Preacher, Teacher, Gadfly

By Ezra Bowen

It has been a dazzling bit of footwork, even for a world-class dancing man like William Bennett. Since he took office in February 1985, the brash Secretary of Education has turned himself into the most visible and surely the ) most audible member of the Reagan team. During the primaries, he flirted with various presidential aspirers who eyed him as a running mate: "I dance with all the girls," he chuckled. So was he hungry for higher office? "I'm not running for anything," he said. Amid a riptide of Administration defectees, Bennett held fast.

Then on May 9, Bennett told Reagan he was quitting in September to lecture and write. But no kiss-and-tell stuff. "That's not my style," he growled. Bennett, however, has more than one agenda. He is consulting with the Republican Platform Committee as it prepares for next month's convention, where he will be a prime-time speaker. Top Republicans have approached him about running for the Senate. He adds, "After watching some of the people in the stakes for the presidency, I could do better than that." As a vice- presidential candidate? "I'm not sure I'd make a very good No. 2 man," he retorts. "I like to run things."

No one who knows Bill Bennett, 44, doubts that. Nor has there been much doubt where he has been headed in the cross-country whirl that has taken him to 102 elementary and secondary schools in three years -- plus scores of service clubs and state legislatures. Watch him as he visits No. 88, the Amherst Middle School near Nashua, N.H.:

The Amherst faculty beams as Bennett rumbles in, trailed by aides. He smiles, waves, pats shoulders, walking canted forward from the waist as though leaning into a wind. Bennett is a big man -- 6 ft. 2 in., 216 lbs. A friend once pointed him out as "the one who looks like a buffalo." Bennett is in Nashua to praise Amherst as a "School of Excellence," one that does well without begging for federal money. "Insofar as people look to Washington for solutions, they're wrong," says Bennett. At these whistle stops, Bennett usually teaches a class, something his wife Elayne, an ex-teacher, challenged him to do. "Get out and see if you can do it," she said.

He can. Scrunching into a child's chair in an eighth-grade English class, Bennett speaks softly. "You don't want to scare 'em," he explains later. When the pupils' questions become too rote, Bennett teases. "Some kids asked me if the Secret Service was here. 'See that big guy back there?' " he says, pointing to a hulking bodyguard. "If you guys make a move for me, you're in trouble."

The kids love him. So does the rest of the school, which roars happily at the award ceremony. Then, running late, he makes a wild, 85-m.p.h. run to Concord to address the New Hampshire legislature. In Governor John Sununu's office, Bennett asks Senate President Bill Bartlett, "How long shall I do?" "Three minutes," says Bartlett, "plenty of time for some guy from Washington."

Bennett guffaws. He revels in this back-room camaraderie, the rough-and- tumble of what he is doing. It seems a grownup version of the heavy-contact touch football that Bennett loves to play on fall weekends -- and may symbolize the life he would choose had he been born faster afoot and eternally young. Bennett plays the theme of frugal independence to these flinty lawmakers. "The key to excellence is local control; you cannot spend your way to excellence," he says to approving nods.

Then he is off again for a sprint to Boston's Logan Airport en route to a final flourish in Atlanta. Bennett seems to revel, too, in these dashes, riding the fast lane in cars, in conversation, in politics. "He's got a big ego, and he knows it," says an associate. At Logan, Press Secretary Loye Miller tells him of an invitation from a TV talk show. "Crossfire wants you Saturday," he says. "Not Saturday," replies Bennett, a homebody who scorns the Potomac syndrome of "working the restaurants at night." He snorts, "A big status thing in Washington is 20 pink slips on your desk covered with stuff at 7:30 in the evening. My desk is clear. You work hard and then go to your family."

He is adamant about skipping the capital's heavy-pol bashes: "Nobody ever says anything at those things," he grumbles. By reports, he has turned down invitations from George Bush. Bennett confesses he'd rather be home "watching Dragonslayer on the Disney Channel" with Elayne and their son John, 4.

This close family life is precious to Bennett, a Catholic whose parents divorced 40 years ago, when pious folk did not. His mother, who disliked the rich and called the family "us common folk," moved Bill, an older brother Bob and their Hungarian grandmother from Brooklyn to Washington. There, Bennett flourished at Gonzaga High, a Jesuit school. "The only guy in the honors class to be starting on the football team," he brags. But he chafed under the discipline of the fathers. "They regarded me as a smarty-pants, and they were absolutely right," he says.

At the same time, he began to develop a ravenous ambition. At 17 he got into elite Williams College in Massachusetts. Grandma scraped together $200 for clothes. "She knew there were a lot of guys from St. Paul's and Andover, and that I ought to dress up to speed," he recalls.

At Williams he got daily letters from her; she read all his major texts so she could trade notes on them. To help pay tuition, Bennett waited on tables and worked summers hauling furniture while earning honors, playing football and strumming a rock guitar -- the very model of the 1960s liberal student. Civil rights concerns nudged him toward the liberal Students for a Democratic Society, which later turned violently radical. But Brother Bob talked him out of it, advising that some day S.D.S. might not look good on his resume.

A resentment at privilege began to boil, and still simmers today. "I really dislike snobs," he growls, "pretentious people who mistreat people who have to work for them. I hate them." This anger congealed into a hard-edged populism as Bennett took a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Texas, then served as a dean of liberal arts at Boston University, all under brilliant, acerbic John Silber, who was then undergoing a conversion from liberal to born-again conservative.

Bennett refined his own convert's faith as director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and then, at age 38, as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington. At NEH, Bennett accused college faculties of a "collective loss of nerve and faith" for serving up trendy courses at the expense of classic Western studies. He spurned affirmative-action quotas in NEH hiring, arguing that quotas were discriminatory.

Mary Futrell, president of the powerful National Education Association, has called Bennett's record on civil rights "less than exemplary." Bennett retorts, "If you don't think people should be given things or have things taken away on the basis of race or sex, if you believed that in 1965, you were a liberal. If you believe it now, you're a conservative."

Bennett's style caught the approving attention of Attorney General Edwin Meese, who recommended him as Secretary of Education, the bottom-ranked Cabinet slot. Bennett recalls, "The President said, 'I can't get rid of this department. But since we have it, I'd like you to represent the views of the American people and not the education interest groups.' I said, 'Fine, that's what I'd like to do.' " He has done so with gusto, greatly aggrandizing the position while so-called education interest groups -- including university people and members of Congress -- chafed at the notion that their own agendas were not of the people. (Silber, who wanted the job himself, dismisses his protege as the "Sorcerer's Apprentice.")

Bennett began by roasting college students as easy riders who beach-bummed on tax-supported loans. He then accused the Supreme Court of a "fastidious disdain for religion" for banning use of public funds for remedial programs in parochial schools. He trampled on congressional toes with public calls for sub-basement education budgets (which Congress rejected), rather than tactfully negotiating compromises in committee.

Reaction was quick and furious. Augustus Hawkins, Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, awarded the new Secretary a "failing grade." Connecticut's Republican Senator Lowell Weicker fumed that Bennett and his views should not be "allowed out of the Education building, much less outside Washington."

So pervasive were the counterattacks that even the cocky Bennett felt abashed. "I underestimated the size of the microphone I had," he says. Bob, a Washington lawyer, offered some new big-brotherly advice. Says Bennett: "He's got this big fish mounted in his office, and he said, 'You know why that fish is up there? Because he opened his mouth, that's why.' "

Bennett has since attacked the likes of Harvard for jacking costs above $12,000 with the help of federal student-loan support and for "ripping off" undergraduates with suffused curriculums that Bennett derides as "core lite." He has detonated heavy controversy by advocating federal vouchers to finance parental choice among public schools -- typically, say opponents, white schools for white kids living in mixed neighborhoods. He has called for AIDS testing of all marriage-license applicants, hospital patients and convicts and has unloaded on Republicans and Democrats alike who opposed the President's Iranian and contra policies. All that after Brother Bob told him about the fish. "He sees a complex federal agency as a bully pulpit," comments Joseph Duffey, chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Bennett's predecessor at NEH. "It is the temperament of a preacher." Hawkins has another, perhaps more canny, perspective: "Bennett gives the answers of a professional politician rather than a professional educator" -- a judgment some observers see as the sum of his many parts.

The contentious Bennett has made no bones about using the office to preach. / "This is the appropriate job for the Secretary of Education," says he, "where your powers to say and be heard are much greater than your powers to make things be." At the same time, he emerged as a formidable doer within the party. When the news came out that Supreme Court Nominee Douglas Ginsburg had smoked pot as a law professor at Harvard, Bennett made a critical call to Ginsburg, urging him to end his candidacy. Nor, in recent months, has he shown signs of easing back on either the frequency or muzzle velocity of his comments on education. Some sample shots:

-- "Star teachers ought to get salary increases. At the other end, throw out the incompetent people; they're killing the profession."

-- "Allan Bloom ((author of The Closing of the American Mind)) is a brilliant man, very good for higher education. But much too despairing. He doesn't see the happiness and spontaneity of American life. I hate that prissy crap where he's anti-rock 'n' roll."

-- "What makes me happy is seeing a good school . . . and knowing more than all my critics."

He has saved his real shockers for Cabinet colleagues. When an old friend, Justice Department Spokesman Terry Eastland, was fired by Meese, Bennett declared bluntly, "Terry Eastland's an excellent man. He can join me at the department any time."

With that stroke, Bennett distanced himself from the wreckage of the expiring regime. He also began to establish himself, for the future, as very much his own man. "Look," he told a reporter, "I put country above party. Always have." Then he added, "I know that I'm popular with audiences out there in the country, and it doesn't seem to make much difference whether they're Democrats or Republicans."

Bill Bennett may be leaving this Administration, but when he says things like that, he does not sound like a man who has given up public service for good. So what might lie ahead for him? "Right now," he says, "if I were going to run for anything in the future, I'd want to run for President."