Bill Bennett's Blinders

In his heart, he knows he's ambivilant

Jacob Sullum from the March 1990 issue

Certainly he has given us cause for alarm. During his confirmation hearings last winter, he suggested that the war on drugs might require the suspension of constitutional rights and the use of the military for law enforcement. On a radio talk show last summer, he said beheading drug dealers would be “morally plausible.” He has vowed to bring the drug war home to casual users by taking away their driver’s licenses, seizing their cars, and throwing them in jail.

America’s drug czar is deadly serious, and he is not going away. It seems we ought to get to know him better. So who is William Bennett, and why does he care if you smoke a little pot after a hard day at work? The answer to the first question suggests why the second one is worth asking, for Bennett is not merely an authoritarian.

As a philosophy student, he explicitly rejected unthinking obedience to the law. Indeed, one of his instructors at Harvard Law School recalls Bennett’s views as basically libertarian. And although lately he has depicted people as powerless to resist the lure of drugs, as secretary of education Bennett emphasized the efficacy of the individual.

By all accounts, the former philosophy professor is a thoughtful, intelligent person. And, although he has presidential ambitions, he is not simply a political opportunist. He seems genuinely to believe that drug use is both immoral and a serious threat to society.

Bennett refused to grant REASON an interview for this article, but his public remarks suggest that he objects to drugs-the illegal ones, that is-at a fundamental, philosophical level. In November 1987, when he was secretary of education, he told Douglas Ginsburg to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court after word got out that the nominee had smoked marijuana as a professor. Bennett didn’t say, “Forget it- you’ve got no chance of being confirmed now,” or, “Geez, haven’t you embarrassed the president enough?” By his own account, he informed Ginsburg that smoking pot is “not right.”

The attitude that drug use itself is bad, regardless of its consequences, pervades Bennett’s first National Drug Control Strategy, released last fall. In the chapter on education, he says, “Young people and adults alike must be consistently confronted with the same message: drugs are wrong, they are harmful, and their use will bring certain consequences.” He objects to educational programs that merely provide information about the effects of drugs, advocating “a firm moral stand that using drugs is wrong and should be resisted.” Elsewhere, he calls drug use “a moral problem” and declares, “there is no such thing as innocent drug use.”

This position is central to Bennett’s vision of the war on drugs. “I remain an ardent defender of our nation’s laws against illegal drug use and our nation’s attempts to enforce them because I believe drug use is wrong,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last September, responding to Milton Friedman’s call for legalization. “A true friend of freedom understands that government has a responsibility to craft and uphold laws that help educate citizens about right and wrong.”

The idea that government should instill moral values and promote good character is shared by neoconservative guru Irving Kristol, an enthusiastic paternalist who has had an important influence on Bennett. “You can’t have people walking around in a daze and still playing a part in the democratic process,” Kristol says. “People on drugs are not capable of being rational.” He adds, “People don’t trust themselves. In many ways, people want government to step in and help them discipline themselves…That’s one of the proper roles of government.” Gee, OK—but how do you decide when government has to step in? “You use your common sense and judgment.”

This authoritarian tendency has been apparent, in some form or other, throughout Bennett’s career. Yet there is much in his behavior, writings, and public statements that runs counter to it: his insistence on a rational basis for obedience to the law, his admiration of James Madison and Martin Luther King, Jr., his rejection of determinism, his emphasis on individual choice and responsibility, his suspicion of big government, and his condemnation of creeping theocracy.

In many ways, Bennett’s career is a study in the tensions between his desire for freedom and his temptation to control, his opposition to the establishment and his feeling that he could do better if the reins were in his hands. Like the conservative movement to which he belongs, Bennett has both libertarian and authoritarian inclinations. And, like the movement, he has largely succumbed to the latter.

Bennett has never been a man who could be summed up in a phrase. Even at Williams College in the early 1960s, he confounded the stereotypes-though he certainly never would have been voted Most Likely to Become Drug Czar. On the one hand, he played on the football team, belonged to a fraternity, and attended his share of beer parties (So far, no smoking joint has turned up.). According to the Wall Street Journal, he acquired the nickname “Ram” after smashing his head through a door to reach his girlfriend, who had locked him out of the room-presumably following an argument. (Perhaps we can look forward to seeing the beefy, 6-foot- 2 drug czar use the same technique for raids on crack houses.)

On the other hand, Bennett was a philosophy major, wrote for literary magazines, and played electric guitar in a rock band called Plato and the Guardians. He opposed the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movement, causes that brought him in close contact with Students for a Democratic Society. He considered joining SDS but decided not to after his brother, Robert, warned him that the move would come back to haunt him. When it was time to choose a graduate school, Bennett sought advice from William Sloane Coffin, the radical minister.

At the University of Texas, where he studied philosophy under John Silber, Bennett stayed away from groups such as SDS but retained his anti-Vietnam and pro-civil-rights convictions. Given his anti-establishment views, Bennett’s doctoral dissertation on societal obligation is especially interesting. In that 1970 paper, which he completed while he was studying law at Harvard, Bennett argued that the requirements of law are justified by the goals of preserving the community and protecting its benefits. He used Socrates’ submission to the judgment of Athens as an example of obeying an objectionable command for the sake of preserving order. Because Socrates had enjoyed the benefits provided by the community and had declined to leave Athens, Bennett argued, he incurred a societal obligation to lay down his life.

It is not clear how Bennett, who speaks of King’s “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the same breath as the Declaration of Independence, would reconcile this notion of societal obligation with the duty to oppose unjust laws. His paper’s discussion of resistance to the draft suggests that, in some circumstances, the community and its benefits might best be preserved through disobedience. So the obligation to obey the law can at least be outweighed, if not nullified, by other obligations.

Moreover, despite Bennett’s current paternalism, his comments in class at Harvard were marked by an insistence that people have the capacity to make rational choices and must be held accountable for their actions. “My recollections of Bill as a student are that he was very much a libertarian,” says Alan Dershowitz, who taught him first-year criminal law. “He certainly always took the view that people are masters of their own destinies.”