Gift Of Memorabilia Helps Illustrate Whitehurst’s 18 Years In Congress

By Steve Daniel

A little over two years since donating a copy of his personal congressional diaries to Old Dominion University’s Perry Library, G. William Whitehurst, ODU’s Kaufman Lecturer in Public Affairs, has now gifted the special collections with a donation of memorabilia that helps complete the picture of his 18 years of public service as Virginia’s Second District representative to the U.S. Congress, which began in 1969.

The items feature everything from letters from Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan thanking him for his support of legislation, to photos with world leaders, to inaugural ball invitations.

Also included is Whitehurst’s World War II flight logbook from 1944-45, when he served as a Navy air crewman. It contains entries about bombing runs and post-war supply drops over Japan. A machine gunner during the war, Whitehurst jokes with his students that it was his role that helped convince the Japanese to surrender.

Among the most interesting, and certainly most unique, items in the collection is a medal given to Whitehurst during a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994. Accompanying the medal is a memo that recounts the story behind it, a story of an unlikely friendship.

The medal had been awarded to Col. Oleg Yermishkin in 1991 on his retirement from the KGB, the former Soviet state security agency. Whitehurst had first met Yermishkin in the 1970s when the Russian was attached to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Shortly thereafter, he learned of Yermishkin’s KGB status from the FBI.

“I was encouraged to preserve the connection with him and report the substance of our discussions to the counter-espionage division agents,” Whitehurst explains in the memo. [In a recent interview, he revealed that, coincidentally, the FBI official he spoke with was a former student of his when he previously taught at Old Dominion, Phil Parker ’62.]

Whitehurst goes on to say in the memo, “After leaving the Congress in 1986, I reestablished contact with [Yermishkin] in 1992. By then he had retired from the KGB and was living in Moscow after several foreign assignments. At my invitation, he met my wife and me in St. Petersburg when we made a visit there. We naturally exchanged gifts [Whitehurst confided later that his gift to Yermishkin was a nice ODU sweatshirt and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s] and this was his present to me.

“The medal is a unique acquisition. First of all, it represents something very personal to a man whose entire career was spent in the intelligence field, and that of a nation that was our principal adversary for nearly two generations.”

Whitehurst added, “In a very real way it represents the tangible act of reaching across the barrier imposed upon us during the Cold War. He knew that I knew what his true mission was in America, yet it did not prevent us from developing a relationship of trust and affection for one another.”

Other items of interest from the Whitehurst collection include a handwritten letter from a former Russian air force fighter pilot, Victor Belenko, who defected to the United States after flying his plane to Japan in the early 1980s. In the letter, Belenko thanks Whitehurst for introducing a bill that allowed him to be fast-tracked for U.S. citizenship.

Whitehurst, now 84 and still teaching, said his latest bequest to the library was made to encourage and aid in scholarly research – and was a matter of “tying up loose ends.”

“These are wonderful research resources for political historians, for people looking at the history of U.S.-Soviet relations, and for those looking at intelligence history and at foreign relations in general,” said Sonia Yaco, ODU special collections librarian.

A Republican, Whitehurst served nine terms in Congress, retiring in January 1987 to assume the lectureship at the university. He spent his congressional career as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and also served a six-year term on the Select Committee on Intelligence, and two years on the Ethics Committee.

Whitehurst taught history at the Norfolk Division, ODU’s forerunner, and Old Dominion College from 1950-68, and served as dean of student affairs from 1963-68.