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Ken Salazar Biography

U.S. Senator / Government Official

Name at birth: Kenneth Lee Salazar

Ken Salazar is the former Colorado senator who became U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama in 2009. He heads a vast agency whose bureaus manage water, fish, wildlife, mining, public lands and national parks and maintain federal relationships with American Indians. A cowboy-hatted lawyer, businessman, farmer and rancher, Salazar was elected to the U.S. Senate from Colorado in 2004. A year earlier, as the state's attorney general, he led a well-publicized fight against a ballot measure that would have transferred water across the Rocky Mountains from western Colorado to Denver. He previously served the state as natural resources director (1990-94) and legal counsel to Gov. Roy Romer (1986-90). His ancestors have lived in the American Southwest since the 1500s, before there was a United States or a Mexico -- meaning he is neither an immigrant to the U.S., nor, technically, a Mexican American. He says he has nonetheless experienced the bigotry and discrimination that are sometimes aimed at those groups.

Extra credit: He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Colorado College (1977) and a law degree from the University of Michigan (1981)... He and his wife, Hope, have two daughters, Andrea and Melinda... A Dairy Queen restaurant is among the small businesses he and Hope have operated together.

Past interior ministers of other countries include Ehud Barak (Israel), Nicolas Sarkozy (France), and King Fahd (Saudi Arabia).