Page 144 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

CHAPTER 14

LEADERS TAKE RISKS

It was 1964, and Robert Patricelli (WHF 65–66) read with great interest
the front-page story in the New York Times about the White House Fel-
lowships, a program being launched by President Lyndon Johnson to give
young Americans a chance to work for a year in Washington, D.C. It was
perfect timing. Patricelli was in his third year at Harvard Law School, and
although he planned to practice international law after graduation, he
thought a detour via the nation’s capital might be not only be interesting
but good for his career. A former Fulbright Scholar, he applied for the Fel-
lowship, was accepted, and spent a year under the tutelage of Secretary of
State Dean Rusk.
Rusk gave the twenty-six-year-old Fellow practically unlimited access
to the workings of the State Department. “He told his scheduler and per-
sonal assistant to share his schedule with me every week so I could check
the meetings I wanted to sit in on,” Patricelli recalled. “Ninety-five per-
cent of the time he agreed to let me attend. Often in those meetings it
would be the secretary and some visiting foreign minister, a translator, and
me. I was also invited to travel with him to lots of international confer-
ences all over the world. I was barely dry behind the ears, and as you can
imagine, the Fellowship was very much a life-changing experience for me.”
Rusk also gave Patricelli the job of organizing his briefing materials in
preparation for the first major congressional hearings on the Vietnam War
and took his young Fellow along to sit in on the hearings. No matter what
the occasion or the pressures, Patricelli was impressed by Secretary Rusk’s
grace under pressure. “I always tried to follow his example of maintaining

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