C-SPAN CEO, 'Booknotes' host to speak at KU Dole Forum in September

Editor's note: A photo of Brian Lamb is available via e-mail from University Relations. Contact kunews@ku.edu.

LAWRENCE -- The Dole Institute of Politics will welcome C-SPAN chair and CEO Brian Lamb as the inaugural speaker of the Dole Forum lecture series this fall at the University of Kansas.

Lamb, who also is host of C-SPAN's "Booknotes" program, will meet with KU students and give a public lecture at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17, at Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

The Dole Forum will be a periodic lecture series featuring prominent people in the fields of government, politics and media, said Richard Norton Smith, director of the Dole Institute.

"And there's no one better to launch the forum than Brian Lamb, who has done more than anyone in America to give meaning to the phrase 'electronic democracy,'" Smith said.

Smith and Lamb have been friends since 1993, when Smith appeared on "Booknotes" to discuss his biography of George Washington. In the course of their conversation, Smith revealed that he had visited every presidential grave site, prompting Lamb to repeat the feat for himself and paving the way for their joint book, "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" published in 1999.

The Dole Institute, established at KU in 1997 to honor former presidential nominee and Senate majority leader Bob Dole, is designed to foster new thinking on major policy issues and to encourage student participation and citizen involvement in public service. The 28,000-square-foot permanent home, under construction since last October, is scheduled to be dedicated on July 22, 2003, Dole's 80th birthday.

This fall, the institute also will inaugurate its Presidential Lecture Series at KU with Pulitzer Prize winners Edmund Morris and David McCullough plus noted biographer Michael Beschloss. Morris, author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, will speak Sunday, Nov. 3. Beschloss, author of books about Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Lincoln, will speak Nov. 10, and McCullough, author of books on Harry Truman and John Adams, on Nov. 17.

Lamb helped found the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network in 1979 to broadcast live gavel-to-gavel coverage of Congress. A nonprofit company supported by the cable industry, C-SPAN is available in more than 81 million households and offers three C-SPAN channels. It is available online at www.c-span.org as well as on WCSP, an FM station that broadcasts to the Washington, D.C., area and nationally via satellite radio.

Lamb has hosted "Booknotes" on C-SPAN since its inception in 1989 and has interviewed more than 600 nonfiction authors. He has published three books based on the "Booknotes" series.

Before helping found C-SPAN, Lamb performed a stint in the Navy and worked as a freelance reporter of UPI Audio, a Senate press secretary, a White House telecommunications policy staffer and Washington bureau chief for Cablevision magazine. He is a Purdue University graduate.