Episode 20: Former Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge

Prior to being elected Governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge was a Republican Congressman from Erie. He left the Governor’s mansion at the call of President George W. Bush to come to Washington and set up the Department of Homeland Security of which he was the first Department Secretary.

Ridge and T. Boone Pickens touched on a number of topics during this episode of the Pickens Podcast. With Ridge's unique knowledge of security issues, Boone asked him about the dispute between Apple and the Department of Justice. Ridge said that Tim Cook and the appropriate DoJ officials should get into a room and figure this out.

As the Governor of Pennsylvania, he said of the fracking boom in the Marcellus Shale play that if he were still governor, he would not only have moved more quickly on pipelines to move natural gas to the ports near Philadelphia, but would also have enticed chemical, pharmaceutical, and any other industry that uses natural gas as feed stock to move into Pennsylvania to be closer to the source of their products and to have access to the energy savings natural gas provides.

When Ridge was tapped by President Bush to stand up the new Department, a successor, Janet Napolitano, described the process of getting 170,000 Federal employees from different departments and agencies, on different payrolls, with different email and phone systems operating as a single unit as “the equivalent of building a ship and sailing it at the same time.”

On top of all that, Tom Ridge left Harvard Law School to fight in the war in Vietnam. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant before he came home, finished law school and was elected to Congress – the first enlisted veteran of that war to do that.

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