Peter Flanigan, 1923–2013

The Nixon aide who pioneered education reform

Peter Flanigan’s ability to push business interests through regulatory barriers during his time as an aide to President Richard Nixon moved Time to term him the administration’s “Mr. Fixit.” Liberal activist Ralph Nader, for one, disagreed. He considered Flanigan’s influence so pervasive and insidious that he called him the “mini-president” and the “most evil” man in Washington.

Flanigan was a vice president at investment house Dillon Read when he became active in Republican politics in the 1950s, said The New York Times. An “early and strong supporter of Nixon,” he headed up the then vice president’s New York office during his run against John F. Kennedy. By 1968 he had raised enough money and given enough support to Nixon to be named deputy campaign manager, and after Nixon’s victory he slipped into an unpaid position to help fill executive branch appointments. The quiet, unassuming Flanigan was “possibly the least known of President Nixon’s dozen or so top aides” in 1969.

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After his foray into politics, Flanigan returned to Wall Street, but he became heavily involved in education philanthropy in the “bright autumn of his years,” said The Wall Street Journal. In 1986 he founded a scholarship program for poor students that is considered the forerunner of voucher programs, and subsequently became a “giant of the school-choice movement.” Using his wealth and political skills, Flanigan helped build an “army of benefactors” in an effort to fund alternative inner-city schools, and “it’s working.” A recent Brookings Institution report found that school vouchers had boosted college enrollment among African-Americans by 24 percent. Flanigan saw his work in education as a dictate of fairness. Among the middle classes, he said, there were “very few people whose parents didn’t, one way or another, get their kids into a good school of their choice. But we deny that right to [inner-city kids].”