Everything about William E Simon totally explained
William Edward Simon (
November 27 1927 –
June 3 2000) was a businessman, a Secretary of Treasury of the U.S. for three years, and a philanthropist. He became the 63rd
Secretary of the Treasury on
May 8 1974, during the
Nixon administration. He was reappointed by President Ford and served until 1977. Outside of government, he was a successful businesman and philanthropist. The
William E. Simon Foundation carries on this legacy. He was a strong advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. He wrote, "There is only one social system that reflects the
sovereignty of the individual: the free-market, or capitalist, system."
In August, he was asked to continue to serve in this position by
President Ford, who shortly afterward appointed him Chairman of the
Economic Policy Board and chief spokesman for the Administration on economic issues.
On
April 8 1975, President Ford also named him Chairman of the newly created East-West Foreign Trade Board, established under the authority of the Trade Act of 1974.
At the time of his nomination as Treasury Secretary, Simon was serving as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a post he'd held from
January 22 1973. As Deputy Secretary, he supervised the Administration's program to restructure and improve U.S. financial institutions. He also served as the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office.
From
December 4 1973, Simon simultaneously launched and administered the
Federal Energy Administration at the height of the oil embargo. He also chaired the President's Oil Policy Committee and was instrumental in revising the mandatory oil import program in April 1973. Simon was a member of the President's Energy Resources Council and continued to have major responsibility for coordinating both domestic and international energy policy.
In
1977, Simon received the
Alexander Hamilton Award, the
Treasury Department's highest honor. In
1976, while serving as Secretary of the Treasury, President
Anwar Sadat of
Egypt presented Simon with the
Collar of the Republic/
Order of the Nile. Simon's term as Secretary of the Treasury ended on
January 20,
1977.
Personal Data
The son of an insurance executive, he was born in
Paterson, New Jersey, on
November 27 1927. He graduated from
Newark Academy and, after service in the
U.S. Army (
infantry), received his B.A. from
Lafayette College in
Easton,
Pennsylvania, in 1952. At Lafayette he was a member of
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
He began his career with
Union Securities in 1952. He served as Vice President of
Weeden & Company before becoming the senior partner in charge of the Government and Municipal Bond departments at
Salomon Brothers, where he was a member of the seven-man Executive Committee of the firm.
Following government service, Simon was a Vice Chairman at Blyth Eastman Dillon for 3 years, then co-founded with Raymond G. Chambers, a tax accountant,
Wesray Corporation (Mr. Simon contributing the "WES" and Mr. Chambers contributing the "RAY"), a leveraged buyout (LBO) firm. In 1982, Wesray invested approximately $1 million in equity capital (with Mr. Simon contributing $330,000) and borrowed another $79 million to take private a Cincinnati-based greeting card company, Gibson Greetings, for $80 million. Eighteen months later, the company was taken public again, with a value of $290 million, and Mr. Simon's $330,000 investment was worth $66 million.
In 1984, he launched
WSGP International, which concentrated on investments in real estate and financial service organizations in the western United States and on the Pacific Rim. In 1988, together with sons
William E. Simon Jr. and J. Peter Simon, he founded
William E. Simon & Sons, a global
merchant bank with offices in
New Jersey,
Los Angeles, and
Hong Kong. The firm is now extensively involved in providing
venture capital.
During his business career, Simon served on the boards of over thirty companies including
Xerox,
Citibank,
Halliburton,
Dart and Kraft, and
United Technologies. In recognition of his visionary leadership in business, finance and public service, the Graduate School of Management at the
University of Rochester was renamed the
William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration in 1986.
Simon was an active member of the
United States Olympic Committee for over 30 years. He served as Treasurer from
1977 to
1981 and as
President of the U.S. Olympic Committee for the four-year period, which included the
1984 Games in
Sarajevo and
Los Angeles. He chaired the
U.S. Olympic Foundation, created with the profits of the
Los Angeles games, from 1985 through
1997, and was inducted into the
U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1991.
Simon received numerous awards during his career in sports. Among them are the
Olympic Torch and the
Olympic Order, the highest honors, respectively, of the United States Olympic Committee and the
International Olympic Committee. Mr. Simon served as an officer or on the board of the
Jesse Owens Foundation, the
Basketball Hall of Fame, the
National Tennis Foundation and Hall of Fame, the
U.S. Amateur Boxing Foundation, the
Women's Sports Foundation, and the
World Cup '94 Organizing and Executive Committees.
As a man of faith and an active
Knight of Malta, Simon considered the opportunity to serve those less fortunate than he a God-given privilege and, indeed, a responsibility. A volunteer at
Covenant House and a Eucharistic Minister to patients, many of whom were destitute and terminally ill or both, at four hospitals, William E. Simon made a personal commitment to serve the sick and poor. He was also a well-known philanthropist, and created hundreds of scholarships for underprivileged students at both the high school and college level. He endowed chairs at numerous institutions, including the William E. Simon Chairs in Political Economy at Lafayette College, his alma mater, and the
Center for Strategic and International Studies a prominent
think tank in
Washington, D.C..
At the
U.S. Air Force Academy, he established the
William E. Simon Center for Strategic Studies, as well as a Simon professorship.
Simon served as President of the
John M. Olin Foundation and as trustee of The
John Templeton Foundation. He has also served on the boards of many of America's premier think tanks, including the
Heritage Foundation and the
Hoover Institution. He was the author of two best-selling books,
A Time for Truth in 1978 (ghostwritten by libertarian author
Edith Efron) and
A Time for Action in 1980.
Simon was a resident of
Harding Township, New Jersey.
In referring to Simon,
The Washington Post stated in its
October 26,
2007 edition:
Mr. Simon is commonly acknowledged as a legendary architect of the modern conservative movement. But he was also legendarily mean, "a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone," in the words of his old friend Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Simon was known to awaken his children on weekend mornings by dousing their heads with buckets of cold water.
Mr. Simon came away from the experience of Watergate with a disgust for the partisan character of the affair. The experience of Nixon impeachment convinced him, that partisanship was necessarily poisonous, but that his opponents were far better at partisanship than his side was."
Simon married former Tonia Donnelly following the death of his first wife, Carol Girard Simon, who died in 1995. William and Carol Simon had seven children and 27 grandchildren.
William E. Simon died of complications of
pulmonary fibrosis on
June 3 2000 in
Santa Barbara, California, aged 72. One of his sons,
Bill Simon, was the Republican nominee for
governor of California in 2002.
In 2004, the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute dedicated a $40,000 cash prize in honor of Secretary Simon. Each year since, the
William E. Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose has been awarded to a college senior desiring to live a life dedicated to serving humanity.
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