BANGOR – After 28 consecutive years in elected or appointed national office, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen is heading into private, if still somewhat public, life in less than two weeks.

Tonight the University of Maine will be host to an invitation-only tribute to the 60-year-old Bangor native that is expected to draw 400 people. It will be held in Norumbega Hall in downtown Bangor.

An aide characterized the speech as a “valedictory” address. In it, Cohen will announce he is donating his Defense Department papers to the university, which already has his personal papers, including those from when he served in Congress. In the early 1970s, Cohen, a Bowdoin College graduate who earned a law degree at Boston University, taught business law courses at the university in Orono.

Cohen’s political career began in 1969 when he was elected to the Bangor City Council. In 1972, he began a 24-year stint in Congress, the first six in the House of Representatives and the last 18 in the Senate. In Congress he served on both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, and he helped draft the START I nuclear arms control treaty.

He is most renowned for being one of a group of breakaway moderate Republicans in 1974 who sided with Democrats in calling for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon over the Watergate cover-up.

For the past four years he has served as the only Republican in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration.

He has been mum for the most part about his plans after he departs from the Pentagon with the change of presidential administrations.

But on Tuesday, answering personal questions after a press conference about the USS Cole Commission report that was broadcast on C-SPAN, he told Pentagon reporters, “I intend to start a small consulting group. I intend to lecture as often as possible. I intend to get back to my writing. [And] perhaps, I’ll have a different pace of life.”

Four years ago, after he announced he was retiring from the Senate, but before President Clinton tagged him as defense secretary, Cohen said he would start an international business-consulting group focused on Asia. That plan was put on hold as he ran the Pentagon.

“I love this job,” he said about being defense secretary. “This is the best job one can have in government … representing the best military in the world.”

He said that no other agency in government has the “can-do” attitude the military has.

“I have never had a job [for the past four years]. This has been a joy,” Cohen said. However, he said he does not leave the post with regret because in this day and age “a four-year time frame for this job is more than enough.”

He noted that he and his wife, Janet Langhart, have traveled more than 800,000 miles in the past four years.

He told Pentagon reporters that some of his sadder duties have been to receive the bodies of military personnel at Andrews Air Force Base, greeting the survivors of the USS Cole, and handling the aftermath of V-22 Osprey crashes, particularly the one that killed 19 Marines.

Recently, Cohen has said that the Pentagon’s top priority should be to get and keep qualified people, according to news reports.

Last year, over administration skepticism, Cohen pushed through a $17 billion raise in the Pentagon’s budget, which contained the biggest military pay hike since 1981.