Otis G. Pike

Otis Gray Pike

Otis Gray Pike (born August 31, 1921 in Riverhead , New York , † January 20, 2014 in Vero Beach , Florida ) was an American lawyer and politician . Between 1961 and 1979 he represented New York State in the US House of Representatives .

Career

Otis Gray Pike was born and raised in Riverhead about three years after the end of World War I. He attended public schools. He then began studying at Princeton University , but later interrupted it when the United States entered World War II. He enlisted in the Marine Corps , where he served as a dive fighter pilot in the Pacific between 1942 and 1946 . During this time he was awarded five Air Medals . After the war, he resumed his studies at Princeton in 1946, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts that same year . Two years later followed a Bachelor of Laws at Columbia Law School . After receiving his license to practice law, he began practicing in Riverhead. Between 1954 and 1960 he served there as a justice of the peace and sat on the Riverhead Town Board .

Politically, he belonged to the Democratic Party . He ran unsuccessfully in 1958 for a seat in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC Only in the subsequent congressional elections in 1960 he was elected to the US House of Representatives in the first constituency of New York, where he succeeded on January 4, 1961 by Stuyvesant Wainwright . He was re-elected eight times in a row. Since he renounced a tenth candidacy in 1978 , he resigned from Congress after January 3, 1979 .

During his time as Congressman, he chaired the Pike Committee , officially called the Select Committee on Intelligence (predecessor of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence , founded in 1977 ) from July 1975 to January 1976 . There he examined, among other things, the activities of the secret service CIA and the FBI . Among other things, the NSA's extensive telephone surveillance in Germany and abroad was determined. Pike's research led to the conclusion that the intelligence services have a much larger budget than officially stated and that the CIA spends a third of its money on bribes and funding political groups. Pike was critical of the use of the budget and the sense of the secret service actions (in terms of whether they actually increase security for the USA) and proposed financial cuts for the secret services. The special envoy Mitchell Rogovin from the CIA chief George HW Bush threatened Pike's office that he could now forget all political ambitions in New York: “We will destroy him for this”. The committee’s final report was never published by Congress, but parts of the report were revealed by The Village Voice magazine .

He then worked as a syndicated columnist for Newhouse Newspapers between 1979 and 1999 . Pike was also president of South Oaks Hospital in Amityville . He last lived in Vero Beach ( Florida ).

Web links

• Otis G. Pike in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Otis G. Pike on The Political Graveyard website
• Pike Committee Reports , Pike Committee Reports , Mary Farrell Foundation publication

Remarks

1. ^ Ex-NY Rep. Otis Pike Dies at 92 in Florida
2. ^ The first congressman to battle the NSA is dead. No-one noticed, no-one cares. , PandoDaily February 4, 2014
3. ↑ Under Syndicated Columnist can understand a columnist who publishes a column in several newspapers.