Lewis E. "Lew" Lehrman (Born August 15, 1938 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania) is a former executive of Rite Aid and conservative activist. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Project for the New American Century, as well as a Trustee to the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. He achieved national political prominence in a 1982 campaign for Governor of New York, in which he ran against Democratic candidate Mario Cuomo, losing the election by only two percentage points.
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Background
In 1972 Lehrman founded the Lehrman Institute, a public policy think tank in New York City which focused on the study of economic and foreign policy from an historical perspective. Lehrman and investor-philanthropist Richard W. Gilder, both members of Wolf's Head Society at Yale, went on to found the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Collection of American historical documents. They also founded the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College, which awards the annual Lincoln Prize for the best work of scholarship on President Lincoln and the Civil War period, as well as the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, which awards the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best work in these fields. Evans and Novak reported that Ronald Reagan considered naming him Secretary of the Treasury before selecting Donald T. Regan. Lehrman was a managing director of Morgan Stanley in the late 1980s. After Morgan Stanley, he established an investment company. L.E. Lehrman & Co. He was also an investor in George W. Bush's Arbusto Energy. He and Gilder were awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2005.
Gubernatorial campaign
Lehrman was the President of Rite Aid until 1977, and resigned all positions in 1981 to run for Governor of New York the following year. He was well known for wearing red suspenders in his campaign commercials. Running on the Republican, Conservative and Independence Party lines, Lehrman was defeated by then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo, 51-48%. Cuomo ran on the Democratic and Liberal Party lines, after defeating New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch in the Democratic Party primary election. Lehrman won the Republican nomination in a primary against attorney Paul J. Curran, after several other Republican candidates dropped out of the race.
Historical society
Lehrman's involvement with the teaching of history began as a Carnegie Teaching Fellow at Yale University in 1960 and subsequently at Harvard University, where he completed a Master's degree as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. In the 1970s he returned to Yale to head up a review of the humanities curriculum for the Yale University Council. More controversial has been his work with the Gilder Lehrman Collection (GLC), now located at the New-York Historical Society but first put on deposit at the Morgan Library. He and Gilder aggressively collected historical documents in order to get them out of private hands and into a collection where they would be available to scholars and the public. By 2006, the GLC had amassed more than 60,000 documents and other historical items, mostly on 18th and 19th Century America. Articles from those periods have been used in exhibits at the New-York Historical Society that have generated additional debate. Lehrman himself has written and lectured about Abraham Lincoln's legacy in the centrality of American history.
Conservative causes
Lehrman is also active in civic and conservative causes. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Project for the New American Century, as well as a Trustee to the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. In 1983 he helped to found Citizens for America, an organization which aided Oliver North's campaign to supply the Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. In 1985, The organization was run by future lobbyist and convict Jack Abramoff. During that year, Citizens for America sponsored a meeting in Angola between Angolan, Nicaraguan, Afghan, and Laotian anti-communist rebels. Lehrman personally attended the event, called the "Democratic International". Abramoff was later fired for mismanaging the organization's funds.[1]
Co-author of "The Case for Gold"
Congressman Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman worked with a team of economists that included Murray Rothbard to write the book "The Case for Gold"
References
- ^ Hemingway, Mark. "My Dinner With Jack" The Weekly Standard, April 3 2006.
