WILLIAM
HUGHES RIP
A lot of
people have done some important things to silently help our cause, and William
Hughes was one of them. Hughes was an Ocean City, N.J. neighbor – we lived on
the same street – and a good friend over time.
When he
stopped practicing law to become a Congrssman he gave his law books to a young
lawyer who went to college with me, who opened a law office just down the
street from my house – and when computers came in and the law books were
obsolete, he threw Hughes’ old law books in the trash in the alley, where I
retrieved them and kept them in my garage for many years.
As a
Cape May County prosecutor Hughes ran as a liberal Democrat against the
entrenched conservative Republican Sandman for the New Jersey Second
Congressional district that ran along the South Jersey Shore from Cape May
north to Long Beach Island. Sandman was one of the last defenders of President
Nixon as he was going down the tube, and lost the election to Hughes, who kept
the seat for two decades.
Hughes
did a lot of good things in Congress, including writing and passing a clean
water act that ended the dumping of medical wastes in the ocean, establishing
the Jersey Pinelands national preserve, and passing the Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) that requires all branches of government to make their records
available to the public upon request – that is all branches of government
except Congress itself.
When we
began to lobby Congress to investigate the political assassinations of the
Sixties, Hughes voted to establish the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) that limited its investigation to that of JFK and MLK. When the HSCA was
disolved, Hughes knew of my interest and his brother Dan Hughes hand delivered
the complete set of HSCA volumes published in support of its final report.
That was
my reading for that summer, and I digested it all.
We found
Rep. Hughes also had a sympathetic ear for our request for Congress to pass a
new law releasing the HSCA records, and after the release of Oliver Stone’s film
“JFK,” Hughes voted along with every other member of Congress to pass the JFK
Act of 1992, establishing the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), and
ordering all of the records on the assassination of President Kennedy released
by October 2017, twenty-five years after Congress passed the law and it was
signed by President G. H. W. Bush.'
At the
same time – in 1992, three groups got together at the Capitol Hill Quaker
Center to form a new organization – the Coalition on Political Assassinations
(COPA), which would become the leading force for the release of the records. It
included Jim Lesar’s Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC), Jim
DiEugenio’s California JFK group and the Committee for an Open Archives (COA),
that was established by John Judge and myself to lobby for the release of the
assassination records.
It was
Rep. Bill Hughes who arranged for COPA to hold their inagural press conference
in the Capitol building in a room close to all of the action so we got some
attention and publicity, and were recognzied by the ARRB as an important
watchdog group that is mentioned prominatly in their final report.
As a
working reporter at the Jersey Shore I had the opportunity to write many news
articles about what Hughes was doing in Washington, and interviewed him on the
record at least a half dozen times – the last time shortly after 9-11. It was
after he had retired from Congress and had served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador
to Panama – seeing the turn over of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian people.
I
occassionally used Hughes as a reference on applications, including one to the
Ford Presidential Library in Michigan, who sent me a form reply denying my
application, - until they got a letter from Hughes, and immediately switched
their position – giving me what I had asked for.
Shortly
after 9-1I, I met Hughes at Ready’s Grill on 8th Street, in our
neighborhood, where I tape recorded our conversation over breakfast one morning.
As he then taught a class in political science at nearby Stockton College,
where there is now the Hughes Center for Public Policy, he invited me to sit in
with him as he taught his first class after the 9-11 attacks.
From the
interview and class I wrote a major article for the local paper on Hughes’
insight into national security at that important time.
God
Bless Bill Hughes
9-11 Air Defense Stand Down: https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/BillKelly/AirDefStdDwn.html
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