Page 181 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

CHAPTER 18

LEADERS ARE

PERSUASIVE

John McGinty (WHF 67–68) was a young architect with degrees from
Rice and Princeton when he was accepted for a White House Fellowship,
the first and only architect ever selected. Sent to the Department of the
Interior to work alongside Secretary Stewart Udall, McGinty was given
several significant assignments that greatly expanded his professional and
personal perspectives. He had a hand in the restoration of Ford’s Theatre,
the historic site of President Lincoln’s assassination, and helped Udall with
his speeches and books, injecting into them fresh ideas about design and
planning. McGinty also was sent to scout out and report on development
initiatives in the Virgin Islands and the Pacific Trust Territories.
Closer to home, McGinty was assigned a task that taught him one of
the most critical leadership lessons he ever learned. In the early summer of
1968 after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, the Reverend Ralph
Abernathy, a close King associate, carried out what was called the Poor
People’s Campaign, which was to be a massive Washington, D.C., “sit-in”
in support of an Economic Bill of Rights that would guarantee that poor
people had access to jobs, housing, and food. “They came by the thousands,
on foot, in symbolic mule trains, by bus, and by air, from all over America,
but particularly they came from the South. Their destination was the
National Mall of the United States, where they intended to camp until
progress was forthcoming on civil rights,” McGinty recalled. “The Mall is
a national park and, as such, under the care and custody of the Department

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