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Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, a longtime fixture of Democratic politics with turns as Energy Secretary and United Nations ambassador under the Clinton administration, died on Friday, the Richardson Center for Global Engagement said in a statement. He was 75.
He was first elected to the US House in 1983, representing New Mexico’s Third District. Richardson later served as US ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of Energy before being elected governor of New Mexico in 2002. He served two terms before leaving office in 2011.
After an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2008, Richardson launched the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a non profit promoting international peace, in 2011.
Over the past three decades, Richardson traveled the world negotiating and securing the release of Americans imprisoned overseas in Bangladesh, North Korea, Sudan, Colombia, and Iraq, among other countries. In 2022, he traveled to Moscow to discuss the release of detained basketball star, Britney Griner, who was arrested at a Moscow airport when authorities found hash oil in her luggage.
Richardson was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California. He grew up in Mexico City, Mexico, leaving to attend boarding school in Massachusetts in 1960.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and French from Tufts University in 1970 and a master’s degree from Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1971.
He married Barbara Richardson in 1972 and had one daughter.
Our thoughts are with his family and everyone who knew him at this time.
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