How does a Green Beret end up working in the White House?
I’ve been very fortunate. Looking back over the past two and a half decades, I’ve been able to serve our nation around the world during extraordinary times of peace and war. About ten years ago, prior to coming to the White House, it occurred to me that in my role as a Special Forces company commander, I was in the role of executing our nation’s foreign policy. With every deployment I made abroad, I realized that I was missing something important. After my first deployment to Bosnia–after everything I’d seen there–I started searching for the connective tissue that makes national policies relevant to our foreign policy, and to our armed forces. Acquiring an intimate understanding of our government, I realized, can only be gained through active service at all levels, and it led me to the White House Fellowship program. It’s a remarkable program available to Americans of all professions, and I found it interesting that as a young Army Lieutenant Colonel, Colin Powell had been a White Ho
