William J. Bennett
Co-Director, Empower America
From "The National Symposium on Character in Politics"
April 4, 2000

William J. Bennett: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much Larry, for that wonderful introduction. This stage is not big enough for Bob and Bill Bennett, literally not big enough. Not figuratively, literally. That's the question I'm asked most often which is what do you and your brother talk about at Thanksgiving dinner, and I say if you've seen my brother and you've seen me, you realize that Thanksgiving dinner we don't talk. George Will wrote a book, one called Men at Work, and that's the Bennett's at Thanksgiving dinner. Fast break down the buffet line.

It's a great pleasure to be at the University of Virginia. I'm honored to be a the University of Virginia and to be invited by Larry Sabato, a man for whom I have a great deal of respect. I'll say nothing more than that, otherwise you will think this whole hour was an invitation to mutual corruption. And since this topic is character, that wouldn't be good.

I'm sure every speaker has said this to you, but as a student of American political thought, I'll say it again. Those of you who are students are sitting in really a blessed place. You are the intellectual heirs of some of the most fertile and important and consequential intellectual activity ever to take place on the earth. This place, this county, Orange County, a few rural counties in Virginia in the 18th century, rivaled Athens for the originality and depth of thought and again, for consequence. It's a great thing to be going to elementary or middle school in Virginia, because while you study 18th century Virginia history, you are studying 18th century American intellectual history. Five or six, seven or eight, nine or ten people changed the course, not of the United States, but of the world, and the future of democracy and freedom by their thoughts in these surroundings. It's always wonderful to think about.

It's especially nice for me to be back on a university campus because it happens so rarely for me, not that I don't in some ways belong here. I am a creature of the academy. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy. I'll tell you more about myself in second, but I'll tell you one thing. When I was 37 years old and went to Washington, I had at the age of 37 been running the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and I had 21 honorary degrees at age 37. I taught the two masters of honorary degrees. There're people who actually collect these things, you know. A man named [Martin Marti], professor of religion and a man named [John Hope Franklin], a very distinguished historian, and they each had over a 100 honorary degrees, and they told me if I kept going at my pace, I would beat the both of them. But at age 37 I had 21 honorary degrees. Then I joined the Reagan administration. I'm now 56. I have 21 honorary degrees. So much for the marketplace of ideas.

In any case, this is a great university with a great faculty and names that matter to me are names like Hirsch and Cantor and Ceaser and Petersen, people from whom I've learned and continued to learn. And Sabato, Dick Howard, others--I could go on. You're very lucky. You're very lucky to be here.

I'm going to talk about character and politics, presidential character and politics, and I will do that, but out of respect to the canons of scholarship, I must confess to you this is not my area of scholarship. This is not an area that I have done years of research in. If I'm a scholar, I suppose it would be in the theory and practice of education, American educational practice. I would welcome your questions about that, if you'd like some later. To some extent, I'm (I guess) a scholar or at least a student, devoted student, of American drug policy, that is, illegal drugs, controlled substances, and I did a lot of work in the humanities. Let me tell you about my career and how it fits with what we're doing today, how I got to be here, I think.

I came to Washington in 1981, a year after Ronald Reagan was elected president to become Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Now, first of all, I want to tell you this. This is not the National Endowment for the Arts. That's the one with the pictures. I'm not involved in that. The Humanities is the one with the books and they're sometimes unpleasant, too, but you have to deconstruct them to know just how unpleasant they are from time to time. Inside joke: universities should work. Okay.

Anyway, it was the year before I got the job I was Professor of Philosophy at the time, and they began a nationwide search for President Reagan to find a professor of the humanities who had voted for him. There were three of us in America at that time. I was the biggest, otherwise, I had no other distinction. I was number two on the list. I was kind of in the middle, actually exactly in the middle of three. The first guy was a guy from Texas who got the nod. He came up. He was just about to be named and he gave a speech denouncing Lincoln. That did not work. So he went home. I was next on the list. I got the job. I went around and made the courtesy visits to the Senator's office. As I was leaving Dan Quayle's office, he said, "you're okay with Lincoln, right?" I said, "I'm fine with Lincoln." "We don't want any Lincoln trouble." I said "no Lincoln trouble for me." So I got the job. It was a nice job. Lots of brie, white wine, tweed, lots of French literary illusions. Oh yes, of course, and that sort of thing, so one had to be on one's intellectual toes while drinking white wine, but it was perfectly fine.

My next job was Secretary of Education of the United States which was really a wonderful job. When I got the job, my wife who's an elementary and special ed. teacher, still works in the D.C. public schools, said, "don't just stand there and make pronouncements about things. Go find out what you're talking about first," and I said, "well, why should I do my job differently from everybody else here in Washington?" And she said, "because you're a teacher. You know, do your homework." I said, "Elaine, I'm the Secretary of Education of the United States. I don't do retail. I do wholesale." Her daddy's a salesman and so she said, "if you do good retail, you'll do better wholesale," so off I went and I went and taught in classes in a 115 schools around the country--3rd grade, 7th grade, 11th grade, and if you're the Secretary of Education, it's great. The only difference is they have a battery of cameras in the back of the room, so that if you make a mistake, as the aforementioned Dan Quayle can explain to you, you may lead the evening news with your mistake, and it's risky with 4th graders and 7th graders and 11th graders. Anyway, it was a lot of fun.

We got involved in university politics from time to time. I went up to Harvard for their 350th celebration and I had the temerity and I suppose hutzpah would be the word, to go up and say you guys are great , but you're not as great as you think you are, and they said, "why not?" I said, "because no one could be as great as you think you are." This was regarded as very unwelcome comments. I said, "why don't you have a core curriculum?" They said, "we do have a core." I said, "you don't have a core." They said, "yes, you have to choose two from column A and two from column B." I said, "that's not a core. That's a core lite." At the end of the presentation, the students presented me with a case of Coor's Lite which I thought was very welcome.

Similar deal at Stanford. I just thought these might of interest to you. At Stanford, I had to go out to defend western civilization. "Hello, can you come defend western civilization?" I said, "don't you have anybody out there who can do it?" They said, "yeah, but they're kind afraid to speak," so they were getting rid of this course called western civ and one of the reasons they were getting rid of it was because some people didn't like it. Some of the faculty didn't like it. They thought it was racist, sexist, homophobic, colonialistic and other things, and despite the fact that almost 80% of Stanford graduates said it was the best single course they've had as undergraduates. Well, there was a tumult. Jesse Jackson went out. He led a parade. They occupied the president's office. Hey, hey, ho, ho, western civ has got to go. I was asked about that. I said I thought it was catchy but not compelling. Anyway, I went out and made the talk. Faculty totally chickened out. They sent the freshmen and sophomore students up to argue with me and it was a very revealing thing. We tried to get the president of the university on TV so we could debate, but he went to Washington while I was going to Stanford, so I got a red eye to catch him back here and we cornered him and he had to do McNeil Lehrer and defend the decision to get rid of Thomas Aquinas, Galileo and a few other insignificant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Catholic males. Anyway-- It was an interesting time.

The irony was that as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I had given a grant, or authorized a grant-- You'd given the grant--the taxpayers--of a million and a half dollars to start a freshman course in non-western cultures because I believe that students should study non-western cultures, but I don't believe that a condition of studying non-western cultures is to avoid studying western cultures. I'm actually in favor of studying them both, in fact, as much as you can study. Anyway, lots of adventures. A lot of fun.

I was out of the job and then called back in by President Bush, maybe the first president Bush, maybe the last President Bush. We'll see. And he asked me to be the nation's first drug czar. No laugh lines in that job, except as drug czar I could refer to my wife as czarling and/or then two little boys as the czardines. This is almost over. This is almost over.

But those were great days. This country was serious about the drug effort then and you may not know it. It'd make a great senior paper, but most Americans don't know and what most people don't know, most students don't know particularly, the years 1985 to 1991 saw a 70% reduction in drug use in this country. It was arguably the most serious and effective assault on a social problem in the last 50 years. A 70% reduction in drug use from '85 to '91 in cocaine and other drugs. We had a bipartisan effort. I worked with Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and lots of people. We really went after it. The day I took office they had a picture of the four heads of the international drug cartels--the Medellin cartel and the Cali cartel. Time magazine said are these the most powerful people in the world, and I said, "no, they're not, and we'll get them." And we did get them. All four of them were deposed from power one way or another, all by legal means with a year. The United States, when it sets its mind to something and people work together, can do extraordinary things. In the last six years, drug use as been going back up again because of neglect, both by the President and by a lot of the Republicans in Congress.

What does that have to do with character and politics? When I was visiting the schools as Secretary of Education and then as drug czar, I did the job the same way. I went out and visited communities, about 112 communities, to see the drug problem up front. Crack houses, hospitals, prisons, therapeutic communities, so on. I talked to people and asked them what they thought we should do, what the most important things were. What was most interesting to me from both jobs and about 232 site visits, was the degree of agreement on both jobs. You might think being Secretary of Education and being drug czar would be entirely discontinuous or wouldn't have much overlap. Turns out the things I heard from responsible adults in both jobs tended to be the same which was the basics. We've got to work on the basics. Basics of right and wrong. Who's teaching young people basic standards of right and wrong? What about the education of character? Does character matter anymore? Or is it just getting ahead? I mean, we're getting rich. We're getting healthier. We live longer, but what about the basic values. This was a big worry out there, and still is a big worry out there.

If you survey the American people, which I don't do, but which Larry Sabato can tell you about eloquently, and tell you which people to listen to, you will find that there's a lot of worry in this country about have we gone off the track, the tracks. Have we lost our guardrails or handholds? I think there's reason to worry. There's enough empirical data to suggest that the collapse of certain critical institutions, or at least, they're weakening such as the family, many neighborhoods, churches, schools. This is a serious serious concern.

Well, my career ends. I go out. I do writing. I do a variety of other things. Bill Clinton becomes president of the United States along the way. We leave. I was out in 1990 before he came in in '92, and we have an interesting kind of test case of character and politics coming before the country. Let me go to my prepared remarks if I can. It'll take about 10 minutes to lay it out because I noticed you called this keynote, Professor Sabato, so let me be a little more formal in the things I want to say and then come back and we'll do an open discussion. I go to my text with some trepidation, but I do so nonetheless. You may know Felix Frankfurter. Do you know that name? Justice of the Supreme Court. Mrs. Frankfurter used to say of Justice Frankfurter when he spoke, she said, "Felix makes two mistakes when he speaks. First, he digresses from his text and second, he returns to it." You be the judge. You decide.

Anyway, I want to lay this out and then we can talk about whatever you'd like. The question posed by Professor Sabato is how should the average voter approach presidential character. I'm digressing. Larry said in the introduction that I give honest answers. One thing I do try to do in every forum I'm in is to answer the question that's asked, and I'm always irritated at TV shows and other forums when people answer a different question, so excuse me for being sort of obsessively literal here, but the question is how should the average voter approach presidential character?

I think the answer is take it seriously. If by character you're speaking about the moral and ethical quality of a human being, does character mean everything in deciding a presidential candidate? No. But it seems to me that there's no single quality that is decisive, no single one. You should look at a person, at a presidential candidate, in the totality of his acts and surely character, the traits that form the individual nature of a person matters. Among other things, a person's character often manifests itself in the exercise of his public duties. The idea that there is always a high wall dividing private and public character is a modern myth. There is no high wall that's always there.

If there's one thing I would leave you with today, it's this. It's the proposition that good character is not some abstraction. It's a real thing. It is one of those very tangible, very real human attributes that we know and we appreciate when we see it. I think the founders, people who wandered around here, like the ancient Greeks, believed it was important that the head of the good polity be a man of good character and they advocated that the office of the presidency be filled by persons whose "reputation for integrity inspires and merits confidence." The intimate connection between private and public character was understood as a form of integrity or wholeness whose root word is integer meaning whole. The leader should be whole. We should not expect that as a rule his public character will be honest and his private character will be deceitful. That is a normal operating assumption is that we won't have two different characters. We may from time to time have somebody who can compartmentalize his life, but for the most part we will not. The purity of his private character gave [222 / __________] to his public virtues were the beautiful words said of George Washington upon his death. More about him in a minute.

Arguing for a strong executive in Federalist 20, Hamilton points out that while a king might avoid supervision by hiding behind a privy council, the American president assumes an extraordinary degree of responsibility. "From the very circumstances of being alone," Hamilton wrote, "the president will be more narrowly watched and more readily suspected." The standard in the executive branch was supposed to be a different standard--higher standard--than for the legislative and judicial branches.

Remember this--Americans in general are not blind to the dictates of good character in other realms. We don't seem to have a problem thinking about character when we talk about other dimensions of our lives. Religious congregations dismiss pastors for unethical or inappropriate private behavior regardless of the quality of the pastor's sermons. In law enforcement, good police commissioners will immediate rid their departments of bigoted cops regardless of how sterling the officer's arrest record. In the world of the military, the Code of Military Justice demands rigid standards of personal conduct no matter how great a soldier's prowess on the battlefield. You saw the recent case two days ago in which the Clinton administration announced that it will allow no sexual harassment whatsoever in its ranks--of the military.

An illustration, think about this. Go back to class and talk about this one. Your child goes to a high school where the SAT scores are 16% higher than the national average. This came up recently. This is a real world example. The SAT scores were 16% higher than the national average. The senior class college acceptance rate for the first and second choices of college is 94% and that includes the University of Virginia, so it's a really good high school in northern Virginia. The girl's hockey team went to the state finals. The band was invited to the Rose Bowl Parade and the football team's been undefeated for two seasons. Under these circumstances, do you keep the principal when he has a habit of fondling substitute teachers? See, I don't think that's particularly problematic. The answer is no. Of course, you don't. He's the principal of the high school. You don't do that. This is only to illustrate that we make these kinds of judgments all the time.

I suppose the most obvious example, for those of you who are parents, is in the choice of babysitters. You make judgments about the character of babysitters. Of course you do. You may not at first, but you may have an experience with a babysitter where you make a judgment you do not want that person back. Now, you all know, and I'm sure you've heard character comes from the Greek. It means enduring marks, traits that can be formed in a person by an almost infinite number of influences. There's a lot of literature on character, an awful lot to read. There're long reading lists on it. I've found in philosophy the work of Plato and Kant and Kierkergaard to be most helpful to me and in literature, Shakespeare and George Eliot. In some ways, George Eliot has one of the most complex understandings of character of any writer. The way she turns a person's character so that you see one part of it shining and another part of it dull. Anyway, there's a lot to say about character and it's been said and it's been said better than I'm saying it now, but that's what you're in college for.

I will be happy to stand up today and yesterday and tomorrow and defend the proposition that character matters in politics. Once upon a time, this was not a controversial position. Today, it is. Well, to some extent, this is the times in which we live, but sometimes as George Orwell said, a restatement of the obvious is our first responsibility. Let me give a caveat about character, since I think in some ways I'm invited here, and I don't mean this disrespectfully, as the straight man, as the guy who will insist that character matters and I will certainly insist that character matters always for its own sake, and I will insist that character should matter more than it does in our consideration of who should be our president, but I'm not going to insist that it's everything. It certainly isn't. There're obviously many other traits to which the public should look.

Again, I'm trying to answer Larry Sabato's question. You should look to the candidate's record of achievement. Does he have a grounded and coherent political philosophy? A strong command of the issues? An analytical mind? The ability to recruit and keep talented advisors? Powerful rhetorical abilities? The capacity to mobilize public opinion and shape sentiments? The ability to anticipate world events? People of good character can be bad presidents. People of average character can be fine, even great presidents, but a president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct, deceit, abuse of power, and contempt for the rule of law certainly, in my view, cannot be a good president because these aspects of character, in this combination, are surely relevant. Let me repeat that. A president whose character manifests itself in patterns of reckless personal conduct, deceit, abuse of power, and contempt for the rule of law, can't be a good president. That's what I say.

Now, at this point, I think it would be-- I wrote a book called The Death of Outrage. I think that's one of the reasons I was invited here is this book about Clinton and the American people and I think it would be an affectation for me not to talk about Clinton, so let me talk about Clinton for about three minutes. First of all, I got known during the whole impeachment business as one of his most outspoken and fierce critics, and I was. This isn't because I had anything in for him. I knew Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas and I was Secretary of Education and I used to refer to him as one of the four best governors in the country on education. I referred to Bob Graham of Florida then, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Bruce Babbitt of Arizona, Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, Tom Kane of New Jersey as the education governors. I thought he was doing some very interesting things, educationally interesting things, in the state of Arkansas and I applauded him. He was for real teacher tests, real standards for teachers. He was a fan of Polly Williams, the black legislator from Milwaukee who was a wonderful force for educational reform in this country, and I saw him at a few White House dinners when the governors came to town and the Cabinet met and we used to chat and correspond, and I appointed his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to be vice chairman of one of the most important boards we had at the Department of Education, the National Association of Governing Boards which is the group that comes up with the evaluations known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, so I wasn't born a Clinton hater, nor was this some partisan thing. I learned to have low regard for the President because of what he did.

But, quite apart from what I said, I can, I think, make my case this way. Not my words, but other peoples' words. President Clinton has been described, and his character's been described by well-known people, in the following terms: immoral, disgraceful, reprehensible, indefensible, disgusting, deceitful, unforgivable, and unacceptable. Just once more: immoral, disgraceful, reprehensible, indefensible, disgusting, deceitful, unforgivable, and unacceptable, liar under oath, and sinful. That's very strong language. I chose my words carefully. These are all words from Democrat senators during the last two years. These are the words of Bob Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Paul Wellstone, Bill Bradley and Joe Biden. That's what his friends think of him, or at least, that's what those who are willing to support think of him. I'm happy to discuss character and politics with you. I just do not think this is a hard case. You may not either and we may want to move on and talk about something else, but let me just finish here on Clinton and then positive example, and then I'm done.

There's a seamless web that connects Bill Clinton's private and public life, and this is the point about there not being a wall. There may be a wall in some people's lives. They may be able to compartmentalize. I do not think Clinton can. His private failings and his public failings all blend together. He's among the least compartmentalized presidents ever. His private character is not only relevant to his mode of governance; it's inseparable from it. Public manifestations, public manifestations, of Bill Clinton's character. Judge Susan Weber Wright held the President in contempt of court. He broke the law in violation of the privacy act. He's lied repeatedly with forethought in civil litigation before a federal grand jury in response to questions posed by the House Judiciary Committee. He's lied to his family. He's lied to his friends, to his lawyers, to his aides, to his Cabinet, to his party, to the Congress, to his fellow citizens shaking his finger at them. He's encouraged his supporters and his aides to publicly defend and therefore become complicit in his lies. His routine savaging of women and those who he considers to be a threat. The refusal to comply with subpoenas is another example and efforts to impede an investigation by the Independent Counsel. These are manifestly public matters, but they reveal an aspect of private character.

What will be his legacy? I don't know what his legacy will be, but I got very concerned and was writing about it at the time that people, young people, kids, were picking up on the Clinton business and the scandal and were quite, to use the word, scandalized by it and I had the worry to use Senator Moynihan's phrase that we were defining deviancy down further, that he was lowering the bar of our standards and morality and I won't go into it now. We can do it in the question and answer period, but there's some evidence that the president's most important legacy domestically may be an argument being made all over this country by some teenagers and some men cheating on their wives which is they all do it, the president did it, what's wrong with this, this isn't really sex, and so on. It would be interesting if that would be the legacy.

In a Time magazine cover story, 6th, 7th and 8th grade boys at a Denver middle school rationalized the sharp rise in lewd language, groping, pinching, and bra snapping this way--if the president can do it, why can't we? Well, that's not what you're supposed to as president. It remains to be seen what his legacy will be. I noticed Mr. [Schneider, Bill Schneider], the other night. You may know who he is. He's the man on CNN who does all the polls, did a survey of Americans and said what are the three most memorable lines of the Clinton eight years, and to date he's still got a few months to change it. According to the American public, they are: "I didn't inhale," "I never had sex with that woman," and "depends on what the meaning of is is." That's not good. Now, that's impressionistic and that's a poll, and I'm not basing my case on that. I'm just saying this is a consequence of character. I base my case on the facts. I base my case on what we know.

I don't want to end on a depressing note, so let's talk about the character in the other direction, if we will. In my view, we've got Clinton and Nixon at one end and some other folks like Lincoln and George Washington at the other end, and a lot of people in the middle going towards various poles, but I'm not a presidential historian. It's just from my sense of things. Let me just tell you a little bit about George Washington, because he had a legacy too. This is meant to be encouraging. The nation's trust in Washington allowed him to maintain popular support in the face of some of the most divisive and controversial issues of his day, most of which--establishing a policy of neutrality towards the warring states of Europe, signing the Jay Treaty with Great Britain, putting down the Whiskey Rebellion-- concerned security issues of great moment for the nation. Confidence about Washington and the principles to which he adhered, the country supported policies that they might have disputed, perhaps disastrously so, if they had been put forward by a man of lesser character.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and I had a discussion yesterday. She's a professor from Harvard and is an expert on Roosevelt and Lincoln and she talks about the capital that a president builds up, the trust, the trust that is his capital in case he needs it for some great occasion. Both his peers and his countrymen recognize the superiority of Washington's integrity, perseverance and vision. In his biography, Henry Cabot Lodge wrote that when in 1775, Washington became head of the American army, effective ridicule became impossible for the dignity of the cause was seen in that of the leader. I suppose Jay Leno and Letterman would have found something about Washington--wooden teeth or Sally Fairfax, something. But he would have been a reach. It would have been a reach. Ridicule would have been hard, I think. At least not as easy as it's been made lately. The British generals soon found that they not only had a dangerous enemy to encounter, but they were dealing with a man whose pride in his country and his own sense of self-respect reduced any assumption of personal superiority on their part to speedy contempt. Washington's character was the bulwark of the emergent nation. He brought dignity to the new government of the Constitution when he was placed at its head. The confederation had excited the just contempt of the world and Washington as president by the force of his character and reputation gave the United States at once the respect not only of the American people but those of Europe as well. Men felt instinctively that no government over which he presided could fall into feebleness [a great word] or disrepute." [NOTE: he does not indicate when this quote actually begins - dp]

Indeed, it's likely that only Washington's reputation for moral seriousness, constancy of purpose, and dignity could have commanded the popular support needed to steer the new nation through the dangers posed by the contending European giants. Character measured in foreign policy terms by sober objectives and the ability to see them to the completion in the face of withering attacks counts and so did his character count in the execution of so many domestic policies, so his character mattered.

So it can matter very much. It can matter for good or for ill. Is it a guarantee of a good presidency or good performance? No, it is not. Is sterling character required? No, it is not. Should we want good character in our president? Yes. Do we deserve it? I think so. Thank you very much.