Governor Praised for His Handling of Crisis

In the space of a week, Rhode Island Gov. Donald L. Carcieri has gone from being the butt of a Jay Leno joke to getting his Rudolph W. Giuliani moment -- and seizing it.

The 60-year-old political neophyte came advertised as a take-charge businessman, but what is drawing him wide praise in the aftermath of Thursday’s devastating nightclub fire is the humanity of his responses.

Carcieri, in a brief interview Sunday at the National Guard armory here, said it takes no particular talent or imagination for a father of four and grandfather of 13 to empathize with the victims’ families.

“I remember what it was like when it got late and the kids weren’t home,” he said.

“You always worried something might happen, but you had to have faith they’d be OK.”

On the “Tonight Show” on Tuesday, Leno had poked fun at Carcieri for being on vacation in Florida when the Presidents Day storm dumped 2 feet of snow on Rhode Island.

Carcieri was still there Friday morning when news reached him of the blaze that left 97 dead and 187 hospitalized, many in critical condition.

The governor headed right back to Rhode Island. Since then, his solid frame and round face, his curly gray hair and rimless glasses, have become familiar to television viewers nationwide.

Like Giuliani, who deftly handled the challenges of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as New York mayor, Carcieri has “stepped up to the moment, showing the proper balance between leadership and compassion,” said Darrell M. West, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

In directing the state’s response, Carcieri has “kept on top of all the details, from reaching out to the families to tracking down the dentists” for assistance with records that could help identify victims, West said.

“A year ago, nobody would have predicted this,” West added, recalling the long odds Carcieri faced as an unknown, first-time candidate not even endorsed by his own Republican Party.

But people who have known Carcieri longer might have predicted it.

Longtime friend Dave Duffy, a retired advertising executive who spearheaded Carcieri’s run for governor, noted that Carcieri had interrupted his career as a business executive to move his family to Kingston, Jamaica, to run the West Indies antipoverty operations of Catholic Relief Services.

Carcieri put his children in the local schools, and his wife, Sue, continued her career as a science teacher.

“It was tough,” Duffy said. “There were bars on the windows, and a priest friend of his was murdered after having dinner the night before at Don’s house.”

Carcieri grew up in East Greenwich, R.I., the first of five children of a legendary high school teacher and football-basketball coach.

In high school, Don was elected class president every year and became a three-sport standout.

Admitted as a scholarship student to Brown, he worked his way through college delivering milk and digging quahogs in Narragansett Bay.

Carcieri taught high school math for two years after college, then landed a job in a Providence-based bank, where he moved through the ranks to become executive vice president in 10 years.

“It’s the math background that makes him so analytical,” Duffy said. “He can seize a problem quickly and break it down.”

After his humanitarian work in Jamaica, a former banking colleague recruited Carcieri to Cookson America, a Providence-based unit of the British-owned manufacturing conglomerate Cookson Group Worldwide. Again, Carcieri moved through the ranks quickly, finally becoming chief executive of Cookson America and a managing director of a $3-billion global operation with 12,000 employees.

In 1997, reluctant to move to London and unhappy with the firm’s direction, Carcieri exercised his option and quit at age 55.

A few years later, at breakfast with Duffy, Carcieri startled his friend by announcing that he wanted to run for governor.

“Any teacher remembers a student from their classroom who had the ability to get A’s but was getting C minuses and Ds,” Carcieri said Sunday.

“I was always convinced that Rhode Island had ‘A’ potential but was getting C minuses because of poor fiscal policy, political corruption and other things,” he said.

Carcieri breezed to victory in a primary over the endorsed Republican and then topped Democrat Myrth York in a nasty general election, in which York tried unsuccessfully to link Carcieri to the deaths of workers at a Brazilian mine with which Cookson had done business.

In barely six weeks in office, Carcieri has impressed legislators from both parties as straightforward, lacking in ego and far more communicative than his predecessor, Republican Lincoln Almond.

“There’s been more interaction between the state House and the governor’s office in two months than there has been in the last eight years,” said Rhode Island House Speaker Robert Murphy, a Democrat whose district includes the nightclub where the fire took place.

The tragedy has revealed Carcieri as “a very caring and committed guy with a very human side to him.”

The hardest part of the job so far, beyond even the horror of the state morgue, has been dealing with the bereaved, Carcieri said.

He recalled visiting the family assistance center at a local hotel on Saturday and talking with “a grandmother my age who lost her daughter. ‘What do I tell her 10- and 12-year old?’ she asked me.”

“Nothing prepares you for this,” Carcieri said.