Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307110166
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROB EURE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
"You fasten all the triggers for the others to fire,
"Then you sit back and watch while the death count gets higher.
"You hide in your mansion while the young people's blood
"Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud."
Dylan's protest came from Dwight Holton's tape deck. It was January, and Holton, newly appointed assistant to the White House chief of staff, relished playing Dylan in his small, windowless office less than 30 yards from Bill Clinton's.
Dwight Holton, 27, is a one-time Young Republican and the son of a Republican former governor of Virginia. Now, the Roanoke native is part of the crowd of youngsters Clinton has brought with him into power. The brash, sharp, idealistic workaholics surrounding the new president have not, to date, earned high marks for effectiveness, but their dedication is undiminished, according to Holton.
"We're trying to something," says Holton, one of the youngest in the capital's new power network. "It would be so much easier to be doing nothing."
In five months on the job, Holton has worked on health care reform for Hillary Rodham Clinton's task force, tracked development of the controversial forest management plan for the Pacific Northwest and assessed the effects of Clinton's White House staff reduction plan. Most recently, he was one of four staffers writing the management review of the White House travel office. He is traveling this week with Clinton in Korea.
He's already lost his office in the West Wing - a result of the recent shake-up to improve the communications department. His new office, across the street in the Old Executive Office Building, has windows and a veranda and, even more intriguing for Holton, once housed Watergate figure Charles Colson. "We keep looking for the safe," he says.
Holton's friends are not surprised to see him so advanced in the new regime. By the time he went to work for the president, he was a veteran of two national campaigns; he also was a key player in Gov. Douglas Wilder's "kiddie crusade" campaign staff of 1989.
Associates say Holton is an efficient organizer, able to focus on difficult tasks and quick to figure steps toward a solution. His political savvy led him to jobs as scheduler for Wilder and last year for Vice President Al Gore. The job involves choosing which events the candidate attends for maximum media exposure and deliverance of the right message.
Holton has a legion of devoted friends from his three campaigns and time he spent in the Wilder administration working for Heath and Human Services Secretary Howard Cullum.
"Dwight was the person I went to for advice," said Laura Dillard LaFayette, press secretary on Wilder's 1989 campaign. "He was more seasoned than the rest of us. He can envision where he needs to go and how to get there. I don't mean in terms of a career, but on a day-to-day basis."
"For somebody who is so personally disheveled, he is incredibly organized professionally," said Paul Garrahan, a friend from high school who worked with Holton in the 1992 race and in Wilder's 1989 contest.
Stories of Holton's messiness abound. During the 1988 campaign, his co-workers on the advance team for Michael Dukakis made Holton leave his shoes outside at night. Eventually someone threw them away and Holton was forced to buy another pair.
In 1989, an effort to throw away the "new" shoes failed when Holton refused to board the campaign plane in Roanoke before he found them. "They were the best cardboard money can buy," LaFayette said.
Now that he works in the White House, Holton has stopped coming to the office in T-shirt and sandals. He still brushes his teeth in the car, though, with a toothbrush he keeps in the glove compartment.
But his concentration sharpens at work. The 6-foot-5-inch Holton once physically blocked Republican candidate Marshall Coleman's entrance to a debate stage, thwarting Coleman from being photographed beside Wilder's empty chair. Wilder had canceled the debate because Coleman came prepared to videotape it.
Politics has been part of Holton's life since he was a toddler. He moved to the Virginia governor's mansion at age 4 when his father, Linwood Holton, became the first Republican elected governor since Reconstruction.
"He pretty much grew up with it all around him and it was fascinating to him," Linwood Holton said. The senior Holton looks for his son to run for office someday. "It's the logical step. He's in it for the right reasons, to do good for people."
Young Holton gives the politician's answer when questions touch on his political views or the specifics of his work for Clinton: He enjoys the public work he is doing now and hasn't thought about an elected office, he says.
He describes his political philosophy this way: "I believe strongly both in the individual's responsibility for the community and the community's responsibility for the individual."
Holton grew up in Richmond and later in Northern Virginia, where he joined the Young Republican Club in high school. He went to Brown University with the sons and daughters of a liberal intelligentsia and volunteered as a researcher for Dukakis in 1987, immediately after graduation.
Holton doesn't hesitate when asked which politician is the best he's seen. "My father. He and my mom have done the right thing over and over."
The best job he can imagine would be either Supreme Court justice or running a nonprofit agency, he says.
"I think community-based action is a lot more effective than government in helping people," Holton said. "Government does good things, but I think the future is in getting people involved in doing something themselves."
In Richmond, Holton helped to form "Act Locally," a group that fed weekly dinners at an emergency shelter and did projects for the city's impoverished families.
He's planning to leave Washington this summer to start at the University of Virginia Law School in August - a stint he had planned to begin last fall, but put off to work on the Clinton-Gore campaign.
by CNB