That's Outside My Boat by Charlie Jones

Author:Charlie Jones [Kim Doren&Charlie Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: ISBN 0-7407-1162-8
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC
Published: 2001-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

BEN HADDAD

Former chief of staff for Congressman Bill Lowery; now senior vice president of communications, Science Applications International Corporation

ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING TIMES of my life was when I was a legislative assistant for U.S. Congressman Bill Lowery in Washington, D.C. The responsibility of Congress is so vast, it includes everything—foreign affairs, health policy, education—there’s not anything it doesn’t touch. But you have to understand, and it takes you a while to figure it out, that you, personally, are not responsible for all this stuff. You need to stop worrying that you don’t know everything about every subject that appears in the Congressional Quarterly, the national journals, or the New York Times.

It’s frustrating at first. You find yourself working seven-day weeks and at all hours. There is no time off, because you feel as if you can’t keep up. At some point you have to realize that that is not your job and it’s out of your control. You cannot possibly keep up. You have to let it go.

I don’t know when it occurred to me exactly, because we were working ridiculous hours and trying to learn everything. I had judiciary and space and education and a whole bunch of other things in my area of responsibility. However, once you start to interact with some of the experts in each field, you realize they spend their entire lives working on just one little piece of what you’re supposed to be learning, and you will never, ever know what they know. So you begin to let go a little bit and say, “You know what? My job is to know where to get the answer. It’s not to know the answer.”

You start developing a network of people you can phone, because in those days there was no e-mail. You could call somebody who knew everything about a particular educational program dealing with disabled kids. You could tap into the person who handled Russia or the expert who knew the nuclear weapons programs.

Another example was when we were dealing with AWACS on whether we should sell a certain plane to Saudi Arabia. You needed to know who to call on the Israeli side of the issue and who to call on the Arab side of the issue. As long as you could call and get the information and then present it to your congressman in a way that he could make a decision, that’s what you needed to do. You didn’t have to be the expert on AWACS.

Going in, I don’t think you really grasp what your role is. You’re so totally overwhelmed. You get frustrated in a hurry because you’re just never going to be that omniscient person you aspire to be. But with a little seasoning, you begin to understand the ways of Washington and you become much more effective. You pick your fights, you specialize, and then you let everything else go to your network. It’s something you learn from doing, from being there.

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