Matthew Broderick, who took responsibility for communications foul-ups at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) during Hurricane Katrina, is resigning.

The former Marine Corps general has been director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Operations Center (HSOC), its 24-hour communications and response hub, since 2004.

“(I) promised my wife I’d come for a year when DHS asked me to come over and help get the HSOC up and running,” Broderick told Congressional Quarterly in an email.

“Later I promised on my children’s heads that I would leave in 3 (she wasn’t too happy about that but she is a great American).”

Broderick also said he was tired of the grind after years of travel and long hours.

He said he had a “lot of deployed time in my 30 year USMC career and (was) almost totally on the road 4-5 days a week for 3.5 years as a corporate VP after I retired.”

“I had to leave (DHS) in May (3 years) and I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from a private company.”

Broderick said he was “dumb enough” to have actually wanted to stay at DHS.

“I did a reality check — family first,” he said.

DHS spokesperson Michelle Petrovich said the department would be issuing a statement late Thursday.

“It’s a huge blow to the department,” said John Rollins, former intelligence chief of staff to DHS’s first secretary, Tom Ridge.

“This guy understood what the rest of us in IAID (the Infrastructure Protection and Information Analysis wing of DHS) didn’t,” Rollins said. “He knew what he was doing and he had a plan to make it work.”

Some sources said Broderick may have been made a scapegoat for the Katrina disaster that continues to embarrass the Bush administration.

But Broderick himself accepted responsibility for the administration’s communications breakdown during a recent congressional hearing.

“Madam Chairman,” Broderick answered in response to a question from Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, on Feb. 10. “It’s my responsibility as, at that time, the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center, to inform these key personnel. If they did not receive that information, it was my responsibility and my fault.

“I would like to point out, though, that getting that situation awareness and getting the correct information was very difficult,” Broderick said.

Speaking of Broderick’s mea culpa at the Collins hearing, Rollins said “he took a lot of blame for Secretary Chertoff not being informed.”

“He took a bullet for the team,” Rollins said.

Broderick had privately announced his resignation in a March 1 letter to members of a DHS emergency preparations program.

“It is with deep, personal regret that effective March 31, 2006, I will be leaving the Department of Homeland Security. The decision was a personal one and was made after several weeks of agonizing over whether my duties to public service outweighed any previous commitments I had made to my family,” Broderick said in the letter, which was obtained by Congressional Quarterly.

The letter was addressed to members of DHS’s Homeland Security Information Network-Critical Infrastructure (HSIN-CI), which shares terror-related law enforcement information between local, state and federal agencies.

“In 2003, I made a personal pledge to my family that I would step down from whatever position I might hold when my 3 years of service in the Department was over,” Broderick wrote.

“That time has come, my friends.”

Tim Starks contributed to this story.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.