proper and improper conduct, and despite his confessed need for campaign money, and despite the additional attractiveness to him of the payment offered, he nevertheless refused to cross into impropriety."

Pressler was also the sponsor of the Pressler Amendment, which banned most economic and military assistance to Pakistan unless the president certified on an annual basis that "Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device and that the proposed United States assistance program will reduce significantly the risk that Pakistan will possess a nuclear explosive device."

He remained active in politics following his failed reelection campaign in 1996 and attempted to regain his former seat in 2014 as an independent, but was unsuccessful.

He has since supported Democratic tickets.

Pressler is founder and president of the Pressler Group, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, a small business to work on projects in service of veterans.

Larry Lee Pressler was born in Humboldt, South Dakota, to Loretta Claussen and Antone Lewis Pressler and was raised on his family's farm.

Pressler ran for a fourth term in 1996 but lost by three points to Democratic Congressman Tim Johnson.

Pressler authored and won Congressional and Presidential approval of a sweeping reform of telecommunications legislation through the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Among Pressler's staffers included future U.S. Attorney Kevin V. Schieffer and future state senator Neal Tapio.

After his defeat in the 1996 election, Pressler passed the New York bar and worked again as a lawyer.