A couple of
days ago a 26 year old French woman turned up at my house in rural France
during the pandemic. She is presently
employed at the environmental protection office of the French Government in
Paris. I had not seen her since more
than 5 years ago when she was an intern in my office. In 28 years in Washington
I had about 400 interns in my DC and Seattle offices.
As we were
eating lunch, I asked how she got to be an intern in 2015. She was in the US after a year abroad from
University and she decided she would like to have the experience of being an
intern in a Congressional office. She
did some research and drew up a short list of 5 offices. Her top choice was the office of “Baghdad
Jim”. I got that nickname by stating from Baghdad in 2003 that George Bush
would mislead us into a war in Iraq that I thought was folly.
She
submitted an application to the office along with her curriculum vita. I looked at the application of all my interns
and interviewed them if it was convenient.
I noted that she was from a French university and I had never had a
French student so I accepted her without meeting her.
My criteria
for interns was not the standard set of criteria. I took people from outside my
district in the US and looked for interesting backgrounds. I always checked
what languages they were proficient in both spoken and written. During the 2001-2010 I had an Arabic speaker
almost every year. Their job was to read
the newspapers in the Arab world and tell me what seemed important to them. I
had interns and fellows from 40-50 countries.
I occasionally took high school seniors who were recommended to me. I
took kids from Foreign Service families who wanted their kids to come to the
US. I took kids who families needed a little distance from their youngster. We
would have a conversation in which I told them that if they caused me any
problem, I was going to send them straight home. I never had a problem that I
knew of.
I thought a
Congressperson has a job to train the next generation for entry into government
and so I wanted to give these students a chance to experience the workings of
an office, close up and personally. Today I have a loose network of people who
worked in my office who now are spread all over the world.
I lived in
Kinshasa, Zaire for a number of months when I worked for the State Department
providing mental health services for official Americans. I don’t remember the country where I learned
the African proverb: You put a seed in the ground but you may never sit in the
shade of the tree that grows from the seed. For me interns were like planting seeds.
There is a
budget director for a state in Brazil who wrote and administered the plan to
cope with COVID19. Another just left a job at the American consulate in
Frankfort after many years there. She is a German citizen. Another of my German fellows was one of my
Arabic Speakers who had lived in Cairo and he is now teaching in Liepzig. Ornanong
worked as the chief of the political
section in the foreign ministry of Thailand.
Having
interns from outside my district and especially from foreign countries was very
important to me as well as good for them.
The Congress fancies that it runs the world, and yet many members couldn’t
find Kosovo on a map if their life depended on it. I wanted these interns in my office to learn
our form of government but also to challenge and teach me and my staff by the
questions they felt free to ask.
I told all
interns that the internship was their chance to learn and that no question was
too stupid to ask if they didn’t know the answer. Their questioning of my staff as to why
certain things were done a certain way allowed my staff to rethink their certainties.
I also tried to get them to believe that they could ask to do things that
looked interesting on the Congressional calendar. They could pursue their own dream if they saw
a spot that seemed to lead in a direction they wanted to go.
What
surprised me the most was the fact that many members took no interest in talking
or eating or drinking with their interns.
I heard again and again,” I haven’t even met my member.” For five years
I had a dinner in my office for Australian interns as we watched the State of
the Union extravaganza. I let interns come and ask me questions,
sometimes to the dismay of my staff. Mentoring takes time but has long term
payoffs that you may never see.
One of my
interns asked me one day how to get a job in Washington DC. I told her that she
had to be ready to take a job that seemed below her skill level as a way of
paying her dues into the system.
Promotion is always possible. A few weeks later an entry level job on
the front desk opened up in DC. She was
almost finished with college, so I offered her the job. If she would leave
college and finish her degree in the summer in addition to working for me. She took the job which she felt was below her
skills but stuck at it until the job of coordinating all my legislative correspondence
came open. She was promoted but still
felt that handling all the mail was not using all skills so asked for some
substantive work. I was chair of the
subcommittee on income security and family support and I gave her several
issues. She did well. She decided to get
a master’s degree at night, so she worked doubly hard. Then a spot in the US senate came open and
she moved to the Senate where she was responsible for the work of one of the
subcommittees on Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee.
Now she is a
special assistant to the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Neither she nor I ever imagined that would be
her path.
Bright and
hard working young people need internships to figure out where they may fit in
the governmental process. They have no real idea what government is all about,
so they need to have a chance to explore the possibilities. An English Major from a middle western university
came to congress in 1989 and was assigned to the HIV-AIDS issue. She knew nothing about it but worked hard and
mastered it for my purposes. She decided
to get a Masters’s degree at John Hopkins in Health management. She is now high up in the hierarchy of one of
the medical specialty societies. In her
wildest dreams she never anticipated the career course.
One caveat:
the Chinese say that if you save a man’s life you are responsible for him
forever. Interns come back for letters of recommendations. I’ve written 7 in the month of July. My modus
operandi is simple. You write the letter
you want in my voice. I reserve the right to add or subtract. Send me an updated resume and a recent
picture in case I can’t remember your face from 5-10 ago. I just got a thank
you today from a young man in South Dakota who got a job in health care.
Mentoring is
the biggest secret that no one tells you about the job as a
Congressperson. You will never know
whose life you have changed. I don’t
know how many people have told me of things I said to them in the past that
resonated in the future.
As we mourn
the loss of John Lewis I sat next to him for 12 years on the W&M committee
and watched as he helped hundreds of people see a brighter horizon for
themselves. They say, “A person dies twice: once when they pass away, and they
pass again when they stop telling stories about them. Mentor’s stories are long. If you want a
legacy this a sure fire one.
