Education
Simon rose to national attention in the 1960s, due in part to his well-researched book Lincoln's Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years. Despite being published 100 years after Abraham Lincoln's death, it was the first book to exhaustively cite original source documents from Lincoln's eight years in the General Assembly. He later went on to write more than 20 books on a wide range of topics, including interfaith marriages (he was a Lutheran and his wife, Jeanne, was a Catholic), global water shortages, United States Supreme Court nomination battles that focused heavily on his personal experiences with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, his autobiography, and even a well-received book on martyred abolitionist publisher Elijah Lovejoy. His final book, Our Culture of Pandering, was published in October 2003, two months before his death.
After his primary defeat for governor in 1972, Simon founded the Public Affairs Reporting graduate program at Sangamon State University in Springfield, Illinois, which helped launch the careers of more than 500 journalists. Simon, who had written four books at the time; he taught a course titled "Non-Fiction Magazine and Book Writing" at Sangamon State, and also taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1973.
Simon lived for many years in the small town of Makanda, Illinois, south of Carbondale, where he was a professor and director of the SIU Public Policy Institute. While there, he tried to foster the institute into becoming a think tank that could advance the lives of all people. Activities included going to Liberia and Croatia to monitor their elections, bringing major speakers to campus, denouncing the death penalty, trying to end the United States embargo against Cuba, fostering political courage among his students, promoting an amendment to the United States Constitution to end the electoral college, and attempting to limit the president to a single six-year term of office. During the electoral college fiasco that followed the 2000 election, Simon said: "I think if somebody gets the majority vote, they should be president. But, I don't think the system is going to be changed."
