Fife Symington has been elected chairman of the board of trustees of the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden. A garden trustee since 2004, he previously served as vice chairman.
Elected governor of Arizona in 1991, and re-elected in 1994, Mr. Symington signed criminal justice measures into law, including a truth-in-sentencing provision that eliminates parole and mandates that convicts serve no less than 85 percent of their sentence.
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Fife Symington appeared on Larry King Live on Friday, July 13, 2007, during a discussion of UFOs, including the Phoenix Lights incident.
Click here to read the transcript from CNN. You can also view a clip of the show at MetaCafe.
Here’s a post-show picture (click to enlarge).
On the tenth anniversary of the Arizona UFO incident, known as the “Phoenix Lights,” former Arizona Republican Governor Fife Symington, III, now says that he himself was a witness to one of the strange unidentified flying objects, even though he originally did not say so publicly.
“It was enormous and inexplicable,” he said in an exclusive interview from his home in Phoenix. “Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too.”
On March 13, 1997, during Symington’s second term as Governor, thousands saw multiple triangular and V-shaped craft, gliding slowly and silently across the sky for half an hour beginning at approximately 8:15 pm. Awestruck witnesses, throughout the state, estimated that the eerie, lighted vehicles were bigger than many football fields, up to a mile long.
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You may also watch a CNN Anderson Cooper 360 interview with Fife about the lights.
Fife Symington recently delivered an address to the Arizona Hisorical Society honoring Barry Goldwater.
Here’s an excerpt:
“I have been looking forward to this day, and I am delighted to be here to remember and honor Barry Goldwater.
He’s a big and consequential figure, and a hard man to capture in words. There has been no one else like him in American politics. But trying to give the man his due is a worthy assignment – and a fun one, too. And you know, that’s one thing to remember about Barry – he was always a lot of fun.
In one way or another, I’ve been drawn and connected to Barry from the early years of my life. Maryland may be a long way from Arizona, but Barry Goldwater carried something of this state everywhere he went. And it was there, when I was 12 or so, that I got my first glimpse of him.
One morning in 1958, there he was, rolling up the steep driveway of our farm thirty miles outside of Baltimore. He had come to stay for the weekend, and his ride was not the black sedan that a young boy expected of a United States Senator. He climbed out of a Corvette Stingray, wearing boots and cowboy hat – and to an eastern boy it looked like Marshall Dillon stepping right out of Gunsmoke.”
For the rest of his speech, click here.
In his first-ever political defeat, former Gov. Fife Symington lost his bid Tuesday to become Republican chairman of McCain’s home legislative district in north-central Phoenix. Symington was not considered conservative enough to defeat District 11 incumbent Rob Haney, a retired IBM manager who took over the organization two years ago and has been outspoken in his criticism of McCain.
“This factionalism has hurt GOP candidates, and it cost (Hesselbrock) his seat,” Symington said. “A district chair should bring Republicans together, not make war on one of your important national officeholders and a potential president. This does not bode well for the district in terms of a Republican future, in my view.”
Symington said District 11 Republicans should be trying to come together to reclaim ground lost in the last election, not picking fights over ideological differences.
“The vitriol is very high against McCain, which is just nuts,” Symington said. “The general public understands, or needs to understand, that just because that kind of noise is coming out of District 11, it doesn’t indicate a lack of support for McCain. That viewpoint is prevailing in that small bubble, but McCain is enormously popular.”
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