NYPD vet to follow Ridge
By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Bernard Kerik, a savvy street cop who rose through the ranks and was the New York City police commissioner at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, has been chosen to head the Department of Homeland Security, senior administration officials with knowledge of President Bush's decision said Thursday. (Story: Kerik started out as a beat cop)
President Bush and Bernard Kerik, right, meet the press in October of 2003.
AFP file
Bush is expected to announce Friday that Kerik will replace Tom Ridge as secretary of the 180,000-employee department, which was created less than two years ago. Kerik, 49, is an outsider who is getting the job over several inside candidates. One senior administration official called him a proven leader whom Bush has gotten to know well since 9/11.
Kerik's pending nomination — confirmed anonymously because Bush has not yet announced it — came on another hectic day of administration personnel moves. Bush nominated Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns to be Agriculture secretary, one of seven Cabinet positions that have opened up since Bush's re-election. And United Nations Ambassador John Danforth unexpectedly resigned after less than six months on the job.
In Kerik, Bush chose someone with a colorful life story and a reputation as a straight-shooter. A high school dropout from New Jersey who later earned a college degree, Kerik was a military policeman in South Korea and a private security guard in Saudi Arabia before becoming a beat cop in the 1980s. Now bald, he wore a ponytail to nab drug dealers and worked the seedy streets of Times Square.
Kerik was named police commissioner in 2000 by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Together they won accolades leading the city's response to the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, where 23 city police officers, 37 Port Authority officers and 343 firefighters died.
In his 2001 autobiography, The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice, Kerik recounted being abandoned as a child by a mother he later learned died as a prostitute.
In 2003, Kerik went to Iraq at the request of the White House to help rebuild Iraq's police. Since then, he has worked with Giuliani in a crisis-management consulting firm.
Kerik campaigned hard for Bush's re-election and spoke at the Republican National Convention in August. He told the New York Daily News during the campaign that his biggest fear was another terrorist attack, and "if you put Sen. (John) Kerry in the White House, I think you are going to see that happen."
Regardless, he was praised by key Democrats Thursday. "Bernie Kerik knows the great needs and challenges this country faces in homeland security," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "He has a strong law enforcement background and, I believe, will do an excellent job in fighting for the resources and focus that homeland security needs and deserves."
Contributing: Richard Benedetto
