Page 264 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

FELLOWS AT WORK

indelible image of a concerned President Johnson standing in shirtsleeves
in a West Wing hallway, reading news reports of the unfolding crisis as
they rolled off the clacking teletype machines. Furtado also was there the
day the president shocked the country—including his own senior staff—
with the abrupt announcement that he would not run for reelection.
At the end of his Fellowship year, Furtado left Washington with a new
outlook on government and the people who serve. “I was sometimes sur-
prised by the extent to which decisions were made by the president because
it was simply the ‘right thing’ to do, sometimes despite substantial pressure
to do otherwise,” Furtado explained. “I came away from my year as a
White House Fellow, plus two other forays into the federal government,
with great respect for the integrity and abilities of many of the senior civil
servants with whom I dealt, an opinion that obviously differs greatly from
the typical public perception.”
Another Fellow who witnessed—and even participated in—history in
the making was Roger Porter (WHF 74–75). A former Rhodes Scholar,
Porter was handpicked by Vice President Gerald Ford to serve as one of
his assistants. The two had hit it off during their face-to-face interview—
so much so, in fact, that Ford asked Porter to come to Washington early
and start work before the Fellowship year began. Porter received permis-
sion from the White House Fellows director to work outside the normal
parameters of the program, and a week later he was packed and ready to
head to the nation’s capital.
“I left Cambridge the morning of August 8 in my car loaded with my
belongings to drive down to Washington. I was on the Massachusetts Turn-
pike when I heard the news that President Nixon was going to address the
nation that night at nine o’clock. I always expected that he would announce
his resignation,” Porter said. “So I arrived that evening and watched
the resignation speech on television, and the next morning I went to the
White House. As I was going up the elevator into the old Executive Office
Building, the elevator doors opened and there was Vice President Ford and
a couple of Secret Service agents on their way to Ford’s last meeting with
President Nixon. He said, ‘Oh, I see you finally made it.’ I was sent to his
offices, where I received my first assignment in government, which was to
make myself useful.”
Porter was proofreading a document for one of the vice president’s staff
members when a messenger arrived. “You must be the luckiest person I’ve

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