Ex-governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. attorney general
Dick Thornburgh forged his impressive reputation for public service as a corruption-fighting federal prosecutor in his native Pittsburgh, burnished it as a cool and efficient governor in Harrisburg, and cemented it in a variety of broader-scope positions from U.S. attorney general to reformminded administrator at the
United Nations.
One of the most notable Republicans ever produced by Democratic-saturated southwestern Pennsylvania and perhaps the most accomplished modern political figure of any stripe from this area, Mr. Thornburgh, 88, died
Thursday morning at his residence in Longwood at Oakmont, his son David said.
Gov. Tom Wolf has ordered flags on state buildings to fly at half-staff until Mr. Thornburgh’s interment. Funeral arrangements had not been announced.
His wife, Ginny Judson Thornburgh, said in a statement prepared by his family that Mr.
Thornburgh “had endured declining health to the end with characteristic determination, grace and humor.”
More pragmatic engineer than passionate ideologue when it came to politics, Mr. Thornburgh maintained a largely untainted reputation that won the trust both of voters who elected him Pennsylvania’s chief executive from 1979 to 1987 and of multiple presidents who tapped him for key roles before and after his governorship.
Mr. Thornburgh’s straight-shooting legal and investigative skills also had him called upon by numerous private entities — from CBS to noted forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht — for high-profile work.
The longtime K&L Gates lawyer was lauded during his political career for unflappably managing the Three Mile Island nuclear plant crisis just 72 days after becoming governor in 1979 and for scrubbing clean the reputation of a state government badly tarnished in the decade before him.
Beyond Pennsylvania, Mr. Thornburgh was recognized for helping craft the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act while attorney general. It was an achievement with special pride for a man whose son suffered a life-altering brain injury during infancy, in a 1960 car crash that also killed Mr. Thornburgh’s first wife while he was at work. He would remarry three years later, and he and his wife received numerous honors for continued efforts on behalf of those with disabilities, like his son Peter.
During the 1990s, the former governor became still more broadly known as a frequent analyst and pundit on television news programs, from “Nightline” and “Meet the Press” to Larry King’s CNN talk show, on which he appeared more than 50 times.
Mr. Thornburgh’s long career wasn’t always successful — he suffered a surprising loss in a 1991 U.S. Senate special election, and he frequently sparred with the media and Democrats while U.S. attorney general during his three years prior to that race.
The lifelong baseball fan — who was meticulously keeping score like always in his seat at Forbes Field when Bill Mazeroski hit his historic World Series-winning home run in 1960 — also lusted by his own admission for appointment to one more position: Major League Baseball commissioner, for which he was passed over in 1993.
Such slights detract little from the Thornburgh legacy. Others looked up to this academic-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses who tended to be reserved personally — proud of his accomplishments, but rarely boasting of them himself.
“There are many Pennsylvanians who believe that Dick Thornburgh’s public service, beginning with his time as a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, set a standard for all who followed,” a former aide, James M. Seif, wrote in a 2016 letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Former Gov. Mark Schweiker issued a statement Thursday, saying “Gov. Thornburgh was a personal hero and a leader to emulate. His passion for public service and the people of his beloved Pennsylvania was still obvious long after he left office. In examining everything he did during the crisis at Three Mile Island, his leadership was thoughtful and strong at a time when the commonwealth needed it most. Kathy and I extend our prayers to Ginny and his entire family.”
The man who was his lieutenant governor for both terms, William Scranton III, said, “Governor Thornburgh was the consummate public servant — honest, competent and caring. ... He loved politics but never let that stop him from doing the right thing. The nation could use more of his kind in elective office.”
Richard Lewis Thornburgh was born July 16, 1932, to parents Charles and Alice Thornburgh, of Rosslyn
Farms. His father, like many others in the family, was an engineer, and that was the field in which Mr. Thornburgh obtained his degree from Yale University in 1954 after attending Mercersburg Academy. He referred later to his young life as undistinguished and lacking in any class presidencies or valedictorian honors that would hint of what lay ahead. His true early ambition, in fact, was to become a sportswriter.
By the time he completed his Yale studies, he saw himself better suited to law than engineering, let alone newspapering. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law before joining K&L Gates, then known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, in 1959. He would work for the firm for many years thereafter in its Pittsburgh and Washington offices whenever he wasn’t holding one of his many official positions.
Mr. Thornburgh’s first foray into the political arena, in 1966, was decidedly unsuccessful, if unsurprisingly so. He challenged Pittsburgh’s Democratic congressman, William Moorehead, in a city with a 3-to-1 Democratic registration edge. After campaigning alongside a prop of a 6foot spoon with which he pledged “to stir things up in Washington,” Mr. Thornburgh attracted fewer than half as many votes as the incumbent.
The contest did nothing to dampen his political interests. In 1969, he was mulling a race for Pittsburgh mayor — coincidentally, it could have pitted him against eventual winner Pete Flaherty, his Democratic opponent for governor nine years later — when President Richard Nixon appointed him U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Thornburgh lacked not only a prosecutorial background but courtroom experience of any kind. It was no deterrent, as he zealously led his staff in pursuing numbers racketeers, corrupt public officials and others who had long been ignored by local law enforcement. He created a special Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit and frequently made headlines with investigations and indictments, including that of Allegheny County District Attorney Robert Duggan, a fellow Republican.
Mr. Thornburgh carried a reform-minded public image by the time he was promoted during the Gerald Ford administration to assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in 1975-76. Upon returning to Pittsburgh afterward to practice law, Mr. Thornburgh’s bid to become governor took shape. By his own account, he benefited from local parochialism in a crowded Republican primary in 1978; among seven GOP candidates to succeed Democrat Milton Shapp, he was the only Western Pennsylvanian.
In the general election against Mr. Flaherty, who had twice been elected mayor of Pittsburgh, the lesser-known Mr. Thornburgh started far behind. Polls at one point showed him trailing by 32 points, and he would later admit that he and his wife feared a humiliating defeat.
But in the wake of the scandal-plagued Shapp administration, which Mr. Thornburgh labeled a “cornucopia of corruption,” the Republican leaned heavily on his crusader image. One campaign rallying cry was to rid the much-maligned Pennsylvania Department of Transportation of “the three P’s — payoffs, patronage and potholes.” More moderate than the Republicans of today, he drew an unusual amount of Black and labor support that helped him come from behind to win on Election Day by a 52-46 margin.
Mr. Thornburgh’s public stature grew by bounds less than three months into his first term. The 46-year-old governor awoke on March 28, 1979, to news of a partial meltdown of a reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, located just outside Harrisburg. For the next 10 days, fears were high among central Pennsylvania residents as the national media, along with President Jimmy Carter, arrived in reaction to the U.S. nuclear industry’s worst disaster.
Mr. Thornburgh, who joined the president in donning large yellow boots to enter the TMI control room, was credited as a steady hand who helped quell community panic throughout the ordeal. He sought expert advice from sources outside the plant’s utility owner, which he had quickly come to distrust, and communicated effectively with the public. He avoided an evacuation call while recommending that pregnant women and young children leave the area as a precaution.
It was on-the-job training in crisis management for the new governor, who said he learned to “expect the unexpected” and “have a good staff of people around you who can handle these things.” The rest of his gubernatorial tenure was more about ordinary state management, but not without its own challenges connected to difficult economics during a sharp manufacturing downturn.
Mr. Thornburgh reduced the number of state employees by the thousands in seeking more manageable budgets at the same time he spearheaded reduction of personal and business tax rates. His administration initiated a welfare reform effort that ended up terminating cash payments to people deemed able-bodied to work. He launched the public-private Ben Franklin Partnership program to begin investing state resources in new technology industries. In the midst of a recession in 1982, he narrowly won re-election over little-known Democratic
Congressman Allen Ertel.
Mr. Thornburgh was also the first among a succession of GOP governors of the state who pushed hard — and unsuccessfully — to dismantle the Liquor Control Board’s state alcohol monopoly. The Legislature also thwarted his effort to replace state election of judges with a merit selection system.
At the end of his eight years in Harrisburg, however, he scored high in polls among both the public and his gubernatorial peers. After leaving office, he had a short stint as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government before outgoing President Ronald Reagan selected him in 1988 to become U.S. attorney general, a post which he retained under President George H.W. Bush.
The high point of Mr. Thornburgh’s three years heading the Justice Department was as the Bush administration’s point man with Congress in developing the ADA legislation, which prohibits discrimination against people with physical and mental disabilities. He also led Justice Department efforts focused on white-collar crime, including the nation’s savings and loan scandals, and international cooperation in combating drug trafficking and terrorism.
Never a gregarious pol, Mr. Thornburgh could have a tight-lipped, defensive nature, and those qualities did not always play well under the greater scrutiny within the nation’s capital compared to Harrisburg. Some of the sharpest criticism of his Justice Department management was for too aggressively pursuing leakers of information which he sought to keep confidential.
By the time he returned to Pennsylvania in 1991 to wage a special election campaign for the seat left vacant by the death of Republican U.S. Sen. John Heinz, the exgovernor had lost the outsider, reformer sheen that had once been such an asset. Though heavily favored at the outset, he lost badly to liberal Democrat Harris Wofford, who championed the cause of national health care. Mr. Thornburgh’s campaign was widely seen as lacking either the enthusiastic spirit or organizational prowess of his earlier efforts.
The candidate himself said he fell victim to widespread disenchantment with government during hard times economically in Pennsylvania and across the country. Mr. Thornburgh called himself the “canary in the coal mine” for Mr. Bush, who himself would be defeated in his 1992 re-election campaign.
After the loss, Mr. Thornburgh spent a year at the president’s request serving as under-secretary-general of the United Nations. It entailed overseeing budget and personnel in an organization viewed as bloated and inefficient. It was a challenge that played to the same strengths he had held as governor and he won recognition for pushing hard for reforms, a number of which were adopted after his departure.
While his full-time role since then was with his law firm, focusing on governmental affairs, he was often tapped for special work. In 2002, he became court-appointed examiner in the WorldCom bankruptcy proceedings, which at the time was the largest Chapter 11 case in history. Two years later, CBS employed him to co-chair an independent investigation of the “Rathergate” controversy, in which anchorman Dan Rather was accused of shoddy and slanted reporting on President George W. Bush’s military background.
And in an unusual pairing, Dr. Wecht, the temperamental longtime Democratic Allegheny County coroner — polar opposite in personality and politics from Mr. Thornburgh — hired the nation’s former top prosecutor to help lead his legal battle against federal felony corruption charges, which were ultimately dismissed.
Mr. Thornburgh involved himself little publicly in politics in his later years, partly due to his party’s sharp shift to the right. He did endorse Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s unsuccessful 2016 candidacy against Donald Trump and other more conservative candidates for the GOP presidential nomination.
Mr. Thornburgh wrote a 2003 autobiography, “Where the Evidence Leads,” and the noted pack rat, who kept copies of everything from school tests and baseball scorecards to political speeches, donated his personal papers and memorabilia — all 1,148 boxes of them — to the University of Pittsburgh.
The university maintains them as the Dick Thornburgh Archives Collection at Hillman Library and established the Dick Thornburgh Forum in Law & Public Policy in his honor, sponsoring lectures, fellowships and other activities that promote the type of public service he personified.
In good health throughout most of his life, Mr. Thornburgh was hospitalized with a mild stroke in June 2014 from which he recovered.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Thornburgh is survived by four sons, John, David, Peter and William; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
A private service will be held by the family. A memorial service for the public will be held at a later date. Donations in his honor are welcomed at the Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh or the Dick Thornburgh Forum for Law & Public Policy.