Donald Riegle

Donald Riegle    ( politician)
Born	Donald Wayne Riegle Jr. February 4, 1938  Flint,  Michigan,  U.S.
Victim of	John McCain
Nationality	American
Alma mater	•  University of Michigan (Flint) •  Western Michigan University •  University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) •  Harvard Business School
Children	5
Spouse	Lori Hansen
Member of	Council on Foreign Relations/Historical Members
Party	Republican, Democratic
American "maverick" politician and opponent of President Richard Nixon regarding the Vietnam War who attended the 1971 Bilderberg meeting.  Chair of the Senate Banking Committee In office January 3, 1989 - January 3, 1995  United States Senator from Michigan In office December 30, 1976 - January 3, 1995  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan's 7th district In office January 3, 1967 - December 30, 1976 Attended Bilderberg/1971.

Donald "Don" Wayne Riegle Jr. is an American politician from Michigan. Known as a "maverick" politician and opponent of President Richard Nixon regarding the Vietnam War, he attended the 1971 Bilderberg meeting.

Education

After going to school in Flint, Michigan, he went to Western Michigan University. He then studied at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1960. He completed a postgraduate degree at Michigan State University in 1961, and then completed another postgraduate degree at Harvard Business School.

Career

As a candidate of the Republican Party, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1966 and represented Michigan's 7th congressional District after several re-elections from 1967 to 1976. In his first two Congressional terms, Riegle rapidly became known as a dove on the Vietnam War. In 1967, he organized a Vietnam study group with University of Michigan professors. In September 1969, he co-sponsored, with Paul McCloskey, the first measure in Congress to repeal the unofficial declaration of war (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution).

He switched to the Democratic Party in 1973 over differences with President Richard Nixon regarding the Vietnam War. Riegle was elected to the United States Senate in 1976 over Republican Marvin Esch. He was re-elected in 1982 and 1988 and was thus the representative of Michigan in the U.S. Senate until 1995.

Keating Five

As a member of the so-called Keating Five, he was one of the five senators in the US Senate who were accused of corruption in 1989, along with Democratic Senators Alan Cranston (California), Dennis DeConcini (Arizona) and John Glenn (Ohio) and Republican John McCain (Arizona). This triggered a major political scandal as part of the so-called savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite these significant accusations, he did finish his election period, but, unlike Glenn and McCain, refrained from running for re-election. The decisive factor was that a Senate Ethics committee found that he, DeConcini and Alan Cranston had influenced the investigation, while Glenn and McCain were acquitted of the charges.

Reagle later said that "I have very strong feelings about it because I think Robert Bennett, who was the special counsel, is a charlatan and a fraud, I think he was out to spring John McCain; I think he wrapped John Glenn around John McCain in order to get McCain out of it".... Later on a special counsel was hired to look at the case. "When he came back with his findings – what he found and put into his official report on the Keating Five thing was, is that a whole lot of wrongful and deliberate misinformation, disinformation, was put out in the Keating Five case, aimed at me. Now, I was the Banking chairman, so you could see why I might be a particularly good target for that because it was more interesting than it might have been true for the others.

"But then as [Fleming] did his detective work, as to: how did this happen, how did this disinformation campaign, which he documented very thoroughly and very carefully, where did this all come from? And he traced it all back to only one person that could have been the beneficiary of this, given when it was done, how it was done, where it happened and so forth, and that was John McCain. And he says that clearly in his report, he says he can’t prove that McCain was behind that, but he does conclude that the only one who could plausibly have benefitted from this campaign of really outrageous and egregious misconduct, in my opinion, was McCain, based on these investigative findings."

As of May 2025, this investigation was omitted from his Wikipedia page.

Despite these accusations, he remained chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs from 1989 until his retirement from the Senate in 1995.

Gulf war syndrome cover-up

In 1994 he was chair of a Senate committee investigating Gulf War Syndrome,an illness that afflicted more than 10,000 veterans of the 1991 Gulf War. The committee, large steered by Riegle, concluded that "Poisoning by chemical warfare agents is a likely cause of at least some cases of gulf war syndrome". Representatives of the Pentagon and the CIA testified they had no convincing evidence — from physical or intelligence sources — that chemical or biological weapons had been used during the gulf war. In reality, the syndrome was the results of a toxic anthrax vaccine.

Later activities

He became a board member of the insurance group WellPoint Health Networks in 2001. He joined public relations firm APCO Worldwide in 2001, as chairman of government relations in Washington, D.C.

 

Event Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1971	23 April 1971	25 April 1971	US Vermont Woodstock Woodstock Inn	The 20th Bilderberg, 89 guests

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