Richard Thornburgh, former Pennsylvania governor and U.S. attorney general, dies at 88
Richard Thornburgh, a former crime-busting federal prosecutor who unflappably led Pennsylvania through the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis as the state’s two-term governor and served as U.S. attorney general from 1988 to 1991, died Dec. 31 at a retirement community in Oakmont, Pa. He was 88.
His son David Thornburgh confirmed his death but did not cite a specific cause.
In the summer of 1988, President Ronald Reagan needed to replace besieged Attorney General Edwin Meese III, who had resigned amid charges of ethics violations for mixing personal finances with government business and for allegedly helping cover up the White House’s role in the Iran- contra scandal. The administration sought a Republican with a law enforcement background and a track record of public integrity to take quick command of the Justice Department.
Thornburgh, who was tall, with a boyish, round face and horn- rimmed glasses, seemed an ideal candidate. Schooled in engineering and law, he was widely seen as methodical, effective and cool under extreme pressure.
As the U. S. attorney for western Pennsylvania from 1969 to 1975, he won convictions against organizedcrime figures as well as police chiefs, city council members, mayors and other public officials who collectively took millions of dollars in bribes from mobsters.
For Thornburgh, the biggest professional challenge came not in a courtroom but rather in a trialby-fire in crisis management when, as governor, he helped avert pandemonium during the Three Mile Island crisis in 1979, the most serious nuclear power plant accident in U. S. history.
He arrived in Washington amid high expectations to take control of a Justice Department reeling from Meese’s tenure.
Thornburgh served in the Reagan Cabinet for five months, then was asked to remain as attorney general in the new administration of George H.W. Bush even though some Republican leaders expressed doubts about his conservative bona fides. He was widely regarded as a GOP moderate, especially in contrast to Meese, a blunt and polarizing campaigner against abortion rights and affi rmative action, and on other cultural flash points.
In the ensuing three years as U. S. attorney general, Thornburgh led the Justice Department during its investigation of the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as well as cases involving Colombian drug cartels and global moneylaundering operations.
But the glare of national media scrutiny, harsh battles of political partisanship and legal turf wars took a toll on Thornburgh’s “clean” reputation.
His department faced scrutiny for its slow pace - compared with those of state prosecutors - in pursuing prosecutions of Charles Keating Jr. and other fraudsters in the multibillion- dollar savings- and- loan crisis that had cost millions of Americans their life savings.
Thornburgh also was accused by congressional Democrats of protecting the White House in a tangled scandal dubbed “Iraqgate.” It appeared to involve members of the
American and Italian governments, a multibilliondollar bank fraud in the Atlanta branch of an Italian bank, and an arms buildup by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq amid the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
One of the bankers went to prison for his role in making illicit loans. But the Justice Department, under Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, issued a report in 1995 absolving members of the Bush administration of misconduct.
One of Thornburgh’s policy triumphs as attorney general emerged from the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
He served as the Bush administration’s point man in the passage of the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, which broadened the scope of civil rights for people with disabilities. He reassured lawmakers wary of the cost of new regulations on businesses, countering with the benefit to productivity and the economy from contributions by workers with disabilities.
The passage had been personally satisfying for Thornburgh, whose son Peter suffered from the effects of a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in 1960. The accident had also taken the life of Thornburgh’s first wife.
Richard Lewis Thornburgh was born in Rosslyn Farms, a prosperous suburb of Pittsburgh, on July 16, 1932. His family consisted almost entirely of engineers and Republican Party stalwarts.
He received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Yale University in 1954 and graduated three years later from the University of Pittsburgh law school. He spent most of his early legal career with the law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart in Pittsburgh.
He said the car accident that killed his wife, the former Virginia Hooton, and severely injured his son prompted soul- searching about his future.