Roger George Kennedy was an American polymath whose career included banking, television production, historical writing, and museum administration, the last as director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, before the Clinton administration selected him to head the National Park Service in 1993. He was especially concerned about expanding the service's educational role and moved to enlarge its presence beyond the parks via the Internet. Kennedy graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1952. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1952 as a... Republican, later he became a Democrat. In 1953, he moved to Washington, D.C. where he worked as a civil trial lawyer with the Department of Justice and served as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General and to the secretaries of the Department of Labor and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He rose to national notice in 1955 as a news correspondent covering the Supreme Court and the White House for NBC, for which he also wrote and produced television documentaries and hosted a radio program.
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