Hazel R. O'Leary

Hazel Reid O'Leary ( born May 17, 1937 in Newport News, Virginia) is a former American politician, who belonged to the cabinet of U.S. President Bill Clinton as energy minister. She was the first woman and the first African-American woman in that office.

Life and career

Hazel Reid grew up in Virginia, the daughter of a medical couple with two brothers and two sisters. In 1980 she married John F. O'Leary, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy, who died in 1987. The marriage comes from a son.

After graduating from a law school in Newark, she worked as a prosecutor in New Jersey; later she became a partner of the financial services Coopers & Lybrand. Then it belonged to the Carter administration as deputy director of the Federal Energy Administration ( Federal Energy Administration); after the establishment of the Department of Energy, she was employed there as Head of Department of Economic Regulatory Administration.

In 1981, Hazel O'Leary with her husband The consulting company O'Leary & Associates, where she worked as Vice President and General Counsel. Between 1989 and 1993 she was vice president of the energy company Northern States Power Company.

Politician

After the victory of the Democrats in the presidential election in 1992, President Clinton appointed her as Minister of Energy in his cabinet. Popular it was at the beginning of their term of office, as they previously held under lock and key documents from the era of the Cold War made public. This showed that the U.S. government had abused American citizens as human guinea pigs in radioactivity experiments.

There were political difficulties for O'Leary, however, in 1996 when she had to before a committee of the Republican-dominated Congress to defend against accusations that they travel too much and give over money for their accommodation from. In January 1997, she finally resigned from her post.

In connection with the election campaign funding scandal of 1996 Hazel O'Leary ran again in the headlines. Johnny Chung, one of the main characters of the donations scandal, testified that the Minister had met with representatives of a Chinese oil company after Chung had donated $ 25,000 to a funded by her charity. The FBI urged an investigation of the matter; Attorney General Janet Reno said, however, there was no evidence of any wrongdoing O'Leary.

Since 2004, Hazel O'Leary has served as President of Fisk University in Nashville, where she had once studied.