Word: bennette
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Silber encouraged Bennett to take a teaching job at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, where he openly advertised his admiration for Martin Luther King and led civil rights teach-ins. He questioned how much some of the students were learning, though, when one counterdemonstrator scrawled a note on his door, GO BACK TO MOSCOW, YOU BIG RADIAL! [sic]. Uncertain about whether he wanted to continue teaching, Bennett in 1969 enrolled in Harvard Law School, meanwhile working as a dorm proctor and tutor. John Carnutte, now an immunologist in California, recalls arriving at Harvard from Dixon, Illinois, accompanied...
...Bennett shared his charges' interest in touch football, beer and especially rock music. (He once stopped traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike when he noticed the toll taker's badge and asked, "Hey, are you the Tommy Facenda who sang High School U.S.A.?") Bennett opposed the Vietnam War, but he respected the men who served there. He grew sickened by much of what he saw at Harvard: privileged youth skipping class to smoke dope and watch soap operas, and twisting the antiwar movement into an attack on America. Like another former Democrat, Ronald Reagan, Bennett thought less that...
After finishing law school, Bennett found another mentor in Charles Frankel, a Columbia philosophy professor who became president of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and hired Bennett as his executive director. One spring morning in 1979, Bennett arrived for an overnight visit with Frankel and his wife at their mansion in Bedford Hills, New York, but he hadn't even unpacked his bags before he was called away on urgent business. That night, the Frankels were murdered by burglars, who were caught and found to have been high on amphetamines...
...murders hardened Bennett's already tough attitudes toward crime and drugs, and changed his life in other ways. He was promoted to president of the humanities center, where his brash critiques of liberalism moved President Reagan to appoint him in 1981 to run the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington. The following year Bennett married Elayne Glover, a teacher with a strong social conscience whom he had met in North Carolina...
After three years in Washington, Bennett was promoted to Secretary of Education by Reagan. Bennett immediately took on the teachers' unions, the granting of taxpayer-subsidized loans to middle-class students who used them for stereos and cars, and the neglect of the basics in schools and colleges. He promoted "the three Cs": content, character and parental choice in public schools. President Reagan observed during one Cabinet meeting, "I see that Bill here is in trouble again with the Washington Post." He paused, then added, "So what's wrong with the rest...