By Stephen McKinley
The man who will head up the Office of Homeland Security created last week by President Bush is Tom Ridge, the Irish-American governor of Pennsylvania.
A two-term Republican governor, Ridge will be responsible for marshalling more than 40 federal agencies and offices into a coherent and focused intelligence organization to prevent further terrorist attacks on American soil.
Announcing the appointment during his speech last Thursday to a joint session of Congress, President Bush said that Ridge would “lead, oversee and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come.”
As yet it is not clear exactly how Ridge will achieve this, whether he will establish a unified command structure or simply coordinate the agencies to work together. But Ridge has an impressive resume already, and many observers have said that he is a capable candidate for the job.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette journalist James O’Toole pondered Ridge’s new appointment at the weekend, and opined: “He has been a soldier and a prosecutor. He knows Washington from years in Congress. He managed a sprawling bureaucracy as the chief executive of the nation’s fourth-largest state — an enterprise with a multibillion-dollar budget. He is a personal confidant of his new boss.”
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The president and Ridge have indeed been close friends since they met when George Bush Sr. ran for president in 1988, and the governor was on the short list of vice presidential candidates when Bush was seeking his runningmate in 2000.
Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Erie, Ridge attended Harvard and served in Vietnam. After law school, he was an assistant district attorney in his home state during the 1970s. He ran for Congress in 1982 and was reelected five times. He was elected governor in 1994 and was reelected in 1998. His governorship has been marked by a tough approach to crime. Ridge is known to be pro-choice, but only in strictly limited circumstances. He told reporters after he accepted his new appointment that he was “saddened that this job is even necessary.”
Pennsylvanians may be saddened, too, at Ridge’s departure. But Philidelphia’s police commissioner and former New York City police official John Timony is a colleague of Ridge, and expressed his opinion that he was “the perfect guy for the job.”
“He’s a real smart guy, a consensus builder. He was right out there at the crash site [of the jetliner in western Pennsylvania],” Timony said. “We had a memorial service about a week ago, which was when I last had a quick word with him.”
“He has what we call in our line of work ‘command presence,’ that is, he gives off confidence and leadership and presence,” Timony said, adding, “there is a huge lack of coordination between all the federal agencies and you need someone to pull it all together and not listen to excuses.”
Pennsylvania was affected by the Sept. 11 day of terror when one of the hijacked planes crashed into a field in the western part of the state. It is believed that a struggle between the hijackers and passengers resulted in the plane crashing away from an intended target, possibly the White House.
Responding to the challenge of his new job, Ridge said, “I will give it everything I have.”