Bob Bennett says he has a pretty good idea of what it takes to be a U.S. senator. After all, he's lived it - both from inside his family and inside the Washington, D.C., pressure cooker of public scrutiny.
If Bennett looks familiar, it's because he's a taller look-a-like of his father - former U.S. Sen. Wallace F. Bennett. When he says he knows how to bring change to Congress, he speaks as a man dragged through the public eye of Watergate, who worked in congressional relations in the Nixon administration and lobbied Capitol Hill as a professional lobbyist for such heavyweights as General Foods and Howard Hughes.At 58, Bennett is the oldest of the U.S. Senate candidates this year. But he says that matters only in that he's mature enough to understand patience, seasoned with wisdom. While the other major candidates' political ideas were tempered by the Vietnam War, Bennett went to college during the Korean War.
While fellow candidates Joe Cannon and Doug Anderson were taking freshman English in the late 1960s, Bennett was Nixon's chief congressional liaison man for transportation, working hard to get Congress to set up Amtrak and the airport trust fund.
Bennett was born in Salt Lake City in 1933, the youngest of five children of Wallace Bennett and Francis Grant. His father's family started Bennett Paint & Glass Co. and worked in setting up Din-woody's furniture store and ZCMI.
Young Bennett was raised in the city and attended East High School in the late 1940s. "At East we won the state debate title, and I was on the team."
In 1951 Bennett entered the University of Utah, took a student deferment, and joined the Air Force ROTC program anticipating
action in the Korean War after graduation. He took two years off to serve an LDS mission. "In my junior year they (ROTC officials) gave me an eye test. I don't know why they didn't do it before. I flunked. They flushed me out of the program. I joined the National Guard and was the (LDS) Church's test case" on the question of being awarded a chaplain rank.
Bennett was named chaplain for the 653rd Field Artillery. But because he hadn't received a university degree in some type of religious study, the Army said he couldn't be a chaplain. "We lost that case, the courts ruling a chaplain had to have at least a master's degree," he recalls.
Since he was 14, Bennett had worked after school and summers at Bennett Paint. Upon graduation he was hired as a purchasing agent and warehouse manager.
His life was changed forever when his father decided in 1962 to run for the U.S. Senate. "I took a leave from Bennett's to run Dad's campaign." Although young, Bennett found himself the only paid member of the campaign staff, making major campaign decisions. Strangely enough, the 1962 campaign headquarters were across 100 South from Bennett's current headquarters.
"Everyone thought we'd lose that race. J. Bracken Lee challenged us from the right in the primary. Our Democratic opponent was U.S. Congressman David King, a Kennedy man. In the final election, King had Kennedy polling - the first time in a Utah race that polling was a real part of a campaign. I guessed we'd win by 15,000 votes - but no one believes me. Dad won by 16,500."
After you've seen Paris, it's tough to go back to the farm. And Bennett didn't want to go back to "counting panes of glass" after the excitement of political life. At 29, Bennett was ready to marry and ready to try his wings outside the family business. He married his longtime sweetheart, Joyce McKay, and set about finding a job in Washington, D.C.
Newly elected Congressman Sherman Lloyd, the Republican who took King's seat, hired Bennett on a temporary basis to be his press secretary. When that job ended, he got his first job as a lobbyist. A group of large companies - including Sears, Ford Motor and U.S. Steel - concerned about federal pension law hired Bennett to do research on pensions. When that job ended, Bennett worked as his father's chief administrative assistant while his predecessor took a nine-month fellowship at Harvard University.
At the end of that job, Bennett either had to come home to Bennett Paint & Glass or quit the firm for good, his uncle told him. He quit.
"It was 1964. I could have gone to work in the Barry Goldwater campaign. But I wanted something more permanent." J.C. Penney Co. was opening a Washington, D.C., lobbying office. Bennett applied and got the job.
After Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, close friend Bryce Harlow - "the smartest D.C. operator in the 1950s and 1960s" - asked Bennett to come into the new GOP administration and run congressional liaison for the Transportation Department. He did it. "No other department had a higher success ratio in Congress. None. I've got the presidential pens (awarded when bills are signed by the president) on my wall to prove what a nifty job we did."
At the end of 1970, Bennett was getting worn out. He'd talked to well-known public relations man Robert Mullen about going into private business. One day, Bill Gray, CEO of Hughes Tool Co., called Bennett - still at the Transportation Department - to say Hughes was firing its Washington, D.C., representatives. Gray asked Bennett to pass the word around. "I asked, `OK, who is your representative here?' Bill said, `You are.' " Here was Bennett's chance. With a big account like Hughes Tool Co. and Hughes Air West, he could buy out Mullen's firm, bringing with him enough business to keep afloat should old Mullen accounts drop away. Mullen had several big accounts, including the LDS Church and General Foods.
"I'd bought and sold stocks for years. I'd waited until I was 29 to get married and squirrelled money away. I had enough to buy Mullen."
That purchase led to Bennett's involvement in the Watergate scandal. In a previous article, the Deseret News chronicled Bennett's involuntary connection to Watergate. E. Howard Hunt worked for Mullen before Bennett bought the business. Hunt planned the Watergate break-in in 1972, and Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, break-in leader, often met in Hunt's Mullen office. Bennett fired Hunt soon after the break-in "because Howard was clearly lying to me and not telling me the truth about his involvement."
As news reports broke about Watergate over the following year, some of Bennett's clients jumped ship. He could have kept the firm going, he says, until the Watergate investigations turned on the CIA angle. Newsweek and Jack Anderson reports about how Nixon aide Chuck Colson was saying Watergate was really a CIA operation planned by Bennett - "a complete fabrication not bought for a second by Watergate prosecutors" - sunk Mullen & Co.
The Hughes people called Bennett and told him he was getting such bad press that they doubted he could help them in Washington. They appreciated his work, and asked him to come to work for them.
Bennett closed down Mullen and moved to California. Howard Hughes died - "I never met the man, we communicated through telex" - and the Hughes cousins "moved in and fired most of the Mormons." Bennett said he could have stayed, but he decided to move to greener pastures.
One executive job led to another - including a stint with the Osmonds' entertainment group in Orem - until an old friend, Hyrum Smith, called in 1984 and asked Bennett to turn around a small Utah company specializing in time management - Franklin Institute. When Bennett took over Franklin there were four employees. When he left seven years later there were hundreds of employees, and a public stock offering this spring netted Bennett $3.9 million in cash. All told, Bennett's Franklin stock is worth more than $27 million.
Bennett has stood at the seat of power - when he worked in the Nixon administration - and seen his career and public reputation ripped apart by Watergate. "I've been there. I know it. And I know what it takes to do this job (of U.S. senator)."
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Candidate profiles
The Deseret News is publishing stories profiling U.S. Senate candidates in the primary election on Sept. 8, Tuesday's story will be on Joe Cannon, Bennett's opponent in the Republican primary.
Profiles of the Democratic candidates were printed Thursday and Frida. Beginning Wednesday, the newspaper will publish stories about the major gubernatorial candidates.