hurting the Republicans nationally in the 1974 elections Pressler was one of six Republicans to gain a seat held by the Democrats. In April 1975, he was accepted as a member of the Congressional Rural Caucus, later supported having open committee meetings for the House Republican Conference, and throughout the year he served as assistant minority leader to Minority Leader John Jacob Rhodes. On April 2, 1975, he was hospitalized at the Bethesda Naval Hospital to be treated for diverticulitis and had surgery in December for it. Later in the month he cosponsored legislation to create a House select committee to reinvestigate the assassinations John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the attempted assassination of George Wallace. On July 30, the House voted 214 to 213 to increase its salary from $42,500 to $44,600. Pressler and eight other members of the House stated that they would not keep the raise given to members of Congress. During the 1976 Republican presidential primaries, he criticized the rivalry between President Gerald Ford and former governor Ronald Reagan which he stated would hurt moderate Republicans as both Ford and Reagan were pushing their conservative stances. In March 1976, Jack Anderson and Les Whitten claimed that multiple articles written by Pressler had been copied in their entirety from The Washington Post and other newspapers. Pressler denied the charge of plagiarism, but admitted that a January 1976 article had "accidentally" included excerpts from The Washington Post . After winning reelection in 1976 with almost eighty percent of the vote, Pressler stated that he was interested in running for Senate in 1978. House committee assignments Committee on Education and Labor Committee on Science and Technology Senate In 1978, he was elected to the United States Senate, succeeding retiring Democratic incumbent James Abourezk and became the first veteran of the Vietnam War to serve in the Senate. He served in the Senate from 1979 to 1997 and was chairman of the Commerce Committee (1995–97). While in the Senate, he also served on the Science and Transportation Committee, Foreign Relations Committee and European and Asian Subcommittees. Pressler ran for a fourth term in 1996 but lost by three points to Democratic Congressman Tim Johnson. He briefly sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, campaigning on Vietnam veterans' issues. Pressler authored and won Congressional and Presidential approval of a sweeping reform of telecommunications legislation through the Telecommunications