page_title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell
section_title: Personal
hierarchical_section_title: Ben Nighthorse Campbell / Personal
caption_attribution_description: Former Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell is interviewed after driving the 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree to Washington, D.C. on Nov.26, 2012. The 73-foot Englemann spruce traveled from the White River National Forest in Colorado. US Forest Service photo/Keith Riggs.
context_page_description: Ben Nighthorse Campbell is an American Cheyenne politician who served as a U.S. Representative from 1987 to 1993, and a U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1993 to 2005. He serves as one of forty-four members of the Council of Chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe. During his time in office, he was the only Native American serving in the U.S. Congress.
  Originally a member of the Democratic Party, Campbell switched to the Republican Party on March 3, 1995. Reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1998, Campbell announced in March 2004 that he would not run for reelection to a third term in November of that year. His Senate seat was then won by Democrat Ken Salazar in the November 2004 election. He later expressed interest in running for Governor of Colorado in 2006; however, on January 4, 2006, he announced that he would not enter the race. He later became a lobbyist for the law and lobbying firm Holland & Knight and afterward co-founded his own lobbying firm, Ben Nighthorse Consultants.
context_section_description: In 1966, Campbell married the former Linda Price, a public school teacher who was a native of Colorado. The couple have two married children, Colin (Karen) Campbell and Shanan (John) Wells. They have four grandchildren. The Campbells still reside in Colorado and are practicing Catholics.
  Linda Campbell was the sponsor of USS Mesa Verde (LPD 19) on January 15, 2005.
  Lake Nighthorse in La Plata County, Colorado is named in Campbell's honor.
  He endorsed then-Ohio governor John Kasich in the 2016 Republican primary.
  In late 2018, Campbell joined with several former Republican and Democratic senators in signing a letter supporting the investigation of then-Special Council Robert Mueller into the alleged Russian-collusion in the 2016 election. However, he openly opposed the impeachment of President Trump, commenting that it was "a waste of time." He also questioned why the Democrats would move to impeach knowing they would fail to convict in the Senate, stating "The cost of this and what it does to the country, it kind of tears the fabric of the nation apart."
  In late June 2020, Campbell appeared on Breitbart News radio to respond to and defend President Trump's use of the Veterans' Memorial Preservation Act (which Campbell had introduced while in the Senate in 2003) to defend American statues during the civil unrest. During the interview he voiced his disgust at the vandalizing of War Memorials around the country, and also defended the statue of Andrew Jackson which had previously been targeted by rioters and vandals: "Leave it there but tell the whole story. I don’t think you can rewrite history to only tell your point of view. Seems to me, if we’re really going to learn from history so that we don’t make the same dumb mistakes, we must look at the bad things that happened at the same time." Campbell compared the destruction of statues  to that of the Taliban's destruction of cultural and religious sites, and said the law must be enforced to protect the monuments or otherwise "We’re in for a full-fledged insurrection, if we don’t stop it." He also condemned the violence in the 2020 protests: "A lot of this is driven by, in my view, people who are basically anarchists. They want to change our whole national structure, and a little bit of white guilt thrown in there, too. There’s just a better way to do it if people don’t want those statutes to remain, because where does it end?" He concluded the interview by stating "I think part of the learning process and teaching our kids is not to totally sanitize things by getting rid of the things that we didn’t like from the old days. We need to explain it to our youngsters why the bad things happened."
caption: Former Senator Campbell is interviewed after driving the 2012 Capitol Christmas Tree from White River National Forest in Colorado to Washington, D.C.
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