Ben Wattenberg

Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg (August 26, 1933 – June 28, 2015), known as Ben J. Wattenberg, was an American author, commentator and demographer. Associated with leading Democratic politicians in the 1960s and 1970s, he leaned increasingly conservative in his latter years.

Wattenberg was born in The Bronx to Jewish parents, and went on to graduate from Hobart College in 1955, majoring in English. From 1955 to 1957, he was in the US Air Force, based in San Antonio. He was an aide and speechwriter to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968, and served as an adviser to Hubert Humphrey's 1970 Senate race and Senator Henry M. Jackson's contest for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, and Democratic Party presidential primaries of 1976, and served on the 1972 and 1976 Democratic National Convention platform committees.

Wattenberg came to national attention as co-author with Richard M. Scammon of The Real Majority, the 1970 analysis believed to have provided the basis for the campaign strategies of the Richard Nixon administration in the 1970 congressional elections and 1972 presidential election.

He was the host of a number of PBS television specials, including Values Matter Most, The Grandchild Gap, America's Number One, What Next?, The Stockholder Society, A Third Choice (about the role of third parties in American politics), Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, The Democrats, and The First Measured Century. He hosted the weekly PBS television program, Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, from 1994 to 2010, and previously hosted PBS series In Search of the Real America and Ben Wattenberg At Large. In a New Yorker article from 1996, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., refers to Wattenberg's book "Values Matter Most" as "the book that prompted Bill Clinton’s infamous midnight-of-the-soul telephone call to the author".

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