Carville, Ford to speak on U.S. politics

By Jeremy W. Peters

Daily Staff Reporter

Political junkies will find their sweet tooths satisfied this week as two high profile political events will most certainly grab the attention of those who just can't seem to get enough CNN.

Tonight, political consultant James Carville will lecture on American politics.

Friday, former President Gerald Ford will host a conference commemorating the 25th anniversary of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Carville, most notably known for guiding President Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign to victory, will speak free of charge tonight at Rackham Auditorium at 8 p.m. in a University Activities Center sponsored event.

"We're really excited," said Jason Wedlick, chairman of the UAC Speaker Initiative. "We've had a lot of positive reaction to it and we hope people will walk away more informed about politics," he added.

Although tickets for the event ran out since last Thursday, Wedlick said UAC will try to accommodate those who arrive 15 to 20 minutes before Carville takes the stage.

"We're trying to fit as many people as we can into the auditorium," he said.

In addition to serving as a political consultant for the prime ministers of Greece and Honduras and the presidents of Brazil and Ecuador, Carville freelances as an author and a speechwriter.

He is married to his political rival Mary Matalin who headed George Bush's unsuccessful 1992 re-election bid against Clinton.

Friday's conference on the Vietnam War, "After the Fall: Vietnam Plus Twenty-Five," brings former President and University alum Gerald Ford to campus as host of a day-long program that will examine the impact of the war on American politics.

"Rather than rehashing the Vietnam War, what we really wanted to do was bring in those who were closely involved with it and get their impression on how the war affected the government," said Dick Holzhausen, who is coordinating the event sponsored by the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the Gerald R. Ford Library and the University's Ford School of Public Policy.

The conference, scheduled for Friday at 9 a.m. in the Michigan League Ballroom, offers the library the opportunity to release thousands of pages of recently declassified documents relating to U.S. involvement in the war - particularly the war's end and the fall of Saigon while Ford was president.

Panelists will include former U.S. senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran for president in 1968 on an anti-war campaign; Robert Dallek, presidential biographer of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; Lawrence Eagleburger, former Secretary of State under George Bush; and journalists Andrea Mitchell of NBC and Morely Safer of "60 Minutes."