William E. Simon - Simon's Legacy

Simon's Legacy

At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he established the William E. Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic.

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."

Simons was a pioneer of the big leveraged buyout in the 1980’s. He and his partner, Mr. Raymond G. Chambers, formed a partnership, Wesray, that bought and sold, among others, the Gibson Greeting Card Company, Anchor Glass, and the Simmons Mattress Company, typically investing tiny fractions of their own money, but loading the companies down with huge debts, and then selling the companies whole or piecemeal after making cosmetic changes that “often included job cutbacks and other short-term cost-reduction measures.”

In the Anchor Glass case, Simons made millions more through cozy deals with the company wherein the company leased its land, buildings, and equipment from Simons. Wesray also received banking fees for handling the subsequent purchase by Anchor of Midland Glass Company. But wait, there was more. Anchor Glass also bought casualty, liability, employee health and benefit insurance from a brokerage firm partially owned by Simons. Finally, the Anchor Glass corporate headquarters in Tampa was leased from Simons. Anchor Glass later admitted in an SEC filing, that “these arrangements…were not the result of arm’s length bargaining… were not…favorable to the company”. Anchor Glass was finally bought by a Mexican company, Vitro, S.A. which closed at least four of its American plants.

Simmons Mattress Company, a company founded in 1886, suffered a similar downward spiral after Wesray and partners bought it in 1986 for $120 million (almost all of it borrowed) and sold it in 1989 for $241 million, making Simon a tidy profit. Today, in 2009, the once solid company is on the verge of bankruptcy after having been bought and sold seven times in two decades by private equity firms, which together have drained $750 million from the company and investors . By the late 1980's, Forbes magazine was estimating Mr. Simon's wealth at $300 million. In retrospect, while Simon made a vast fortune for himself, his legacy on the ground was a series of damaged companies, fired workers, and closed plants. Culturally, his exploits inspired subsequent corporate raiders, the modern private equity firms, to follow directly in his footsteps, with companies like Simmons Mattress, further despoiling America’s corporations and investors.

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 twenty-seven grandchildren.

Simon died at the age of seventy-two of complications of pulmonary fibrosis on June 3, 2000 in Santa Barbara, California. One of his sons, Bill Simon, was the Republican nominee for governor of California in 2002, having been defeated by the Democrat Gray Davis, who was subsequently recalled and replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger. A daughter, Mary Simon, was married to Dana Streep, brother of actress Meryl Streep.

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.

Since 2001, the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership has been awarded to distinguished living donors, including John T. Walton, John Templeton, and Phil Anschutz.