Page 134 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ASK THE TOUGH QUESTIONS

When the opportunity arises to learn something new, leaders do not linger
in the shadows. They take a deep breath, step forward, and ask the tough
questions. That’s what Mark Vlasic (WHF 06–07) did when he met Pres-
ident George W. Bush.
Vlasic was a Fellow in the Department of Defense, and he described
what it was like for his class to visit the forty-third President of the
United States. “We were a bit excited and a bit nervous, all at the same
time. We had all met famous people before, and we’d all just met Presi-
dent Bush the week before at the White House Christmas party, but to
my knowledge this was the first time any of us had sat down for a chat
in the Roosevelt Room with the leader of the free world. After a few min-
utes, President George W. Bush opened the door and walked in just like
any other person. He invited us to sit down, and he sat at the middle of
the table. He was relaxed, and although he was wearing a suit like the
rest of us, he was still informal. He immediately put the room at ease.
My first impression was that President Bush in some ways is very differ-
ent in person than he is on television. The man that sometimes seems
awkward on television is both passionate and articulate in person. I knew
some of my friends would never believe me. Still, the president is just
a man, as human and fallible as every one of us. But as I look back at
it today, he really is, in person, a guy you’d want to go have a cold
beer with.”
Indeed, Vlasic, a Californian who had spent a year backpacking
around the world and over three years studying and working in “Old
Europe,” had taken some ribbing from a few friends and former col-
leagues for accepting the White House Fellowship appointment from
President Bush, although he doubted that any of those disparagers would
have turned down the chance to talk face to face with the president. “I
decided to ask him about something I was passionate about and some-
thing my friends might be proud of me for asking—how to fight geno-
cide,” Vlasic explained. Vlasic had spent nearly three years working for
the United Nations as a prosecuting attorney at the International Crim-
inal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where he was a member of the
Slobodan Milosevic and Srebrenica genocide trial and investigation
teams. Milosevic and others were implicated in the most terrible mass
execution in Europe since the Holocaust, in which Bosnian Serb forces
rounded up more than 7,500 Muslim men and boys and slaughtered

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