Page 87 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

education and also expanded public housing for the poor. In 1968 he made
an unsuccessful bid for president, and in January 1969 the winner, Richard
Nixon, appointed him to head the Department of Transportation. Later
that year, Volpe chose Pastora San Juan Cafferty (WHF 69–70) to be his
White House Fellow.
Cafferty, an instructor at George Washington University, had been a
Wall Street Fellow and a Smithsonian Research Fellow before she was
selected to be a White House Fellow and Secretary Volpe’s special assis-
tant. Her time at the Department of Transportation taught her a lasting
lesson about how a leader fosters change. “Volpe used to get together with
his immediate deputies for lunch on Saturdays at the Coast Guard mess.
The upside of that was the Coast Guard mess had the best food in town,
far better than anything at the White House,” Cafferty recalled. “And one
day Volpe said that I ought to join the group for lunch on Saturdays, and
I told him that I couldn’t go: They didn’t allow women in the Coast Guard
mess. He said that was inappropriate, and he made them change the rule.
I was the first woman to ever have access to the Coast Guard mess.”
Volpe was appalled when he realized that all those working on the
upper two floors at the DOT building were white and those working on
the lower floors were predominantly black. “He called his assistant secre-
taries together and he told them that that was unacceptable and that he
wanted those floors integrated within the year. And you know what? They
were integrated within the year,” Cafferty said. “Secretary Volpe taught me
a great deal about leadership in the sense that the number one person has
to set the agenda for change and has to make it very clear that the mark-
ers are measurable, that there’s a time line, and that he is going to keep
track of it. And once a week in Volpe’s office we went over recruitment and
promotion statistics to look at diversity. I learned that if a leader said some-
thing had to be done and then measured it and held people accountable
for it, it happened, no matter how difficult it was to do. The DOT was
completely segregated when he moved in; in fact, it’s hard to believe how
extremely segregated the entire city was at that time.”
Even though people of color were not given access to many high-profile
jobs in Washington in the 1960s, the White House Fellows bucked that
trend and included African Americans from day one. Ron Lee (WHF
65–66) was the nation’s first African-American White House Fellow, and
he made the most of his unique perspective during his year at the U.S.

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