Gardner, John William (1912-2002), served as United States secretary of health, education, and welfare from 1965 to 1968. He was appointed to the position by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Gardner had been president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York since 1955.
Gardner was born on Oct. 8, 1912, in Los Angeles and graduated from Stanford University in 1935. He received a doctor’s degree in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1938. Gardner later taught psychology at several colleges.
In 1942, he became head of the Latin American section of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943 to 1946, when he joined the Carnegie Corporation. Gardner served as director of the National Urban Coalition (formerly the Urban Coalition) from 1968 to 1970. In 1970, he founded Common Cause, a group that promotes urban and social legislation and government reform (see Common Cause ). He served as the group’s president until 1977. Gardner died on Feb. 16, 2002.
