When I ran for City Council in , at 27 years of age, I knew a lot of people by virtue of working there. I owe that print shop for associations that served me well for the rest of my political life. Q: What about hanging out in that environment inspired you to go into politics?
A: I always knew I wanted to do something in public service. There were moments when I wanted to be a military officer like my father, who served as a private in the Pacific in World War Two and rose to a colonel by the s. But I was in college in , the year Dr. I concluded I wanted to help the country domestically. Q: As you began to pursue that career, how did you support yourself? I spent another year at Harvard and MIT, and taught as a graduate assistant, which was enough to cobble together compensation there.
When I got to be Mayor, I continued to teach. Q: What lessons about money do you hope you have passed on to your three grown-up children? Cisneros formed Cisneros Asset Management Company, a fixed income management firm operating nationally and ranked at the time as the second fastest growing money manager in the nation.
In , President Clinton appointed Dr. Cisneros to be Secretary of the U. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cisneros personally worked in more than U. After leaving HUD in , Dr. Cisneros was president and chief operating officer of Univision Communications, the Spanish-language broadcaster which has become the fifth-most-watched television network in the nation. He is a former member of the advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He stressed the need for economic expansion and not the expansion of welfare as a solution to social problems.
As one observer noted: "A Martin Luther King he is not. When once told by a potential industrial re-locator that the city's University of Texas branch lacked programs in key engineering fields, Cisneros got together a committee that persuaded the state educational authorities to remedy that need. Cisneros married his high school sweetheart, Mary Alice Perez, in and was the father of two daughters and a son.
In his public announcement of an extramarital affair with Linda Medlar led to his resignation as mayor and the near destruction of his marriage.
He reunited with his wife primarily because his infant son had been born the previous year with a defective heart.
Although Cisneros supposedly ended the affair with Medlar, he continued making support payments to her after he left office and founded Cisneros Assets Management Company. As HUD secretary Cisneros worked hard to reverse decades of Federal housing policy that promoted racism and to make the department's programs more efficient.
Despite his efforts, though, the Medlar controversy would not go away. The scandal worsened in late as tapes of conversations between Cisneros and Medlar surfaced in the press. From to , Medlar had secretly taped her conversations with Cisneros. She sold the tapes to the tabloid TV news show Inside Edition. The fall-out from this unwanted publicity led to a further FBI investigation of Cisneros's financial reports used during his cabinet background check.
National Public Radio NPR reported Cisneros response as "I regret any mistakes that I may have made but affirm once again that I have at no point violated the public's trust. Throughout his ordeal, Cisneros continued to receive the support of the Clinton administration, but decided in not to remain in his post during the president's second term in office.
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