Page 259 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

BECOMING A WHITE HOUSE FELLOW

NOW YOU’RE INVOLVED . . .
Howard Zucker (WHF 01–02) had graduated from George Washington
University’s School of Medicine at the ripe old age of twenty-two and gone
on to earn his J.D. from Fordham and his Master of Laws from Columbia.
He had been around the block a time or two by the time he was named a
White House Fellow under President George W. Bush, but Zucker still was
awed to find himself riding through the streets of Washington in a govern-
ment car across from his new principal, Department of Health and Human
Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, and he was pleased when Thomp-
son struck up a conversation by asking what he would most like to get out
of his Fellowship year.
“I want to get involved in health care policy and understand how it
works,” the eager young physician replied.
“How involved?” Thompson asked.
“Completely involved.”
“Totally involved?
“Yes, totally, completely involved.”
Thompson gathered up the tall stack of files piled beside him and
plunked them down on Zucker’s lap. “Summarize these by tomorrow
morning,” he said. “Now you’re involved.”
There are as many ways to craft a Fellowship year as there are Fellows.
However, most Fellows, like Zucker, want to become entirely immersed
in projects important to their principals. After the terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001, Thompson sent Zucker to work with Congress on the
response to the anthrax crisis. “If I thought something was important, he
would let me work on it,” Zucker recalled. “He gave me complete freedom.
Any meeting I wanted to sit in on, anything I wanted to do . . . it was just
the most unbelievable experience.”

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS MARSH CARTER?
Although most Fellows carry out the bulk of their duties at their desks in
Washington, many have the chance to travel to meetings or events either
with their principal or on behalf of him or her. One jet-setting Fellow
was Marshall “Marsh” Carter (WHF 75–76). A Fellow at the U.S. Agency
for International Development (USAID), Carter was part of a team that
laid out an electronic surveillance system in the Sinai desert after a peace
agreement between Israel and Egypt brokered by Henry Kissinger. Then,

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