Remembering Ella
(page 1 of 2)
As the election season comes down to the wire, and shameless candidates start saying and doing anything to get elected, I find myself longing for candidates who seemed to be more interested in what they could do for our country as opposed to what our country could do for their bottom line.
It's no accident that close to $1 billion will be spent on the presidential election, and that $27 million will be spent by a single candidate in our senate contest—you need to spend money to make money, and it's no secret that a stint in political office can be quite lucrative, epecially after being in office, as Bill Clinton can attest to. Even former governor Lowell Weicker told me during a recent interview that "When I was governor of the state of Connecticut, I got what? $70,000. [But] when I left and became the head of a large nonprofit enterprise in the medical research field, you could just about quadruple that amount of money."
Speaking of elected officials (and former governors) who were more interested in serving than cashing in, I recently received Ella Grasso: Connecticut's Pioneering Governor, a wonderfully detailed biography about the remarkable state leader, the first woman elected governor of any state in her own right and a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Freedom. The book is the work of Jon E. Purmont, professor emeritus of history at Southern Connecticut State University and former executive assistant to Gov. Grasso.
According to a press release:
Remembering Ella
