The following remarks were given by then-Indiana Supreme Court Justice Frank Sullivan, Jr., introducing the Hon. Lee Hamilton at the 1999 annual banquet of the Indiana Law Journal. Hamilton, a distinguished member of Congress from Indiana for thirty-four years and a leading national figure on matters of foreign affairs, was a 1956 graduate of the Maurer School of Law. He died on February 3, 2026.
There is something different about our nation’s capital this year. For the first time in thirty-four years—the firsttime in one-third of a century—Lee H. Hamilton is not a member of the United States House of Representatives.
During that entire period, he was one of the most admired and respected members of Congress. Of this admiration and respect, all of us gathered here this evening are at least generally aware. But to provide some context for our distinguished guest’s remarks to us this evening, I think the reasons he achieved this admiration and respect are worth some exploration—especially since virtually all the students here tonight, and even some of the faculty members, were not yet born when Lee Hamilton was first elected to Congress.
I think it clear that some of the admiration and respect that Lee Hamilton has earned can be traced to his Hoosier roots. Lee Hamilton is a native of Evansville, graduate of DePauw and this law school, and Columbus, Indiana, lawyer. His Hoosier heritage is perhaps epitomized by his receipt during his senior year at Evansville Central of the Arthur L. Trester Award. For those handful of you who are not Indiana high school basketball fans, the Trester Award is simply the highest honor any Indiana schoolboy can hope to achieve. It is presented annually to the outstanding senior participant in the boys’ basketball state finals—to a student who must excel in mental attitude, scholarship, leadership, and basketball ability.
A second basis for the admiration and respect Congressman Hamilton has achieved is the wide range of public policy topics that he mastered during his tenure in the House. I cite but two of many possible examples.
While the House and the Senate generally do their work on separate tracks through separate committee structures, one notable exception is the Joint Economic Committee. Under the auspices of the JEC, leading senators and representatives meet together to examine the nation’s (and world’s) economy and fiscal and monetary developments. It goes without saying that only those members with the greatest capacity for dealing with the most technical and sophisticated questions of economic policy are asked to serve. Lee Hamilton chaired the JEC in 1989 and 1990.
The image of Congress suffered greatly in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Members of Congress came to be seen as more interested in their own re-election than the national interest and less than principled in passing laws regulating all manner of enterprise and citizen behavior while exempting themselves and their institution. In an effort to cope with this criticism, the Speaker appointed Congressman Hamilton as the co-chairman of a Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress that recommended comprehensive and far-reaching reforms. It is one of the telling episodes of Congressional history that the Democrats in Congress refused to adopt the Hamilton reforms and, in the next election, the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. In my view, this was no mere coincidence: The inability of House Democrats to defend themselves against the Gingrich charges of individual and institutional malfeasance, a defense adoption of the Hamilton reforms would have provided, was far more significant in determining the outcome of the 1994 Congressional elections than anything done or not done at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Lee Hamilton’s principal contribution to public policy during his thirty-four years in Congress was in the area of foreign affairs. Any biography of him will reflect the fact that he chaired the important Middle East Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee for many years, chaired the full committee itself from 1993 to 1995, chaired the House Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 1987, and chaired the nationally televised and closely watched investigation of Oliver North and the Iran-Contra scandal in 1987 and 1988.
But beyond these biographical entries, Lee Hamilton’s contributions in the area of foreign affairs have been extraordinarily substantive. He has helped make the House an essentially equal partner with the Senate when it comes to Congress’s role in world affairs. He has sought a bipartisan, consensus foreign policy—of the kind that characterized our nation’s praiseworthy role in the world during the middle third of this century but which has been lacking since the Vietnam era. And he has been an advocate for a long-term view of foreign policy, one that eschews the use of specific incidents overseas to make domestic political points at the expense of future international strategic, economic, and humanitarian progress.
In addition to his Hoosier heritage and to his wide-ranging expertise, a third reason why I think Lee Hamilton came to command so much admiration and respect was his willingness to challenge conventional wisdom when his analysis of the issues led him to a different result. There are many examples of this phenomenon. Against the conventional wisdom, Lee Hamilton opposed the Gulf War against Iraq in late 1990. Against the conventional wisdom, he advocated greater political accountability for the Federal Reserve Board. Against the conventional wisdom, he was an early champion of Congressional ethics reform and enforcement. And during the late 1980’s, when everyone decried the federal deficit, called for federal spending cuts, but did nothing, Lee Hamilton candidly argued that only with revenue increases would the deficit be brought under control (of course, it was the revenue increases signed by Presidents Bush and Clinton, and the favorable response of the financial markets, and ultimately the economy itself, that produced the budget surplus of today).
But for me the greatest example of Lee Hamilton’s willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom was in the area of Middle East policy. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when Congressman Hamilton took over the chairmanship of the Middle East Subcommittee, there was in the Congress almost blind support for Israel: Israel could do no wrong; the Arab nations could do no right; and the Palestinians were not even acknowledged. Lee Hamilton brought an even-handed attitude toward Arab-Israeli relations to his new chairmanship. I remember to this day his placing in the Congressional Record in 1973 a long, flattering profile of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat who at that time, I think it fair to say, was regarded by most on Capitol Hill as just another Arab leader of another Arab nation out to destroy Israel. Lee Hamilton helped force the Congress in particular and Washington in general to rethink the conventional wisdom about the Middle East. And so it came to pass that in 1978, the first major breakthrough in Middle East peace came when President Carter presided over the signing of the Camp David Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat.
I have said something about the roles Congressman Hamilton’s Hoosier background, range of expertise, and willingness to challenge conventional wisdom played in earning him the admiration and respect of his colleagues. The objective and serious way he approached his work was responsible as well. I can do no better in this regard than by quoting a long time observer of the House:
“[Lee Hamilton] approaches difficult issues cautiously, hears out all sides, researches the facts personally, reaches decisions or makes recommendations judiciously and on the merits. He seems impervious to personal influence and the blandishments of friendship and camaraderie.”
As you can well imagine, there is much more that could be said about Lee Hamilton. About his seventeen consecutive elections to Congress. About his wonderful family. About his close ties to this Law School and this University. About the three significant ventures that he has undertaken in what can only euphemistically be referred to as his retirement.
I hope this overview, however, gives you some sense of what an extraordinary man we have with us this evening: a man whose Hoosier heritage, whose range of expertise, whose challenges to conventional wisdom, whose objectivity and seriousness, not only made him one of the most admired and respected members of the Congress during the last generation-and-a-half, but also contributed mightily to some of the most salutary developments in American foreign and domestic policy.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Honorable Lee H. Hamilton.
Posted February 12, 2026