Ralph Nurnberger, a former staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and professor at Georgetown University, later concluded in a study for the "African Studies Review" that the economic sanctions imposed against Amin by the U.S. led to Amin's downfall. Nurnberger wrote that the congressional initiative to impose the sanctions had garnered little attention or support until "Jack Anderson assigned one of his reporters, Murray Waas to follow the issue" and write regularly about it. At the time, Anderson's columns were published in more than 1,000 newspapers, which in turn had 40 million readers. Waas was eighteen and nineteen years old at the time he wrote the columns.