“Governor Richardson passed away peacefully in his sleep last night,” said Mickey Bergman, the center’s vice president. “He lived his entire life in the service of others — including both his time in government and his subsequent career helping to free people held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad.”
Richardson was with his wife of 50 years, Barbara, at the time, Bergman said. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Richardson’s career in politics and diplomacy spanned four decades and included seven terms in Congress, a stint as energy secretary during the Clinton administration and a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007.
In more recent years, he was best known as the globe-trotting statesman and savvy negotiator who was repeatedly dispatched by Democratic and Republican administrations for a wide array of troubleshooting missions. Over two decades, he worked to negotiate the release of hostages and political prisoners, including those being held in North Korea, Myanmar and Russia. In one of his final missions in December, he helped secure the release of WNBA basketball star Brittney Griner from imprisonment in Russia.
His record for brokering cease-fires and promoting conflict resolution won international accolades and multiple nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the 1990s he helped lead nuclear talks with North Korea, and a decade later played a key role in a complex dialogue to end fighting in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
In 1998, three years before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Richardson was sent to Taliban-held Afghanistan by then-President Bill Clinton, becoming the only high-ranking U.S. official to appeal directly to the Taliban leadership to turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for arrest and prosecution. The meeting was unsuccessful, but it was “a dangerous moment,” with a civil war raging in the country’s north, recalled former CIA counterterrorism official Bruce Riedel, who accompanied Richardson for the talks.
For his acumen as a negotiator, he was once dubbed the “diplomatic Red Adair,” a comparison to the world-traveling oil-well firefighter. “He sits there and listens,” former White House adviser and ABC News personality George Stephanopoulos once said, “and people trust him.”
Charismatic and colorful, Richardson was a skilled politician who more than occasionally attracted controversy and even scandal.
At the time of his presidential bid in 2007, he was perhaps the Democratic Party’s most celebrated and courted Latino official. He campaigned in English and Spanish, presenting himself as the embodiment of America’s growing diversity. He was known then, and since, for often striking a humorous and self-deprecating tone.
“I was talking to my mom, and I said, ‘Mom, I’m running for president,’” he said during a 2007 campaign stop in Phoenix. “President of what?” he recalled her asking him in Spanish.
He dropped out of the race in early January after poor performances in early contests.
The winner, Barack Obama, nominated Richardson as commerce secretary, but soon afterward he withdrew his name amid public revelations of a federal grand jury investigation into allegations of a pay-to-play scheme. No charges were brought in the case.
Richardson served during the Clinton administration in two roles: first as U.N. ambassador, then as energy secretary. While at the Energy Department, he successfully pushed for the first national program to compensate tens of thousands of Americans who became ill from exposure to radiation or chemical toxins while working to build the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program — spurred in part by media reports in the 1990s that documented environmental hazards inside the nuclear weapons complex — has since paid out more than $7.6 billion in compensation to ailing nuclear workers or their survivors.
Despite his close association with the Clinton White House, Richardson surprised political observers in 2008 by endorsing Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. His disloyalty drew attacks from Clinton aides and stirred resentments that lingered for years. Longtime Clinton adviser James Carville would deride him in an opinion essay as “Judas Iscariot.”
Yet, more often, Richardson’s warmth and humor disarmed his critics and political foes, even during difficult diplomatic exchanges, friends said.
“Nobody was an adversary to him. Everything was an opportunity, everything was a conversation,” said Richard Klein, a longtime friend of Richardson’s who wrote his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. “He was intensely respectful and curious. With very few exceptions, you couldn’t help but love the guy.”
One of his successors as New Mexico governor hailed Richardson on Saturday as a “giant among men.”
“The entire world lost a champion today,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said. “Bill Richardson was a titan among us, fighting for the little guy, world peace, and everything in between.”
William Blaine Richardson III was born in Pasadena, Calif., on Nov. 15, 1947, the son of an American banker and a Mexican-born homemaker. He grew up mostly in Mexico City, where his father worked as a Citibank executive, but later moved with his family to Connecticut, where he attended prep school. A gifted athlete, he was the starting pitcher for his school’s baseball team and, upon graduation, he was drafted by the then-Kansas City Athletics but turned down the offer to pursue a college degree.
“That was a major disappointment in my life, not playing major-league baseball,” he told People magazine in a 1995 interview. “I guess I made the right choice.”
