our namesake and founder was carl levin, who was a champion of congressional oversight. and our center focuses on one of its key missions is to improve fact based bipartisan oversight by congress and by the 50 state legislatures around the country. and carl levin, of course, was longtime chair of the senate armed services committee, i believe. did you work for us? did you work for him on the hill? well, i worked for him on the permanent subcommittee on investigations for nearly 30 years. now, doing that, can you imagine holding a hearing for days after a tragedy today that would be so difficult? i think back then this was very early in the country's history and they used hearings a lot more for fact finding. today, what we tend to do, the fact finding off stage, and then once we figure out what happened, we then convey that information to hearing. but back then, they had 18 days of hearings, usually we only have one or two days of hearings on a particular topic. in 1912, did congress have permanent committees on investigations at that point? well, they didn't have a perm

jim townsend, your center is named after pretty well-known congressional investigator, senator carl levin. what kind of work did he do? and what about the levin center? well, senator levin was the longest serving senator from the state of michigan. he served six terms, 36 years and he did many, many things. but one of the things he was really focused on was doing good oversight and making sure that those lessons learned from the mccarthy era, the lessons about the importance of a bipartisan investigation, of investigations that are truly committed to finding the facts. he took those lessons to heart. and when he came to the senate in 1979, he really made it his mission to to do everything he could to try to investigate corruption, malfeasance. and just really the performance of government, because he believed in government leave, the government had an important role to play in solving problems and in helping people. but he was concerned that the government, the administrative state that had grown up in the in the aftermath of the new deal and certainly after the great society, that it was

bipartisan group of senators in this case in particular, susan collins, republican of maine, and carl levin, a democrat of michigan, jointly releasing all these records, and collins in particular as a republican making an unequivocal statement about mccarthy, condemn his behavior, condemning his tactics and and really calling out that sort of abuse of the oversight power. so it was quite significant. and now, you know, we understand. the era better, much now than we did before this was released. and another from maine back in 1950, margaret chase smith spoke out against joseph mccarthy. and this is what she had to say. here's a portion of her speech from 1950. i think it is high time that we remember that we have sworn to uphold and defend the constitution. i think that it is high time that we remember that the constitution as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech, but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation, whether it be a criminal prosecution inourt or a character prosecution in the senate. there is little practical distinction when the life of person has been ru