Bridgeport Native is First Lady’s Chief of Staff
MCBRIDE
The Hour
Anthony Rotunno
Boston University Washington News Service
3/28/07
WASHINGTON, March 28 – Unlike her husband’s West Wing Oval Office, the East Wing office of first lady Laura Bush is modest, and square. A wall of full bookshelves stands behind a simple desk, and sunlight shines through two glass windows overlooking the East Garden in bloom. Meetings have pulled Mrs. Bush away from her desk, but seated at a small conference table in the corner is a woman as poised and put-together as the first lady herself.
Anita McBride, Mrs. Bush’s chief of staff, sits attentively, smiling politely from across the table. After two decades of White House service under three different Republican administrations, the former resident of Bridgeport, Conn., now serves as the first lady’s right-hand woman and as a senior staffer to President George W. Bush. Her perfect posture and kind brown eyes visually suggest the delicate balance between seriousness and compassion that’s come to characterize her life both in and out of the White House.
On her boss of more than two years, McBride says: “Mrs. Bush sets a very high standard. She sets the tone for the office and all of us really want to do the best that we can possibly do. She cares about us, she has very good instincts and she gives good direction.”
“More and more actually, I realize how we are so privileged to be temporary custodians of these jobs and how much we are responsible for actually accomplishing here,” she says of her various jobs in the White House. “I feel the real sense of history around me…It’s a national park, it’s a museum, it’s a symbol of our democracy where our president works and lives.”
McBride, 47, is a veteran in the ever-reshuffling White House cast. In addition to working in the current administration she also has served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Occupying positions in both the East and West Wings over the course of her tenure, she says there is no spot on the 18-acre estate her jobs have not taken her.
Up at 5 a.m., she says her work days start in the car, where she listens to radio broadcasts of Fox News and CNN for what will be the day’s hot news topics as she drives to work each morning. In the office by 7 a.m., she tries to quickly read emails and the newspapers before she’s required to attend the president’s senior staff briefings each morning at 7:30 a.m.
“As a member of the president’s senior staff but assigned to the first lady, my position gives me, and ultimately everyone on our staff, the opportunity to have our feet in both camps,” she says of her jobs in both wings.
As Mrs. Bush’s chief of staff, McBride oversees a group of 23 East Wing employees, and is responsible for managing the First Lady’s policy, press, correspondence, scheduling, speechwriting and social offices – responsibilities, she says, that don’t allow her to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until 9 o’clock each night.
“I do get about five to six hours of sleep a night,” she says, laughing at the suggestion of going days without rest. “The days are long and full, but they are exactly what you would expect them to be working in the White House.”
McBride began working her “long and full days” more than 20 years ago, starting as a volunteer for President Reagan’s re-election campaign in 1984. Following her volunteer work, she served as Reagan’s deputy director of personnel for two years until she was promoted to director of White House personnel in 1987, a position she held through the George H.W. Bush administration.
Of all three administrations she’s served, McBride says the Reagan White House was her favorite, “because it gave me my start.”
Working under Reagan was also when she met her husband, Timothy McBride, then an aide for Vice President Bush and now the senior vice president and a top lobbyist at the financial services company Freddie Mac. They have been married for 14 years and have two children.
In terms of her influence within the White House, however, McBride says her positions in the current administration have given her the ability to have a much greater impact on a number of very diverse issues.
Earlier this month, McBride accompanied the President and Mrs. Bush on their trip to Latin America, where she visited the countries of Brazil Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico. Last year she helped to organize the White House’s Summit on Malaria and Conference on Global Literacy, two integral components of the First Lady’s policy initiatives.
“One of the most important things I had an opportunity to play a role in was the search process to hire a new chief usher for the White House,” she says of her part in selecting a new manager of the first family’s executive residence. “Being part of that selection process really drove home for me that if I do nothing else, I have helped place somebody who will serve future presidents to come in a really, really good way.”
McBride says a career in politics was not one she imagined for herself while growing up in Bridgeport. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she says her parents were not politically active, but they did teach her early on how important it is to vote.
“They took voting very, very seriously,” she says.
She may be modest about her political prowess, but McBride’s flair for leadership was evident long before she joined the Reagan campaign, according to Carl Phillip, then her Spanish teacher and now assistant principal at Notre Dame Catholic High School in Fairfield, Conn. As president of her 1977 senior class, McBride (then Anita Bevacqua) did a great job “without a lot of fanfare and noise,” Phillip says.
“She’s probably perfect for the job she’s in now,” he adds. “In contrast to other presidents who might have been flashier, she would take the last seat in the room but would give the best product. Laura Bush must see that in her.”
McBride’s desire to give more than 100 percent effort to everything she does is another quality that makes her so successful, according to longtime friend and fellow University of Connecticut alum Gregg Shipman. When they were both living in UConn’s Buckley Hall, McBride’s positive attitude and optimism made her one of the most well liked students in the dorm, he says.
“It’s not a coincidence that everyone ended up congregating in her room,” Shipman says. “She really is the type of person who gets her greatest joy from making other people happy.”
Initially enrolled as a pre-med student, McBride says she was not turned on to a political career until she spent her junior year abroad at the University of Florence in Italy and experienced anti-American sentiments during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.
“The American flag and effigies of Jimmy Carter were being burned in the courtyard of where I was going to school,” she says. “I had not had the experience of being challenged as an American, and it really threw the light bulb switch on about how deeply I felt about my country.” She returned to graduate with a degree in international studies from UConn in 1981.
After her stints in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, McBride thought it was time for a break. From 1992 to 2000, she held various jobs in the private sector, and was working part-time as an executive recruiter when her two children, now ages 9 and 6, were born. “I had moved on in my life,” McBride says.
She was enjoying the chance to spend more time with her family at their home in Washington’s Spring Valley neighborhood, but after agreeing to help the current administration set up their personnel structure, she quickly got sucked back into the daily White House routine and the subsequent offer to become Mrs. Bush’s chief-of-staff marked a “career capstone” that she and her husband decided she couldn’t pass up.
Having worked for former President George H.W. Bush, Timothy McBride says he has “a very clear appreciation and enthusiasm” for the roles his wife plays in the current administration. With the help of a nanny, the couple has been able to establish a fairly efficient system to manage their household but, he says, some kinks are still being worked out. Vacations often get missed or postponed because of their busy schedules, he explains.
With less than two years left in the White House, McBride says, everyone on the first lady’s staff, including Mrs. Bush herself, feels the pressure to get as much accomplished as possible in the short time that remains.
But, she says, once that time expires, she has no expectations of staying in the White House under a new Republican administration. And as her children get older, Timothy McBride says, they look forward to the time when their mom’s schedule isn’t so consumed by work – unless it gets them another trip to Camp David, that is.
“They’re always asking when we can go back,” Timothy McBride says of their trip to the presidential retreat in western Maryland. “They don’t realize those invitations are only extended by the president and the first lady.”
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