In 1964, frustrated that the radical right threatened to take over the Republican Party-to its detriment-Thornburgh, then a lawyer in downtown Pittsburgh, began complaining to anyone who would listen about the problems with the GOP. When finally challenged to do something about it, he set out on a course that would ultimately take him to the highest corridors of power in the United States.
As a federal prosecutor, Thornburgh quickly became known as a racket-buster, diligently fighting organized crime and official corruption. Using the same no-nonsense approach, he describes, in direct, honest prose, his own rise through the Republican ranks. The only member of his party to have been elected to two successive terms as governor of Pennsylvania, he reveals the details of a political campaign that few expected him to win. After leaving that office in 1987, his sterling reputation led to the directorship of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Shortly thereafter President Reagan asked him to join his cabinet, replacing outgoing Attorney General Ed Meese.
Thornburgh's calm, cool-headed response to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, occurring mere weeks after his gubernatorial inauguration, is still held up as a model of emergency management. His ability to objectively analyze situations pervades Where the Evidence Leads, whether describing his early missteps in helping to fill positions in the Justice Department under President Bush, or the grudging admiration he exhibits toward his opponent's campaign managers James Carville and Paul Begala during his failed bid for the late H. John Heinz III's seat in the U.S. Senate.
In these pages he also reveals the playful side of his personality, long known to friends and colleagues, but often hidden from the public: his raucous, Louis Armstrong-like rendition of "Mack the Knife" at a retreat for members of his law firm; his delight in the humor (and hard work) of his first campaign, where he taught voters how to remember his name in a region rife with alternate spellings with the slogan "Thornburgh as in Pittsburgh;" the simply joys received from his lifelong love of baseball.
In fact, the Pittsburgh Pirates' dramatic pennant race and 1960 World Series win would prove to be a sustaining force during the darkest moment of Thornburgh's life, for it was in that summer that his first wife was killed and his then-infant son, Peter, was grievously injured in an automobile accident. He never shies away from revealing the painful details of this ordeal, nor the religious and familial sources of his strength during those days. Nor does he fail to recount the personal struggles he and his present wife faced in fighting for equal rights and opportunities for Peter, culminating in his effective advocacy to help enact the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A strong proponent of civil rights and racial equality; a tireless spokesman for the GOP tenets of the individual, the free-enterprise system, fiscal responsibility, strong state and local governments, and a combination of toughness and compassion at home and abroad; a strict adherent to the overriding importance of the rule of law; these are but some of the ways Dick Thornburgh defines himself and his life in Where the Evidence Leads.
