Bill Richardson, who served two terms as governor of New Mexico and 14 years as a congressman, and subsequently remained dedicated to freeing Americans who were held hostage or who he believed were being unjustly imprisoned by hostile countries abroad, died Friday at his summer home in Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He was 75.
His death was announced by the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, which he founded. A cause was not given.
Under President Bill Clinton, Mr. Richardson also served as Ambassador to the United Nations, succeeding Madeleine Albright in early 1997, after serving as a member of the New Mexico delegation to the House of Representatives from January 1983 to February 1997, and as Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. He was Clinton’s energy secretary from 1998 to 2001.
Born in California – his mother had traveled from Mexico City, where the family lived, to Pasadena to give birth to her child, so there was no doubt about his citizenship – and descended from William Brewster, a passenger on the Mayflower, Mr. Richardson served as the country’s only Hispanic governor during his two terms in office from 2003 to 2011.
Rep. Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, described Mr. Richardson in a statement as “one of the most powerful Hispanics in politics this nation has ever seen.”
But his popularity in his home state — he was reelected in 2006 by a margin of 68 percent to 32 percent, a record for New Mexico — did not translate into national office.
In 2008, Mr. Richardson launched a short-lived campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire caucuses. Although he served in the Clinton administration, he supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
After winning the presidency, Mr. Obama nominated Mr. Richardson to be commerce secretary, but Mr. Richardson withdrew pending an investigation into allegations of unfair business dealings in his home state. No charges were ever brought against him and the investigation was later closed.
After Mr. Richardson completed his second term as governor, he honed the quasi-public and freelance diplomacy skills he had learned in college and on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and while working on congressional relations for the state , further expanded department under Henry Kissinger.
His individual humanitarian missions on behalf of approximately 80 families resulted in the release of hostages and American soldiers in countries hostile to the United States, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and Colombia.
“I plead guilty to doing photo ops, saving people and improving people’s lives,” he once said.
In 2006, he persuaded Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to release Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Paul Salopek.
The next year, he traveled to North Korea to recover the remains of American soldiers killed in the Korean War.
He helped negotiate the release of Michael White, a Marine veteran released by Iran in 2020; flew to Moscow to meet with Russian government officials as part of a prisoner exchange in the months before the release of Trevor Reed, a Marine veteran; and worked on the case of Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who was held captive by Moscow and later released.
He also helped secure the release of American journalist Danny Fenster from a prison in Myanmar in 2021 and this year negotiated the release of Taylor Dudley, who crossed the border from Poland into Russia.
Mr. Richardson was respectful, realistic, smart and never condescending. His protocol included: Carry a few nice pens with you and “if your opponent admires one, give it to him.” But he added: If your watch is admired, don’t give it away. If you do that, it is a sign of weakness.” Also find out where you can settle. Identify eight essential goals and achieve five.
However, not every mediation or negotiation was successful. In 1998, while on a mission for Mr. Clinton, he failed to persuade Taliban leaders to hand over Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.
After speaking to autocrats like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro, Mr. Richardson once described himself as an “informal undersecretary of state for thugs.” He put it more diplomatically in the title of a 2013 book: ““How to Flatter a Shark: Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.” (He also wrote a memoir, “Between Worlds: The Making of an American Life,” published in 2005.)
“There was not a person that Governor Richardson would not talk to if there was a promise to restore freedom to one person,” Mickey Bergman, the vice president of the Richardson Center, said in a statement.
Given all of Mr. Richardson’s public positions, the center said in a statement, his lasting legacy will be his participation “in ‘fringe diplomacy’ to open the doors to negotiations with foreign parties to bring detainees home.”
William Blaine Richardson III was born on November 15, 1947 in Pasadena. His father, who was of Anglo-American and Mexican descent, was a bank executive from Boston who worked in Mexico for what is now Citibank and was born on a ship en route to Nicaragua when his own father, a biologist, was on his ship. Collect museum specimens.
“My father had a complex because he wasn’t born in the United States,” Richardson told The Washington Post in 2007.
For this reason, his mother, Maria Luisa Lopez-Collada Marquez, the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Spanish father who had been his father’s secretary, was sent to California to give birth to Bill.
When he was 13 years old, Bill was sent to the United States and attended Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1970, he earned a bachelor’s degree in French and political science from Tufts University in Middlesex County, Massachusetts – he was also a pitcher in the Cape Cod League – and a master’s degree in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts in 1971.
In 1972 he married Barbara Flavin, whom he had met in high school. She survives him. His survivors include her daughter, Heather Blaine Richardson.
After working in Washington, Mr. Richardson became passionate about politics and moved to New Mexico, where his Hispanic heritage gave him the best chance of being elected to public office. He ran for Congress in 1980 and lost – his only electoral defeat until the 2008 presidential campaign – but was elected in 1980 in a new district in northern New Mexico.
During his time in Congress, he sponsored a number of bills related to Native American rights.
His record as energy minister was mixed. He presided at a time when computer equipment containing nuclear weapons secrets was lost at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as during the government’s botched investigation and the firing of Wen Ho Lee. a former weapons scientist who spent nine months in solitary confinement for misusing sensitive information — only to plead guilty to one count of misusing computer files and receive a pardon from a federal judge.
Mr. Richardson established more efficient energy standards for air conditioning and other equipment, founded the National Nuclear Security Administration, implemented a nuclear waste management plan and oversaw the return of 84,000 acres of federal land to the Northern Ute Tribe of Utah.
As governor, he increased teacher pay, abolished the death penalty, signed a law allowing New Mexicans to carry concealed handguns, established a fund to finance public works, supported gay rights, raised the minimum wage and provided four-year preschool programs to -old woman. But he refused to pardon William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid, for killing a New Mexico sheriff 130 years earlier. (Mr. Bonney was said to have been promised a pardon if he testified in another case.)
Mr. Richardson said of his two terms as governor: “It’s the most fun. You can achieve the best. They set the agenda.”
When Mr. Richardson was at the United Nations in 1997, he was asked by the White House to interview Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who would play a role in Mr. Clinton’s impeachment and who wanted to return to New York from Washington for a career . He is said to have offered her one, which she declined.
However, he mostly prevailed because he negotiated tirelessly and had a gregarious personality.
In his first campaign for governor, he set a Guinness World Record by shaking 13,392 hands in eight hours at the New Mexico State Fair. And the lengths he went to to impress the president, who appointed him ambassador to the UN, became the stuff of legend. These means were not necessarily always intended.
In December 1996, he helped free three aid workers, an American, an Australian and a Kenyan, who were being held in Sudan, which the United States had declared a terrorist state after he persuaded rebel leaders to accept their demand for millions of dollars to drop ransom and instead agree to exchange the prisoners for rice, jeeps, radios and a health check-up in their disease-ridden camp.
When Mr. Richardson returned to Washington to brief President Clinton on the negotiations, prominently on the president’s desk in the Oval Office was a copy of the New York Times article on the hostage affair.
It vividly described a negotiating table at which barefoot boys armed with rifles and an entourage of observers, including vultures, sat on the roofs of thatched huts while a goat was roasted nearby.
As Mr. Richardson later told New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, the president asked him, “Did you all eat the goat?” Mr. Richardson actually admitted as much.
Mr. Clinton smiled and asked, “How about becoming ambassador to the United Nations?”