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During the battle over President George W. Bush’s plan to partly privatize Social Security, many of us engaged in the debate received long, lucid memos from a former Social Security commissioner. I used to receive similar notes from this particular person years before, when I was in the Clinton White House.
What was extraordinary was that the individual pounding out and faxing these memos was at the time 91 years old. It just didn’t seem like a big deal to most of the Washington policy community, because everyone had just come to expect that from Bob Ball, who died four weeks ago at age 93.
Ball’s Social Security resume probably never will be matched. He was Social Security commissioner under three presidents (John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon). He was one of the chief architects of Medicare, the national health-insurance program for the elderly. In his 80s, he was a key member of the president’s Social Security Advisory Commission from 1994 to 1996.
When I was national economic adviser, he was a mentor and trusted counsel on Social Security. At our request, he trooped to Capitol Hill to speak with the House Democratic Caucus and top officials at the bipartisan White House Social Security Conference in December 1998. He wrote us so many smart and informative memos that he later turned them into a book that was published by the Century Foundation.