There, he majored in political science and won the National Oratorical Championship in 1928, receiving an all-expense-paid trip to Europe.

[3] He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931, was the top male student, then studied at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

[5] Albert served in the Judge Advocate General Corps as a prosecutor assigned to the Far East Air Service Command.

He earned a Bronze Star Medal and other decorations and left the Army with the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1946.

Albert knew the bill had insufficient Congressional support for passage due to the opposition of ten Republicans and eight southern Democrats.

After Kennedy's assassination, Albert worked to change House rules so that the majority Democrats would have greater influence on the final decisions of Congress under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

With these changes in place, Albert was able to push through the Medicare bill, known as the Social Security Act of 1965, and to shepherd other pieces of Johnson's Great Society program through Congress.

Riots and protests raged outside the venue, and disorder reigned among delegates tasked with leading the party after Johnson's late March decision to not seek reelection, the April assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the June assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and the increasing casualties of the Vietnam War.

In September 1972, Albert was witnessed driving drunk and crashing into two cars in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington.

[22] As the Watergate scandal developed in 1973, Albert, as speaker, referred some two dozen impeachment resolutions to the House Judiciary Committee for debate and study.

Under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Nixon nominated Republican House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford to succeed Agnew as vice president in October 1973.

Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was nominated by Ford, then confirmed and sworn into office as vice president in December.

He decided to retire at the end of the 94th Congress in January 1977, and after leaving the House he turned the gifts over to the General Services Administration as required by law.

[26][27][28][29] After he left Washington, Albert returned to Bugtussle, turning down many lucrative financial offers from corporate concerns.

A post-retirement editorial in the New York Times called him "a conciliator and seeker of consensus, a patient persuader .

The Center holds the archive of Albert's Congressional papers along with those of Robert S. Kerr, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Millicent Fenwick, Ernest Istook, Fred R. Harris, Percy Gassaway, and many others.

The Congressional Archives hold material from the Civil War era to the present, but the largest portion covers the 1930s to the 1970s.

The University of Oxford established a monument to Albert in the Eunomia Chambers of the St Peter's College Law Library.