Scope and Content Note
The United States Senate Historical Office Oral History Interviews include transcripts of oral history interviews conducted by Senate Historical Office historians Richard A. Baker, Betty K. Koed, Donald A. Ritchie, and Katherine A. Scott between 1976 and 2015 with members and employees of the United States Senate. The interviews generally focus on staff whose service spans more than two decades and whose experience includes work on committee staffs as well as in the offices of individual senators. The collection contains sixty-six bound interview transcripts, including the 2022 Addition, with one transcript restricted by the interviewee, and a 2018 index to all the interviews in this collection.
The interviews serve as eyewitness accounts of notable events and people in the United States Senate during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to elections and presidential inaugurations, the interviews cover the Watergate Affair, the impeachments of Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, the civil rights movement, Hurricane Katrina, the Vietnam War, and the September 11 Terrorist Attacks. Many of the interviewees worked with significant politicians, including Presidents Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy, and Senators Hubert H. Humphrey and Joseph McCarthy.