Page 233 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

effort to create, polish, and submit policy for the presidential imprint. It
was a consensus-building process that put him in contact with people across
the federal government spectrum, and it reinforced the lesson he had
learned from Bundy: He would have to earn the right to lead.
“Leadership doesn’t mean the occupation of a title. A title does not
automatically confer power upon you. You have to earn it. And boy, I
learned that from dealing with the people in the federal government,” De
Luca said. “Remember, we were at war, and I was put on the Vietnam coor-
dinating committee, and you had to know your stuff, especially a guy like
me, a White House Fellow. If I wanted to be effective, I had to get to know
all the different departments and all the different people who would work
with me. I was constantly on the go to find out what so and so was thinking
or to go over to the State Department and spend some time there in meetings
they were having. I learned to always bring something that they needed,
always bring some way to help them expedite their roles. That was something
I learned from Walt Rostow’s personality and his style.”
At the end of De Luca’s Fellowship, he stayed on in Washington for a
few more months to serve as Senator Frank Church’s special assistant on
international issues, and then he and his wife, Jo, returned to San Francisco
with their baby daughter, Gina. At that time, the San Francisco mayor’s
race was in full swing and one of the candidates, a prominent antitrust
attorney named Joe Alioto, asked De Luca to advise him on how to appeal
to Russian-American voters. De Luca accepted the challenge. Alioto was
elected, and in a surprise move he chose De Luca to be his deputy mayor,
a new position Alioto created to help him run the city.
“And one of the very first things he wanted was to go to Washington
to meet Lyndon Johnson, because we needed waivers for the city, and he
wanted to meet Bundy, who was then head of the Ford Foundation, so we
could get monies for our police,” De Luca said. “It could only have been
the invisible hand of destiny that would bring me to such a place as that,
and so rapidly.” The lesson De Luca had learned as a White House Fellow
suddenly came back to him as he realized that on its own the title of deputy
mayor of San Francisco probably would have been insufficient to get him
into the White House and the Ford Foundation. However, because he had
earned respect through his diligence and hard work in Washington, he and
Mayor Alioto were granted access to Johnson and Bundy. Their requests
were approved.

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