Lake Forest High School senior Robert Whipple said he is not sure why he fell in love with politics but thinks it stems from the heated current-events debates that frequently take place around his family’s dinner table.
Regardless of origin, the bug has definitely bitten Whipple, who at the age of 17 already has written a Senate bill and met the president of the United States. Those achievements came over the summer when he attended the 51st annual Boys Nation, a program sponsored by the American Legion to teach about national government.
Whipple was one of only 96 boys selected nationally to take part in the program, out of 28,000 candidates. Based at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., the nine-day program included participating in a mock Congress, visiting major Washington landmarks and meeting with high-level government officials, including one of the best-known Boys Nation alumni: Bill Clinton.
Whipple, who got to spend 30 seconds one on one with the nation’s leader during a VIP tour of White House, said, “He really understood us because he went through the same thing when he was our age.”
Whipple got a taste of political ups and downs in the pretend Senate meetings. The bill he proposed, to withdraw military and financial support from the United Nations, never got out of committee. But the whole experience “really encouraged me to give something back to my country.”
