Reaching in, reaching out: Lee H. Hamilton, head of the Woodrow Wilson centre in Washington D.C., has won international acclaim for his work in foreign affairs …

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 2000

Once home, many scholars write to tell Hamilton how deeply their experience affected them. Wilson alumni have regional associations to keep them linked and interactive.

Nazokat Kasymova, a lecturer in economics at the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, told me as she was about to return home that she would share her greater grasp of democracy with her students.

Two hundred radio stations across America broadcast the Wilson Center programme, Dialogue, to 200,000 listeners. The Wilson Quarterly has more than 60,000 subscribers. The Wilson Center and Close Up Foundation have collaborated to bring policy-issue briefings to high schools with televised student forums on the C-Span national cable network.

Since Congress founded the Center in 1968 as a monument to the nation's 28th president, Wilson scholars have written more than 800 books and countless papers. Alumni include the historians Gertrude Himmelfarb and Edward Tenner, the writers Vassily Aksyono and Mario Vargas Llosa, the diplomats Madeleine Albright, Simcha Dinitz, George F Kennan and Anatolii Dobrynin, and the journalists Thomas L Friedman, John J Fialka and Rajmohan Gandhi.

Woodrow Wilson had been President of Princeton University before becoming President of the United States in 1913. `Wilson was our only President with a PhD,' notes Hamilton, who strongly believes that the interaction of public officials with scholars nurtures democracy.

For all the action he left on Capitol Hill, Hamilton delights in the `stimulation' of his new job. He also directs the Center on Congress which he initiated at Indiana University. That takes him back home twice a month. `There is a huge public lack of understanding of the role of Congress,' he says. With his radio commentaries and other outreach, the Center on Congress aims to serve `the kind of people who have breakfast at McDonalds', in Hamilton's words. It even has a web site on how bills become law. The site features a game that takes viewers through the maze.

Now almost 70, an age when many men are retired, Hamilton shows no sign of slowing down. But he often gets home earlier to his wife, Nancy, a talented painter whom he met at DePauw (they have three children and four grandchildren). `And I've discovered weekends,' he enthuses.

One incident tells a lot about him: `A few years ago, when I still represented southern Indiana in Congress, I was getting ready to take part in a small-town parade when a young woman--a teenager, actually--came running up and said she wanted to talk to me,' he recalled in a radio commentary. `She was so obviously distressed that I had my car pull over to the side and let the rest of the parade pass. Her parents, she said, were addicted to drugs, and she felt trapped. If she went to the police, her parents would be arrested, and she'd lose them. If she didn't report them, they would continue their abuse. It was a horrible dilemma, and I promised I would do what I could to help out.'

He said that encounter and a few others galvanized him `into a concerted effort to improve the availability of drug treatment and drug education activities in rural communities generally, and in southern Indiana in particular'. This experience drove deeper his conviction of the need for `ongoing conversation between elected officials and the people they represent'. Reaching out was a Hamilton hallmark.