Ben Wattenberg

American writer (1933–2015)

Benjamin Joseph Wattenberg (born Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg; August 26, 1933 – June 28, 2015) was an American author, neoconservative political commentator and demographer, associated with both Republican and Democratic presidents and politicians in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. National Affairs claimed that Wattenberg "challenged and reshaped conventional wisdom ( ) at least once a decade".

Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg was born on August 26, 1933, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in The Bronx. The book has been cited by anti racism activist Jane Elliott as a suggested book for on learning about the problems of racism. In an interview, Elliot also claimed the central tenet of the book as "[t]he main problem confronting the United States these days is that there aren’t enough white babies being born" and that "[h]e says if we don’t change this and change it rapidly, white people will lose their numerical majority in this country and this will no longer be a white man’s land"; in another interview in 2022, Fern Schumer Chapman, who reviewed the book when first released, later called it "outrageous", that Wattenberg "worried that America would no longer be characterized as a nation that is predominately of white European extraction", and stated that "[l]ooking back, I believe he launched the white nationalist movement." Later liberal and progressive writers have also attributed the book's focus on white population as part of a larger belief in white supremacy, and of a larger "white extinction anxiety" to justify anti abortion legislation. In 1995, his book Values Matter Most drew the attention of President Bill Clinton which examined how centralist themes of the Republican party had helped win congressional victories of 1994. As a senior fellow at AEI, he wrote The First Measured Century in 2001 with Theodore Caplow and Louis Hicks. and previously hosted PBS series In Search of the Real America and Ben Wattenberg At Large.

Wattenberg was the son of real estate attorney Judah Wattenberg and Rachel Gutman Wattenberg, and he was the younger brother of actress Rebecca Schull. He had four children, Ruth, Daniel and Sarah with his first wife, the former Marna Hade who died in 1997, and Rachel with his second wife, Diane Abelman. Wattenberg died on June 28, 2015, from complications following surgery.