"Newsweek" Cover, June 2, 1975

In the summer of 1975, when I was 18, the Hon. Tennyson Guyer, Republican, 4th District of Ohio, appointed me his L.B.J. Summer Intern to the 94th United States Congress.  In fact, he appointed me for the first time the prior summer, but when one of his staffers rang to interview me for a press release announcing the appointment, he realized that, although I had graduated from high school, I was still legally a minor.  No one wants to take responsibility an unaccompanied minor, so I was unappointed and promised the internship the next summer, when I was no longer jailbait.

Rep. Guyer--"Tenny" to almost everyone but me--was good for his word, so in June 1975, I moved into a private dorm room at George Washington University and reported for duty at the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill.  It was an exciting time to be a young intern in Washington.  It was the summer after Watergate.  Gerald Ford was President.  Robert Redford was in town filming All the President's Men and, boy, did all of us female interns hope for a close encounter with him!  The Metro was under construction, so everything was dug up and noisy.  Security was nowhere near as tight as it is today, so almost everything and everybody were accessible.  No one had yet heard of Monica Lewinsky, so the reputation of the Washington intern was intact.

L.B.J.'s intern program was very competitive, but very well organized once we all arrived in D.C.  The idea was for each congressperson to hire one intern from his/her district for the summer and for the internship to focus on learning how that city and our federal government work.  As such, we were provided opportunities to experience things that most private citizens and tourists are never permitted.  One Saturday morning we were given a private tour of the White House.  Another time we were given a private tour of the Pentagon and met with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.  Speaker of the House Carl Albert spent time with us.  Most evenings we interns went out for dinner in Georgetown, attended events at the Kennedy Center, acted like tourists even though some of us had been to D.C. before, and took in the occasional movie.  I remember seeing the movie Jaws when it opened at a theater so packed that my friends and I had to split up.  I ended up sitting between two very excitable black women and, every time that creepy two-note Jaws theme played in the background, the one to the right of me grabbed my right thigh and squeezed it so tight I couldn't concentrate on the film.  When the lights came up, she looked at me, laughed, and apologized.  But as a result of her fright, I had small finger bruises on that leg for the next 10 days.

The "job" of intern was loosely defined.  Some of my counterparts--all of whom were older than me and most of whom were law students--were bored stiff making photocopies and stuffing envelopes.  Rep. Guyer told me my job was constituent relations and legislative research.  Never mind that I didn't know what either entailed.  I just dove right in and did whatever needed to be done around the office.  As people discovered that I was actually reasonably capable, they began to delegate more substantive work to me.  One day Rep. Guyer asked me to do some research on the right to privacy for a speech he had to give on the House floor.  After I did the research, he asked me to write a first draft of a speech.  After I did, I showed it to one of the staffers.  He did some tweaking, then handed it off to Rep. Guyer.  Many days later, I arrived at work only to find the stack of Congressional Records that were usually delivered to the front office sitting on my desk.  I asked around. . .does anyone know what I'm supposed to do with these?  Nope.  Around mid morning, Rep. Guyer arrived at the office, stopped at my desk, and told me to read a specific range of pages from that issue of the Congressional Record.  Then, oddly, he hovered.  As I began to read those pages, I realized it was the speech I'd drafted for him.  He'd presented it on the House floor the day before.  In fact, the entire office knew about it and was part of the set up.  I was never bored working my little intern job.  One day Rep. Guyer sent me over to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's office in the Capitol to drop off some CIA reports.  I arrived shortly after lunch, only to have the door open up to this exquisite scene of elegantly-dressed men and women gathering for lunch.  The ladies were dressed in ballgowns.  One was smoking using one of those silver cigarette holders, something I'd seen only in the movies.  The door answerer was the Vice President himself.  He waved me in, and when I stepped inside, the carpet was so plush it felt as though I was stepping onto a thick down comforter.  Another day Rep. Guyer gave me elaborate directions to a meeting in another building in the city and asked me to take copious notes for him.  When I got there, I discovered the meeting was in fact a committee hearing with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  That night it was on the news, me a small background presence in some of the shots.

The perks of being a lowly intern in Washington were many.  Any time I wanted I could go to the House or Senate gallery and watch the proceedings.  I did that often, and I got to watch the late Senator Hubert Humphrey acting chummy with Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate floor and those early glass-ceiling breakers Reps. Shirley Chisolm and Bella Abzug (she of the crazy hats) representing the state of New York on the House floor.  In the mid 1970s, there was an elaborate underground pedestrian tunnel system connecting the various House and Senate office buildings with the Capitol.  (It's since been converted to a subway system.)  In the tunnel, there were fancy shops carrying heavily price-discounted merchandise.  All of this was intended primarily for the representatives and the senators, to make voting on the floor and shopping easy and expedient, but we interns had access, too.  Also accessible through the tunnel system were the cafeteria and the dining room.  Again they were shared with the interns. 

This is where I most often ran into Senator Kennedy.  Sometimes he'd already be seated as I queued up in the chow line.  Other times he'd be lined up one or two or three people behind me, trying like the rest of us to figure out what to have for lunch.  I had my chances, but I never approached him.  In those days, we interns knew our place.  No one had to tell us.  But he was already widely recognizable for being part of the Kennedy clan, for having lost two prominent siblings in the decade or so prior and more even before that, and for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.  In his early 40s, he was still handsome in that big-toothed, bushy-haired, large-headed way of the Kennedys.  His hair hadn't gone statesman silver yet.  But his face was lined, and it wasn't hard to see in his eyes the toll all this tragedy had taken on him.  One of my intern friends worked in the same Senate office building as him, and she said rumors were rife that he was drinking too much and womanizing (having women service him from under his desk, according to her).  And so the joke among us interns was to keep me the heck away from him, as I was the youngest, freshest flesh in the female intern universe.

So this is what is swirling through my mind as I watch the news of Senator Kennedy's death.  I do not know what to make of the character of this man.  He was deeply flawed, but he also suffered much and was massively tested.  Some of those tests, he passed with flying colors.  And for one all-too-brief summer, he was my colleague.  Well, sort of.