Lewis Lehrman

He was presented the National Humanities Medal[1] at the White House in 2005 for his contributions to American history, the study of President Abraham Lincoln, and monetary policy.On November 10, 2005, Lehrman and Richard Gilder were awarded the National Humanities Medal in an Oval Office ceremony[6] by U.S. president George W. Bush.[15] Lehrman stepped down as Rite Aid president in 1977 and as chairman of the firm's executive committee in 1981, eventually severing all ties with the company.On June 16, 1982, Lehrman was chosen as the official GOP designee for governorship, getting "68.88 percent of the weighted votes at a hectic meeting of the Republican State Committee in Manhattan.Political scientists Peter W. Colby and John K. White noted a sharp upstate-downstate split in the race, with Cuomo carrying a 575,000-vote advantage in New York City.The public encounters of Mario M. Cuomo and Lewis E. Lehrman in the closing weeks of the 1982 gubernatorial campaign produced a substantive, often lively, at times intense, but consistently civil exchange of ideas," recalled E. J. Mahon, who covered the race as a journalist.Mario M. Cuomo and Lewis E. Lehrman argued without significant interruptions for 50 minutes yesterday in their first debate of the New York gubernatorial campaign.However, if the election had been a referendum on Reaganomics and unemployment, Cuomo would have won by a margin reflecting his party's enormous voter-registration edge and allowing room for a few disgruntled Republicans and Independents as well, according to a Princeton University thesis on the gubernatorial campaign."Instead, Lew Lehrman was able to use technologies such as television and direct mail to campaign 'offensively' on issues which were more favorable for him such as the death penalty, crime, welfare fraud, prayer in schools, and unpopular record of the [Hugh] Carey Administration.The Christian Science Monitor reported late in the campaign: "The ads have aired so frequently that the New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing a parrot next to a television set."The polls indicated that neither the gold standard nor Reaganomics would enhance the image—the public knew little of the former and New York State was suffering severely from the Reagan Recession and budget cuts—so these issues were ignored.Instead, television ads—four or five million dollars' worth to begin—depicted Lehrman as a genial family man who knew how to produce jobs—his successful business career was proof—and stop crime—with capital punishment."[28] In his diary, Cuomo complained about Lehrman's high spending on direct mail and television advertising, but admitted in late October 1982: "A strange problem has developed.Articles from those periods have been used in exhibits at George Washington's Mount Vernon, Gettysburg, the Morgan Library and the New-York Historical Society.In 2005, David Brion Davis, a self-described "leftish Democrat" who worked with them on the Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition defended them: "Despite our major political differences, I have never encountered even the most subtle attempt at ideological influence of any kind with respect to my teaching, writing, cocurating a national exhibition on slavery, or making proposals as a member of the Advisory Board of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.In 1983, he helped to found Citizens for America, an organization that aided Oliver North's campaign to supply the anti-communist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.[40] Political columnists Evans and Novak reported that Ronald Reagan considered naming him U.S. Secretary of the Treasury before selecting Donald T. Regan.In his memoirs, Regan wrote that he was urged to "placate my critics by appointing Lewis Lehrman, a prominent New York conservative, as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury."[42] Unlike Sprinkel, Lehrman was critical of the floating exchange rate policies of Milton Friedman, the leading academic monetarist.[44] Conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote that, "Stockman was deeply impressed by Lehrman's arguments and used them as the inspiration for his own more specific paper.[49] From very early on, Lehrman "became a big fan of Jacques Rueff, Charles de Gaulle's finance minister, and a true believer in the gold standard.Lehrman's singular point of view appears in many periodicals including The Wall Street Journal,[52] the Washington Post,[53] National Review,[54] American Spectator[55] and The Weekly Standard.One commentator noted that "Lehrman is one of a very small group of contemporary gold advocates able to successfully bridge the gap separating practical conservative intellectualism from fleeting, half-baked idealism.The center worked to "enrich higher education by creating the right conditions for vigorous discussion and contemplative scholarship—particularly within the scope of American Studies", according to the institute's website.The center provided a variety of programming, including an annual two-week summer institute at Princeton University for young academics, and maintained an online library of teaching resources.