Reed Hundt
| Reed E. Hundt | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission | |
|
In office November 1993 – November 1997 |
|
| President | Bill Clinton |
| Preceded by | James H. Quello |
| Succeeded by | William Kennard |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
March 3, 1948 Ann Arbor, Michigan |
| Spouse(s) | Elizabeth "Betsy" Katz |
| Children | Adam, Nathaniel and Sara Hundt |
| Alma mater |
Yale College Yale Law School |
Reed E. Hundt (born March 3, 1948 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is probably best known as the chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, he served for most of Clinton's first term. He was succeeded by William Kennard. Hundt is the CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital and a senior advisor to GTCR, a private equity firm. He is on the board of a number of technology companies, including Intel Corp., and the Connecticut Green Bank. Most recently, Hundt has been named Chairman of the Compensation Committee for SmartSky and an adviser to ViewFind, INC.
Hundt attended high school in Washington D.C at the prestigious St. Albans School. He went to Yale College, where he majored in history, and worked on the Yale Daily News, and then taught school for two years. He returned to Yale in the fall of 1971 in order to attend Yale Law School, graduating with a J.D. in 1974. He then clerked for Harrison Winter, a Baltimore judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Hundt's co-clerk Tim Cullen of Washington, D.C., became a lifelong friend. Tim had a great career as a litigator at Jones, Day, where he still practices. Hundt then moved to Los Angeles, where he became the 85th lawyer at Latham & Watkins, then considered to be the fourth or fifth best firm in a city not well known for law practice. From the early 1970s to the present Latham has become one of the biggest, most lucrative, and most successful firms in the world. In 1980 Hundt moved to the Washington, D.C., office of the firm, where he was the ninth lawyer. In his litigation career at the firm, Hundt appeared in court in 48 states and the District of Columbia, argued appellate cases in almost all circuits, and handled cases in many topic areas, although he specialized in antitrust.
Meanwhile, from 1983 and onwards, Hundt played many diverse roles in helping Al Gore's political career. In 1992-3 he was part of the Clinton-Gore transition team, and chaired the committee that draft that partly successful carbon tax introduced and passed in the House of Representatives in 1993. It was not passed through the Senate. The issue remains alive to this day. In 1993 President Clinton, who Hundt had known in law school, nominated Hundt to be chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He was confirmed in November 1993, which was approximately the same time that the Internet was commercially invented as a practical matter because of the confluence of the first popular browser, Mosaic,and the decision of the CERN laboratory to release for free the now famous Berners-Lee software protocols that enabled any connected computer to join the Internet. Serendipitously, that same month saw Congress empower the FCC to create the structure and function of the digital cellular market in the United States by means, among other things, of spectrum auctions, then having previously been tried only in isolated cases in small countries.
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