As was too often the case during my time in the White House, my attempts to share information, recommendations, and insights continued to meet with resistance. Communication in large organizations, in any human endeavor, is always difficult. In this case, with this administration, among certain elements, there seemed to be an inverse correlation between the rise in the urgency of the pandemic and the administration’s failure to—or desire not to—communicate effectively.
Despite having gathered effective solutions on our road trips, I found it was difficult to convey them, much less rouse a sense of urgency. Some in the administration still considered the deceptive lull in cases in late August a permanent condition. I tried to make it clear that for every trough, there was going to be another rise, another crest—just in a different part of the country. We were gaining greater clarity about how this virus moved through communities and regions. We were seeing the earliest signs that indicated a cascade was beginning. We understood that the greatest drivers of community spread were friend and family indoor gatherings. How precipitous that rise would be depended on many factors, but we had to remain vigilant and stay on message. We had solutions, but they needed to be implemented appropriately and consistently.
Since July, I’d been placing in the governor’s reports key common mitigation recommendations for what to do when counties were in the red or yellow zone. As a result of what we’d learned on our trips, I’d refined these reports with the practical, ground-tested solutions that were working. I had also developed a list of mitigation bullet points for the entire state. Those went to every governor and state health official based on the level of community spread. In short: These are the things you need to do in red and yellow counties.
While I was still on the road, Marc Short had written to me stating, essentially, that these common mitigation points in the governor’s reports had to stop. He wanted the county-specific red and yellow zone language removed. We’d reviewed these with him just weeks earlier, in July, and now he was reconsidering.
For best mitigation in the most at-risk (red) counties—those with the highest spread and a test positivity rate greater than 10 percent—I had recommended that they reduce hours of operation for bars, as South Carolina had done, closing them entirely or at 10:30 p.m., to prevent packed indoor gatherings. Restaurants needed to reduce indoor dining capacity and create more outdoor spaces. Friend and family gatherings in homes needed to be reduced to ten people. Based on the level of community spread in those counties, they also needed to: institute weekly testing of all workers in assisted-living and long-term-care facilities; mandate masks at all indoor retail and personal services businesses; provide targeted, tailored messaging on the risk of serious disease for those with comorbidities and others in high-risk categories; recruit more contact tracers to ensure that all exposed or infected were contacted and that positive households tested within twenty-four hours; and provide isolation facilities outside households if Covid-positive individuals couldn’t quarantine successfully. It also included steps to increase testing, specifically in areas with the highest case rates.
These highly specific recommendations and suggested steps had been approved, posted, and used for more than two months now, in state after state. Many governors had told us that federal recommendations like these were critical for them to justify the actions they were taking to limit community spread. These recommendations had, in many cases, been very effective at slowing the spread and reducing fatalities. Why change them now?
I wrote back to Marc Short, telling him that the optics of any change would be horrible. The guidelines were out there, had been out there since July. Any abrupt change to them would look suspicious. I asked if we could hold off for a week, until I returned to Washington. He agreed. But when we did finally meet, his resolve had only hardened. He told me the reports had to be revised and the bulleted action steps deleted.
I pushed back: “There are critical aspects of this, college and antigen testing information that can make a real difference. If you stop the governor’s reports, then that information won’t get to those who need to know right now.”
Marc was adamant: “You’re overstepping. You cannot include the common recommendations to red and yellow counties. If you do, the reports won’t go out. It’s that simple.”
My data contradicted the president’s message that the situation was better and would continue to improve. But we couldn’t relax our vigilance now. The states needed to put in place the effective solutions we’d seen on campus communities and elsewhere.
Feeling thwarted, I agreed to rewrite the reports. I removed the common red and yellow county bullet points in question. I wasn’t happy, but I had to balance the data and specifics with the interests of the rest of the state. If the reports didn’t go out at all, the governors wouldn’t get the county-by-county data they needed to know the precise location and level of spread in their state.
I devised a work-around for the governor’s reports I was then writing. Instead of including those recommendations in the common bulleted list, I’d include them in the pandemic summary and state-specific recommendations in the governor’s reports, where they wouldn’t be so obvious. These weekly reports couldn’t go out on Monday without administration approval. Week by week Marc’s office began providing line-by-line edits. After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected.
In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.
This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield. He confirmed my suspicions: he had disagreed with the guidance, but had felt pressured by HHS and the White House to post it. Also, many on his staff in Atlanta were still comfortable prioritizing symptomatic individuals. Even at this late point, eight months into the pandemic, many at both the White House and the CDC still refused to see that silent spread played a prominent role in viral spread and that it started with social gatherings, especially among the younger adults. We had to find a way around them. Recognizing the damage to public health the Scott Atlas–driven testing guidance could do and was doing with testing rates dropping across the country, Bob and I agreed to quietly rewrite the guidance and post it to the CDC website. We would not seek approval. Because we were both quite busy, it might take a week or two, but we were committed to subverting the dangerous message that limiting testing was the right thing to do.
On the first day of September, while working on this rewrite, I received an email from Alyssa Farah, the White House director of strategic communications and assistant to President Trump since April. She asked—as if the governor’s reports were a new development—why two sets of data were being used. Governors were complaining to the White House about the source of our data.
I understood the subtext: No governor wanted their state classified as a red zone. Apart from indicating that the statewide positivity rate was more than 10 percent, a sign of broad community spread, the “red zone” appellation, some governors no doubt feared, would convey the perception that the state wasn’t handling the crisis well. Again, politics and public health were entwined. During a pandemic (or other crisis), political concerns, like an upcoming election, can do one of two things: either they can motivate a leader to do the hard things to mitigate the crisis or they can prompt that leader to question public health efforts at the expense of their constituents’ well-being.
It was easy for me to answer Alyssa Farah’s actual question, and I did, strongly emphasizing that I used only one set of data across the board—that data in the weekly governor’s reports and the daily reports to the administration. Throughout my career, I have never played one set of numbers against another. The numbers are the numbers. On their own, they neither lie nor distort. How they get interpreted, however, can be variable.
Alyssa Farah’s question foretold a deeper concern about why the governors were complaining about the source of the data. Did that mean they were receiving data that ran counter to ours? Or was this complaint a shorthand way of challenging my results. And who was behind this questioning?
This was the first time I’d heard of the governors’ data concerns. Prior to this, my experience had been that if a state official had an issue with the numbers, they contacted us, and our data team worked with them to resolve it. Specifically, Alyssa seemed interested in the figures for California, Arizona, and Florida. For example, the governor of California believed his state’s test positivity rate was 9.9, putting it in the orange zone. But the state was actually at 10.1, which placed it in the red zone. Both the timing of this inquiry and who specifically was mentioned were concerning. Governor Newsom had complained about this before, so it was easy to understand why he was among the three governors registering dissatisfaction with a difference between 9.9 and 10.1.
More puzzling were the complaints from the other two states. I’d worked closely with Governor Ducey of Arizona and Governor DeSantis of Florida to manage the serious outbreaks in their states. Both had experienced success. I’d even been using Arizona’s and Florida’s (particularly Miami’s) success as a talking point.
Governor DeSantis’s complaints to the White House brought this political-versus-public-health divide into stark relief. It also vividly illustrated Scott Atlas’s damaging influence. From the outset of my tenure, I’d spent an enormous amount of time and energy supporting Florida’s management of the crisis, whether in securing PPE or providing staffing support. We had learned a lot from Florida in our weekly calls with the Miami mayor, on the governors’ calls, in private phone calls, and during in-person visits. We learned about the role of family gatherings in continuing community spread from the two mayors of Miami and Miami/Dade county. We saw health care innovation creating “hospitals without walls” from our Tampa visit. DeSantis had agreed to allow local officials to issue the needed mitigation including mask mandates, due to the diversity of case rates across the state, and he supported community-level enhanced testing in neighborhoods with elevated rates.
Those approaches had worked. From a summer peak of more than 15,000 new cases per day on July 12 (two weeks after my meetings with the governor) to the first of September, the rate of daily new cases fell below 2,500. Unfortunately, on September 13, Scott Atlas was in Florida, speaking with Governor DeSantis. Irum and I were in Texas when Tyler Ann informed us of this. As we drove from Texas into the Southeast, through torrential rains from Hurricane Beta—a constant cloudy, looming presence—our mood soured. We knew that elected leaders and communities had been working there for months trying to control their community spread. We wondered what effect this latest contact with Atlas would now have on Governor DeSantis and his vulnerable state.
Less than a week later, Bob and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House, but we were being transparent with the American people.
On September 18, I was still on the road—in Arizona again, for a meeting with those conducting proactive testing at the University of Arizona—when Mark Meadows’s name and number flashed across my White House–issued smartphone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You rewrote and posted the CDC testing stuff.”
“Yes, I did, but—”
“There’s no ‘buts’ here. You went over my head.”
I explained why I had done it. We’d already seen the drop in testing numbers resulting from Scott Atlas’s dangerous guidelines. Those few pages we’d rewritten would change how states could test, and we’d prevent even more community spread going into the dangerous winter ahead.
Mark Meadows took this in and then, biting off each of his words, said, “You went over everyone else on the task force’s heads. You went around the whole approval process. You do not make unilateral decisions. It’s that simple. Period. End of sentence. Understood? Don’t ever do this again.”
“Understood. I did what I needed to do.”
“Don’t do that again without talking with me first.”
Some of the edge in his tone had softened. I suspected he believed Bob and I were right. He never said this, but in this case, his actions spoke louder than words. He allowed the new testing guidance to stand. He didn’t have to; he could have removed it and replaced it with the Atlas–influenced version.
This was the dichotomy that defined work in this White House and had helped justify my decision to stay. Yes, the chief of staff had every right to be angry at me for what I had done. But he had listened to why I had changed the guidance and he had let it stay up.
People are not one-dimensional; everything isn’t in black or white—even if the media often paints a picture in these tones, with catchy sound bites and headlines. In the end, at certain moments, just as Mark Meadows did the right thing here, so did others. Still, this near miss didn’t completely offset what I saw every day—how Covid-19 communication efforts we so desperately needed and that should have been priorities were diminished by this White House.
I had to continue to ensure that science was at the decision-making table inside the White House. If I hadn’t been there, along with Bob, to subvert the process that had empowered Scott Atlas, this occasion when the Trump administration did the right thing almost certainly would not have happened. Spread this principle across the entirety of the response—and all the critical victories like this one might not have happened. I couldn’t quit. I couldn’t leave Bob, Tony, and Steve alone on that fulcrum. (We were joined by so many others who worked in supporting roles, and I couldn’t abandon those people, either.) Each and every day the weight of all the physicians together on the task force could help offset the enormity of the disparity that existed between doing what the science and data dictated and what political considerations required.
I clearly recall standing in the Arizona heat while on that call with Mark Meadows. I was sweating—from the heat, from anxiety over possibly being late to my meeting, and from the knowledge that the guidance gambit was only the tip of the iceberg of my transgressions in my effort to subvert Scott Atlas’s dangerous positions.
Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate Covid-19’s vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my reports, I said in person.
I’m grateful that our CDC test guidance efforts paid off. On August 31, the day the CDC released the new Atlas–inspired “anti-testing” guidelines, 702,320 new tests were administered. By the end of September, after Bob and I had revised the guidance, we were back to more than 1 million tests a day, and we would achieve 1.7 million per day in January 2021. Over the four months after that, testing would hit a free fall, decreasing to 300,000 per day in May 2021. From the time we changed the guidance until the election, we doubled the number of people being tested, restoring some order to the universe. Yes, with more testing, we’d have a better sense of just how dire things were. This was never good news, but at least we’d have more accurate information to help direct attention and resources to the most critical areas.
On September 19, the day after Mark Meadows’s angry call, I received a call from the surgeon general of Florida. The news was not good: Scott Atlas had told the governor that the state had achieved the level of infection that met the criteria for herd immunity, that it wouldn’t experience a significant surge again, and that it didn’t need to keep mitigating as it had been. Scott Atlas was wrong. Florida had not achieved herd immunity. It would see another significant surge, the holidays would come, gatherings would increase, and the virus would spread again.
After ending the call with Florida’s surgeon general, I immediately wrote to Jared Kushner. I informed him that we couldn’t afford to have another state reverse course like Florida had. If Atlas was going to travel to states like I was doing, then we needed to send him someplace like South Dakota, where the outbreak was low and where he could do less real harm. Governor Kristi Noem wasn’t mitigating in any serious way, and Dr. Atlas would find a kindred spirit there. We couldn’t have Atlas telling governors just before winter that testing, masking, and other mitigation were no longer needed.
Jared wrote back to say he got it; he’d see what he could do.
When it came to Florida, though, whatever Jared could do didn’t really matter: Governor DeSantis appeared to believe Scott Atlas and had begun to act on those beliefs. On September 24, the governor proposed a reckless college “bill of rights” for students to party. This was in the aftermath of Tallahassee police breaking up dozens of large gatherings at Florida State University. The next day, DeSantis issued an order that effectively reversed what he’d told me he supported when I visited with him—local control and local mitigation as needed based on the local data. His new edict prohibited local governments from enacting comprehensive mitigation measures that were working (these included fines for violating mask mandates), allowed restaurants to open at full capacity, and prevented local governments from ordering restaurants to operate at less than 50 percent capacity.
Each of these moves countermanded the three basic mitigation measures that had proven so effective and that Scott Atlas had challenged as unnecessary—he had obviously convinced the governor they were no longer needed. At the time, daily cases in Florida had fallen from an end-of-July peak, but as we’d seen time and again, a relaxation of vigilance if not reinstated at the time of a surge would result in cases skyrocketing. Just shy of a month after the governor’s new edict was instituted in Florida, daily case figures there doubled. Hospitalizations and fatalities increased. The same pattern we’d been seeing was at work.
By the end of September, Governor DeSantis had lifted all restrictions and prevented local counties and cities from adopting their own restrictions based on ground-level assessments. His about-face wasn’t a result of a significant decrease in cases; instead it seemed to be the result of embracing Scott Atlas’s beliefs and positions. Apparently in a single visit to Florida, Atlas had undone months of work.
At the end of September, Florida was seeing just shy of 3,000 new cases per day and had lost 16,490 of its residents to Covid-19 disease. Three months later by the end of the year, with the holidays just passed and without the needed mitigations in place, these figures rose to 21,000 new cases in one day and 23,349 deaths.
THE SEARCH FOR GOOD news in the pandemic data continued in the White House. Throughout August, the president had made the claim that we were doing better than Europe. He did so by misusing an excess mortality figure someone in the White House had given him, likely the same person who had given him the graphs for the Axios interview. Put simply, “excess mortality” aggregates all causes of death during a period into a single number that can be compared to a prior period. For example, March 2019–July 2019 compared with March 2020–July 2020 (read: prepandemic to pandemic). Someone in the White House who knew that public health agencies around the world tracked excess mortality figures was analyzing them. Believing that this figure showed that the number of deaths was higher in Europe than in the United States, they had used it to prove that we were “doing better” in response to Covid-19. I didn’t believe the numbers supported this.
For a long time I’d been urged to provide the White House communications people with positive news the administration could use to bolster its message of “We’re doing great!” I guess they’d tired of my not fabricating anything usable. They knew the United States was coming out of a surge, but we were heading into fall and winter, and I knew the worst was yet to come.
I enlisted the support of HHS secretary Alex Azar, and together we asked the CDC to review the administration’s calculations. They did so, and came back with an excess mortality figure that showed we were only 8 percent better than all of Europe. As a scientist, I knew this was statistically insignificant. The administration had not quantified their “better than.” In citing their figure, the White House had obscured the fact that the most relevant data in a pandemic is data that confirms whether you are preventing or limiting community spread. Excess mortality rates, and final fatality rates—all these had their place, but these measures were more useful for analyzing a situation after a surge or after the full pandemic was over. They were more useful for telling the story of what happened rather than guiding you in the present to do what was necessary to alter that story’s ending. Sometimes they told a tale of the very recent past, but they always gave a glimpse of what was in the rearview mirror, and not what the view was through the windshield.
I wrote to the Staff Sec, the gatekeeper of all White House communications to the president, to inform the staff there that this fruitless use of data distorted the truth, shifted priorities and perspectives, and fundamentally altered the course of the response. The data misuse and misunderstanding had to stop.
I didn’t get a response. The distortion of data and miscommunications in all forms, intentional or otherwise, continued.
There were times when I received clear signals from the outside world that I was not alone in my thinking. They often coincided with a low point I’d experienced and the world had witnessed—after the “disinfectant” briefing, for example, or when the press or the president had written or said something unfavorable about me. These messages from outside the White House didn’t come to my direct line.
Once, Condoleezza Rice used the White House operator to be put in touch with me. We had met a number of times during her tenure as secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. Though she seemed to have a sixth sense about when to call, she never cited these low points as her reason for reaching out. Instead, she’d ask me about an issue related to PEPFAR—among her many ongoing commitments was her passionate belief in the importance of global HIV/AIDS programs. Sometimes she would call to ask about global vaccination programs or other public health issues, like malaria. She was always upbeat and expressed her gratitude for the work I’d been doing in my other capacity. It was as if she were sending me an encoded message. She wasn’t working directly as a cheerleader, encouraging me from the sidelines as I took on my role as task force coordinator. She was more like a coach, reminding me that I’d done good work in the past, that I had navigated difficult times, and that, in the end, it would all be worth it because of the lives we had saved.
I also believed that every time she called, she wasn’t speaking just for herself but also for the former president. PEPFAR had been launched in 2003, during George W. Bush’s administration. The president and Mrs. Bush had a deep commitment to improving the health of others, including in the face of HIV/AIDS and malaria, particularly in Africa. This was in keeping with their compassionate conservatism. I also knew that in contemplating a run for the White House, President Bush had consulted with Condoleezza, who advised him that Africa should play a large role in his foreign policy. I sensed that he couldn’t contact me directly—he had to avoid the perception of meddling in the Trump administration’s handling of the present crisis. Still, each time I spoke with Condoleezza, I felt I was hearing President Bush saying, I’m glad you’re there. Thank you for staying there.
I was struck by the difference in tone between President Bush and President Trump. Through my PEPFAR interactions with President Bush, I’d seen him as a very positive force for action. He believed that people could accomplish great things if they were supported—even when they doubted their own abilities. I had worked in Africa before PEPFAR, and I had stood witness to the death and despair permeating every village and household as AIDS claimed friends and family members. President Bush had a vision: He believed we would be able to put two million people on HIV treatment. Oh my gosh, I thought, when I heard this. That is a really aggressive goal. At that time, fewer than fifty thousand Africans were being treated for HIV infection. I knew the reality on the ground: limited physical infrastructure and personnel. But President Bush had a way of making all of us confident in taking on the really difficult tasks and completing them. He created a space where people could succeed, supported us to make the impossible possible.
Trump’s White House was the opposite in many ways.
As September rolled on and many in the White House moved into campaign mode, I saw the distortions and deceptions only get worse, not better. Back in March, I was led to believe that Google had developed an app that would allow users to find out the nearest testing location and that the app was operational. When I found this wasn’t true, I knew I had to question everything I’d been told. Now, the number of untruths, partial truths, distortions, and blind spots were coming at us so fast and furious that dealing with them all in real time was a near impossibility.
By mid-September, I was worn out from dealing with the politicization of the entire enterprise. Fighting both the pandemic and Atlas’s influence had used up nearly all my resolve. For the first time, I began to question whether it was worth it for me to be there. Prior to this, those thoughts had been fleeting, but as it became clearer to me that I was being pushed to the side, they became more persistent. For the first time, I considered resigning. I am not a quitter, but I had to weigh the costs and benefits of my remaining. I’d come into the White House fully aware that there had been a revolving door of officials who said they’d stayed at the White House as long as they had out of fear of what would happen if they left. It was a common trope: they had to remain there to be the “adult in the room.” This was less an issue, in my case, than my concern that whoever took my place would be a huge setback for the larger pandemic response. I felt certain that Scott Atlas would be tapped to become the new task force coordinator. All signs pointed to it. He’d been the only person added to the roster. He’d played an active role in the writing of the CDC testing guidance. He seemed to have allies among others in the administration and at the agencies. The extent of his influence was difficult to fully discern. If I left, I believed that I’d be removing one element of resistance in his way toward shaping the response.
The consequences of their bringing in someone more sympathetic to the administration’s positions on testing, masks, and the data would be disastrous. The data team I had constructed with Irum was the comprehensive daily truth that transcended the White House and the State Houses. Maintaining that and pushing for more and better data would be not only key for this pandemic response but also for creating the new pandemic preparedness strategies. They would need comprehensive data to review and I wanted to make sure that existed. It wasn’t just that this new person wouldn’t push as hard on the things I prioritized, or would give President Trump his way more, it was that this person would almost certainly actively work to undo much of what I’d helped accomplish. It was one thing for progress to have slowed as it had, but entirely different to think about someone leading the response backward: misrepresenting federal data to skew the message toward whatever story President Trump wanted to tell; dismantling the national reporting systems that were created; telling the public that Covid-19 wasn’t a big deal, that we should just go about our lives; accepting hundreds of thousands of lives lost as a natural and unavoidable cost of a successful economy, an acceptable form of collateral damage.
When I thought about how much a new response coordinator, one aligned with President Trump on the most important issues, would risk American lives, the stakes for my quitting suddenly felt incredibly high. From where I sat, the picture was plain: if I left, more people would die—not because I was irreplaceable, but because the last two months had shown the willingness of the Trump administration to bend data to fit their desired ends, to misrepresent reality. I wouldn’t bend data and I could provide that daily analysis based on all the integrated data.
Still, in spite of all that logic, I couldn’t escape the feeling that quitting would help me breathe a much desired and needed sigh of relief. I’d been at it nearly round the clock for months. It felt as though something was about to give. I needed a break, a fresh perspective, a reminder of what was possible, and of the successes of the past. Proactively, I had called a member of the Bush team and said I would be coming through Texas on our next road trip and that I’d like to meet with the president. And on September 19, I was in the Bush family home in Dallas, getting a tour of the president’s painting studio. I opted to follow Condoleezza’s strategy, and when we sat down to speak, I briefed the president on PEPFAR, letting him know that Covid-19 had not gotten in the way of people’s treatment. The work we had done to build the capacity of indigenous groups for service delivery had been critical, as they were carrying the ball. Most Americans who had been working there were back in the United States, and most international partners were unable to fly into Africa. Treatment access was being sustained, but we were losing ground on our prevention activities. The former president and I reviewed the impact surveys in Zimbabwe and Lesotho, seeing the evidence of our controlling the HIV pandemic. We talked about how the investments made in infrastructure and human capacity for HIV were serving the broader cause and now supporting the overall Covid-19 response there.
I paused, and I then laid it all out on the line, letting him know why I had actually come to speak with him. “I am not having the impact on the White House with the current pandemic that I would like. I should focus on the other pandemic. I think I should return full time to my PEPFAR position at the State Department.”
The president regarded me for a few moments, his eyes glinting. I knew he understood what I was really saying. Finally he said, “So, Deb. What you’re saying is you want to quit.”
Hearing those two words paired that way made me drop my gaze from his eyes to my own hands. We were heading into the worst part of the Covid-19 pandemic. He knew those words would stop me in my tracks.
I looked up and saw his trademark grin. Nearly chuckling, he said, “Well, you know you can’t do that. I know you know that’s right. You’ve got to do this. You need to finish. You can never quit.”
I felt an infusion of hope and energy. Okay. Good enough. I’d gotten another set of orders.
“Never again” versus “never quit.” What a difference a single word makes.
President Bush has remained an anchor for me. He is a good and decent person with unlimited empathy for others. His and Laura Bush’s compassionate conservatism had driven them to found PEPFAR, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the President’s Malaria Initiative, each of which positively impacts the lives of millions around the globe. He continued his work to improve global health through Go Further, a campaign to prevent HIV-positive women from succumbing to cervical cancer.
I liked that, in dealing with me, President Bush didn’t pull any punches. He didn’t throw any, either. I respected him and his insights. On this occasion, he wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear. (If he had said, “I get it. It’s an impossible task. You should leave,” I would have done that.) He also didn’t paint a rosy picture of the days ahead. Without being directly critical of the present administration, he let me know he understood what we were all up against. All the more reason to carry on.
That was it. We chatted a bit more about his art and his present life and PEPFAR. It was September 19, and in about four months, as it turned out, a new administration would be sworn in. I knew we were in for a rough patch with the upcoming election, but I had no idea just how awful political events in the country would become.