William Bennett


William John Bennett is an American conservative pundit, politician, and political theorist, who served as Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988 under President Ronald Reagan. He also held the post of Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W. Bush.

Early life and education

Bennett was born July 31, 1943 in Brooklyn, the son of Nancy, a medical secretary, and F. Robert Bennett, a banker. His family moved to Washington, D.C., where he attended Gonzaga College High School. He graduated from Williams College in 1965, where he was a member of the Kappa Alpha Society, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Political Philosophy in 1970. He also has a J.D. from Harvard Law School, graduating in 1971.

Career

Educational institutions

Bennett was an associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Boston University from 1971 to 1972, and then became an assistant professor of philosophy and an assistant to John Silber, the president of the college, from 1972 to 1976. In May 1979, Bennett became the director of the National Humanities Center, a private research facility in North Carolina, after the death of its founder Charles Frankel.

Federal offices

In 1981 President Reagan appointed Bennett to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities, where he served until Reagan appointed him Secretary of Education in 1985. Reagan originally nominated Mel Bradford to the position, but due to Bradford's pro-Confederate views Bennett was appointed in his place. This event was later marked as the watershed in the divergence between paleoconservatives, who backed Bradford, and neoconservatives, led by Irving Kristol, who supported Bennett.
While at NEH, Bennett published "To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education", a 63-page report. It was based on an assessment of the teaching and learning of the humanities at the baccalaureate level, conducted by a blue-ribbon study group of 31 nationally prominent authorities on higher education convened by NEH.
In May 1986, Bennett switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. In September 1988, Bennett resigned as Secretary of Education, to join the Washington law firm of Dunnels, Duvall, Bennett, and Porter. In March 1989 he returned to the federal government, becoming the first Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, appointed by President George H. W. Bush. He was confirmed by the Senate in a 97–2 vote. He left that position in December 1990.

Radio and television

In April 2004, Bennett began hosting Morning in America, a nationally syndicated radio program produced and distributed by Dallas, Texas-based Salem Communications. The show aired live weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m. Eastern Time, and was one of the only syndicated conservative talk shows in the morning drive time slot. However, its clearances were limited due to a preference for local shows in this slot, and the show got most of its clearances on Salem-owned outlets. Morning in America was also carried on Sirius Satellite Radio, on Channel 144, also known as the Patriot Channel Bennett retired from full-time radio on March 31, 2016.
In 2008, Bennett became the host of a CNN weekly talk show, Beyond the Politics. The show did not have a long run, but Bennett remained a CNN contributor until he was let go in 2013 by then-new CNN president, Jeff Zucker.

Author, speaker, pundit

Bennett writes for National Review Online, National Review and Commentary, and is a former senior editor of National Review.
Bennett is a member of the National Security Advisory Council of the Center for Security Policy. He was co-director of Empower America and was a Distinguished Fellow in Cultural Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Long active in United States Republican Party politics, he is now an author, speaker, and,
Bennett was the Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He was also a commentator for CNN until 2013.
He is an advisor to Project Lead The Way and Beanstalk Innovation. He is on the advisory board of Udacity, Inc., Viridis Learning, Inc. and the board of directors of Vocefy, Inc. and Webtab, Inc.
In 2017, Bennett launched a podcast, The Bill Bennett Show.

Political views

Bennett tends to take a conservative position on affirmative action, school vouchers, curriculum reform, and religion in education. As Education Secretary, he asked colleges to better enforce drug laws and supported a classical education. He frequently criticized schools for low standards. In 1987 he called the Chicago Public Schools system "the worst in the nation." He coined the term "the blob" to describe the state education bureaucracy, a term which was later taken up in Britain by Michael Gove.
Bennett is a staunch supporter of the War on Drugs and has been criticized by some for his views on the issue. On Larry King Live, he said that a viewer's suggestion of beheading drug dealers would be "morally plausible." He also "lamented that we still grant them habeas corpus rights."
Bennett is a member of the Project for the New American Century and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998 PNAC Letter sent to President Bill Clinton urging Clinton to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power.
Bennett is a neoconservative. Bennett was an advocate for the Iraq War.
In April 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, Bennett falsely claimed that the coronavirus pandemic was not a pandemic. Contradicting the assessments of scientists and health authorities, Bennett also likened the coronavirus to the flu in terms of public health harms.

Controversies

Gambling

In 2003, it became publicly known that Bennett was a high-stakes gambler who lost millions of dollars in Las Vegas. Criticism increased in the wake of Bennett's publication, The Book of Virtues, a compilation of moral stories about courage, responsibility, friendship and other examples of virtue. Joshua Green of the Washington Monthly said that Bennett failed to denounce gambling because of his own tendency to gamble. However, Bennett and Empower America, the organization he co-founded and headed at the time, opposed an extension of casino gambling in the United States.
Bennett said that his habit had not put himself or his family in any financial jeopardy. After Bennett's gambling problem became public, he said he did not believe his habit set a good example, that he had "done too much gambling" over the years, and his "gambling days are over". "We are financially solvent," his wife Elayne told USA Today. "All our bills are paid." She added that his gambling days are over. "He's never going again," she said.
Several months later, Bennett qualified his position, saying "So, in this case, the excessive gambling is over." He explained "Since there will be people doing the micrometer on me, I just want to be clear: I do want to be able to bet the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl."

Radio show abortion comment

On September 28, 2005, in a discussion on Bennett's Morning in America radio show, a caller to the show proposed that "lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years" could preserve Social Security if abortion wasn't permitted following Roe v. Wade. Bennett responded that aborting all African-American babies "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were the sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and the crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down."
Bennett responded to the criticism saying, in part:

Books

Bennett's best-known written work may be , which he edited; he has also authored and edited eleven other books, including The Children's Book of Virtues and The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals.
Other books:
Bennett and his wife, Mary Elayne Glover, have two sons, John and Joseph. Elayne is the president and founder of Best Friends Foundation, a national program promoting sexual abstinence among adolescents.
Bennett is the younger brother of Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett.