Page 208 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

hesitation and with a twinkle in her eye, Julia replied with total confidence,
‘The first plane will leave immediately. It’s loaded, on the runway, and ready
to go. You don’t think I’d wait to start until after the president signed the
order, do you?’” Taft arrived in the country aboard that military aircraft,
carrying only her daughter’s pink Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag
because it was the only personal gear she could find on such short notice.
The cargo plane otherwise was packed with relief supplies. Chutzpah with
charm was one of Taft’s trademarks.
Personal courage was another. Her work as the head of the U.S. delega-
tion for earthquake victims in Armenia earned her the Soviet Union’s
Order of Personal Courage award and a distinguished service award from
the Agency for International Development in 1989. On a relief mission to
Sarajevo in 1992, she donned a helmet and bulletproof vest and hunkered
down in a bathtub when her hotel came under fire.
During her three years at OFDA, Taft and her staff dealt with major
flooding in Bangladesh that covered an area almost three times the size of
New Jersey and left 25 million homeless, less-publicized floods in the
Dominican Republic and India, displaced people in Burundi, a poison gas
incident that killed 1,200 in Cameroon, and a locust plague that resulted
in widespread famine in the Sahel and Ethiopia. As a result of her work,
she was recruited to head InterAction, a coalition of headstrong non-
governmental organizations (NGOs). At first she resisted, saying, “I’m just
too disorganized and too bossy for this kind of job.” As Kenneth Bacon
noted, “It was one of the few times in her life that she was wrong. From
1994 to 1997, she turned InterAction into an important advocacy voice,
showing once again that she could herd cats.”
In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Taft as Assistant Secretary of
State for Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), a post she held for four
years. In 1999, she was named to the additional post of special coordinator
for Tibetan issues to promote dialogue between the Dalai Lama and the Chi-
nese government. While serving as the Assistant Secretary of State for PRM,
Taft played a key role in protecting the 800,000 refugees driven from Kosovo
and in shaping U.S. responses to displacement around the world.
Taft had almost everybody’s number and was not afraid to pick up the
phone, but because she was a problem solver, people often called her. After
leaving the State Department, Mark Malloch Brown, then the Adminis-
trator of the United Nations Development Programme, lured her to the

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