A skill that's out of style

Bill Richardson spent decades talking with "thugs" and others he felt were wrong.

A privilege of working as a reporter is that you meet people in all walks of life—at campaign rallies, in war zones and at the scenes of disasters; in interviews, debate spin rooms and television green rooms. In such places I occasionally talked with Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor, who has died at the age of 75.

Once we appeared as panelists on NBC’s Meet the Press, and our off-camera conversation turned to the novelist Cormac McCarthy, who lived in New Mexico. Richardson said they were friends. The famously reclusive writer sometimes had spent time in the governor’s mansion because nobody would bother him there. I mentioned that I’d been trying to interview McCarthy for years—he almost never did interviews—and Richardson instantly offered to set up a meeting. It didn’t work, but it was characteristic that he tried. He was in the business of solving problems.

When he ran for president, Richardson did not attend a debate that I co-moderated in Iowa in 2007. According to the transcript, Richardson “could not join” Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others because he was “attending the funeral of a Korean War soldier whose remains the governor recently helped repatriate from North Korea.”

This showed what made Richardson distinct. When he served as President Bill Clinton’s United Nations ambassador, in the 1990’s, he negotiated prisoner releases from autocratic regimes, and he later continued working as a freelance diplomat.

Obituaries mention a disorienting number of countries and cases where he worked. NPR notes that in a single year in the 1990’s he arranged the release of “an American civilian arrested after crossing into North Korean waters,” and also held talks with Cuban leader Fidel Castro to win “the release of three political prisoners.”

The New York Times adds that in recent years he “helped negotiate the release of Michael White, a Navy veteran who was freed by Iran in 2020; flew to Moscow for a meeting with Russian government officials in the months before the release last year of Trevor Reed, a Marine veteran, in a prisoner swap; and worked on the case of Brittney Griner, the W.N.B.A. star who was held prisoner and later released by Moscow.”

He went to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and arranged the freedom of journalist Paul Salopek from Sudan.

In a statement, the vice president of his Richardson Center said, “There was no person that Governor Richardson would not speak with if it held the promise of returning a person to freedom.”

Some people have made the case that Americans should not be dealing with terrible leaders. The conservative version of this case commonly holds that it makes the United States look weak. The progressive critique commonly holds that it makes authoritarians look good. When Richardson visited Myanmar in 2021, according to NPR, “some human rights leaders criticized him for giving its military legitimacy. Days later, the former governor successfully negotiated American journalist Danny Fenster’s release after holding meetings with Gen. Min Aung Hlaing,” who had led a coup there.

“Prisoner exchanges are unseemly,” he said in a 2022 NPR interview, “but sometimes you have to do them in order to bring American hostages home.”

Richardson was practicing a skill that has gone out of style: dealing with people he believed to be wrong. He didn’t approve of the leaders of Russia, Sudan or Myanmar (he once said he was “the informal under secretary for thugs”)—but he kept his lines open. He was taking a risk! Richardson’s critics were not entirely wrong. But he tried to make a difference where he could.

It’s a skill we need inside our divided country as well as beyond its borders.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must, a companion to my forthcoming book of the same name. This column explores our divided times. The book tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him. Differ We Must is a phrase Lincoln wrote to his best friend, who disagreed with him about slavery.

Lincoln’s story is a great one, filled with some of the most remarkable characters of his age; and his dealings with those who differed could hardly be more relevant. You can preorder at your local bookstore, or by clicking this link for a hardcover, ebook, or audio book.