Кристин Тодд Уитман: Биография и политическая карьера

American politician and author (born 1946)

Christine Temple Whitman (; born September 26, 1946) is an American politician and author who served as the 50th governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 and as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. as of 2024, Whitman is the only woman to have served as governor of New Jersey. Born in New York City to a Republican political family, Whitman graduated from Wheaton College in 1968 and began her political career in the Nixon administration's Office of Economic Opportunity. After coming within three percentage points of unseating U. S. Senator Bill Bradley in 1990, she ran for governor of New Jersey, defeating Democratic incumbent Jim Florio. A self described Rockefeller Republican, Whitman defeated Democrat Jim McGreevey to win re election in 1997. She remained governor until stepping down in 2001 to become Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, where she served until 2003. During her tenure at the EPA, Whitman was noted for having assured the public that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; she apologized in 2016 for having made this statement. In 2022, Whitman joined former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang to form the Forward Party, a centrist third party.

Christine Todd Whitman was born Christine Temple Todd in New York City on September 26, 1946. Her mother was Eleanor Prentice Todd (née Schley) and her father businessman Webster B. Todd. Both the Todds and the Schleys were wealthy and prominent New Jersey political families. The Schleys were among the first New Yorkers to move to the area that later became Far Hills, New Jersey, which became a popular suburb for wealthy, moderate Republicans. Eleanor Prentice Todd served as a Republican national committeewoman, led the New Jersey Federation of Republican Women, and served as vice chair of the Republican National Committee. As a child, Todd attended Far Hills Country Day School before being sent to boarding school at Foxcroft in Virginia. Todd disliked being so far away from home and after a year, she transferred to the Chapin School in Manhattan, allowing her to return home on the weekends. Whitman served on the board of trustees of Somerset County College (later renamed Raritan Valley Community College). She was considered an underdog against the popular Bradley, but performed better than expected despite being outspent 12 to one. Whitman continued to build her profile by founding a political action committee, the Committee for an Affordable New Jersey, through which she campaigned for Republican candidates in the 1991 midterm elections. Whitman took on a full campaign speaking schedule through October 1992. In 1993, Whitman helped to found the Committee for Responsible Government, an advocacy group espousing moderate positions in the Republican Party. In 1997, the group renamed itself the Republican Leadership Council.

Whitman was mentioned as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate in 1996. In 1996, Whitman had joined a New Jersey State Police patrol in Camden, New Jersey. During the patrol, the officers stopped a 16 year old African American male named Sherron Rolax and frisked him. The police did not find any contraband on Rolax's person, but Whitman frisked the youth as well. A state trooper photographed the act. In 2000, the image of the smiling governor frisking Rolax was published in newspapers statewide, drawing criticism from civil rights leaders who saw the incident as a violation of Rolax's civil rights and an endorsement of racial profiling by Whitman (especially since Rolax was not arrested or charged). Whitman later told the press that she regretted the incident, and pointed to her efforts in 1999 to oppose the New Jersey State Police force's racial profiling practices. Ultimately, then Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate in the 2000 presidential election.

Whitman was appointed by President George W. Bush as Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, taking office on January 31, 2001. In the final weeks of the Clinton administration in January 2001, the administration ratified a new drinking water standard of 0.01 mg/L (10 parts per billion, or ppb) of arsenic, to take effect in January 2006. The old drinking water standard of 0.05 mg/L (equal to 50 ppb) arsenic had been in effect since 1942, and the EPA, since the late 1980s, had weighed the pros and cons of lowering the maximum contaminant level (MCL) of arsenic. The incoming Bush administration suspended the midnight regulation, but after months of research, the EPA approved the new 10 ppb arsenic standard to take effect in January 2006 as initially planned. In 2001, the EPA produced a report detailing the expected effects of global warming in each state in the country. President Bush dismissed the report as the work of "the bureaucracy." After the September 11 attacks in New York City, she appeared there twice to inform New Yorkers that the toxins released by the attacks posed no threat to their health. On September 18, the EPA released a report in which Whitman said, "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D. C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink." She also said, "The concentrations are such that they don't pose a health hazard We're going to make sure everybody is safe." However, a 2003 report by the EPA's Inspector General determined that the assurance was misleading, because the EPA "did not have sufficient data and analyses" to justify it. A July 2003 report from the EPA Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response provided extensive documentation supporting many of the inspector general's conclusions. The report further found that the White House had "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security Council control EPA communications after the September 11 attacks. On June 27, 2003, after having several public conflicts with the Bush administration, Whitman resigned. In December 2006, legal proceedings began on the responsibility of government officials in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Whitman was among the defendants. The plaintiffs alleged that Whitman was at fault for saying that the downtown New York air was safe in the aftermath of the attacks. On April 20th, 2007, a three judge panel of the 2nd U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Whitman and other EPA officials could not be held liable for saying that the air was safe to breathe. The panel "reasoned that the government's interest in returning New York to normalcy following the attacks should protect it from lawsuits alleging that the government made false statements about air quality." In an interview in 2007, Whitman stated that Vice President Dick Cheney's insistence on easing air pollution controls, not the personal reasons she cited at the time, led to her resignation. At the time, Cheney pushed the EPA to institute a new rule allowing power plants to make major alterations without installing costly new pollution controls.

In early 2005, Whitman released a book entitled It's My Party, Too: Taking Back the Republican Party And Bringing the Country Together Again in which she criticized the policies of the George W. Bush administration and its electoral strategy:

The defining feature of the conservative viewpoint is a faith in the ability, and a respect for the right, of individuals to make their own decisions – economic, social, and spiritual – about their lives. The true conservative understands that government's track record in respecting individual rights is poor when it dictates individual choices. The last chapter of that book, entitled "A Time for Radical Moderates", speaks to radical centrists across the political spectrum. The same year as her book was released, Whitman formed a political action committee called It's My Party Too (IMP PAC), to assist electoral campaigns of moderate Republicans at all levels of government. After the 2006 midterm elections, IMP PAC was merged into RLC PAC, the Republican Leadership Council's PAC. Whitman "is co founder and president of The Whitman Strategy Group, a consulting firm specializing in government relations, and environmental and energy issues". In February 2013, Whitman supported legal recognition of same sex marriage in an amicus brief to the U. S. Supreme Court. As of 2015, Whitman is a member of the ReFormers Caucus of Issue One. The group, which included 100 other former elected officials advocated for campaign finance reform. In 2016, Whitman was named the co chair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative. On February 26, 2016, she endorsed John Kasich in his bid seeking the GOP nomination for presidential candidate. She said that Donald Trump was using "fascist" tactics in his campaign and after Chris Christie's endorsement of Trump said that, in the case of a Trump nomination by the GOP, she would vote for Hillary Clinton. In 2018, Whitman wrote an op ed calling Trump unfit for office and urging other Republicans to pressure him to step down. In February 2020, Whitman endorsed former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld for president in the Republican primaries, in which he was challenging incumbent president Donald Trump. Whitman spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, endorsing Democratic nominee Joe Biden over Republican nominee Donald Trump in the general election. Whitman co founded the States United Democracy Center in 2021. and, as of 2022, serves as its co chair. In her States United capacity, she was among the former state officials who submitted testimony to the U. S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, arguing that the attack was part of "a sustained and coordinated effort by the former president and his anti democracy allies to suppress voting rights, delegitimize free and fair elections, and subvert the will of the voters by overturning election results deemed undesirable to their movement." In July 2022, Whitman was among three former Republican governors who submitted a friend of the court brief to the U. S. Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold provisions of the federal Voting Rights Acts of 1965 that protect minority voters from having their voting power diluted. In 2022, Whitman joined former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang to create the Forward Party, a centrist third party.

As of 2008, Whitman served on the board of directors of Texas Instruments and United Technologies. Whitman is also co chair of the CASEnergy Coalition, and in 2007, voiced support for a stronger future role of nuclear power in the United States. Whitman joined the board of the American Security Project in April 2010; by 2015, she served as chairperson of its board of directors.

At a 1973 inaugural ball for Richard Nixon, Christine had her first date with John R. Whitman (1944 2015), an old friend she had met while a student at Chapin. The pair married the next year. While governor, Whitman used Pontefract, the family farm on which she was raised, as her primary residence. With her late husband, Whitman had two children: daughter Kate and son Taylor. In 2007, Kate Whitman was named executive director of the Republican Leadership Council, her mother's organization which promotes moderate Republicanism. Whitman has seven grandchildren.