I've been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught - from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.
Mr. Truman studiously avoided giving power to his White House staff that has been characteristic of recent administrations. Staff people in the White House, with no responsibility but incredible authority is one of the reasons we're now in so much trouble.
I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.
To go to the White House is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In fact, the building is not that big.
To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, the three astronauts from Apollo 11 visited the White House. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were allowed to set foot inside the White House, while Michael Collins was forced to drive around in circles outside.
All of our presidents come into office looking so vigorous ... They grow grayer and grayer, and by the time they leave, they’re as white as the building they live in ... I have one big advantage: I’ve been coloring my hair for years. So you’re not going to see me turn white in the White House.
I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out.
We Poor Cousins don’t care at all though, except for when we’re on welfare, broke, starving, unable to buy cool high-tops for our children or pay for their university tuition or purchase massive fourth homes on private islands with helicopter landing pads. But whatever, we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes but at least we have rage and we will build empires with that, gentlemen.
I have been constantly working on the interiors of my homes in Delhi, Goa, Dubai, Mumbai, and the Red Chillies Building. I had been designing homes, too. Having a background in art, graphic design, and charcoal helped me in my work immensely.
When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.
People still assume the White House Correspondents' Association works for the White House, when in reality, it's a group of journalists who cover the White House. It's a branding thing, but because it has the 'White House' before it, people think they're just King Joffrey's goons.
The White House - now shares the same name as the new government center in Moscow. The name originally comes from Egypt. The White and Red Houses of the late first dynasty were departments that officiated for the will of pharaoh. The second most important state building in Egypt was the treasury. It was known as Per Hetch, meaning "White House."
Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
Directly down the lawn and accross the Ellipse from the White House are those ordered, classic lines of the Jefferson Memorial and the eyes of the 19-foot statue that gaze directly into the White House, a reminder to any of us who might occupy that mansion of the quality of mind and generosity of heart that once abided there and has been so rarely seen there again.
I vividly remember my first day on the White House staff. My office, of course, was in the Old Executive Office Building. I didn't rate one in the West Wing; but don't try to tell me or any of the rest of us working there that we weren't working in the White House.
My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.
As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.