David George Ball

Author of "A Marked Heart: A Spiritual Journey Inspired by Martin Luther King led to Financial Security for Millions of Americans"

 Scheduled for release by History Publishing Company in January, 2009. Look for it in bookstores nationwide!

About the Book and Its Author

Photo below shows David helping Martin Luther King cut a cake at Yale on January 15th, 1959, to celebrate King's 30th Birthday.

In this luminous book of electric honesty David George Ball explores questions many of us face in our own lives.  Do we care too much about what other people think?  How do we affirm our true selves in the face of pressure and conflict?  Where do we go for support?  How do we find our own calling?

When he was born in Gloucester, England just before the beginning of World War II his ex-missionary mother dedicated his life to the Lord.  She planned to make him a minister.  As a scholarship student at Yale he gave the relatively unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. a birthday party.  At the time David was unaware how that meeting would change the course his mother had mapped out for his life. 

Within days of the birthday party David changed his major to political science.  On graduating from Yale he chose to attend law school, but he swore to help make the world a better place in a secular career.  His mother said, “You have been led astray.”

Ball talks candidly about his lifelong battle with his mother and the conflict between his desire to serve God and his temporal ambitions.  He tells a cautionary tale of the strains that his focus on his career put on him and his family.  Climbing the corporate ladder he neglected the call to service inspired by King, but in 1981 he championed the first 401(k) pension plan adopted by a large industrial company.

David found his own calling when President George H. W. Bush nominated him as Assistant Secretary of Labor.  He hung a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall of his office at the Labor Department.  His mission was to get out a road map for the rapid growth of 401(k) plans, and the regulation was published three weeks before the election in 1992.  The New York Times quoted a financial expert saying, “This is the most significant thing to affect the pension industry in years.”  In fact, it fostered a revolution.  By 2005, 401(k) plans covered 47 million participants and $2.4 trillion in assets, and the numbers continue to grow.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David George Ball was born in Gloucester, England in 1936.  His father was a nonconformist minister and his mother had been a missionary in India.  At age seventeen he came to America to attend Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to train for the ministry.  But after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1960 and a law degree from Columbia in 1964 he became an attorney with White & Case, a Wall Street law firm.  From 1970 to 1974 he served as assistant secretary of The Babcock and Wilcox Company.  From 1974 to 1989 he served as a senior executive of AMAX, a metals and mining firm, where he championed the first 401(k) plan adopted by a large industrial company.

In 1989 President George H. W. Bush nominated him as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Pension and Welfare Benefits.  Ball believed that 401(k) pension plans reflected the realities of the modern workplace and best of all the benefits were portable when workers moved from job to job.

At this time many companies still hesitated to adopt 401(k) plans because of concern about liability for losses.  Ball published a regulation that gave workers the opportunity to exercise independent control over their investments and relieved employers of liability for losses arising from workers’ instructions.  401(k) plans now provide a financially secure retirement for millions of Americans.

Ball has testified before Congress, appeared on television and spoken on pension issues at conferences throughout the United States.  From 1993 to 1998 he was managing partner of the Washington office of Williams, Mullen, Christian & Dobbins.  He studied creative nonfiction at the College of William and Mary and has written essays based on his life story for the Virginia Gazette.

Book Endorsements

To learn more about the book -->  David's Interview with Radio Talk-Show host Neal Steele