Page 252 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

BECOMING A FELLOW

personnel or lawyers we had, or what geography was represented. People may
have been thinking about it, but we never explicitly discussed it. We just let
that fall out, and we counted the bodies after the battle.” Roger Porter con-
curred, saying, “It was something that happened. I was on the Commission
with John Gardner, and he emphasized over and over again in our delibera-
tions that there were no quotas for anything—males, females, regional, eth-
nic group—anything. We’re looking for excellence, and there’s plenty of
excellence out there to find. I never took into consideration people’s demo-
graphics, and inevitably, we ended up with a very diverse class.” The overall
makeup of the program’s alumni clearly demonstrates that the Fellows are a
fair reflection of the American population.
However, that was not the case the first year, when Lady Bird Johnson
lamented the fact that not a single woman was selected. Indeed, at least one
extremely capable young woman who applied that year was not chosen. By
the time the first class of Fellows was selected, North Carolina native Mary
Elizabeth Hanford had graduated from Duke University, done postgraduate
work at Oxford, and earned a master’s degree in education and a law degree
from Harvard. Even though she didn’t make the final cut—she was selected
as an alternate—Tom Carr remembers Hanford well. He acknowledged that
her regional panel “may have reflected a prevalent regional view of the role
of women and their opportunities at that time. But probably there were no
women the first year because I did a lousy job of getting the word out. I plead
guilty, but I guarantee we worked our tails off to remedy the problem!”
Carr also notes that Mary Elizabeth Hanford—later known as Sen-
ator Elizabeth Dole—managed to have a stellar career in public service
despite not being selected to be a White House Fellow. Dole joined Pres-
ident Ronald Reagan’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, the first
woman to hold that position. She then was sworn in by President George
H. W. Bush as the nation’s twentieth Secretary of Labor in January 1989.
Dole left President Bush’s cabinet in 1991 to become only the second
woman since founder Clara Barton to serve as President of the Ameri-
can Red Cross, an organization larger than many Fortune 500 compa-
nies. In January 1999, she concluded her service at the Red Cross and
sought the Republican presidential nomination. Despite not being
selected in that first class of White House Fellows, Elizabeth Dole has
had a remarkable public service career, winning 54 percent of the vote in
November 2002 to serve the people of North Carolina in the United

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