Hazel Reid O'Leary (born May 17, 1937) is an American lawyer, politician and university administrator who served as the 7th United States secretary of energy from 1993 to 1997. A member of the Democratic Party, O'Leary was the first woman and first African American to hold that post. She also served as the 14th president of Fisk University from 2004 to 2013, a historically black college and her alma mater. O'Leary's tenure at Fisk came amid financial difficulty for the school, during which time she increased enrollment and contentiously used the school's art collection to raise funds.
O'Leary received her bachelor's degree from Fisk before earning her Bachelor of Laws degree from Rutgers School of Law. O'Leary worked as a prosecutor in New Jersey and then in a private consulting/accounting firm before joining the Carter administration. O'Leary returned to the private sector and rejoined the government as secretary of energy under President Bill Clinton. During her tenure, she declassified documents detailing how the United States had conducted secret testing on the effects of radiation on unsuspecting American citizens. She also received criticism for her excessive spending while in office.
Early life and education
Hazel Reid was born in Newport News, Virginia. Her parents, Russel E. Reid and Hazel Reid, were both physicians. They divorced when she was 18 months old. Her father and stepmother, a teacher named Mattie Pullman Reid, raised Hazel and her older sister Edna Reid, primarily in the East End neighborhood. Hazel attended school in a segregated school system in Newport News for eight years. She and her sister were then sent to live with an aunt in Essex County, New Jersey, and attend Arts High School, an integrated school. She earned a bachelor's degree at Fisk University in Nashville in 1959. She then married Carl Rollins and had a son before returning to school and earning her Bachelor of Laws degree from Rutgers Law School in Newark in 1966.
Career
Early career
O'Leary worked as a prosecutor in New Jersey on organized crime cases, later becoming an assistant attorney general for the state. In 1969, after obtaining a divorce, O'Leary moved to Washington, D.C., where she joined the consulting/accounting firm Coopers & Lybrand. During the Carter administration, O'Leary was appointed assistant administrator of the Federal Energy Administration, general counsel of the Community Services Administration, and administrator of the Economic Regulatory Administration at the newly created Department of Energy. At the Department of Energy, Hazel met her third husband, Jack O'Leary.
In 1981 O'Leary and her husband established the consulting firm O'Leary & Associates in Morristown, New Jersey, where she served as vice president and general counsel. After Jack died of cancer, Hazel moved to Minnesota. From 1989 to 1993 she worked as an executive vice president of the Northern States Power Company, a Minnesota-based public utilities.
Secretary of Energy
In a press conference on December 21, 1992, held in Little Rock, Arkansas, then President-elect Bill Clinton announced his intention to nominate O'Leary as Secretary of Energy. Clinton officially made the nomination on January20, 1993, and the Senate confirmed O'Leary by unanimous consent the next day. O'Leary became the first woman and first African American to serve as Secretary of Energy. She was also the first Secretary of Energy to have worked for an energy company. At the time she led the Department of Energy, it had an annual budget of $18billion and approximately 18,000 employees.
O'Leary challenged the way the department had traditionally been run, particularly its focus on developing and testing nuclear weapons. During her tenure, the size of the Department of Energy was reduced by a third. It was also a target for Republicans who wanted it eliminated. While reducing the size of the department overall, O'Leary shifted resources toward efficient and renewable energy sources, a priority of the Clinton administration.
In this position, O'Leary won praise for declassifying old Department of Energy documents, including Cold War-era records that showed the U.S. government had used American citizens as guinea pigs in human radiation experiments, as had long been rumored. Clinton issued Executive Order 12891, which created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to prevent such abuses of power. O'Leary also announced a $4.6million settlement payment to the families of victims of past radiation experiments. Other declassified documents included facts about plutonium the United States had left in South Vietnam.