William Verity, Jr. (January 26, 1917 - January 3, 2007) was a U.S. administrator and steel industrialist. He served as the Secretary of Commerce between 1987 and 1989, under President Ronald Reagan.
Born as Calvin William Verity, Jr., he was a native of Middletown, Ohio. He roomed with John F. Kennedy at Choate, a Connecticut boarding school, starting a friendship with the future president.[1]
Verity worked for most of his career at Armco Steel, a corporation founded by his grandfather, George M. Verity.[2] He started there in 1940, and retired from Armco in 1982.
Between 1980 and 1981, Verity was a chairman in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In 1981, he served as chairman of Reagan's bipartisan task force on Private Sector Initiatives (PSI). In 1983, he was appointed to be a member of PSI's Advisory Council and later served on PSI's Board of Advisors. Between 1979 and 1984, he co-chaired the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade Economic Council, a private sector council of American and Soviet businessmen.
During Verity's time at the U.S. Department of Commerce, he established the Commerce Hall of Fame in 1988 to honor good employees of the department. In 1988, he also created the Office of Space Commerce to support the National Space Council. That office was an early version of the Office of Space Commercialization, an office created to promote the effective commercial use of outer space. According to Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, Verity kept a passage from Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged on his desk, including the line "How well you do your work . . . [is] the only measure of human value."[3]
Verity and his wife Peggy had two sons and a daughter together. Peggy Verity died in 1999.
Verity died of complications of pneumonia on January 3, 2007 in Beaufort, South Carolina.[4] He is buried in Middletown, Ohio.
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| Preceded by Malcolm Baldrige |
United States Secretary of Commerce Served under: Ronald Reagan October 19, 1987 – January 30, 1989 |
Succeeded by Robert Mosbacher |
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