MATT PORTER: The West Wing has been portrayed in TV shows and movies. But what is working in the White House really like? Every president's West Wing is different, and for President Kennedy, his West Wing reflected the youthful energy and new voices that carried him all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Join us this week for an inside look at JFK's administration and how his West Wing compares to a 21st century president more than 50 years later.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so, my fellow American, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do.
MATT PORTER: Welcome to JFK35, a podcast by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. I'm Matt Porter, and my co-host Jamie Richardson is off this week. We want to thank everyone who listened and subscribed to our first season. And to those who wrote to us, your words do mean a lot to us.
Now we're kicking off our second season by looking at the West Wing of President Kennedy's White House. We have an interview with Dan Fenn, staff assistant to the president and the first director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. Fenn was with JFK as he put together his administration in the early days of his presidency.
Fenn's job was to help fill assignments in President Kennedy's young administration. In that story, we will also hear from Harvard University historian Fredrik Logevall, who is working on a comprehensive biography of the 35th president. Following that, we'll speak with three members of President Barack Obama's West Wing.
They have a new book featuring essays from members of the 44th's president administration and what it was like to work in the Obama White House. Our first segment takes us to one of the last surviving members of President Kennedy's administration. Dan Fenn was in his mid 30s when he worked for President Kennedy as a staff assistant.
Fenn had met Kennedy earlier in his life while working as a radio host and later met him on the campaign before being hired to work in the West Wing. My co-host Jamie Richardson and I had the pleasure of visiting Fenn, now 95 years old, in his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he was able to tell us what it was like to serve the president.
DAN FENN: It wasn't until years later that I realized really how different it was. We felt that we were doing something important and exciting.
MATT PORTER: In 1961, 37-year-old Dan Fenn was brought on to work as a staff assistant to President Kennedy. His job was to help staff Kennedy's new West Wing. And there was at least one main common thread among most members of the new administration.
DAN FENN: Dave Powers was older, but we were all pretty young. He was pretty. It was a young group of people.
MATT PORTER: In Kennedy's West Wing, Fenn says it wasn't a massive staff of 1,000 to 2,000 people like you'd see in today's White House. Instead, it was a cadre of just a little more than 70 people, with many of those positions being typists and secretaries. Fenn said the smaller circle of advisors was also much more informal.
DAN FENN: When I read in the paper about President Trump having a chief of staff who decides what he's to see and who he's to see and when, I have to chuckle because it was only one person who decided who he would see and what he would read and what he would focus on at any given time. That was John Kennedy.
He was-- he did that. There was no single staff meeting because nobody had the authority to call a staff meeting. The lines were very permeable so that if I had a brilliant idea that would save Western Civilization, which I did all the time, there was nothing either organizationally or culturally to prevent me from talking to Mac Bundy, the president's national security advisor, or his deputy about this.
MATT PORTER: Fenn remembers one moment in the first few days where everyone was still trying to figure out their new roles.
DAN FENN: Arthur Schlesinger, great American historian, came over to the Oval Office in the first few days, actually, and said, Mr. President, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing around here. President said, don't worry, Arthur. I don't know I'm supposed to be doing around here either. So it was informal and non-bureaucratic.
MATT PORTER: Historian Fredrik Logevall says the young Kennedy staff was a break from prior administrations.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: And I think Kennedy made clear that he wanted, in fact, to have a range of viewpoints around him. He didn't want what one might call yes men around him.
MATT PORTER: He said they were sometimes more willing to think outside the box and challenge established norms.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: There was a sense of possibility that these young Kennedy staffers and others who worked in the federal government felt.
MATT PORTER: For Logevall, Kennedy's staff was not so different from the inspired young advisors in President Obama's West Wing.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I think to understand President Obama and his appeal, it helps to reflect on the degree to which there are these similarities between him and between the 35th President, John F. Kennedy.
MATT PORTER: For Dan Fenn, he saw a lot of his old boss in the 44th president.
DAN FENN: I thought I saw a lot of JFK and his approach to the world, his approach to decision making, his approach to politics and governing, in Barack Obama-- thoughtful, easy, pragmatic, prudent, innovative, just solve problems and try to find good fixes for them.
MATT PORTER: And he also says he sees a lot of that same energy from the 1960s in the hearts of today's young activists and entrepreneurs.
DAN FENN: I think that he would be very happy to see the kind of action and activity that we saw in the 2018 midterms and the Women's March. And I think that the spirit of participation which John Kennedy lauded and trumpeted, I think that conviction burns brighter in America than it did even in his time.
MATT PORTER: While most Americans alive today were not born when a young Dan Fenn walked the halls of the West Wing, he says President Kennedy's legacy will continue to live on.
DAN FENN: He continues to occupy a very special place in the American mind and heart.
MATT PORTER: Well, joining me now are three former members of President Barack Obama's administration who all served for at least part of his eight years in office. Now all of them have penned essays in a new book West Wingers-- Stories From the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House. In the studio with me are Raina Thiele, who worked in the White House office of intergovernmental affairs, specifically focused on climate change, energy, and tribal governments in the Arctic, Ned Price, who started out in the CIA and later joined the Obama administration on the National Security Council, first as the director of the strategic communications and later as the NSC's spokesperson. And finally, we have Gautam Raghavan, who served as a liaison to the LGBTQ community for President Obama as well as for Asian and Pacific Islander communities. Raina, Ned, Gautam, thanks for being here.
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: Thanks for having us.
RAINA THIELE: Thank you.
MATT PORTER: Awesome. Well, Gautam, you were the one who came up with the idea of this book, according your introduction, which is a book of essays from staffers in the West Wing. Now we get a lot of books from past presidents, from secretaries, or very high profile members of the West Wing detailing or breaking down a presidency. What's different about this collection of essays and why was it important to put it together?
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: Yeah, thanks for having us. You know the goal, really, of this collection was to capture what it was like to work in the Obama White House. I think if you ask any of us, we'll tell you that the thing we miss the most about our experience in Barack Obama's White House was the people that we worked with.
We were really lucky to work with talented, patriotic folks from all over the country, from every walk of life, who cared deeply about giving back to their country and really were following President Obama's call to service all the way to the White House. So when we were thinking about the end of the administration and the start of this new one I think we all felt certainly a sense a sense of nostalgia, that we wanted to capture what was so special about our time there, and also to give readers, you know, a behind the scenes look at how change happens in the White House. It's not always, you know, stuff that the cameras capture, the news headlines capture. A lot of it is the day to day what life in the White House is like, and we wanted to give you a sense of what that was.
MATT PORTER: They're all really interesting essays. All of you talk about being inspired at a moment in our young lives to become active in public service. Particularly a few of you mentioned President Obama as he came onto the scene.
Now as all of you know, President Kennedy made a similar call to the young and young at heart in the 1960s. So this is for any of you. Tell me about what inspired each of you to enter public service and how that experience has influenced you to this point.
RAINA THIELE: Well, for me, I think just growing up in Alaska as Alaska native, I was always very connected to my own community. And so public service, if you want to call it that, was always encouraged. You were always encouraged to be involved and to contribute however you could back to your own community.
So for me, I feel like I was ingrained from a very early age. And so what I was going to undergrad and grad school, it just felt natural to me that I wouldn't ever do something in my career that wasn't giving back to the greater good, which brought me really kind of towards politics and towards policy and trying to serve the greater population of our country. And so for me, I feel like when Barack Obama came on the scene, it was kind of perfect timing because I was just getting through grad school.
I graduated in 2009 from the Kennedy School, actually. And his administration just created this wonderful opportunity for many of us who were looking for that inspiration, for that inspirational figure, and somebody who really welcomed in people who weren't typically part of the political fold to be involved. And so I feel like for me, that was just the perfect moment to enter into the political arena.
MATT PORTER: That's a great story. Any of you guys also have stories you want to share?
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: So I actually write about this a little bit in the book that the very first time I saw Barack Obama was back in 2004. And I was actually knocking on doors for a congressional campaign in my hometown in the suburbs of Seattle. And I saw him on the TV through a window, and it was when he was giving the keynote address at the Democratic Convention right here in Boston.
And I obviously couldn't listen to the speech then, but I watched it that night. And it was quite possibly one of the most inspiring moments in my early adulthood and my-- you know, at the beginning of my career to hear this new, fresh voice talking about a call to public service. We're talking about how, you know, I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, this idea of a social contract in America, and that we're all sort of obliged and have a responsibility to give back. And I remember telling my parents that, you know, one day I want to work for Barack Obama never actually thinking it would be true. But you know, when I actually found myself at the White House, it was, in a lot of ways, a dream realized, right, to have the opportunity to work for this man who, just like JFK, issued that call to service, inspired a generation of young people and not so young people to give back to their country.
NED PRICE: For me, and this is something I write about in my chapter, you know, I think I'm part of a generation whose commitment to public service was steeled on September 11, 2001. I was a freshman in college on that day, and it's something that I know remained with me and remained with my classmates and peers at the time, many of whom went into the military, some of whom went into the diplomatic corps, the Foreign Service. And for me, as someone who had always been interested in foreign policy national security, the intelligence community presented a way to use the passion and the skills that I brought in a way that I found and I thought would be productive and useful.
I think all of us, our time in government, there's stories of personal maturation. And in my case, I write in the chapter about how we as a country have sort of grappled with how we confront threats to our national security, including terrorism. And I think that has changed over time. But something that hasn't changed in me is sort of that passion and that commitment on my part and the part of so many of those around me that I think was forged on that day and had stayed with us since.
MATT PORTER: Pretty amazing. You know, I think a lot of people think of government workers and people in government as bureaucrats. But you know, it's really nice to hear the stories of why you all want to get involved.
To get specifically for each of you, Gautam, I'm going to start with you. You've shared a personal story about your journey as a gay man from coming out to meeting your husband Andy and ultimately getting married. And along that journey, President Obama was evolving himself on marriage equality. So tell me about how those two parallel journeys were for you and especially when it was difficult for you because President Obama hasn't necessarily caught up to speed of the demands being pushed by your friends in the LGBTQ community maybe as quickly as you or they would have liked.
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: You know, in a lot of ways, my journey as a gay man and, you know, coming out, meeting somebody, falling in love, getting married, there is a weird parallel with the story of gay rights and marriage equality in the country. In a lot of ways, we were following that journey in our own relationship. So you know, I got to the White House in October of 2011.
And at that point, Andy and I had been married for about a year. And we were at this moment where there was this national conversation about marriage equality, that it started actually back in the Bush administration when the prior administration had actually opposed marriage equality rights. And coming into the Obama administration, there was a lot of expectation that things would change. And we were in this moment where President Obama had essentially signaled obviously his broader support for LGBTQ rights but that he personally wasn't quite yet ready to speak out in favor of marriage equality.
So yeah, my first eight or nine months in the job were pretty difficult getting asked pointed questions by community leaders and friends saying, you know, how do you sort of square your own identity and your relationship with the fact that the president hasn't spoken out on these issues yet? But for me, the thing that ultimately kept me grounded and feeling like I had a role to play was I had a lot of faith in President Obama. You know, this is the guy who, as I mentioned before, back in 2004 when he spoke at the convention talked about having gay friends in the red states.
And I felt like this is someone who understands the sweep of civil rights in our country, that change takes time, that public opinion shifts gradually. And so I had faith then that the president was ultimately going to do what was right for the country. And that bore out as we saw with his interview with Robin Roberts on ABC News where he spoke out in favor of marriage equality and then the shift in public opinion that followed that.
You know, as I like to say, by virtue of having this period of time where he was evolving on marriage equality, he gave millions of Americans the space to do the same thing, to sort of think about, pray on it, talk about it, and then ultimately realize that they had no conflict between their support for marriage equality and what other principles they hold of their own lives. So you know, as we've seen now, the public opinion has shifted tremendously in favor of marriage equality and, in general, in support of LGBTQ rights too.
MATT PORTER: Right. You know, I think there are parallels here between the struggle for marriage equality in the Obama administration and the struggle for civil rights in the Kennedy administration in the sense that both communities wanted more definitive action taken by both presidents. And it would be finally JFK in his time who would roll out a national speech announcing that the University of Alabama had been integrated and that he promised to send a civil rights bill to Congress. And you know, I think you just mentioned it, but in your essay, you detail a scenario where you are called in to prep for an Obama interview where he would give his full-throated support for marriage equality. Describe how you handled that situation, what went on, and what you think, maybe, of the similarities between both these presidents who eventually found their way to these history-defining moments.
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: Yeah, you know, in so many ways, there is a parallel there right between President Kennedy's role advancing civil rights and President Obama's role around LGBT equality. In part, obviously, they found themselves in the right place at the right time, right? The courts were moving. Public opinion was shifting.
But that in and of itself is not enough. Really advancing the cause requires that kind of leadership, I think that kind of awareness of how the country is moving, and the role that the president can play in shaping those attitudes and those shifts. So you know, when I when I actually found myself on the day that the president was giving his interview, it was all about just getting the job done.
You know, I got called in that morning to meet with senior staff. It was a little panicked going into that room and seeing everyone from the president's senior advisors to the press secretary to White House counsel. And they basically said, you know, you have a couple of hours to prepare for this, and go get ready. And ultimately, what we decided was the most important thing was just to let the president's words speak for themselves.
There was no spin you could put on it. There was no explanation needed. You know, just like President Kennedy, President Obama is a very gifted speaker and communicator. And so the best thing we could do was just to make sure that as many people as possible heard from him directly about his support for marriage equality.
MATT PORTER: And you know, to turn to Raina, you had your own experience in your essay. You described a trip President Obama took to the Arctic. And again, being the first president to travel above the Arctic Circle during the presidency, how did that trip come about? What did it mean and what did it mean for you as another member of a community that was looking for leadership and looking to be acknowledged by the president?
RAINA THIELE: Absolutely. So the Alaska, trip which happened in 2015, was a truly historic trip in many different ways. And the way that it came about was kind of a circuitous route, which, I think most of his trips probably come about in a similar way. But we kind of had folks pushing on different sides, you know, from like the international affairs perspective, from the tribal perspective.
And the stars kind of aligned for this particular trip to happen. And it was because we were kind of in a time where policy was all sort of shifting towards the Arctic because of what was happening with climate change above the Arctic Circle. So what you have in Alaska is kind of one of the most impactful versions of what climate change is doing to our environment.
You have communities that are basically about to fall into the ocean because of climate change and the rising sea levels and erosion. And so when we talk about what the impacts are going to be in 20 years and 30 years across the United States, we really have to look to the Arctic or the Antarctic to see that. And so Alaska being kind of the Arctic part of the United States, it made a lot of sense for us to explore going to Alaska if we were going to talk about climate change and climate change impacts.
So it took probably a good year or so to actually get that trip on the books. We had kind of brought it up in the past, but Alaska, being extremely remote and also being difficult to travel within, it was kind of a logistical nightmare for Secret Service, for the advance team that goes out there and does all the logistics in advance of trips. And so it took just like a while to get folks to a place where they said, OK, this is actually something we can do.
And we had explored, you know, kind of different parts of the state. We looked at Barrow, which, to be honest, I think is where the president really wanted to go, which is the very northern part of Alaska. But there was just no way we could land Air Force One there. It just wasn't compliant with any of the rules the Secret Service had put out there.
And so I wouldn't say we settled, but I would say that we explored all the options. And mostly, the places that were most reasonable for us to go were the places where there used to be a military base, where they used to fly military planes. And so we ended up in, of course, Anchorage. Kotzebue was one of our locations which was above the Arctic Circle and Dillingham in the southwest where we had done a bunch of work, and President Obama had protected the region from offshore drilling and also protected it from the pebble mine.
MATT PORTER: You know, for the members of your community-- and they really are your community because you lived there. You grew up there. What did it mean for them to have a president actually visit versus just speaking from afar down in DC or somewhere else?
RAINA THIELE: You know, the entire state of Alaska during that trip was extremely excited. Like, I'm a lifelong Alaskan. I've been living outside of Alaska for a number of years, but I born and raised there.
My family roots go back about 10,000 years in the state, so a significant amount of time. I think we'd never, at least in my lifetime and in my parents lifetime, we'd never seen a trip that had excited people so much. And Alaska is a red state, right? So it's not like it this huge liberal enclave.
But everybody was so excited that a president would come to Alaska and would actually experience the state. They weren't just kind of doing a refueling stop at the Air Force Base. They got out of the plane, and they went into Anchorage, and they went into Seward.
And they went on these trips to Dillingham and to Kotzebue and spent three whole days in the state. That was incredible, and I think it really-- what it did for Alaskans was it really put them on the map or, like, made them feel like they were on the map, that the federal government really cared about who they were and what they wanted to see in policy. And so I really think that it solidified Alaskans' appreciation of President Obama in a really strong way, but it also just made folks feel like, you know what?
This is like, more people should come and visit here because like, we are important. Like, we have a lot of things happening which are going to be impacting the rest of the country very soon. And we just have a lot to offer as a state.
So I think it was very reaffirming for a lot of Alaskans too. I mean, because like, we all love our state. Like, we think we're the most amazing place in the world. But it was great to have the president there.
MATT PORTER: Absolutely. Massachucits pride over here. Ned, I want to get to you. You sort of were in the foreign policy world.
But President Kennedy and President Obama were both presidents during areas where, as you mentioned for Obama, you know, the politics of fear could overtake some of maybe our foundational values-- President Kennedy with the Cold War, President Obama with the War on Terror. What was one of the moments in your time in the West Wing that showed through President Obama's leadership or just showed by your work that America could maintain sort of its ideals without succumbing to, again, what you called the politics of fear in your essay?
NED PRICE: Well, I think there are a lot of similarities between the two presidents in this respect. When I think about President Kennedy, you know, the speech that really stands out to me is his Rice speech, where he talks about the space race and the need to go to the moon and the ability of America to choose to go to the moon, to choose our own destiny, using that space program as a broader metaphor for America's ability to plot its own path and to choose its own course. I think when it comes to President Obama, we saw this quite a bit in both the domestic and the foreign policy realms.
But one issue that really sticks out in my mind is the way in which President Obama wrestled with America's actions in the aftermath of 9/11, in the aftermath of the attacks on New York City and Washington, and particularly how he was clear-eyed and had an acute vision of how we should address some of the actions that were driven by fear in the years after that. And particularly, there was a report that was put together by the Senate Intelligence committee that documented in exacting and painful detail the CIA's detention and interrogation program.
That was a source of some controversy because there were quite a few people even within the administration that did not want to declassify that entire report. They did not want to open up old wounds. They didn't want to have to relive and relitigate this history.
But what we heard, both in the situation room as we were debating this and, subsequent to that, from President Obama directly, when he addressed the nation on this, was the idea that in order for America to remain true to who we are, to remain true to our values, we also have to be upfront about the times where and when we may have transgressed, where we may have made errors, where we may have been driven by fear and what fear compelled us to do. I think his idea was that if we're honest with ourselves, if we're honest with the American people and with the broader public, we will insulate ourselves against being driven towards those fear-based decisions going forward. And that's precisely what he did. In the end, he gave, I think, a pretty remarkable set of remarks in which he made clear that America would be transparent, that we would own up to what we did, and that we would do so in a way that would hopefully prevent us from going down those dark paths once more. And it's, in many ways, I think, reminded us of what we heard from President Kennedy.
MATT PORTER: Exactly and obviously, both presidents had major situations to face. This is a podcast about President Kennedy, so what are any of your thoughts on the 35th president? Or what do you think about the two presidents-- 35 and 44-- and how they chose to inspire and call people like yourselves to service?
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: When I think about President Kennedy, you know, obviously the line that always sticks out of my mind is, you know, ask not, right? And I think similar to President Kennedy, President Obama inspired a whole generation of young people to think about what they could do to serve their country, whether in the military, in community service, or in public service. And unfortunately, what we see today is very few calls to action to consider service. And you know, we've sort of lost this idea of the nobility of public service, which is one of the things that we wanted to do with this collection of stories is just to remind people that idealism is not naive, that giving back to our country is really a noble calling, and that, as President Kennedy called for and as President Obama inspired all of us to do, that there is a worth and value to public service.
RAINA THIELE: Yeah, I would say, I mean, like, I agree with Gautam. I think that they were very similar in that they were both able to appeal to a lot of young people and really get folks inspired. And a whole generation of folks who weren't previously engaged were then engaged because they loved the message coming from President Kennedy and from President Obama. And that's what inspired me, to be honest, to get involved when I did was just hearing the message that Obama brought with him and that he delivered so eloquently to all of us-- that we all mattered and that we were approaching a new time in our country when we had to come together in solidarity and support one another.
And I feel like the one thing that sticks out to me about President Kennedy and President Obama is, like, they really cared about smaller populations that weren't always heard. Despite the fact that maybe those people weren't going to win them the next election, they still cared, right? Like, they were authentic human beings. They understood the importance of including everybody. And that's really sticks out to me about the two of them and why they were able to inspire so many.
NED PRICE: So I think for me, what President Obama represented that was different from his immediate predecessors in some ways was the affirmative vision of America and American leadership that he put forward. You know, for the formative, younger years of my life, especially in this period, a college student and immediately thereafter, and sort of the post 9/11 period, we heard a lot about what we had to do, what we must do, what these exigent circumstances called upon us to do, but not a lot about what America could do and what our promise held and what we should be doing. And I think that is what President Obama put forward in a way that we hadn't heard.
At least I, as a young person, hadn't heard from a President of the United States in sort of this clarion call way. And I think that is what inspired me and inspired a lot of my contemporaries to want to be a part of this project, to remember that we have such tremendous potential and promise, that it's something we can work towards. It's something we can be a part of
MATT PORTER: So Raina, Ned, Gautam, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. Really enjoyed the book. Hopefully other people enjoy reading it as much as I did.
It was, again, great insight to actually get a look from the West Wing not from the top down but really from the ground up. Thank you for doing this and writing those essays. I think everybody will be better for it.
NED PRICE: Thank you.
GAUTAM RAGHAVAN: Thanks very much.
RAINA THIELE: Thank you for having us.
MATT PORTER: Well, it's been a great show and great to be back. Thank you for listening to this episode of "JFK 35." Visit our podcast page at jfklibrary.org/jfk46 where we'll have some links to the photos and documents mentioned on this episode.
If you have questions or story ideas email, us at jfk35pod@jfklfoundation.org or tweet us @jfklibrary using the hashtag #jfk35. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram. And if you liked what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again in two weeks for another episode. Thanks for listening, and have a great week.