President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was the last sensation of the second millennium AD in the US. While it was an odd thing to do in White House, there was not much to it. But the American institution of internship is distinctive; I thought it was a great idea to expose bright young people to what went on in the highest echelons of power - though Bill went too far. Hence this column - the last one for 1999, on Christmas Day, in Business Standard.
WHO WAS MONICA LEWINSKY?
Everyone
knows: Monica Lewinsky was an intern. Just what sort of a selection she went
through I am not sure. At least three offices in the White House take interns:
Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of Management and Budget, and
Centre for Environmental Quality.
Of these, the OMB runs
a programme called White House Fellows. President Johnson started it; in
the thirty years since it began, over 500 young people have served as White
House fellows. Some 11-19 fellows are taken every year out of 500-800
applications that are usually received. Usually it is young people early in
their careers who get selected.
The application asks for details of the applicants’
achievements in four spheres – education, work, voluntary activities and
professional activities. But they are not the only relevant ones: one is
supposed to mention all achievements, such as in sports or arts. In other
words, the organizers are looking for young people who would serve as special
assistants to some high-level government official; but they are also looking
for leadership qualities and a commitment to serve others. OMB staff screens
the applications. Then 10 regional commissions interview the 100 or so
short-listed candidates. The final selection is made by The President’s
Commission on White House Fellowship, which consists of 36 eminent persons,
such as Professor William Wilson of JFK School of Government, Dana Mead, CEO of
Tenneco, General Wesley Clark (retd), and Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice of the
Navajo Nation. The selected fellows are then placed in various departments of
the government.
The selection process begins in February and ends in
June; the winners are placed in office at the beginning of September for a
year. There they write speeches, help draft legislation, answer Congressional
enquiries, conduct briefings, and generally watch the government processes.
Thus 16 candidates were selected in 1999. Amongst them
was Sunil Garg, 32, who works as assistant to Mayor Richard M Daley of Chicago.
He is Master of Public Policy from Kennedy School of Government and is doing an
MBA at Chicago University. In the Mayor’s office, he is working on setting up a
new public-private partnership to attract and retain businesses in the city.
Khalid Azim, 34, grew up in Harlem, and was helped
through studies by A Better Chance programme, a programme intended to harness
talented students from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. He served five years in
the US Navy, where he became the only minority officer in his submarine
squadron and took part in the Desert Shield and Desert Storm campaigns. He got
an MBA from Virgnia, and is serving as a Vice President at Morgan Stanley Dean
Witter in Hong Kong. He mentors a 16-year-old boy and pays his tuition in a private
school.
Juan Garcia III is Flag Lieutenant in London to the
Deputy Commander in Chief of the US Naval Forces in Europe, and earlier served
as ADC to the Director of the Joint Task Force for operations in Kosovo. He is
a UCLA graduate; he got a Master’s degree from Kennedy School of Government and
then joined the naval air arm. He flew 30 sorties in Desert Storm, including an
emergency landing in the desert sand. He taught civics to candidates for
immigration amnesty, and started a programme to introduce youths from troubled
homes to naval aviation.
Melissa Goldstein has degrees from Virginia and Yale Law
School and is consultant to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission; she is
a post-doctoral fellow in Georgetown and Johns Hopkins universities. She served
as a law clerk in the US District Court for New York South.
Christopher Moore is a 37-years-old police lieutenant in
the San Jose Police department and an attorney in Pleasanton. He is a Berkeley
graduate. He has served in patrol, street crimes, burglary, crime prevention,
and field training units of San Jose Police and is the youngest command officer
in the department. He created two programmes to prevent local school kids to
turning to violence.
Timothy Wu is 36, and director of development at the
Support Center for Nonprofit Management in San Francisco. He has a degree in
politics from Princeton and in law from Harvard Law School. After graduation he
joined CBS News, and became the youngest member of Princeton’s Board of
Trustees. He is also a director of the International Lesbian and Gay Film
festival.
Jacqueline Lane is Assistant Director of Government
Relations in the Texas Association of School Boards in Austin Texas. She provides legal advice to members of
school boards and pleads their case with the state legislature and regulatory
bodies.
Lance Wyatt is a surgeon in the UCLA hospital. He
graduated from Howard University and got his MD from UCLA. He worked on
projects focusing on bone development, repair and regeneration; now he is
taking training in plastic surgery. He runs Health Relief International, a
nonprofit organization to provide health care to the poor.
Esther Benjamin, a Sri Lankan, is a management
consultant. She was the youngest officer in the UN relief programme in Somalia.
She is co-founder of a fund which finances the education of victims of the
civil war in Sri Lanka.
Ariel Zwang, 35, is a graduate of Harvard Business
School; while there, she started a programme in which students helped recent
immigrants find jobs. She works in the Women’s Housing and Economic Development
Corporation in the Bronx, which provides job training, low income housing and
social services in the Bronx. She was special assistant to the Chancellor of
the New York City Board of Education. She is active in the United Jewish Appeal
of New York.
Of the 16 fellows, only 4 did not belong to some minority
group; all the rest were either black, Asian, Hispanic or Jewish. Drawing
members of minorities into the innermost circles of government and exposing
them to administrative processes seems to me to be a far better encouragement
than giving them reservations in administrative services.
