Word: bennette
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President Bush named Bennett director of his Office of National Drug Control Policy, where he recruited a strong staff and garnered much attention for its efforts and, of course, for himself. But several of his colleagues felt betrayed when he resigned after only 20 months to make more money outside government. "I was disappointed in him," said Reggie Walton, a Washington judge Bennett had hired as a top deputy. "I had signed on for a four-year effort, and when he left, that effort suffered tremendously...
During his time as Education Secretary, Bennett had become convinced that the country needed an update of McGuffey's Reader, a collection of moral tales children could read, and have read to them, to help counter all the junk on TV. When he left the Bush Administration, Bennett set out to produce such a book. With help from a brainy young assistant named John Cribb, Bennett considered 5,000 stories, selecting 320 and organizing them under 10 virtues: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and faith...
...imagined the response The Book of Virtues would elicit, with 2.3 million copies sold to date. Bennett followed with an illustrated Children's Book of Virtues; a separate anthology aimed at adults, The Moral Compass; and the PBS cartoon series in which a buffalo named Plato (who bears a strong resemblance to Bennett) leads a pair of children through animated moral tales...
...Bennett has enough book contracts and lecture requests to keep him rich and busy through the turn of the century. He helps with the "Best Friends" program, co-founded by his wife, which encourages sexual abstinence among girls in the poorest neighborhoods of Washington and 12 other cities, and has sharply increased their graduation rates. The Bennetts and their two young sons spend summers and weekends on the Outer Banks of North Carolina at what Bill has dubbed "the beach house that virtue built." And he pursues his goal of walking up America's "fourteeners," its 55 mountains above...
...when Bennett talks of the 1996 campaign, he betrays a frustration that borders on regret. Friends and strangers urged him to run, and last year he seriously considered it. But he says he couldn't imagine spending most of his time "having cocktails with people who want to explain the obvious, or tell me how what's good for them is good for the country, and I have to smile and nod because now I'm just another politician who needs their money...