William J. Bowe

Born and raised in Chicago, after graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967, Bill Bowe enlisted in the Army’s Intelligence Branch for three years. After training as an Army counterintelligence agent at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, Maryland, he was immediately assigned to the Pentagon. There, he worked in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence as an analyst assessing the need to deploy Regular Army troops in a domestic peacekeeping mission role. This was a task necessitated at the time by the widespread racial unrest, riots, and antiwar protests increasingly common during the Vietnam War period. During his tour of duty, he also evaluated security vulnerabilities in the Army’s Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile System then under development.

After his discharge, Bowe returned to Chicago and the practice of law. Becoming politically active in the 1970s, he worked to defeat the political machine of the city’s longstanding Mayor Richard J. Daley. After leaving private practice in 1979, Bowe embarked on a long career as General Counsel for several businesses, including the news wire service United Press International and Encyclopaedia Britannica. In his 28 years as Britannica’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Bowe helped transition the 250-year-old print reference publisher to its vastly expanded future as an internet-based publisher. Today, its multilingual educational product offerings reach more than 150 million students and customers in over 150 counties.