By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Bernard Kerik speaking at the Republican National Convention. |
WASHINGTON -- President Bush has chosen former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik, who helped oversee the city’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks, to run the Department of Homeland Security, a senior administration official said Thursday.
Kerik’s path to the top anti-terror position, replacing Tom Ridge, has been anything but conventional.
A military policeman in South Korea in the 1970s, Kerik’s first anti-terrorism work was as a paid private security worker in Saudi Arabia. He joined the New York Police Department in 1986, first walking a beat in Times Square when it was still a haven for small-time hustlers.
He eventually was tapped to lead the city’s corrections department, and was appointed commissioner in 2000.
It was in that position that he became known to the rest of the country, supervising the NYPD’s response to the 2001 terror attacks, often at the side of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani. In 2003, he took on a temporary assignment in Iraq to help rebuild the country’s police force.
After the 9/11 attack, Kerik helped rally a department that lost 23 members. Most recently, he has been a consultant for Giuliani Partners, working to rebuild Baghdad’s police force.