Robert M. Ball, 93; Social Security commissioner under three presidents
WASHINGTON — Robert M. Ball, an indefatigable champion of Social Security who was present practically at its creation in 1935 and rose in the bureaucracy to become its commissioner under three presidents, has died. He was 93.
Ball, a resident of suburban Maryland, died Tuesday night after a brief illness, according to the National Academy of Social Insurance. Ball was the founding chairman of the organization.
Active virtually until his death, Ball was a key player on a package that rescued Social Security from financial ruin in 1983 and as recently as last year was writing alternatives to President Bush's proposal to privatize the program, an approach that Ball abhorred.
"No individual has done more to advance American social insurance programs than Robert M. Ball," said Lawrence Thompson, chairman of the National Academy of Social Insurance.
"He led the Social Security program for more than 20 years, and he has been its most influential and articulate advocate, architect and philosopher."
Even before the first monthly Social Security check was paid ($22.54 to Ida May Fuller of Vermont in 1940), Ball was working as a 25-year-old clerk in the Social Security office in Newark, N.J.
He rose steadily through the bureaucracy to become commissioner of Social Security for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. On his watch, Social Security became the biggest and most popular benefits program.
And, in 1983, when he had already been collecting retirement benefits for four years, he was a key negotiator of the law that rescued Social Security from the brink of insolven- cy.
"We could never have made that compromise without him," former Secretary of State James A. Baker III recalled Tuesday.
Baker, as President Reagan's chief of staff, led the negotiations to rescue Social Security in 1983, often in the basement of his home in Washington, D.C.
Baker represented the White House. Ball represented Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts. "He was very knowledgeable," Baker said. "Serious and imposing."
With the possible exception of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps no one had been associated with a federal institution as intimately and for so long as Robert M. Ball. He was one of the last of a nearly extinct species: career civil servants who became top policymakers.
