Path to Power
Richardson was born in California but grew up in the Coyoacan neighborhood of Mexico City, where his father was head of Citibank. His mother is from Mexico and still lives there, but his father is from Boston. Richardson went to Middlesex School in Concord, N.H. before earning his undergraduate degree from Tufts University, his father’s alma mater. He was a star baseball player at Tufts, but he injured his pitching arm during his junior year. Instead of playing in the Major Leagues, Richardson got a master’s degree from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
After finishing graduate school in 1971, Richardson got a medical deferment from the Vietnam draft and moved to Washington. His first job was as a staffer for the Wednesday Group, a gathering of moderate Congressional Republicans. He also worked in the State Department’s Congressional Relations office and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s staff on human rights. He lived in Washington for about five years, finishing with a low-level job at the State Department and doing a short stint with Sen. Hubert Humphrey’s (D-Minn.) staff.
Richardson moved West to New Mexico in 1978, three years after he first visited the state. He became executive director of the New Mexico Democratic Party, but was fired when the new governor started in 1979. In 1980, he challenged Republican incumbent Rep. Manuel Lujan. He put up a good, though unsuccessful, fight.
His 1980 House loss made him the favorite for New Mexico's third House seat, which opened for the 1982 race. It was not an easy fight. Democrats figured the heavily Hispanic and Indian- American district would be a Democratic stronghold and many candidates threw their hats into the ring, including Lieutenant Governor Roberto Mondragon (D) and future Congressman Tom Udall (D). Richardson won the primary with 36 percent of the vote, and then won the general election, 64 to 35 percent.
U.S. House and United Nations
Richardson served in the U.S. House for the next 15 years. He was given a spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee in his first term, and helped pass a bill to improve health care in New Mexico and increase the number of nurses in the state. Richardson was an aggressive legislator even as a freshman, but he gained a reputation around Washington for his negotiating tactics.
As a congressman, Richardson was able to bargain for the release of captives in Iraq, Bangladesh, Burma, Cuba, North Korea and Sudan. “The reason they [the administration] use me and not Jimmy Carter or [Jesse] Jackson is because they’re lone rangers with their own agenda,” Richardson said. “I try to stick to the administration’s speech.” Richardson met and negotiated with some of the world’s most infamous dictators: Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Fidel Castro of Cuba.
When Clinton was elected to a second term, he nominated Richardson to be ambassador to the United Nations, where Richardson continued to work as a mediator. He stayed in that job for a little over a year until Energy Secretary Federico Pena resigned in June 1998, prompting Clinton to nominate Richardson to that post.
During the Clinton impeachment crisis, Richardson also came under fire for offering a U.N. job to White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Richardson repeatedly said he didn’t talk to President Clinton about the hiring, but the incident may probably damaged him politically.
Energy Secretary
As energy secretary, Richardson pushed nuclear energy production, but also pleased environmental activists with his support for a bill requiring electricity companies to generate 7.5 percent of their electricity from environmentally-benign sources. He pledged to visit every Energy Department facility and lobbied Congress to declassify the medical records of workers at nuclear plants whose injuries the government denied being work-related. But during his time as head of the 100,000-person department, Richardson had to deal with a handful of controversies that may have hurt his ambitions for higher office.
Los Alamos
In early 1999, Wen Ho Lee, an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was accused of spying for China and fired. Lee denied the charges and eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling nuclear information. Then in May 1999, a forest fire ravished the Los Alamos facility, shutting down the lab for two weeks. During the fire, two computer hard-drives that contained design details of nuclear laboratories went missing, and six managers were suspended during an investigation. The disks were found a week later, but it was just one of a series of problems at the facility during Richardson’s tenure.
When allegations of Chinese spying surfaced, Richardson improved security and quickly fired Lee. But the energy secretary was criticized for the lax security that led to the incident, his handling of the crisis and the botched case against the alleged spy. Some still accuse Richardson of using racial profiling to single out Lee.
New Mexico Governor
Richardson never hid the fact that he was ambitious. He kept a house in Santa Fe throughout his time in Washington and was mentioned as a possible running mate to Al Gore during the 2000 election. After Gore lost, Richardson moved back to New Mexico and began to prepare for the 2002 governor’s race. In January 2002, he announced his candidacy and his plan to shake 600 hands per day. He is in the Guinness Book of World Records for shaking 13,392 hands in eight hours at the New Mexico State Fair during the campaign, a record for a single day.
In the 2002 gubernatorial contest, Richardson raised and spent huge amounts of money and easily beat the other candidates. The new governor had spent $7.3 million by the end of the general election.
It didn’t take long for Richardson to get to work. Before he took office, the Democrat asked for the resignation of hundreds of employees and he required new employees to submit letters of resignation that he could invoke at any time. Richardson immediately started lobbying for a tax cut and, less than a month into his term, signed a bill cutting the top income tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent. During his first year, he signed a bill cracking down on drunk driving and approved an executive order extending employee benefits to same-sex couples.
In 2006, Richardson won 69 percent of the vote in his re-election bid, the highest percentage for a gubernatorial candidate in state history. He lost only one county, and he lost that county by just six votes.
Overwhelmingly popular in an important battleground state, Richardson decided to run for president in 2008. Richardson came in fourth during the Iowa caucuses, but his campaign made a decision to encourage his allies to vote for Barack Obama as a second choice. Many assumed that there was a quid pro quo for Richardson, a charge that both Obama and Richardson denied.
After Obama won the presidential election, Richardson’s name came up as a potential secretary of state candidate. But when that job was offered to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Richardson became a top choice for commerce secretary.
In December 2008, Richardson accepted the nomination for commerce secratary, but withdrew his name from contention in early January 2009, citing an investigation into allegations that his office asked a state agency to hire a firm after large donations from the firm to Richardson's political action committees. The governor said the investigation would clear his name, but he didn't want to slow down the confirmation process.
