Page 206 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

One former White House Fellow who was renowned for solving
problems on a global scale was Julia Vadala Taft (WHF 70–71). Taft was
selected as a White House Fellow at age twenty-eight, just one year after
earning a master’s degree in international relations from the University of
Colorado in Boulder. The daughter of an army surgeon, she came to the
program a recent divorcee who had been abandoned by her first husband,
but with a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm for a lifetime of public
service that epitomized the dreams and aspirations for the program of its
founders, President Lyndon Johnson and John Gardner.
Few women were selected in the early years of the White House
Fellows program, and Taft was the only woman in a class of seventeen. Her
fellow classmates Dana Mead, “Burn” Loeffke, Tom O’Brien, and Keith
Crisco noted that it must have been like having sixteen brothers, all of
whom were very protective of her, especially on the social scene. Taft
served her Fellowship year in the Office of the Vice President, where her
outgoing personality and abilities were such that she was sought after for
management positions in several agencies when her Fellowship year came
to a close. She chose the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
because she wanted to help the poor. And in 1974—with the hearty
approval of the sixteen big brothers from her White House Fellows class—
she married the great-grandson of President William Howard Taft, William
Howard Taft IV, who would go on to become the general counsel to both
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Department
of Defense; Deputy Secretary of Defense; United States permanent repre-
sentative to NATO during Operation Desert Storm; and legal advisor to
the State Department under Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Beginning in 1975, Julia Taft embarked on a career that would mark
her as one of the world’s few true experts in caring for and resettling
refugees. At the suggestion of HEW Secretary Caspar Weinberger, President
Ford plucked her from the senior ranks at HEW to direct the resettlement
of refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos after the collapse of
Saigon. The resettlement program brought 131,000 refugees to the United
States in six months. Nothing on such a scale had ever been attempted
by this country before. There was no template and no time to plan. The
work just had to get done, and Taft directed it all with humor, grace, and
a backbone of steel. “Because she was so young—she was only thirty-two
at the time—Julia felt comfortable saying, ‘I don’t have a clue about how

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