Douglas Joseph Bennet

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/obituaries/douglas-bennet-who-le...

Douglas Bennet, Who Led NPR and Wesleyan, Dies at 79

By Neil Genzlinger June 13, 2018

Douglas J. Bennet, who took over National Public Radio when it faced an uncertain future and spearheaded a decade of growth, died on Sunday at his home in Essex, Conn. He was 79.

The cause was complications of a fall sustained five years ago, his family said.

In a wide-ranging career, Mr. Bennet also led Wesleyan University in Connecticut for 12 years and served in various political and government positions. He was known for bringing financial and organizational stability to whatever institution he took on, a skill honed as an assistant to political figures like Chester Bowles, a diplomat and a former governor and congressman; and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

When Mr. Bennet took the helm at NPR in 1983, during the fiscally conservative administration of President Ronald Reagan, the organization was in financial distress. Mr. Bennet made structural changes that reversed the decline.

“He restored NPR’s financial stability and directed its further growth,” Ralph Engelman wrote in “Public Radio and Television in America: A Political History” (1996).

The same was true of his years as president of Wesleyan, where he rejuvenated physical facilities and initiated what was, at the time, the largest fund-raising effort in its history. During his presidency, the university’s endowment rose to $631 million from $345 million.

Michael S. Roth, the current president, in a posting on the university’s website, called Mr. Bennet’s tenure “years of remarkable progress for Wesleyan” and “the culmination of a truly distinguished career.”

Douglas Joseph Bennet Jr. was born on June 23, 1938, in Orange, N.J., and grew up in Lyme, Conn. His father was a small-business man and an aide to Mr. Bowles when he was governor of Connecticut in the late 1940s and early ’50s. His mother, Phoebe (Benedict) Bennet, helped establish a state office to assist people with mental disabilities.

Mr. Bennet received a bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan in 1959 and a master’s in history from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960. After a stint as an assistant to Mr. Bowles when Mr. Bowles was the ambassador to India, he earned a Ph.D. in Russian medieval studies at Harvard in 1967.

In 1967 and 1968 Mr. Bennet was an assistant to Mr. Humphrey, Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president. From 1969 to 1973 he was an aide to Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, the Missouri senator who was briefly George McGovern’s running mate on the 1972 Democratic presidential ticket before dropping out after disclosures that he had been treated for depression. Mr. Bennet was a key figure in arranging Mr. Eagleton’s withdrawal from the ticket, a testament to his growing skill as a Washington insider.

That skill would serve him well later in the 1970s as staff director of the Senate Budget Committee — he was the first person to hold that position — and then as assistant secretary of state for congressional relations. In that job he played a pivotal role in 1978 when he helped shepherd through the Senate the contentious Panama Canal treaties, which led to the eventual transfer of control of the canal to Panama.

In 1979 Mr. Bennet, by then something of an expert in foreign policy, was named administrator of the Agency for International Development. He had no radio experience when he took over the presidency of NPR a few years later, but he saw similarities between the two jobs.

“Both organizations are highly complex, and their missions are very sensitive,” he said at the time. “A requirement of strenuous nonpartisanship is essential.”

Mr. Bennet expanded NPR’s audience and news operation. But by 1989 some on the staff were complaining that NPR’s coverage had lost its risk-taking spunk.

“We have evolved into the standard of radio news,” he told The Washington Post by way of defending the change. “The real debate here is whether that has resulted in a homogenization of product, and my answer is the depth of our reporting, which is still greater than any other broadcast organization in the country.”

After leaving NPR in 1993, Mr. Bennet became assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under President Bill Clinton. He served until taking the Wesleyan post in 1995.

His tenure at the university was not without controversies. One involved his decision, in 2002, to place a moratorium on “chalking,” a university tradition in which opinions and other messages, some of them profane, would be scrawled on sidewalks. The practice, he said the next year when he turned the moratorium into a permanent ban, did not “meet the civility test.”

Some students and faculty members complained about the stifling of free speech. A group of students marched on his house chanting, “We want chalk!”

The issue was still being debated years later. In 2012 a student blog ran a five-part series called “A Decade Without Chalk.”

Mr. Bennet’s first marriage, to Susanne Klejman, ended in divorce in 1995. His survivors include his wife, Midge Bowen Bennet, whom he married in 1996; a brother, John; and three sisters, Phoebe Bennet Boyer, Lois Bennet Hager and Mary Bennet Rhodes. They also include two sons, Michael, a United States senator from Colorado, and James, the editorial page editor of The New York Times; a daughter, Holly Bennet, global managing director of Deloitte & Touche; two stepchildren, Richard Ramsey and Elizabeth Ho Chee; seven grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.

When he left NPR, Mr. Bennet was given a farewell party that featured staff members doing impressions of him and some off-key singing.

“No wonder he’s leaving,” the NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg deadpanned in a report on the party.

She also made reference to the financial stability he had brought to the organization.

“Thanks to Doug Bennet,” she said, “we have no debts anymore, except to him.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_J._Bennet

Douglas Joseph “Doug” Bennet, Jr. (born June 23, 1938) is a former national political official and college president. He was the fifteenth president of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1995 to 2007. Before that, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the Clinton Administration (1993–95) and Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs in the Carter administration (1977–79), was the President and CEO of National Public Radio (1983–93), and ran the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Carter (1979–81). In 2011, Bennet was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Early life and education

Born in Orange, New Jersey to Douglas Joseph Bennet, Sr. and Phoebe Benedict Bennet, Bennet grew up in Lyme, Connecticut, and attended the local public schools. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Wesleyan University in 1959, an M.A. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, and a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1968.

Career

In 1956 he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Connecticut General Assembly's House of Representatives, losing to Horace Seely-Brown, Jr He was an assistant to Ambassador Chester Bowles in the 1960s. In 1970, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic primary for Connecticut's 2nd congressional district, which was vacated by the death of Congressman William St. Onge.

He later served on the staffs of Missouri Senator Thomas F. Eagleton, Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff. In 1977, Bennet became United States Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs.

Bennet succeeded John J. Gilligan as the head of the Agency for International Development in 1979, where he served for two years. After heading a private research institute, he was named head of NPR in 1983. In 1993, President Bill Clinton named Bennet as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, where he served until 1995.

In April 1995, Bennet succeeded William M. Chace, becoming the fifteenth president of Wesleyan University. Bennet developed Wesleyan's first comprehensive strategic plan, "Strategy for Wesleyan," adopted in 1998. He renewed the institution's strategic vision, in 2005, with a new plan, "Engaged with the World." The "Strategy for Wesleyan" defined key institutional priorities: an expansion of the faculty in order to extend scholarship and teaching in new and interdisciplinary areas; a reaffirmation of the University's commitment to need-blind admission; and a program of campus renewal. "Engaged with the World" included further and continuing curricular innovations and renewed commitments to science and international studies.

A history-making $281 million fundraising campaign supported these priorities and enabled Wesleyan to create 140 new scholarships, add 20 new faculty positions and six endowed professorships, and embark on more than $200 million in renovation and construction projects on campus. Bennet also sought better and increased collaboration with the city of Middletown. Under his guidance, Wesleyan participated actively in the city's development efforts, which resulted in, among other things, a new hotel downtown and the Green Street Arts Center, "a community arts center meant to help revitalize the city's North End."

On May 4, 2006, Bennet announced that he would step down as president following the 2006-2007 academic year. The last several years of his twelve year presidency were contentious in some respects, with opposition by a minority in the student body on certain matters. Some students believed Bennet's fundraising priorities conflicted with the interests and needs of the student body, and the university's mission of education. A student movement came to a head in December 2004, when approximately 250 students (of more than 2,700 undergraduates) protested in front of the administrative building South College, where Bennet's office was located, demanding that he address student concerns. On March 26, 2007, Wesleyan's Board of Trustees announced that Michael S. Roth would succeed Bennet as president for the 2007-2008 academic year.

Awards

In 1994, Bennet received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Wesleyan; in 2008, he received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Trinity College.

Personal

On June 27, 1959, Bennet married Susanne Klejman of Washington, D.C. They have three children, Michael, James and Halina Anne. They divorced in 1995. He married Midge Bowen Ramsey in 1996.

In 2006, his son James was named the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly. In 2009, his son Michael was chosen by Governor of Colorado Bill Ritter to represent Colorado in the United States Senate, replacing Ken Salazar, who was appointed as Secretary of the Interior in the Obama Administration.