Frank Shakespeare served on the Hillsdale College board of trustees for 37 years
Former Hillsdale College trustee, diplomat, and media giant Frank Shakespeare died Dec. 14, 2022, at the age of 97.
“Frank Shakespeare was a great man, full of the blarney,” Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn said. “He was always a good friend to me.”
Shakespeare served on the college’s board from 1976 until 2013 and spent several years on the board’s outreach committee, according to Liz Gray, executive assistant and operations manager.
“He was a serious man of high character,” Chief Administrative Officer Rich Péwé said. “He was respected. He was gracious. He cared about defending civil and religious liberty, his family, and serving his country.”
Shakespeare is perhaps best known for his work in media, especially his role in shaping the use of television for political campaigns due to his advertisements for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, where he worked alongside the late Roger Ailes, who later founded Fox News. His other notable achievements include serving as the United States’ ambassador to Portugal and the Vatican under Ronald Reagan, with whom he was close.
Originally from New York, Shakespeare was born in 1925 and raised in a devout Catholic family. Arnn called Shakespeare a patriot, which Shakespeare demonstrated by interrupting his education at the College of the Holy Cross to serve as a naval officer in World War II. He graduated in 1946 and entered the private sector to work in media, getting his start in radio.
He was an early executive of CBS, one of the first television networks, serving as vice president and later executive vice president in the 1960s. Shakespeare left CBS to work on Nixon’s presidential campaign, using his media expertise alongside a team of others, including Ailes, to try to improve Nixon’s public image.
The Washington Post, in its obituary of Shakespeare, described these ads: “Nixon voiced-over ads in a conversational style as if talking to a small group — while images extolling patriotism or decrying social strife, blamed on Democrats, flicked by on the screen.”
Before the work of Shakespeare and the rest of Nixon’s media team, political candidates did not use television as powerfully as they did in 1968. Since then, television has remained an important part of political promotion, Ailes said in “The Selling of the President,” a 1968 book about this campaign.
During Nixon’s presidency, Shakespeare served as director of the United States Information Agency,. He held the position from 1969 until 1973, and instructed libraries controlled by the agency to include more conservative books in their collections.
“He tried to make it more decent and friendly to our own country,” Arnn said.
In 1975, Shakespeare started working as the president and later vice chairman of RKO General, a film and broadcasting company.
Shakespeare returned to government work in 1981, when president Ronald Reagan put him in charge of the Board for International Broadcasting, an agency overseeing Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. After some time, Reagan had other plans for him.
“When Reagan was elected president, he wanted Frank to be an ambassador,” Arnn said. “Frank didn’t want to do that. But Reagan knew Frank pretty well, and he knew that Frank was in love with the Fatima story.”
Shakespeare, a devout Catholic, loved the story of Our Lady of Fatima, an apparition seen by three children in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. Recounting this story to author Paul Kengor in his book “A Pope and a President,” Shakespeare explained why he took the position.
“The reason was Fatima, which fascinated me from my childhood,” Shakespeare told Kengor. “I wasn’t going to be ambassador to Portugal, in my mind; I was going to be ambassador to Fatima. I didn’t tell him that, of course, but that was my thinking.”
He served in this position for about a year before Reagan suggested moving him.
“Later, Reagan called and proposed to move Frank, and Frank said, ‘Mr. President, I agreed to do this only for that one special reason, and there’s no other job that could attract me,’” Arnn said. “Reagan said, ‘How about the Vatican?’ We have had no ambassador to the Vatican for a while, and it is time we fixed that.”
In 1987, Shakespeare became the second ever American ambassador to the Vatican.
“He served as ambassador under Reagan to the Vatican during Pope John Paul II at the height of the Cold War,” Hillsdale College board member and philanthropist Daniel Peters said. “Reagan and JPII were arguably the two most influential leaders in the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Frank Shakespeare was a link between these two great men, Arnn said.
In 1987, shortly after making Shakespeare ambassador to the Vatican, Reagan met with the pope, bringing Shakespeare with him. Peters, who knew Shakespeare from serving alongside him on the board of trustees, recalled a story the latter told him about this experience.
“Reagan met JPII after both had been shot, but both had survived,” Peters said. “In their first meeting Reagan said something like, ‘well, we’ve both been through a lot together, but we survived.’ To which the pope replied, ‘and do you think that was by accident?’ Frank mentioned the point was not lost on Reagan.”