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FIRST PERSON

A Young Lion’s Year in Washington

By Greg Shill ’02

Greg Shill ’02 (right) with Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), for whom he served as a legislative assistant in 2002–03.

As a career choice, public service was, for me, the natural successor to space exploration and race car driving. My parents were leaders in the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa before they fled to America in 1969, and their activism and idealism have inspired me for as long as I can remember. At Columbia, I tried grassroots activism, advocacy through journalism and an internship in Washington, D.C. As my graduation from the College approached in early 2002, I felt ready to make the transition to Capitol Hill.

Armed with a thin Rolodex of Beltway contacts I’d cultivated during my internship, I was able to learn of a few openings in the secretive Hill job market. I traveled to our nation’s capital in early May of my senior year for five interviews in the span of four hours, confident that at least one of them would pan out. None did, however, and all I had to show for my whirlwind day were blisters and a seedy basement sublet.

I spent my first couple of weeks in Washington, D.C., frantically interviewing before netting a position with the liberal Democratic congresswoman who represented my hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., Rep. Lynn Rivers. I had grown up admiring Rivers and was honored to work for her. But I wanted to work on foreign policy issues, and that portfolio already was spoken for in her office. When I heard that Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) needed a new legislative assistant — two rungs up from the usual entry-level Hill job of staff assistant — I jumped at the opportunity.

Lantos is the ranking member on the House International Relations Committee and is a major foreign policy voice of the Democratic leadership. But his leadership position wasn’t the only thing that drew me to him — his compelling personal story and perspective were even more powerful. Lantos is the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress. An active member of the anti-Nazi and then the anti-Communist underground, Lantos endured horrors in several Nazi work camps. His experience lends credibility to the muscular internationalism that is his policy trademark and inevitably makes it harder for him than most of his congressional colleagues to forget the painful history of appeasement. Lantos was a thoughtful and outspoken advocate of military action against Bin Laden long before 9-11 and a longtime supporter of India, Israel and other nations at war with terror.

I was a bit intimidated when I applied for a job in his office. A few interviews later, however, I started as the youngest legislative assistant (a midlevel position usually occupied by people 5 to 10 years my senior, often with advanced degrees) in the Lantos office — in fact, his youngest staffer period, even younger than several of the interns. The staff assistants and other L.A.s in the office had four to eight years on me, and our senior staff members had at least 100 years of Washington experience among them. But soon, the mythic Honorable Thomas P. Lantos became simply Tom. I was proud to work for such a passionate advocate of human rights — he co-founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus 20 years ago, before the cause gained wide acceptance — and a man committed to a realistic brand of internationalism, a Democrat who never confused pacifism with progressivism.

Though Lantos wings most of his speeches, I was fortunate to write others. Shortly after I started, I realized that I had an enormous amount of responsibility on a day-to-day basis, something I was especially grateful for, given my age. I wrote speeches on all kinds of issues; some Lantos delivered on the House floor or elsewhere, and others were entered directly into the Congressional Record.

For the most part, the senior staff members, from Lantos on down, were refreshingly open to new ideas, and I think many of them respected me despite my age because of my Columbia education and my strength as a writer. Nevertheless, I often found my age to be a handicap and felt I had to work twice as hard to earn the respect of people I interacted with professionally.

None of my responsibilities reinforced this truism more than my duty to take meetings — mostly with lobbyists and constituents — on the congressman’s behalf. These meetings fell mostly within the purview of my huge portfolio of health care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Homeland Security, welfare, women’s and children’s issues, civil rights, abortion and agriculture. I also was responsible for handling foreign policy from a constituent relations standpoint, and often I would have as many as five or six constituent or lobbyist meetings lined up on a given afternoon. I met with groups of cancer patients from our district, CEOs of major hospitals, San Francisco peace activists, a former senator who’d turned to lobbying, presidents of statewide or national trade associations, directors of State of California agencies and professional lobbyists, many of them three times my age and employed at many multiples of my pay grade.

These meetings were a pedagogic exercise in themselves, as I had to learn how to make sure our guests went home happy while preserving my boss’ policy options. Some lobbyists, particularly those from major lobbying shops, deserve their reputation as hired guns; others work for nonprofits and are simply there to take their cause to Congress. Despite their warm and conciliatory demeanor, I knew I was being taken for a ride when I met with U.S. Tobacco and they tried to sell me on a “relatively safe” brand of their chewing tobacco that they wanted my boss to defend before the Government Reform Committee. (Sorry, guys.)

My responsibilities comprised much work aside from meetings. As my portfolio encompassed a broad range of issues, I had to evaluate hundreds of bills and decide whether to recommend them for co-sponsorship, and I was in charge of constituent correspondence for my areas. I also did a considerable amount of press work and drafted many of his official communications. Once I’d learned the budget appropriations process, I initiated a campaign inside Congress to secure more federal funding for treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the horrible and tragic disease that gets its popular name from Lou Gehrig ’25.

During my year in Washington, I met many congressmen and ambassadors and a number of foreign and prime ministers, and even accompanied Lantos inside the White House several times. On these occasions and others, I often felt the way another Columbia alumnus said he had felt when he worked in the corridors of power. George Stephanopoulos ’82 wrote in his memoir that he fully expected someone to realize during an important meeting that he was way too young to be in the room; he was just waiting to be told to get lost.

I had more opportunities and more access than I could ever have hoped for, and I feel honored to have had the chance to serve, even if only in a small way. It’s a really good feeling to wake up in the morning and know you’re going to work for what you believe in.

Greg Shill ’02 is a graduate fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary and keeps active in Democratic politics. He looks forward to law school and, maybe a political career of his own one day. He can be reached at ghs13@columbia.edu.

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