Bill Richardson

William Blaine Richardson III (born November 15, 1947) is an American politician, author, and diplomat who served as the 30th governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. He was also the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, a U.S. congressman, chairman of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. In December 2008, Richardson was nominated for the cabinet-level position of Secretary of Commerce in the first Obama administration but withdrew a month later, as he was being investigated for possible improper business dealings in New Mexico. Although the investigation was later dropped, it was seen to have damaged Richardson's career as his second and final term as New Mexico governor concluded. Richardson has occasionally provided advice on diplomatic issues pertaining to North Korea and has visited the nation on several occasions, including efforts to release American detainees. He has completed a number of private humanitarian missions, one of which secured the release of U.S. journalist Danny Fenster from a Myanmar prison in November 2021. Richardson was born in Pasadena, California. He grew up in the borough of Coyoacán in Mexico City. His father, William Blaine Richardson Jr. (1891–1972), who was of Anglo-American and Mexican descent, was an American bank executive from Boston who worked in Mexico for what is now Citibank. His mother, María Luisa López-Collada Márquez (1914–2011), had been his father's secretary — she was the Mexican-born daughter of a Mexican mother and a Spanish father from Villaviciosa, Asturias. Richardson's father was born on a ship heading towards Nicaragua. Just before Bill Richardson was born, his father sent his mother to California to give birth because, as Richardson explained, "My father had a complex about not having been born in the United States." Richardson, a United States citizen by birth, spent his childhood in a lavish hacienda in Coyoacán's barrio of San Francisco where he was raised as a Roman Catholic.