Page 62 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS KNOW THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN WORK

the importance of work-life balance. Drummond started his journalism career
at the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal. He then worked his way up the
ladder at the L.A. Times, progressing from staff writer to assistant metropol-
itan editor to bureau chief of New Delhi and Jerusalem before being
appointed to a White House Fellowship by President Gerald Ford. He was
assigned to work in the State Department, but when Jimmy Carter was inau-
gurated in January 1977, Drummond was tapped to be an associate White
House press secretary. After his Fellowship, he returned to the L.A. Times and
then accepted an offer to become the first editor of National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition. In 1983, he left NPR to become a journalism professor at
the University of California at Berkeley, where he remains today. Through-
out his impressive careers in journalism and teaching, Drummond was a self-
described workaholic—that is, until the day in 1997 when his wife of fifteen
years, Faith, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Suddenly nothing at the office
mattered anymore.
“She was getting chemotherapy, and she was in such pain. I felt utterly
helpless—like a fifth wheel. I desperately wanted to help her, so I took it
upon myself to enroll in a massage therapy course, and I got certified as
an acupressure therapist. Acupressure helped her so much, and I liked it so
much that I enrolled in another course on emotional balance,” Drummond
said. “So when she was dying, we used this guided therapy and revisited
all the places we had been when we were the most happy. Faith and I had
visited Mexico often. Our favorite place was the Pueblo Bonito resort in
Mazatlan, on the western coast of Mexico. We had bought a time share
there not long after the resort opened in 1984. We often took long strolls
along the beach. We knew all the contours along a one-mile route south of
the resort. It wasn’t hard for us to remember that place. We could see the
water glistening on the beach. It helped both of us to do that, and I believe
in the power of it. Then I looked at all my colleagues, and their family
lives were in such chaos, so I decided we must do something to show peo-
ple that there’s another way. At U.C. Berkeley we started a course called
“Emotional Balance for Journalists,” which shows the students that there’s
a mind-body connection and gives them some techniques that will not only
prolong their working lives but also their lives as human beings. There’s an
old saying that on one’s deathbed, you never hear somebody say, ‘I wish I
spent more time at the office.’ It’s an article of faith these days that stress
kills and destroys. But in the news business we tend to accept stress as the

47