John William Gardner (October 8, 1912 – February 16, 2002) was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) under President Lyndon Johnson.

During the early days of World War II he was chief of the Latin American Section, Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.

Gardner was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and of the Educational Testing Service and a director of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

He served as chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel on Education, and was chief draftsman of that group's widely circulated report, The Pursuit of Excellence.

[5] Gardner was featured on the cover and in an article of the January 20, 1967 Time magazine, and later that year also presided over the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

[9] In 1980–1983 he co-founded Independent Sector, which lobbies and does public relations work on behalf of tax-exempt organizations in order to retain the charitable deduction.

Notable former fellows include Gary Rosen, editor of The Wall Street Journal's Weekend Review (1988–1989), Rachel Maddow (1994–1995), and Heather Podesta (1993–1994).