By Mark Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers
Nov. 29, 2008

Then-Navy Lt. Zach Ambrose spent an intense day in November 1994 coordinating the evacuation of 800 cruise ship passengers who had fled their burning vessel and were stranded on the deck of an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean.
Ambrose was dispatched to the tanker from the guided-missile frigate USS Halyburton by his captain, then-Cmdr. Robert Reilly.

"You pick a mature and capable junior officer who's got the savvy and sense to go over there and make order out of chaos," Reilly, now an admiral, said last week.

Sounds like good training for Ambrose's new job as chief of staff for Gov.-elect Beverly Perdue.

Ambrose, 41, is an MIT-trained engineer with a reputation as a steady hand, a trait that could serve him well as he seeks to manage the chaos of a new administration.

The chief of staff is usually the gatekeeper through whom staff members, agency heads, legislators and political supporters must pass to reach the governor. He's also the chief operating officer, who ensures the governor's agenda keeps moving and that the executive branch of state government runs well.

"He watches my back," Perdue said. "My personality isn't such to make the trains run on time."

Ambrose is a linear thinker who colleagues say breaks down a problem to solve it rather than thinking about how to spin it in the best political light. But Ambrose has challenges. He will have to show that he can butt heads with powerful legislators for whom he used to work.

Some observers wonder, too, whether he's got better game than the campaign he ran for Perdue this year. The campaign was widely criticized among Democrats as careening from message to message. Former Gov. Jim Hunt, a Perdue mentor, tried to reassure supporters in mid-October.

"She will be a better governor," Hunt said, "than people have seen in this campaign."

Serendipitous arrival

Ambrose's new job is the result of an unplanned journey. Ambrose didn't hurry into politics, he wandered into it.

"I wasn't a teen Democrat," Ambrose said in a recent interview. "I wasn't in College Democrats."

Ambrose, born in Fairfax, Va., moved to the Raleigh area from upstate New York at age 7 after his father, an entomologist, joined N.C. State University.

Ambrose is the son and grandson of sailors, but says no one pushed him to sign up for ROTC. He liked the idea of the Navy paying for college.

The military training was not unusual in the wire-and-gear-heavy world of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ambrose studied electrical engineering and Russian. He and a classmate would wire fraternity brothers' desks with a contact switch and firecrackers to explode when the desk was opened. Today, he still displays a quick wit and wry smile.

After college, a highlight of his five years in uniform was the cruise ship rescue while serving on the Halyburton.

Ambrose was a tactical action officer on the Halyburton, meaning he was empowered to direct the weapons during battle, to "fight the ship," Reilly said. As an officer of the deck, Ambrose also had the captain's driver's license when needed, maneuvering the vessel at sea.

"He was, in many ways, a little more mature than many of his contemporaries," Reilly said.

Transition to politics

Ambrose finished his tour in 1996. He moved to Durham and became a stay-at-home dad while his wife, Jill, finished her residency in pediatrics. He had the time to focus on local politics and was at a stage in his life, as a new parent, where those things started to mean more to him.

He started voicing his opinion through letters to the editor of The News & Observer in 1996. One criticized a story and defended President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton against the congressional inquiry into their finances. The other, perhaps a foreshadowing of the Perdue's election as the state's first female governor, essentially said girls can do anything boys can do.

That same year, he decided to get involved. Ambrose saddled up his daughter, Catherine, in a backpack carrier and knocked on doors for Democrats.
Four years later, Ambrose was the campaign manager for Wiley Wooten, a Democrat taking on a Republican state senator in a district around Burlington. Wooten lost, but Democratic Senate leaders hired Ambrose to oversee all their party's Senate campaigns in 2002 and 2004, despite his limited resume of political experience.

Sen. Tony Rand, a Fayetteville Democrat and caucus leader, said Ambrose's background of engineering and military leadership distinguished him.

"We don't see many MIT graduates running campaigns," Rand said. "His decision-making processes were very solid."

Engineering politics

Ambrose brought an engineer's mentality to political problems, according to colleagues, breaking them down and analyzing each element for a solution. Scott Falmlen, executive director of the N.C. Democratic Party at the time, said he has never seen Ambrose lose his cool.

"He's no-nonsense, but he's not stiff," Falmlen said. "He's not an egghead."

Perdue hired Ambrose as chief of staff in the lieutenant governor's office with the expectation that he would run her campaign for governor. After winning the nomination, the Perdue campaign took lumps from fellow Democrats as polls showed her in a tight race with Republican Pat McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte.

"An awful lot of folks predicted she was going to lose," said Democratic consultant Gary Pearce. "There was a lot of criticism of the messaging in the campaign. When you're not inside a campaign, you can't see their polls and their research, so you don't know."

Mac McCorkle, one of Perdue's consultants, said the campaign took hits for not sticking to a few core messages.

"McCrory owned the message of governmental 'change,'" McCorkle said, because Perdue had spent 22 years as a legislator or lieutenant governor. "Rather than hammer a simple, coherent message and stay on it from day one, we had to be more flexible."

He said Ambrose kept the campaign and resources focused on the end game that turned out to be more important.

Perdue said that Ambrose has a long view.

"He's not afraid of fighting," she said. "He just knows when to pick his battles."