Activist explores personal freedoms

He is a long-time friend of Barry Goldwater, who was "The Father of the Conservative Movement." Yet he calls himself a "fallen-away Republican," and one friend classified him as "staunchly liberal."

William Rentschler '49 — a longtime freelance writer, eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and former United States Senate candidate — has become a principal advocate for reforming the criminal justice system, co-founding the Justice Summit 2000, an Illinois group that supports such reform.

"We founded it because a group of us felt that the criminal justice system is flawed and erratic," Rentschler said.

Members of the Justice Summit 2000 include former Sen. Paul Simon, former Illinois Supreme Court justice Seymour Simon and several other prominent politicians, judges and university officials.

Rentschler — an American history major, 'Prince' chairman and Colonial Club president while at Princeton — will speak today in McCormick 106 at 4:30 p.m. in a lecture titled "The Loss of Freedom — Yours and Mine."

"My point is that there are a great many institutions that are intruding on our personal freedoms," he said, listing the FBI, police and the criminal justice system as such institutions.

In addition to his two senatorial races, Rentschler held positions in the campaigns for Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and Senators Charles Percy and Barry Goldwater.

Rentschler recently published "Goldwater: A Tribute to a Twentieth-Century Political Icon" — a collection of memoirs by and about Goldwater, the hard-right, five-term Arizona senator who lost a landslide presidential election to Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Yet during the past decade, Rentschler said he has been sliding increasingly toward the left in response to what he describes as the far right gaining control of the Republican party.

In an editorial printed in USA Today in 1995 titled "I'm an embarrassed Republican," Rentschler criticized staunch Republicans for abandoning the principles of conservatism, resorting to racism and becoming sycophants to big business.

Rentschler said he stands for prison reform and gun control, adding he is against the death penalty.

"Ultimately what's going to happen is the death penalty is going to be thrown out," Rentschler said, casually unbuttoning his houndstooth jacket with a flip of the thumb and index finger. "There are too many errors. There's too great a prospect of executing someone who's innocent."

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Rentschler speaks confidently, never wavering to qualify a statement because of his decades of experience in journalism. He is well versed in anecdotes, citing incidents from 1960s politics, Whitewater and current events to support his convictions.

"Another thing that is needed to control crime better is much stronger control on guns," he continued. "There are more restrictions on the manufacture of teddy bears than the manufacture of guns."

Rentschler has written several articles since George W. Bush acceded the presidency after November's hotly contested election, criticizing some of Bush's policies and reproving the tax cuts as "rigged to the wealthy."

Rentschler also said he is wary about Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld '54's plan for a missile defense system, fearing that such a system would trigger more problems than it would solve.

"It will mistakenly cost us billions and billions of dollars, and there is absolutely no assurance that it will work," he said. "There's a feeding frenzy for a lot of defense contractors. It might kick off another arms race."

Nominated eight times for the Pulitzer Prize, Rentschler is an acclaimed journalist, winning three Peter Lisagor Awards and the Chicago Headline Club's first annual "Ethics in Journalism" award and having been named the top U.S. columnist in 1996 by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

After graduating from Princeton with a 60,000-word honors thesis on the founder of The New York Times, he served as editor and publisher of the 11 News/Voice community newspapers on Chicago's North Shore.

He is currently chairman of R.L. Kaiser Company — founded by his son to market consumer products through mass retailers and the Internet — and is co-authoring a book with Sen. Simon titled "Get Smart on Crime."