Alumni Spotlight

George Croner, Methacton High School Class of 1971, is a former principal litigation counsel in the Office of General Counsel at the National Security Agency (NSA), where he served following a long and exciting career that began with his appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Having graduated from the Navy with distinction in 1975, he served on an aircraft carrier for two years before being accepted into the Navy's Law Education Program and then graduating cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1980.

Mr. Croner has had an extraordinary career. He is part of a Methacton legacy only surpassed by his father, William Croner, a teacher and administrator at Methacton from its opening in 1962 until he retired in 1982. George credits his father as the single greatest influence on his life and, he suspects, his father has influenced countless other Methacton graduates as well. When William passed away in 1994, George’s family created the William G. Croner Memorial Award, which has been presented to a worthy Methacton graduating senior each year for the past quarter century.

George recalls that when he attended Methacton, the junior and senior high schools operated out of one building. He remembers being in that building for 6 years. Fifty years later, it is hard to nearly impossible for him to select a "favorite" memory, but George says he has indelible recollections of his entire family going to that one building every day because Methacton was truly the center of their universe. George is a proud graduate of Methacton High School and he asserts that it provided the foundation for all that has followed in his life.

George worked as a Navy JAG both at NSA and in a variety of other legal capacities before leaving the Navy in 1988, and continuing in the private practice of law for the next 28 years. During his time in the NSA, he worked as NSA’s principal lawyer on several major espionage cases and as NSA's representative to the White House Iran-Contra interagency group. For his service related to the Iran-Contra matter, he received a letter of appreciation from President Ronald Reagan, and his 13 years of active-duty military service as a Navy lawyer landed him two Defense Meritorious Service Medals (DMSMs), a Meritorious Service Medal (MSM), and a Navy Commendation Medal (NCM).

Following 28 years of private law practice while serving as shareholder and director of a Philadelphia-based law firm, George retired in 2016 and returned to his NSA interests to write on foreign intelligence and national security matters. In 2017, he was invited to join the Foreign Policy Research Institute (fpri.org) as a Senior Fellow, and he has had over 50 articles published on a variety of media platforms addressing issues of national security, foreign intelligence and electronic surveillance with a particular focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). He also serves on the Advisory Council to the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) at the University of Pennsylvania, he is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, and remains "Of Counsel" to his law firm as indicated on the law firm's website (www.kohnswift.com).

George has a profound appreciation for his experience as a high school student. “The quality of your education impacts your future success more than, perhaps, any other single factor.” His advice to current Methacton HS students: “Take advantage of the opportunities that Methacton offers. I didn't fully appreciate this while I was attending Methacton but, when I started at the Naval Academy and was matriculating with people drawn from high schools all over the United States, I quickly came to recognize the quality of the education I had received at Methacton. The Naval Academy's academic standards were quite high but, after assessment testing, I validated an entire year of English, Spanish, and math that afforded me significant academic opportunities not available to others who didn’t have the more flexible curriculum created by those validations. I quickly recognized that the quality of the education I had received at Methacton represented the major difference in creating those academic opportunities.”

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