Page 32 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

A FOUNDATION FOR FELLOWSHIP

was mortified, to say the least. “I had heard of the President’s reaction to
earlier, more trivial public embarrassments,” Goodwin wrote. “I could eas-
ily imagine his punishing, or even canceling, the entire White House Fel-
low program for its error in selecting me.” 6
Goodwin was correct in her assumption that the president would not
be pleased. Johnson’s personal secretary, Marie Fehmer Chiarodo, witnessed
his reaction to the New Republic article. “He had some very graphic lan-
guage, and I’m not going to repeat what he said,” Chiarodo recalled. “But
he used all of the four-letter words that he knew and some of the several-
syllable phrases that he used. He wondered why those selectors didn’t know
that this woman had this article coming out, and he said this was his White
House, and here someone had been selected that really made him feel like
an idiot. He thought he ought to have something to say about why these
Fellows were selected. I remember sort of a red-faced feeling, as if we did-
n’t do our homework, which is always very bad.”
In spite of Johnson’s embarrassment, Goodwin received word that the
president still wanted her to be a Fellow—just not in his office—and she
was reassigned to the Department of Labor. It wasn’t long, though, before
he invited her to work for him at the White House, telling her, “I’ve always
liked teaching. I should have been a teacher, and I want to practice on you.
I want to do everything I can to make the young people of America, espe-
cially you Harvards, understand what this political system is all about.”
Chiarodo—who was one of the select few to accompany Lyndon Johnson
on his flight from Dallas to Washington after John F. Kennedy’s assassina-
tion—said that the president viewed Goodwin as a challenge to his ability
to persuade. “Not only was [she] an eastern establishment nonbeliever, but
[she] was a female eastern establishment nonbeliever, and that was before
females were supposed to be very smart,” Chiarodo explained. “So this, in
a way, was another challenge to him, and he set about to eruade her and
to understand her and what made her think this way.” 7

6 Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s
Press), Foreword.
7 Transcript, Marie Fehmer Chiarodo, Oral History Interview III, August 16, 1972, by
Michael L. Gillette, pp. 15–17, LBJ Library. Online: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/
johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Chiarodo/Chiarodo3.pdf (accessed June 22, 2008).

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