Page 280 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE EDUCATION PROGRAM

they had gotten wind of,” former director Steve Strickland said. “I apolo-
gized to Bess for asking, given that the Fellows had just been at the White
House the previous week. ‘Don’t apologize for pushing, Steve,’ Bess said.
‘Don’t forget, if there had been a White House Fellows program in Lyn-
don Johnson’s early years, he would have been a Fellow, and he would have
been the first in line asking the White House if the Fellows could come
more often!’ I hope all the Fellows from the first four classes know what a
good friend and ally—what a good godmother—they had in Bess Abell.”
The spouses of today’s White House Fellows occasionally are invited
to attend White House functions such as dinners, receptions, and parties,
and they also are included in educational meetings now and then. How-
ever, their level of participation is not as intense as it was in the early days,
perhaps because many spouses, now both wives and husbands, tend to have
opportunities for enrichment through their own jobs, not to mention busy
calendars!

FELLOWS AROUND THE WORLD
Another highly anticipated component of the Fellowship education pro-
gram is travel, during which the Fellows see firsthand the impact of U.S.
domestic and foreign policy at home and abroad. At the beginning of their
year in Washington, the Fellows discuss where they would like to travel
and what they hope to study at each destination, and the class then votes
on which trips to suggest to the Director, who makes the final decision
about where the class will go. Fellows have witnessed the fall of the Berlin
Wall and studied the effects of nuclear policy in Pakistan and India.
They’ve traveled to Botswana to learn about strategies to address
AIDS/HIV, and they’ve studied border and customs issues on the ground
in Miami. From the USSR to the Panama Canal to the Middle East to
meet with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the Fellows have traversed
the globe and returned home with an enriched sense of the common
humanity of the world and the challenges that face its diverse peoples and
governments.
When their trip to Russia was canceled because of President Carter’s
boycott of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Moscow, Marsha “Marty”
Evans (WHF 79–80) and her class promptly recalibrated. It was shortly
after the Camp David Accords, and so they scheduled a trip to Egypt and
Israel. Upon their arrival in Cairo, the class asked to meet President Anwar

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