Everybody im steve it is my privilege to preside over this speakers pride ceremony our program is a little bit of it introduction a little bit of things in a discussion with her three winners that is great to see a good group here and thank you all for sharing this part of the evening with us. Let me first tell you about this prize since not all of you maybe is acquainted with it as we are. This is a memory of tony lucas was fired my generation of journalists by the time we were in college and started to think about what we wanted to know and what we wanted to write. And social issues in Common Ground was one of the big books on that shelf. When tony passed a lot of experience to come together to create this prize. So that is where this prize began. It has expanded gradually to include the history prize which is named for the late mark hinton who is a Senior Executive in the netherlands for the time of his death in 1997 and a deep reader and supporter of serious history. His wife maria
All right. Good afternoon. Thanks for coming out to the North Carolina museum of history. We are getting ready to do our program right now. My name is michael scott. I do a lot of programming at the museum of history. We have three distinguished guests with us. We have dr. Karl campbell, author of the book senator sam ervin, last of the founding fathers. He will be guiding the ship through the waters of watergate. In the center, we have former state attorney general and no stranger to most people here, Rufus Edmisten. [applause] closest to me, i hope no stranger to people around here, or maybe not, he is a judge. Judge sam ervin iv. [applause] all right. Thank you, guys. I will let them take it away. Good afternoon. It has been 40 years and a few hours since Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency. [applause] wow. [laughter] for those of us of a certain age, we remember the trauma of watergate. And perhaps four decades later, we are ready to put the scandal in a greater historical c
their supper in the form of a panel discussion with a distinguished moderator who this year is taylor branch who i ll introduce in a minute. the reason we do that specifically has to do with tony who felt that particularly in nonfiction writing, there was not enough of a structured conversation about our craft, and there needs to be more, so we use this program as a pretext to do that, and, indeed, they have spread this concept to several of our other award ceremonies as well. it reminds us all of why we re giving this awards in addition to honoring outstanding achievements. it s to try to, and i think we ve succeeded at doing this, create a community of people who do this kind of work, who care about this kind of work, and are always engaged in thinking about how it can be done better. there s several former winners in the audience here. i see diane mcorder, any other winners i m not seeing? so that s proof that this suspect just one this isn t just one evening in your lif