Didn't get paid, didn't get laid

In the summer of 1990, as part of Wellesley College's Summer in Washington program, Seattleite Elizabeth Brinkley worked in the White House Office of Communications, assisting seven presidential speechwriters, as one of approximately 50 White House interns. This account is adapted from her journal notes.

Day 1

I have worked in the White House for approximately 42 minutes, and I have already lied to the FBI. It isn't enough that I could barely sleep in the sauna of my George Washington University dorm room, that my roommate went to work at the Justice Department wearing shorts (they were silk, but still), while I'm walking seven blocks in heels and sweaty pantyhose. The District of Columbia has committed significant manpower to digging along the whole of Pennsylvania Avenue, and I spend my day's supply of bottled water wringing the dust out of my stockings in a phone booth outside the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB). I realize this must be the booth where Robert Redford talks to Deep Throat for the first time in All the President's Men. I have had my first brush with fame.

8:35am. Meeting of the Communications interns. We're told that anyone caught misusing White House stationery will be fired. We cannot take stationery out of the building, send letters to our friends, or do anything else with it. Anything else? I spend the rest of the meeting planning spiteful and flagrant breaches of national security (Dear Sen. Gorton: The chicken bone you fed Ranger at the last White House dinner gave him internal bleeding. If you ever approach the White House again you will be shot).

The only other thing I catch is the rule about no leaks to the press. Though I'm a closet Democrat, I have been looking forward to this job. I have vowed to keep an open mind. I am eager to work hard at my bit part in American history. Now I can barely wait until I have something leakable. Wait—I could make up things to leak, then send the pretend leaks out on White House stationery!

Security clearance. All new White House employees, even interns, must submit to a security interview. The FBI agent is friendly enough as he asks about any Communist Party connections, felony convictions, etc. Then he asks if I have ever smoked pot. I say no. As I leave his office, I realize I will never be elected to public office. I will never sit on the Supreme Court. I did not especially want these things before, but I don't like to have my possibilities restricted. Maybe it's because I am a college senior, and already the world-is-my-oyster years are drawing to a close. Not even planning to leave a really steamy letter from Marlin Fitzwater to Barbara Bush at The Washington Post can cheer me up.

First tasks. Make rounds of Communications offices to deliver tomorrow's fake POTUS schedule (the President of the United States is called "POTUS" in all memos). For security reasons, one or more false schedules is distributed before the real one, which is inevitably changed anyway. I decide this is really to keep the overstaffed office busy.

Spend rest of day working the phones, accidentally disconnecting Maureen Dowd and many other important people. Now I'll never get a job in journalism. A White House internship is obviously not expanding my career choices as I'd hoped.

1am: Nightlife. Georgetown is full of lewd, cat-calling assholes who sweat beer. My friends and I exchange thoughts on how great it is that we go to a women's college and don't have to deal with all this sexist nonsense. As we walk home, I poll them: Can you approach a cute Secret Service agent, or would you be arrested for endangering the president? The general consensus is that flirting is OK if said agent is guarding a door or walking Ranger or something, but not if POTUS is around.

Day 2

Spend most of the day helping the seven speechwriters move in a game of musical offices; for some inexplicable reason, they're all getting rotated, even though only one is moving out. Arms sore from lugging copies of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the Bible, political almanacs, and biographies of famous statesmen.

I take a stray photograph to the Communications Office manager Drucie Scaling and ask if she knows whose it is. She has a sharp gray bob and barks out, "For God's sake, use your head" in a Texas drawl whenever we ask her a question about how to do something. She is also an uncontrollable gossip.

"Let me see, honey." She takes the 8x10. "Look, there." She taps a peach-polished fingernail on a blurry image at the far right, standing by a doorway with George Bush, James Baker, and communications assistant David Demarest. The blur seems to be wearing a skirt and looking down at something in her hand.

"That's Jennifer." Drucie explains that Bush had an affair with this blur for several years, but when he became vice president, Barbara put her foot down: He could not keep his mistress while they were in the White House.