KU News Release

Former New York Times reporter to give Muncy lecture at KU

LAWRENCE — Veteran New York Times political reporter Adam Clymer will give this year’s Muncy Lecture in Journalism and Politics at the University of Kansas.

Clymer’s lecture, titled “Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch,” will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, at the Dole Institute of Politics. The lecture is free and open to the public, and a book signing will follow.

“Anyone who follows national politics knows Adam Clymer’s byline,” said Jonathan Earle, interim director of the Dole Institute. “His biography of Sen. Ted Kennedy is first-rate, and he has a compelling argument to make about the Panama Canal treaty as a ‘wedge’ issue between left and right.”

The program will focus on insights from Clymer’s latest book, “Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right,” published this month by the University Press of Kansas. The book reviews the fracture in American politics that occurred over the engineering feat and, later, the highly politicized turnover of the canal from the United States to Panama. Clymer argues that the return of the canal foreshadowed the entrenched right-left political divisions that currently exist over hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage, gun control and abortion.

Clymer has spent more than 40 years as a political reporter, the last 26 covering Capitol Hill and the White House for the New York Times. Clymer retired from his position as chief Washington correspondent at the Times in 2003. He has since continued to write books and served as a visiting scholar and political director for the National Annenberg Election Survey from 2003 to 2005. He is the author of “Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography” and co-author of “Reagan: The Man, The President.”

Clymer actually became a news story during the 2000 presidential campaign when he was the subject of an off-color remark by then-Gov. George W. Bush at a campaign rally. Although Bush apologized that the remark was made public, he never officially extended an apology to Clymer himself. Clymer received media requests about the incident, but he only gave an interview to CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

Clymer also will discuss the intricacies of political campaigns and his experience as a political reporter for the “Gender, Race and Religion in Politics” study group with Dole Institute fellow Jennifer Schmidt at 3 p.m. March 25 at Simons Media Room in the Dole Institute.

The Muncy lecture series, dedicated to the ever-changing relationship between politics, policymaking and the media, is endowed by Martha E. “Betty” Muncy, the retired owner, publisher and editor of the Dodge City Daily Globe.

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