Many of us, I think, can look back and recall certain specific moments in our lives that take on greater importance the longer we live.<\/p>\n
“The past has a different pattern,” T.S. Eliot wrote, when viewed from each of our changing perspectives.<\/p>\n
For me, one of those moments occurred when I was 17 years old. I was a high school senior in Louisville, Kentucky, representing my state in the 1963 America’s Junior Miss competition in Mobile, Alabama.<\/p>\n
Along with the other young contestants, I was doing my best to hold up under the grueling week-long schedule of interviews, agonies over hair that curled or wouldn’t, photo sessions, nervous jitters and rehearsals.<\/p>\n
In the midst of it all, there was one person who stood at the center\u2014at least my psychological center\u2014someone I viewed as an island in an ocean of anxiety.<\/p>\n
She was one of the judges. A well-known writer. A woman whose sea-gray eyes fixed on you with laser penetration, whose words were always deliberate. She felt the right words could make all the difference. Her name was Catherine Marshall.<\/p>\n
From the first moment I met Catherine Marshall, I was aware that she was holding me\u2014indeed all of us\u2014to a more exacting standard.<\/p>\n
While other pageant judges asked questions about favorite hobbies and social pitfalls, she sought to challenge. She felt even 17-year-old girls\u2014perhaps especially<\/em> 17-year-old girls\u2014should be made to examine their ambitions and relate them to their values.<\/p>\n During the rehearsal on the last day of the pageant, the afternoon before it would all end, several of us were waiting backstage when a pageant official said Catherine Marshall wanted to speak with us.<\/p>\n We gathered around. Most of us were expecting a last-minute pep talk or the ritual good luck wish. Or at most an exhortation to be good citizens, but we were surprised.<\/p>\n She fixed her eyes upon us. “You have set goals for yourselves. I have heard some of them. But I don’t think you have set them high enough. You have talent and intelligence and a chance.<\/p>\n “I think you should take those goals and expand them. Think of the most you could do with your lives. Make what you do matter. Above all, dream big.”<\/p>\n It was not so much an instruction as a dare. I felt stunned, like a small animal fixed on bright lights. This woman I admired so much was disappointed in us\u2014not by what we were but by how little we aspired to be.<\/p>\n I won the America’s Junior Miss contest that year. In the fall I entered Wellesley College, where my sister, Linda, was beginning her junior year. I graduated in 1967 with a B.A. degree in English and a complete lack of inspiration about what I should do with it.<\/p>\n I went to my father, a lawyer and later a judge in Louisville’s Jefferson County Court. “But what is it that you enjoy doing most?” he asked.<\/p>\n “Writing,” I replied slowly. “I like the power of the word. And working with people. And being in touch with what’s happening in the world.”<\/p>\n He thought for a moment. “Did you ever consider television?”<\/p>\n I hadn’t.<\/p>\n At that time there were few if any women journalists on television in our part of the country. The idea of being a pioneer in the field sounded like dreaming big.<\/p>\n So that’s how I came to get up my nerve, put on my very best Mary Tyler Moore girl journalist outfit, and go out to convince the news director at Louisville’s WLKY-TV to let me have a chance.<\/p>\n He gave it to me\u2014and for the next two and a half years, I worked as a combination weather and news reporter.<\/p>\n Eventually, though, I began to feel restless. I’d lie awake at night feeling that something wasn’t right. I’d wait for the revelation, the sign pointing in the direction of the Big Dream.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What I didn’t realize is what Catherine Marshall undoubtedly knew all along\u2014that the dream is not the destination but the journey.<\/p>\n I was still working at WLKY when, in 1969, my father was killed in an auto crash. His death\u2014coupled with my urge to make a change\u2014spurred me in the search for a different job and also seemed to kindle my interest in the world of government, law and politics.<\/p>\n I racked my brain. I put out feelers. And then one of my father’s associates said, “What about Washington?”<\/p>\n Several months later, in the autumn of 1970, I said goodbye to my mother and Linda and to the good folks at WLKY, and boarded a plane for Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n Now, I know this may sound incredibly naive, but when the plane landed at National Airport, I got off with a very firm idea of where I wanted to work. At the White House.<\/p>\n True, in the eyes of official Washington I might be right off the equivalent of the turnip truck, but working in the White House was exactly what I had in mind!<\/p>\n Thanks to a few kind words of recommendation from a friend of my father’s, I was able to obtain an interview with Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary, and I was hired.<\/p>\n Those were heady days. The Press Office, located in the West Wing of the White House, was the hub for information flowing between the White House and the media. I worked hard and I worked long and loved every part of it.<\/p>\n Then came Watergate.<\/p>\n In the summer of 1974 the President resigned. Immediately I was appointed to his transition team in San Clemente, California.<\/p>\n My assignment on the West Coast was supposed to last only six months. But a few days after my arrival the President made a request that I was totally unprepared for.<\/p>\n He asked me to consider staying on in San Clemente\u2014along with several other writers and aides\u2014to assist him in researching and writing his memoirs. I had to make a choice, and a choice that I knew would have consequences.<\/p>\n “Career suicide.” mumbled some of my friends.<\/p>\n But I had worked for this man and he had been good to me. Now he was asking me for something that I was in a position to give. I have never regretted the decision. I stayed.<\/p>\n One day in the long exile, Catherine Marshall and her husband, Leonard LeSourd, called to say they were nearby. They came for a visit, and once again I felt the searching gaze and, implicit in it, the words. “What is next?”<\/p>\n Again I came to appreciate the immense power of someone who is unafraid to hold other people to a standard. And again I realized the way a single uncompromising question can force reexamination of a life.<\/p>\n