You Can’t Be Serious(82)
The letter urged that I raise this issue with President Obama, who should act swiftly to grant exemptions to these two men so they could proudly serve with their articles of faith intact. It seemed like a no-brainer. I took the letter next door to VJ’s deputy, Michael Strautmanis. I stood across from Straut in his ornate EEOB corner office (decked out with Chicago sports memorabilia and a portable mini-golf setup) trying to read his face as he read.
“You mean to tell me,” he said calmly as he closed his thick oak office door, “that these brothers are trying to serve our country and we’re preventing them from doing that? That’s some fucking bullshit.”
Strautmanis quickly looped in our coworker Matt Flavin, the president’s director of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy. Flavin agreed, it was totally un-American to be denying these men the right to serve. The problem was that on matters like this, the army was considered an independent agency. As commander in chief, Obama did not have the authority to unilaterally grant individual exemptions to this rule. Flavin would have to raise the issue with the army in a way that made it clear the president would strongly urge them to grant the exemption, but we had to take care to avoid saying that we somehow mandated it. I was hopeful that this would just be a formality—was the US Army actually going to say no to a request from the president?
Perhaps the bigger complicating factor was the issue of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), the policy that prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.
More than thirty-two thousand servicemembers were discharged under DADT and its predecessor policies. In the midst of our protracted battle to repeal it through legislative action, if word got out that we were pressuring the army into granting exemptions for two Sikh captains who couldn’t serve because of their turbans (but not the tens of thousands of LGBT service members who couldn’t serve because of their orientation), it could turn into a real problem.
The fundamental differences between the two policies were pretty clear: Sikhs were prohibited from serving because of a 1984 rule-change made by then army chief of staff John A. Wickham Jr. (not a law passed by Congress), whereas Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a law passed by Congress (not a rule made by the army chief of staff). The mechanism to repeal each terrible policy was therefore fundamentally different. LGBT advocates had nevertheless already railed against Obama for refusing to pause DADT by executive order, and we knew we had to tread lightly or risk losing both gays and Sikhs in the military.
As Flavin worked the ins and outs of lobbying the army, I could offer only broad pledges of support to advocates of the Sikh community that we were “doing everything we can” to help (and we were). Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was ultimately repealed by Congress. The army eventually granted Captains Rattan and Kalsi their exemptions, and I had the privilege of meeting them at a reception in celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month that year.
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Ninety-nine percent of my White House job had nothing to do with Hollywood. In fact, I went out of my way to avoid the mere perception that I was in any way different from other staffers. One afternoon, a coworker named Ken Williams-Bennett brought his excited kids into the complex. His son told me he was a big fan and asked for a photo. I was usually polite in declining these types of requests, but I must have been having an especially hectic day. “I’m not really here for that,” I told him curtly as I walked away. A few years ago, I was at the MTV Video Music Awards and ran into Chance the Rapper. I told him I was a massive fan, and he quickly let me know that he was the kid who I iced out of a photo at the White House. I still feel bad about that one.
Besides the Chance fiasco, there were only a small handful of times when there was any overlap between my White House job and my old life as an actor. Sometimes OPE would support the Social Secretary (Social) and Secret Service (USSS) for what was known as “gate duty.” It’s exactly what it sounds like. When we had gate duty, we’d stand with Social and USSS at the White House gates and help check names off of guest lists for various signing ceremonies and events that were being held in the complex. The Obama Administration was notoriously short-staffed given the scope of things we were trying to get done—and while OPE was focused on outreach (not event planning), since we did help put together the lists of attendees for official meetings and events, it stood to reason that we would also pitch in from start to finish to make sure everything went smoothly. One time, Chris Rock saw me staffing the northwest gate of the White House when he was coming in for the National Medals of Arts and Humanities ceremony. I could tell by his shocked look that he thought I left the television show House to literally work the front gate of the White House checking names off a list. Even if that had been my whole job, working the gate is an honorable gig, Chris Rock!
A more substantive intersection of my life in Hollywood and my years at the White House came at a darker time, immediately following the earthquake that decimated Haiti on Tuesday, January 12, 2010. More than three hundred thousand people had died. Another three hundred thousand were injured. Countless more had lost their homes, their livelihoods, everything. With few close nearby allies, America had to help Haiti, and the Obama Administration led the international response.
Within hours of the disaster, the president directed the entire staff to do everything we could to assist. Valerie Jarrett and Tina Tchen called several emergency staff meetings to offer regular updates from the National Security Council. The Situation Room began to email hourly reports similar to those we received after the BP oil spill. Given Haiti’s limited capacity and infrastructure, it would be critical for Americans to contribute money to the recovery effort rather than donating supplies that couldn’t physically be sent to the island.