Speechwriter for two U.S. presidents

Author, actor, lawyer, economist, columnist

He was also Ferris Bueller’s what? Anyone ...

When I interviewed him for this book, I just had to ask Ben Stein something that had been on my mind. Several years ago I was anchoring a cable business show and he was one of the guests. He was joining us from a studio in Los Angeles and at one point I asked him a question, but he didn’t respond. So I went with the obvious: “Bueller ... Bueller ...”

Crickets. And when he did finally say something, he didn’t reference it. So I figured I must have ticked him off by reducing this accomplished author, lawyer, columnist, and economist to his iconic role as the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

“No, not at all,” he told me. “I didn’t hear you. If I had I would have said something. I love being teased about Ferris Bueller and I will never get tired of it.”

That surprised me a little bit because it’s not the most creative thing a person could throw his way. “No,” he says. “I go through the airport and people say ‘Bueller ... Bueller ...’ all day long to me and I never get tired of it. I like the attention. I don’t want to be anonymous; I want the attention.”

That’s one of the engaging things about Ben Stein—his sense of humor. In fact, when he says something serious, sometimes it still sounds funny. When he rails against a politician as a guest on CNN or Fox News Channel, it often sounds so humorous that you can’t always tell at first whether it’s tongue in cheek or earnest. That’s part of what makes him such an interesting person to talk with.

After all, this is a highly educated man. The son of noted economist Herb Stein, Ben graduated from Columbia University with honors in economics, and graduated from Yale Law School as well. He has worked as an economist at the Department of Commerce, has been a trial lawyer at the Federal Trade Commission, and has taught economics or law at American University, Pepperdine, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

He has written dozens of books, including seven novels, and once served as a speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon. He has been a contributor to Barron’s and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the New York Times, New York, and the American Spectator. He was the star of his own television game show on Comedy Central, Win Ben Stein’s Money, and is a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning and Fox News.

I could go on and on with his accomplishments, but the point is this: John E Kennedy once assembled Nobel laureates at the White House dining room. He is famously quoted as saying, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Maybe Ben Stein isn’t Thomas Jefferson, but he is probably a better actor and a whole lot funnier than the group that JFK dined with. Yet he is charmingly realistic in knowing what people will remember him for. He says:

I expect that on my gravestone it will just say, “Ben Stein” and it will give my dates and then it’ll say “Bueller ... Bueller ...”

And that’s fine with me.

In recent years his conservative political leanings have not always gone over well in the mainstream media. Take his column in the New York Times Business Section. They dropped it after objecting to Ben’s participation in TV commercials.

“That was a total political smear,” he says. “For them to say I can’t make TV commercials, after I had been making TV commercials for twenty years when they hired me, was just unbelievable. And they would ask me for souvenirs from the TV commercials! So for them to say, ‘Oh, we didn’t know you were going to do TV commercials!’ My editor has a collection of souvenirs from those commercials!”

As a loyal reader of his former Sunday column, I still miss reading it. And when I brought it up to Ben it was clear he remained irked by the gray lady. I felt a little bad talking about it, and I’m a little ashamed to say that when he spoke of it with considerable annoyance—it was still kind of funny.

Ben Stein’s Best Mistake, in His Own Words

In 1978, my wife and I bought a beautiful house at Sixth and Hallam in Aspen, Colorado. It was a very beautiful house. The market was terribly weak and we got an incredibly good buy on it. I think we paid something like $270,000 for a beautiful house in Aspen.

We kept it for a while; we had nothing but aggravation. The contractor that was renovating it ripped us off mercilessly—MERCILESSLY! The neighbors one time when we were out of town tried to seize by adverse possession a couple hundred square feet of our property. We rented it out during the ski season and various people mistreated it....

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We just thought, “You know, this is more aggravation than it’s worth, and besides, Aspen is done for, nothing much seems to be happening here, it’s a has-been town.” So we sold it for maybe a hundred thousand more than we paid for it. Within 10 years it was worth 10 times what we had paid for it.

The reason that turns out to be a colossal business mistake, way beyond what it might seem to be, is that in the meantime I’ve bought many, many, many other pieces of real estate, and I never sell them. And that’s turned out to be a big mistake, too! Because now that real estate is a drug [sic] on the market, it’s not the world’s greatest idea to be holding anywhere near as much real estate as I do. I have a startling number of homes, and quite a bit of commercial property.

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And the lesson I learned in Aspen of never selling turned out to not be the right lesson! My lessons almost always have to do with taking the wrong lesson from a situation.

Long ago my incredibly smart father [Herb Stein, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Nixon and President Ford] told me something that I should have borne in mind, which was, “Every time there’s inflation, including in real estate, there is one inevitable corollary to the rule of inflation, which is that all inflations end.” I keep forgetting that all inflations end! But of course, they always start up again, so I’m hoping I live long enough to see it start up again.

There is positive out of this Aspen thing, though, because if I net out all the losses I’ve had in real estate and then subtract them from all the gain I’ve had in real estate, the gains still greatly outnumber losses.

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The lesson that I learned in Aspen, which is I sold too early, has stood me in good stead, because even though I’ve lost money in things I’ve bought in the past few years, if you take the things I’ve bought in the last twenty years, the gains have been quite good.

About Ben Stein

Benjamin J. Stein was born November 25, 1944, in Washington, D.C., the son of the economist and writer Herbert Stein; he grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School. He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class by election of his classmates. He also studied in the graduate school of economics at Yale. He has worked as an economist at The Department of Commerce, a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C., a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C., a university adjunct at American University in Washington, D.C., at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), and at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. At American University he taught about the political and social content of mass culture. He taught the same subject at the UCSC, as well as about political and civil rights under the Constitution. At Pepperdine, he has taught about libel law and about securities law and ethical issues since 1986.

In 1973 and 1974, he was a speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon at the White House and then for Gerald Ford. (He did not write the line “I am not a crook.”) He has been a columnist and editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (R.I.P.) and King Features Syndicate, and a frequent contributor to Barron’s, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles magazine, New York magazine, E! Online, and most of all, has written a lengthy diary for 20 years for the American Spectator. He currently writes a column for the New York Times Sunday Business Section and has for many years, a column about personal finance for Yahoo!, is a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, and for Fox News.

He has written, co-written, and published 30 books, including seven novels, largely about life in Los Angeles, and 21 nonfiction books, about finance and about ethical and social issues in finance, and also about the political and social content of mass culture. He has done pioneering work in uncovering the concealed messages of TV and in explaining how TV and movies get made. His titles include A License to Steal, Michael Milken and the Conspiracy to Bilk the Nation, The View from Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights, DREEMZ, Financial Passages, and Ludes. His most recent books are the best-selling humor self-help series, How to Ruin Your Life. He has also been a longtime screen-writer, writing, among many other scripts (most of which were unmade), the first draft of The Boost, a movie based on Ludes, and the outlines of the lengthy miniseries Amerika and the acclaimed Murder in Mississippi. He was one of the creators of the well-regarded comedy Fernwood Tonight.

He is also an extremely well-known actor in movies, TV, and commercials. His part of the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was recently ranked as one of the 50 most famous scenes in American film. From 1997 to 2002, he was the host of the Comedy Central quiz show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. The show won seven Emmys. He was a judge on CBS’s Star Search, and on VH-1’s America’s Most Smartest Model.

He lives with his wife, Alexandra Denman (a former lawyer), six cats, and three large dogs in Beverly Hills. He is active in pro-animal and pro-life charitable events.