On Thursday, September 19, University of Kentucky Libraries will welcome historian emeritus of the U.S. Senate Donald A. Ritchie for the 2024 Earle C. Clements Lecture-Symposium.
Ritchie’s lecture, “The Political Education of Bess Clements Abell,” will address her life and political career, drawing from his most recent book, Washington’s Iron Butterfly: Bess Clements Abell, An Oral History, published by University Press of Kentucky in 2022.
The daughter of former Kentucky governor Earle C. Clements, Abell served as social secretary in the Lyndon Johnson White House, a crucial and largely unsung role that she carried out with a unique blend of deftness, toughness, and grace, organizing high-profile events and managing high-stakes personalities at a time of great political turmoil.
Washington’s Iron Butterfly was co-written with the late Terry L. Birdwhistell, former Dean of UK Libraries and the founding director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. Birdwhistell passed away in 2023.
The Clements Lecture will be held at 5pm in the Great Hall of the Special Collections Research Center. The event is free and open to the public, and RSVPs are appreciated. Washington’s Iron Butterfly will be available for purchase at the event, and Ritchie will sign copies after the lecture.
Ritchie spent a nearly 40-year career in the Senate Historical Office, serving as associate historian from 1976–2009 and as Senate historian from 2009–2015. During his tenure, Ritchie conducted oral history interviews with former senators and retired members of the Senate staff as part of the Senate oral history project and edited for publication the previously closed transcripts of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's investigations.
A graduate of the City College of New York, Ritchie received his PhD in history from the University of Maryland.
Ritchie is a leader in the field of oral history, serving as the author of the premier oral history guidebook, Doing Oral History (2014), and as former editor of the Twayne Oral History Series. A past president of the Oral History Association and of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR), he has also served on the council of the American Historical Association and on the board of the Society for History in the Federal Government. He received OHMAR’s Forrest C. Pogue Award for significant contributions to the field of oral history.
He has authored numerous books, including James M. Landis: Dean of the Regulators (1980), American Journalists: Getting the Story (1997), Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (2005), and Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (2007). His Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (1991) received the Organization of American Historians’ Richard W. Leopold Prize.
The annual Clements Lecture-Symposium honors the legacy of Earle C. Clements, who served as governor of Kentucky and represented the state in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. Throughout his long and distinguished political career, Clements embodied a spirit of service, a dedication to public life, and a commitment to productive political discourse. The Lecture-Symposium celebrates these ideals by welcoming renowned intellectuals and scholars in the areas of public policy and government.
“Earle C. Clements believed in public service, and I am grateful that the Clements Abell family has supported UK Libraries in a way that allows us to give back to the community,” said Deirdre Scaggs, Associate Dean for Research & Discovery at UK Libraries. “By bringing in speakers with a national voice we are promoting the ideals that Clements believed in and supporting positive discourse in American politics.”
In 2007, a gift by Abell established the Earl C. Clements Graduate Research Fellowship, which supports graduate student research in UK Libraries’ Wendell H. Ford Public Policy Research Center. A 2015 gift to the National Archives established the Earle C. Clements Innovation in Education Award. The award recognizes Kentucky’s best history and civics teachers and is given every year by the National Archives in partnership with the Ford Center. In 2016, a $500,000 gift established the Earle C. Clements Memorial Endowment Fund, which is used to organize the Lecture-Symposium and support UK Libraries’ programs in public policy, government, and archival research.
