William Floyd Weld (born July 31, 1945) is an American attorney, businessman, author, and politician who served as the 68th governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997. Weld was Gary Johnson’s running mate in the 2016 presidential election for the Libertarian party. Weld also ran for president in 2020.
A Harvard graduate, Weld began his career as legal counsel to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary before becoming the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and, later, the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. He worked on a series of high-profile public corruption cases and resigned in protest of an ethics scandal and associated investigations into Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Weld was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1990. In the 1994 election, he was reelected by the largest margin of victory in Massachusetts history. In 1996, he was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, losing to Democratic incumbent John Kerry. Weld resigned as governor in 1997 to focus on his nomination by President Bill Clinton to serve as United States Ambassador to Mexico; due to opposition by socially conservative Senate Foreign Relations committee Chairman Jesse Helms, he was denied a hearing before the Foreign Relations committee and withdrew his nomination. After moving to New York in 2000, Weld sought the Republican nomination for governor of New York in the 2006 election; when the Republican Party instead endorsed John Faso, Weld withdrew from the race.
Weld became involved in presidential politics in later years. In 2016, he left the Republican Party to become the Libertarian Party running mate of former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson. They received nearly 4.5 million votes, the most for a Libertarian ticket and the most for any third-party ticket since Ross Perot's Reform Party in 1996.
Returning to the Republican Party, Weld announced in April 2019 that he would challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican primaries. He won his first and only delegate of the primaries in the Iowa caucus in February, making him the first Republican since Pat Buchanan in 1992 to win a delegate while running against an incumbent president. Weld suspended his campaign on March 18, 2020, shortly after Trump's delegate count made him the presumptive Republican nominee, and placed second in 22 states and second overall with 2.4% of the popular vote, collecting up to 13% in protest votes against Trump in several states. He also placed second in allocated delegates. He endorsed Democrat Joe Biden seven months later.
Early life and family
William Floyd Weld was born in Smithtown, New York, on July 31, 1945. He was primarily raised on a farm in Smithtown, though his family also owned a residence in Manhattan. His father, David (1911–1972), was an investment banker; his mother, Mary Nichols Weld (1913–1986), was a descendant of William Floyd, a signatory of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. His ancestor Edmund Weld was among the earliest students (class of 1650) at Harvard College; eighteen other Welds have attended Harvard, and two Harvard buildings are named for the family. A distant cousin, General Stephen Minot Weld Jr., fought with distinction in the Civil War.Eicher, John H. and Eicher, David J. Civil War High Commands, p. 760. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001. Eicher, John H. and Eicher, David J. Civil War High Commands, p. 559. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Weld attended Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in classics from Harvard College in 1966. He studied economics at University College, Oxford. After returning to the US, he graduated with a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1970.
His siblings are Francis "Tim" Weld, David Weld, and Anne Collins. His maternal grandfather was the ichthyologist and ornithologist John Treadwell Nichols, and his first cousin is the novelist John Nichols.
Early career Nixon impeachment inquiry Weld began his legal career as a junior counsel on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry staff during the 1974 impeachment process against Richard Nixon. He contributed to the groundbreaking "Constitutional Grounds for Presidential Impeachment" report, which detailed the historical basis and standards for impeachment of a president. He also worked on researching whether impoundment of appropriated funds was an impeachable offense. Among his colleagues was Hillary Clinton.
U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Weld's experience on the impeachment inquiry staff sparked his interest in criminal law. He returned to Massachusetts, where he ran for Massachusetts Attorney General in 1978, losing to Democratic incumbent Francis X. Bellotti, 1,532,835 votes (78.4%) to 421,417 (21.6%).
In 1981, Weld was recommended to President Reagan by Rudy Giuliani, then Associate U.S. Attorney General, for appointment as the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts. During Weld's tenure, the Attorney General's office prosecuted some of New England's largest banks in cases involving money-laundering and other white-collar crimes. Weld expanded an ongoing public corruption investigation of the administration of Boston Mayor Kevin White. More than 20 city employees were indicted, pleaded guilty, or were convicted of a range of charges, including several of the mayor's supporters. In 1985, The Boston Globe said Weld "has been by far the most visible figure in the prosecution of financial institutions."
Weld gained national recognition in fighting public corruption: he won 109 convictions out of 111 cases.
In 1983, The Boston Globe wrote: "The U.S. Attorney's office has not lost a single political corruption case since Weld took over, an achievement believed to be unparalleled in the various federal jurisdictions."
Promotion to Justice Department
In 1986, President Reagan promoted Weld to head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department in Washington, where Weld oversaw 700 employees. Serving from September 15, 1986, until March 29, 1988, Weld was responsible for supervising all federal prosecutions, including those investigated by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as the work of the 93 U.S. Attorneys (who by then included Rudy Giuliani in Manhattan). During this time, Weld worked on some of the Reagan administration's most significant prosecutions and investigations, including the capture of Panama's Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Weld was on the prosecution team against NASA Administrator James Beggs and General Dynamics that caused Beggs to take a leave of absence shortly before the Challenger disaster. After the trial exonerated Beggs, Weld was asked to apologize to him. He refused.
In 1988, while serving as Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department Criminal Division, Weld wrote the House Judiciary Committee a memorandum formally reviewing the recommendations of the House Select Committee on Assassinations final report and reported conclusions of active investigations on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. In light of investigative reports from the FBI's Technical Services Division and the National Academy of Sciences Committee determining that "reliable acoustic data do not support a conclusion that there was a second gunman" in the Kennedy assassination, and that all investigative leads known to the Justice Department for both assassinations had been "exhaustively pursued", the Department concluded "that no persuasive evidence can be identified to support the theory of a conspiracy in either the assassination of President Kennedy or the assassination of Dr. King."
In March 1988, Weld resigned from the Justice Department, together with Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns and four aides, in protest of improper conduct by Attorney General Edwin Meese. In July, Weld and Burns jointly testified before Congress in favor of prosecuting Meese for his personal financial conduct, following a report by a special prosecutor investigating Meese. Meese resigned in July, shortly after Weld's and Burns's testimony.
Weld was a senior partner at Hale and Dorr from 1988 until 1990.
Governor of Massachusetts (1991–1997)
In 1990, Weld announced his candidacy for governor of Massachusetts to succeed the outgoing Michael Dukakis. Republicans made up under 14% of the Massachusetts electorate and a Republican had not won the gubernatorial election since 1970, but Weld's liberal stances on social issues made him a viable candidate for office in the state. At the state Republican convention, party officials backed Steven Pierce over Weld, and initial polling had Pierce ahead by 25 percentage points, but Weld gained enough support to force a primary, and won the nomination over Pierce by 94,249 votes.
In the general election, he faced John Silber, the president of Boston University. Polls showed Weld anywhere from a statistical tie to trailing by as many as ten points. Voter dissatisfaction with the state's Democratic majority gave Weld support for his promises to reduce the state deficit, lower the unemployment rate, and cut taxes, while Silber's statements to the right of Weld on social issues caused many Democratic voters to vote for Weld. On November 6, 1990, he was elected as the 68th governor of Massachusetts by 75,939 votes, becoming Massachusetts's first Republican governor since Francis W. Sargent left office in 1975. Weld is generally considered to have been a moderate or liberal Republican governor. He is fiscally conservative and socially liberal.