Get a Job: Heather Hurlburt

From college to the State Department to Yugoslavia to the White House to Michigan. Here’s how Heather did it.

By Ezra Klein, UCLA
Monday July 11, 2005

Few of my interviews are set up on days where my subject’s expertise intersects with the morning’s events in order to create the sort of cosmic convergence needed for me to make sense of increasingly bewildering news cycles. Heather Hurlburt, however, was kind enough to extend a helping hand of sanity while I was still groping for some way to wrap my mind around four bombs ripping through London’s transportation system. It’s the first time I was ever glad to wake up at 7am to talk with somebody.

That’s because few of my interviewees have written the seminal article on Democrat’s troubled relationship with the military (“War Torn”), fewer have penned speeches for Warren Christopher and Bill Clinton, and yet a mere fraction of those have spent their post-college years shuttling between Europe and America, pulling all-nighters on Yugoslavia’s peace negotiations. It makes all those sunrise hours spent poring over term papers seem, well, a bit small. Welcome to Get a Job.

Heather was just a wee tyke when Nixon was completing his Shakespearian arc. The neighborhood moms all pooled funds to hire baby sitters so they could watch the tragedy’s endgame free from prepubescent distractions. Unfortunately, neither puberty, adolescence, nor young adulthood would offer much change. Despite the breather that was Jimmy Carter, “the forces of reaction‿ remained firmly in control during Heather’s academic career, leaving the young, rather liberal Brown graduate without an obvious place to ply her freshly minted degree. Sporting a double major in international relations and Russian studies, the State Department seemed an obvious berth, but a summer spent working there while George H.W Bush occupied the Oval Office ruled it out.

But if Heather was done with the State Department, the State Department wasn’t quite finished with her. When she’d applied for their internship, she’d hoped for the Russian desk, figuring knowledge on the topic would be the sort of thing the State Department would want. Hah! Instead, she got the comparative backwater of European Security, an unfamiliar territory packed with unknown acronyms.

Summer passed, and she must’ve proved herself against the alphabet soup, because fall brought a call from Capitol Hill. The Helsinki Commission, Congress’s delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, needed someone familiar with the European Security scene, and one of Heather’s old colleagues brought up her name.

During her first week on the job – January 1990, for those keeping score at home – a seminar on military doctrine brought Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Heather Hurlburt, and a few others to a large, ornate conference table in Vienna. But just because you start with a bang doesn’t necessarily mean the volume will ever go down. Heather spent the next four years on the delegation, working towards German reunification and peace in Yugoslavia.

1992, of course, brought a change on the homefront. For the first time in Heather’s life, an exciting Democrat was elected on his own terms (rather than as consequence of another leader’s total humiliation). Suddenly, working stateside stopped sounding so bad. So Heather boarded a plane, temporarily took up residence with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and soon became a speech writer for Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

Of the many glorified jobs in politics, speech writer is second only to Chief of Staff in screen time. We’re talking Sam Seaborne, Toby Zeigler – earnest, bright folks using pens to sketch a vision of the world as it should be, if not the world as it is. That, according to Heather, can be a problem. If you spend too much time in Oz (the friendly technicolor version with songs, not HBO’s incarnation with jail rape), you begin to lose touch with Earth. And while soaring rhetoric may lift audiences, the drop is much farther if the words obscure a gloomier reality.

Nevertheless, wordsmith to the Secretary of State, or anyone else with a similarly serious title, ain’t a bad gig. Unlike other Washington positions that demand a long trudge up the seniority ladder, a good speechwriter can get face time and access far out of proportion to her years on the job. And indeed, that’s what happened. Heather outlasted Warren Christopher, stayed on for three years with Madeleine Albright, and was called to the White House by a member of Clinton’s staff. There, she penned addresses on policies both foreign and domestic, issues both pressing and fanciful, and Congressmen both living and on their way out. Once, Heather was asked to write a speech in memory of a congressmen to be given at a memorial service a few hours later. Only problem was, Google indicated the subject was alive. Turns out, the congressmen’s fatal disease had prompted Washington to offer his funeral a bit early, so the still-living leader could hear all the nice words that’d otherwise be uttered out of posthumous earshot.

Eventually, putting words into the mouths of others – or at least drafts into the hands of Clinton – gets tiring. Too many collaborators, too many moving parts, too many interests to juggle. Heather moved on, going to reestablish the Washington presence of the International Crisis Group, a think tank of sorts dedicated to providing accurate and timely information on global hot spots. But Rhode Island, Moscow, Vienna, DC– all that suggested a touch of the peripatetic, and Heather soon moved to Michigan. But this was no ordinary wanderlust. A new husband who’d landed a dream job with the United Auto Workers and a desire to start a family made the move attractive, and a burgeoning consulting business proved the decision right.

Having a family, for Heather, was wholly reconcilable with remaining active. In short order she helped lead the set-up of Bono’s African AIDS group, DATA, helped write the Rockefeller Foundation’s massive guide to foreign policy, wrote speeches, penned articles, and was tapped for Democracy Arsenal, a blog of progressive foreign policy professionals.

So how can you be Heather? Learn to write. Really. No one who can wield a pen ever goes hungry. Then get yourself on the Hill or in a campaign, both have plenty of documents to be authored and good authors will find themselves sorted to the best documents, from speeches to policy papers. Once there, doors will open on their own.

Also, learn to type. Heather didn’t (nor, for that matter, has your humble correspondent, who is pathetically hunt ‘n’ pecking this out), and a Summer spent on a newspaper saw her constantly lying about a bad connection as she tried to keep up with telephone dictation. Nailing keys while looking elsewhere has proved, in the intervening years, the sort of skill that’d have occasionally come in handy, and future generations should see that they have it.

So pen some papers, master the keyboard, and climb the hill or blitz a campaign. Got it? Good. Now go get a job.

Ezra Klein is a Junior at UCLA. He does have a blog, it’s at http://ezraklein.typepad.com. He does not work for the school newspaper. Which leaves him time to respond to your e-mails: ezrak@ucla.edu. Who do you want to see profiled in Get a Job? Drop him an email and let him know.