Janet Napolitano

President of University of California, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, former governor of Arizona

A former United States attorney, Janet Napolitano was in the middle of her second term as governor of Arizona when president-elect Barack Obama tapped her to head the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Napolitano, a Democrat, was sworn in as the third secretary of homeland security on January 21, 2009, a day after her confirmation by the Senate in a unanimous vote that also approved the appointments of five other cabinet members. Established in 2003 in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, DHS is the third-largest federal agency, after the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

The first woman to chair the National Governors Association (NGA), Napolitano was instrumental in creating both the NGA's Public Safety Task Force and its Governors Homeland Security Advisors Council (GHSAC). In 2005, Time magazine named her one of the five best governors in the United States.

Education and Early Career

The first of the three children of Leonard M. Napolitano and the former Jane Winer, Janet Ann Napolitano was born on November 29, 1957, in New York City. Her father, a professor of anatomy, was a dean emeritus of the University of New Mexico College of Medicine. Napolitano and her brother and sister were raised first in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then later in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she attended Comanche Elementary School, Madison Middle School, and Sandia High School. As a junior at Sandia, Napolitano participated in New Mexico's Girls State program, a nationwide leadership and citizenship program sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary and was elected lieutenant governor of her group. She also edited the student newspaper and played the guitar and the clarinet, the latter as a member of the school band. At her graduation in 1975, she earned an award for being the most accomplished musician in her class.

After high school, Napolitano attended Santa Clara University in California, where she majored in political science. During her third year she won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, a federal scholarship awarded to juniors who intend to pursue graduate degrees and careers in public service. In 1979, she earned a BS degree summa cum laude from Santa Clara and became the school's first female valedictorian. She had also gained membership in the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Sigma Nu. That year, thanks to her father's acquaintance with US senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, she secured an internship as an analyst with the Senate Budget Committee. Among other tasks, she helped project the possible long-term costs to the US government of the Chrysler bailout of 1979–1980—the government's $1.5 billion loan to the auto manufacturer Chrysler to save the company from bankruptcy.

In 1980, Napolitano entered the University of Virginia School of Law (UVA Law), where she won a Dillard fellowship, named for former UVA Law dean and International Court of Justice judge Hardy Cross Dillard, for excellence in legal research and writing. She was also elected to the Raven Society, the university's most prestigious honor society. After receiving her juris doctor degree in 1983, Napolitano moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to work for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1984, the same year she became a member of the Arizona bar, Napolitano left her job with Judge Schroeder for the Phoenix law firm of Lewis and Roca, where she specialized in commercial and appellate litigation. In her first year at the firm, she worked with John P. Frank, an esteemed legal scholar who had argued many desegregation cases in the 1950s. Frank, who often worked pro bono, had represented Ernesto Miranda in the landmark 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona. Napolitano became a partner in Lewis and Roca in 1989. On her own time during the next year, she traveled in eastern Europe with a delegation from a national teachers' organization and advised high-school instructors how to teach students the skills necessary for maintaining a representative democracy.

In 1991, Napolitano served with Frank as cocounsel to Anita F. Hill, a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma, when the US Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Hill regarding charges she had made concerning Clarence Thomas, whom President George H. W. Bush had nominated to succeed the retiring Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Through a leak to the press, the committee had learned that before the hearings, Hill had told Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigators that during her stint as one of Thomas's staff attorneys at the US Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s, Thomas had sexually harassed her. The committee had closed the hearings after voting 13–1 in favor of sending Thomas's nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation, then reopened them to question both Hill and Thomas about her accusations. During those special hearings, held on October 11–13, 1991, and televised nationally, Frank advised Hill while Napolitano helped line up and work with witnesses who testified on Hill's behalf, including California judge Susan Hoerchner. The hearings ended when Thomas announced that he would not submit to any more questioning. On October 15 the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48. The outcome of the special hearings left Napolitano with feelings of disillusionment and dismay.

Later Career

In July 1993, Napolitano learned from US senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona that President Bill Clinton wanted to nominate her for the post of US attorney for the District of Arizona. Although at first she did not know what the position entailed, she did some research, then accepted the nomination and began working as the acting US attorney. During the September 1993 hearings the Senate Judiciary Committee held to consider her nomination, several Republican senators contended that she was unfit for the job because she had improperly interrupted Susan Hoerchner during the Clarence Thomas hearings in an attempt to coach her. Napolitano vehemently denied the accusation and refused to answer questions about her conversations with Hoerchner, citing attorney-client privilege. On September 30 the Judiciary Committee voted 12–6 to confirm Napolitano, but her Republican detractors blocked the nomination from coming to the floor of the Senate. Several journalists later reported that a Judiciary Committee staff member, not Napolitano, had interrupted Hoerchner. On November 19, 1993, after a vote that ended a Republican filibuster, the Senate confirmed Napolitano.

Napolitano's responsibilities as a US attorney for Arizona included the prosecution of criminal cases brought by the federal government, the prosecution or defense of civil cases in which the US government was either the plaintiff or the defendant, and the collection of debts owed to the federal government that could not be collected in any other way. Cases involving drug trafficking, gang-related violence on Indian reservations, hate crimes, and white-collar scams made up much of her workload. Under her leadership, her office prosecuted more than six thousand crimes—more than any previous federal prosecutor in the state. Her achievements also included procuring $65 million in federal funds to enable Arizona cities to hire additional police officers and helping the FBI set up an office in Kingman, Arizona, and investigate the activities of Timothy J. McVeigh in Kingman in the months before he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1995.

In November 1997 Napolitano resigned from her job and announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination for attorney general of Arizona. After running unopposed in the Democratic primary, she faced Republican Tom McGovern, who had served briefly as a special assistant to the state attorney general. The two candidates agreed on most issues, with the notable exception of abortion; Napolitano was pro-choice, believed that so-called partial-birth abortions should be legal, and opposed the requirement that parents be notified when minors sought abortions, while McGovern took the opposite positions. During their campaigns Napolitano, who was unmarried, rarely veered from remarks about the issues or her professional experience, while McGovern, who had three children, often spoke about his family, perhaps to subtly raise the issue of the never-married Napolitano's sexual orientation. On Election Day, November 3, 1998, Napolitano emerged victorious, with 50.4 percent of the vote to McGovern's 47.5 percent. (The Libertarian candidate captured the remainder.) She was the first woman to serve as Arizona's attorney general. No other state had ever filled its top five elected executive positions with women; besides Napolitano (the only Democrat), the new state government included Governor Jane Dee Hull, Secretary of State Betsey Bayless, Treasurer Carol Springer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Graham Keegan, collectively nicknamed the "Fab Five" by the media.

As attorney general Napolitano distinguished herself as an advocate for children, women, senior citizens, and the environment. For example, when she successfully sued shoe manufacturers for price fixing, the damages paid enabled the state to maintain and expand women's shelters. She also created an Office for Women in the attorney general's department, aggressively prosecuted con artists who preyed on the elderly, and set up a unit to investigate Internet users' exploitation of children and others through an array of enticements and scams. She filed a consumer-fraud lawsuit against Qwest Communications International, accusing the company of placing unauthorized charges on consumers' bills and engaging in false and misleading advertising, which resulted in the firm refunding $721,000 to Arizonans. After three police officers died and another was injured in explosions of Ford Crown Victoria sedans, the model used by the Phoenix police department, she exacted an agreement from Ford to install shields around the vehicles' fuel tanks. Among Napolitano's most significant accomplishments was the reduction of the backlog of unresolved child-abuse cases from six thousand to fewer than nine hundred. By the time she left the attorney general's office, Napolitano had argued cases before the US Supreme Court and at The Hague, as well as countless federal circuit courts throughout the country.

On January 15, 2002, Napolitano announced her candidacy for the governorship of Arizona; the incumbent, Hull, who had served the remainder of Governor Fife Symington's second term after his conviction on charges of bank fraud in 1997 and who had won election to a full term in 1998, was barred by law from seeking a third consecutive term. Running against three others in the Democratic primary, Napolitano secured the nomination with about 57 percent of the total vote. In the general election she faced (in addition to eight minor-party candidates who stood little chance of winning) the Republican Matt Salmon, a former US congressman and former Arizona state senator. In a bitterly fought race that centered on Arizona's looming $1 billion budget deficit, Salmon branded Napolitano a “tax and spend liberal,” while Napolitano derided Salmon's promise not to raise taxes and his assurances that he would personally attract a half million new jobs to the state. Napolitano opted to depend entirely on public funds for her campaign; Salmon chose to rely on private contributions and spent a significant portion of his time trying to raise money. When the ballots were counted in November, Napolitano's tally came to 566,284 (46.2 percent of the total), only 11,819 more than Salmon's 554,465 (45.2 percent).

In a PBS NewsHour discussion on January 3, 2003, three days before she was sworn in as governor, Napolitano noted that the financial woes Arizona was then suffering were being compounded by population growth. In June 2003, although both the thirty-seat state senate and the sixty-seat state house had Republican majorities, she and the legislature agreed on a budget for fiscal year 2004 with which she felt largely satisfied, thanks in part to the governor's right to make line-item vetoes. Although it exceeded the previous year's total by $400 million, it called for no new taxes and no substantive cuts in essential services.

In Napolitano's 2004 State of the State address, she declared that the budget deficit had shrunk by two-thirds. Among other accomplishments in 2003, she cited the introduction of the CoppeRx Card, which enabled all Arizonans eligible for Medicare to buy prescription drugs at discounts greater than those offered through the newly launched and far more complicated federal program. The state agency responsible for investigating child abuse had received increased funding, as had schools, shelters, and drug-addiction programs. In 2003 Arizona became the first state to complete a comprehensive homeland-security plan, and it began setting up a 211 phone system (similar to the 911 system for summoning police or other emergency services) for providing information during emergencies.

In addition to her duties as governor, Napolitano was proving to be a rising star in the Democratic Party. As Arizona's attorney general, she had given a rousing speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, despite having undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer a few weeks earlier. In the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential debates between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, Napolitano (who had been discussed as a possible Kerry running mate) was one of the Democratic Party luminaries entrusted to negotiate the terms of the debates.

Napolitano's first term was widely considered a success, and in 2005 the editors of Time magazine named her one of the five best governors in the country, citing her successful handling of Arizona's budget crisis and her centrist approach to the state's immigration issues. As governor of a border state that is home to such extreme anti-immigrant groups as the Minuteman Project, Napolitano—who won a second term in 2006 by beating her opponent, Len Munsil, by a margin of nearly two-to-one—was often a crucial voice of moderation. She vetoed bills that would have denied US citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants, required the police to arrest undocumented immigrants for trespassing, and made English the official language of the state. However, she opposed amnesty for undocumented workers and the businesses employing them; in 2007, during her second term, for example, she signed a bill that called for revoking the licenses of businesses that were caught more than once knowingly employing illegal immigrants.

Napolitano's nomination as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security drew criticism from leaders on both sides of the immigration debate. Conservatives complained that she was not tough enough regarding undocumented immigration, while other groups, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), complained that her positions were overly punitive. In February 2009, within weeks of being sworn in as homeland security secretary, Napolitano ordered a reevaluation of the federal government's biggest program—as it existed under then-president George W. Bush—for testing the nation's ability to respond to acts of terrorism. One of the more significant changes Napolitano planned to carry out called for more collaboration with local governments in planning for natural disasters and terrorist attacks. The following month Napolitano announced that the federal government would increase security at the two-thousand-mile US-Mexico border by sending 460 additional agents to strengthen border-patrol units and by making use of additional search tools, among them new canine teams and mobile x-ray units. (The stepped-up level of security sprang from the concern that drug-fueled violence in Mexico near the border might spill over into Arizona, Texas, and other states.) In August Napolitano launched an effort to enforce immigration laws more widely. In October, she announced that the White House was considering converting hotels and nursing homes into immigration detention centers, on the grounds that the estimated 90 percent of detained illegal immigrants who were nonviolent offenders did not need to be held in prison-like buildings.

Napolitano was a controversial figure as head of the DHS. In 2013, she further expanded her resume outside the political world in Washington, assuming the helm of the vast University of California system, the first woman to do so. In 2020, she joined the faculty at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy as the Founder and Faculty Director of the Center for Security in Politics at UC Berkeley. In May 2022, President Joe Biden appointed Napolitano to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

Bibliography

Baker, Peter, and Tamar Lewin. "Napolitano Stepping Down as Homeland Security Chief." New York Times, 12 July 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/us/politics/napolitano-stepping-down.html. Accessed 24 June 2024.

McCarthy, Terry, and David Schwartz. "A Mountaineer on the Political Rise." Time, 21 Nov. 2005, content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1129542,00.html. Accessed 24 June 2024.

"President Biden Announces Appointments to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and the National Science Board." The White House, 4 May 2022, www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/05/04/president-biden-announces-appointments-to-the-presidents-intelligence-advisory-board-and-the-national-science-board. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Savage, David G. "The Enforcer of Border Laws." Los Angeles Times, 23 Nov. 2008, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-nov-23-na-napolitano23-story.html. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Silverman, Amy. "Tom and Janet's Excellent AG Venture." Phoenix New Times, 22 Oct. 1998, www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/tom-and-janets-excellent-ag-venture-6421749. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Wood, Mary. "Napolitano Encourages Balance of Private, Public Practice." University of Virginia School of Law, 20 Mar. 2003. www.law.virginia.edu/news/2003‗spr/napolitano‗ps.htm. Accessed 24 June 2024.