Robert Ball; championed, bolstered Social Security

ROBERT M. BALL (file/1973)

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, died Tuesday in suburban Washington after a brief illness. He was 93.

Active until his death, Mr. Ball was a key player on a package that rescued Social Security from financial ruin in 1983 and as recently as a few months ago was writing alternatives to President Bush's proposal to privatize the program, an approach that Mr. Ball abhorred.

"No individual has done more to advance American social insurance programs than Robert M. Ball," said Lawrence Thompson, chairman of National Academy of Social Insurance, a group founded by Mr. Ball. "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 to an American citizen ($22.54 to Ida May Fuller of Vermont in 1940), Mr. Ball was already working as a 25-year-old clerk in the Social Security office in Newark.

He rose through the bureaucracy to become commissioner of Social Security for Presidents Kennedy, Lyndon 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 a law that rescued Social Security from the brink of insolvency.

"We could never have made that compromise without him," 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. Baker represented the White House. Mr. Ball represented House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. of Massachusetts. "He was very knowledgeable, serious and imposing," Baker said.

With the possible exception of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, perhaps no one has been associated with a federal institution as intimately and as long as Mr. Ball.

He met nine presidents, from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton, except Gerald R. Ford. He bristled particularly at the proposals of George W. Bush.

"FDR talked about a basic retirement income that would guarantee a certain replacement rate for everybody to build on," Mr. Ball said. "For the last 70 years, we've been operating a system that's useful to every American family. Bush's plan now says we'll maintain the benefits promise only for the poor."

Not everyone was enamored of Mr. Ball and his ideas, arguing that his adherence to the original principles of the Depression-era program impeded reform.

"This is a dynamic, not a static program, and each generation has an obligation to model it according to its needs," said Richard Thau, backer of individual stock accounts as part of the program, in 1999.

Edward D. Berkowitz, who wrote the book "Robert Ball and the Politics of Social Security" in 2003, said Mr. Ball was part of the generation of public servants who came to Washington during the New Deal.

"He was probably the best of them," Berkowitz said. "He was . . . by far the most important bureaucrat who ever worked in the Social Security Administration."

Over the years, Mr. Ball had a first-hand look at how presidents handled the politics and finances of the popular retirement program. He was appointed commissioner of Social Security by Kennedy in 1962, a job he held through Johnson's Democratic administration and the first term of Republican Nixon.

In 1972, when he was running for reelection, Nixon supported a 5 percent benefit increase along with a longtime goal of Mr. Ball's: automatically adjusting benefits to keep pace with inflation. Congress kept the inflation protection, but not before granting a 20 percent benefit increase for 1972.

Nixon had opposed the 20 percent raise as unaffordable. Still, his aide Chuck Colson got the idea of including in the envelope with the first beefed-up Social Security check an insert crediting Nixon with the increase. Mr. Ball threatened to quit and, by implication, go public with the reason, if the White House took this unprecedented step. The White House backed down. Nixon replaced Mr. Ball the next year.

Mr. Ball had called for this year's presidential candidates to insist on no benefit cuts. "The program lifts 13 million elderly beneficiaries above poverty," he wrote in an Oct. 29 column in the Washington Post.

A native of New York City, Mr. Ball earned his undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in economics from Wesleyan University.

Material from the Associated Press was used in this obituary.