Janet Ann Napolitano (; born November 29, 1957) is an American politician and lawyer. She is on the faculty at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, since 2015.
Napolitano served as 20th president of the University of California from 2013 to 2020, as the United States secretary of homeland security under the first Obama administration from 2009 to 2013, as the 21st governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009, as the 23rd attorney general of Arizona from 1999 to 2003, and as the United States attorney for the District of Arizona from 1993 to 1997.
Forbes ranked her as the world's ninth most powerful woman in 2012 and eighth most powerful woman in 2013. She served as chairwoman of the National Governors Association for the 2006–2007 cycle. In 2008, she was listed by The New York Times as one of the women most likely to become the first female president of the United States. She sat on the bipartisan advisory board of States United Democracy Center. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
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Early life and education
Janet Napolitano was born on November 29, 1957, in New York City, the daughter of Jane Marie (née Winer) and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. Her father was of Italian descent and her mother had German and Austrian ancestry. Her grandfather was named Filippo Napolitano.
Napolitano is a Methodist. She is the oldest of three children, with a younger brother and sister. She was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she graduated from Sandia High School in 1975.
Napolitano received a Bachelor of Science summa cum laude with a major in political science from Santa Clara University in 1979 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia in 1983.
Napolitano was Santa Clara's first female valedictorian, a Truman Scholar, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduation, she worked as an analyst for the United States Senate Committee on the Budget. In 1978, she studied for a term at the London School of Economics as part of Santa Clara's exchange program through IES Abroad. She then attended the University of Virginia School of Law after which she served as a law clerk for Judge Mary M. Schroeder of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, then joined Schroeder's former firm, Lewis and Roca, in Phoenix. She was named a partner of the firm in 1989.
Career
In 1991, while a partner at Lewis and Roca LLP, Napolitano served as an attorney for Anita Hill. Hill testified in the U.S. Senate that then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her ten years earlier when she was his subordinate at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In 1993, Napolitano was appointed by President Bill Clinton as United States attorney for the District of Arizona, an office she held until 1997. As U.S. attorney, she was involved in the investigation of Michael Fortier of Kingman, Arizona, in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing. She ran for and won the position of Arizona attorney general in 1998. During her tenure as attorney general, she focused on consumer protection issues and improving general law enforcement.
While serving as attorney general, she spoke at the 2000 Democratic National Convention just three weeks after having a mastectomy. Napolitano recalled that the pain was so unbearable that she could not stand up. "Work and family helped me focus on other things while I battled the cancer," says Napolitano. "I am very grateful for all the support I had from family, friends and Arizonans." As attorney general she also defended Arizona's death penalty statute before the United States Supreme Court when she argued Ring v. Arizona.
Governor of Arizona
In 2002, Napolitano narrowly won the gubernatorial election with 46 percent of the vote, succeeding Republican Jane Dee Hull and defeating her Republican opponent, former congressman Matt Salmon, who received 45 percent of the vote. She was Arizona's third female governor and the first female elected governor in the United States to succeed another elected female governor. She was also the first Democrat popularly elected to the governorship since Bruce Babbitt left office in 1987, and the first female governor of Arizona to be elected outright.
She spoke at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where some initially considered her to be a possible running mate for presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Kerry selected Senator John Edwards instead. In November 2005, Time magazine named her one of the five best governors in the U.S.
As Governor, Napolitano set records for total number of vetoes issued. In 2005, she set a single-session record of 58 vetoes, breaking Jane Dee Hull's 2001 record of 28. This was followed in June 2006, less than four years into her term, when she issued her 115th veto and set the all-time record for vetoes by an Arizona governor. The previous record of 114 vetoes was set by Bruce Babbitt during his nine years in office. By the time she left office, Napolitano had issued 180 vetoes.
Napolitano supported many educational initiatives. She successfully negotiated the creation of voluntary full-day kindergarten in Arizona. The state previously only funded half-day programs. She created a literacy program, and acquired funding for an increase in teacher salaries. She spearheaded significant investments in higher education, including funding a Phoenix campus for the University of Arizona College of Medicine.
She also built the state's rainy day fund to more than $650 million, at the time the highest ever. She played a leading role in the successful bid to host Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona, expanded the number of teams in the Cactus league and invested heavily in tourism and economic development initiatives. She was one of the first governors to call for the National Guard at the border after declaring a state emergency related to border security.
In November 2006, Napolitano was re-elected as governor, defeating the Republican challenger, Len Munsil, by a nearly 2:1 ratio. She was the first woman to be re-elected to that office and the first gubernatorial candidate in state history to win every county and every legislative district in Arizona. Arizona's constitution limits its governors to two consecutive terms, so Napolitano would not have been eligible to seek a third term in office in 2010.
Secretary of Homeland Security
In February 2006, Napolitano was named by The White House Project as one of "8 in '08", a group of eight female politicians who were suggested as possible candidates for president in 2008. On January 11, 2008, she endorsed then Illinois Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for president. On November 5, 2008, she was named to the advisory board of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.
On December 1, 2008, Barack Obama introduced Napolitano as his nominee for United States Secretary of Homeland Security. On January 20, 2009, Napolitano was confirmed, becoming the first woman appointed as Secretary in the relatively new department, and the fourth person to hold the position overall (including one acting secretary). Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer became governor of Arizona.
In March 2009, Napolitano told the German news site Der Spiegel that while there is always a threat from terrorism, she preferred to talk about "man-caused' disasters" as a way "to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur".
In April 2009, in an interview defending her plans to tighten the Canada–US border, Napolitano incorrectly implied that the September 11 attack perpetrators entered the United States from Canada. This claim was made by several politicians based upon erroneous news reports in the days after the attack. Napolitano explained that she misunderstood the question and was referring to other individuals who had planned attacks and entered through Canada, but Canadian diplomats rebuked her for helping perpetuate a myth.
In response to criticism, she later said that while she knew no 9/11 terrorists entered the U.S. through Canada, "there are other instances ... when suspected terrorists have attempted to enter our country from Canada to the United States ... [s]ome of these are well known to the public, such as the millennium bomber, while others are not due to security reasons." There has only been one publicly reported case of terrorists coming to the United States through Canada, that of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian citizen who was in Canada illegally and who had planned an attack on Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) as part of the 2000 millennium attack plots. Nevertheless, Napolitano later claimed that "Canada allows people into its country that we do not allow into ours" as a justification for treating the Mexican and Canadian borders equally.
President of the University of California
In July 2013, Napolitano announced she would leave her post as Secretary of Homeland Security to become president of the University of California (UC). She was appointed the 20th president by the University of California Board of Regents on July 18, 2013, the first woman to lead the University of California, and began her tenure as president on September 30, 2013. But after Napolitano became a president of the UC, there were protests who interrupted her as "they were among dozens of demonstrators who contended that Napolitano was the wrong person to lead an institution with so many students from around the world". On September 18, 2019, Napolitano announced her resignation as president, effective August 1, 2020.
Among her first acts as president was the allocation of more support for UC's undocumented students, and expanded efforts to diversify the ranks of UC graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. She also initiated an ambitious ongoing plan for the ten-campus system to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, saying that it was a 'moral imperative' for UC to find solutions to global climate change. In seeking to reduce UC's carbon footprint to zero, Napolitano authorized the university to register as an Electric Service Provider, allowing it to supply energy directly to some of its campuses and medical centers from an 80-MW solar farm in Fresno. In 2017, Napolitano was awarded the Pat Brown Award from the California Council for Environmental and Economic Balance for her environmental leadership.
Napolitano has used her tenure as president to encourage more students to pursue public interest careers. She created a fund for fellowships for undergraduate students to offset costs related to public service internships in Sacramento and Washington D.C. She also created the President's Public Service Law Fellowship program, which awards $4.5 million annually to law students at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Irvine and UCLA to make postgraduate work and summer positions more accessible for students who wish to pursue public interest legal careers but might be forced to seek private sector jobs out of financial need.
As part of her Global Food Initiative, which was launched in 2014, Napolitano committed $3.3 million to help students at the University of California access nutritious food. At the time it was the nation's most comprehensive, systematic plan to tackle the problem of food insecurity.
Later career
Napolitano was repeatedly discussed as a contender for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Some political commentators also suggested a possible candidacy in the 2016 United States presidential election.
In September 2014, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced his intention to step down, there was speculation that Napolitano might be a candidate for the next United States attorney general. Instead, Loretta Lynch replaced Holder.
Napolitano serves as an advisor on the COVID-19 Technology Task Force, a technology industry coalition founded in March 2020 collaborating on solutions to respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
After stepping down as president of the University of California, Napolitano continued to be a UC Berkeley faculty member within the Goldman School of Public Policy. In 2021, she founded and became the director of the Center for Security in Politics.
In May 2022, Napolitano was appointed to serve as a member of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.
Personal life
Napolitano is an avid basketball fan and regularly plays tennis and softball. Whitewater rafting and hiking are among her hobbies. She has hiked in Arizona's Superstition Mountains, New Mexico's Sandia Mountains, and the Himalayas, and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.
Napolitano has never married and has no children; as a result, some of her political opponents have speculated about her sexual orientation. In 2002, "vote gay" fliers were posted next to her campaign signs. Napolitano responded by saying that she is "just a straight, single workaholic".
Napolitano began undergoing cancer-related treatment in August 2016. On January 17, 2017, Napolitano was hospitalized in Oakland due to complications from the cancer treatment. She was released from hospital on January 23.