W. Willard Wirtz

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For the former president of the Chicago Blackhawks NHL team, see Bill Wirtz.

The official portrait of W. Willard Wirtz hangs in the Department of Labor

William Willard Wirtz (born March 14, 1912) is a former U.S. administrator, cabinet officer, attorney, and law professor. He served as the Secretary of Labor between 1962 and 1969 under the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Wirtz was born at DeKalb, Illinois. While a student at Beloit College, he became a brother of Alpha Phi Omega. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1937 and was immediately appointed to the faculty of the University of Iowa Law School by the Dean of the Law School Wiley Rutledge. He was a professor of law at Northwestern University from 1939 to 1942. He served with the War Labor Board from 1943 to 1945, and was chairman of the National Wage Stabilization Board in 1946. Wirtz eventually returned to Northwestern, where he again taught law until 1954. He was appointed Under-Secretary of Labor in 1961, and succeeded Arthur Goldberg as Secretary of Labor in 1962. He held this post throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, during which time he is credited for having dealt effectively with the various strikes of the 1960s.

Following his public service, he practiced law in Washington, D.C. as a partner in Wirtz & Gentry (1970-78) and Wirtz & Lapointe (1979-).

Wirtz, along with Robert McNamara and Stewart Udall are the only three surviving members of the Kennedy administration cabinet.

Since the 2008 death of Earl Butz, Wirtz has been the oldest living former cabinet member.

The Willard Wirtz Labor Library [1] is the main library of the U.S. Department of Labor in the Frances Perkins Building in Washington, D.C. The library contains 181,000 items, including the James Taylor collection (labor history), the Folio collection (trade union serials) and a 30,000 volume labor law collection.