The First to Speak

(Kristin Clark) Taylor, the youngest of seven children in a close-knit family of high achievers, spent her early years in a poignantly disturbing dilemma: straddling the all-white affluence of her private school by day and the cultural and racial security of her own inner-city Detroit neighborhood where she returned each evening. So it was both fitting and ironic that, at the age of twenty-eight, she would be called on to join Vice President George Bush's staff as a media spokesperson. She stayed with Bush into his presidency, becoming the first African-American woman in history to hold the post of White House director of media relations. Like many African-Americans, Taylor was often caught in an isolated middle world, pulled to one side by her emotional and cultural needs, drawn to the other by a driving desire to excel. Hers is a deeply personal story that transcends day-to-day politics, examining the "human" challenges of maintaining equilibrium in a world which itself knows no true balance, an atmosphere lacking in ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity. In candid reflections on her years with Bush, Taylor describes the joyful excitement she found in her White House job, tempered by stark reminders that racial sensitivity sometimes took a back seat in the rough-and-tumble world of White House politics - where she once had to urge a speechwriter to remove the word nigger from one of Bush's speeches. Taylor, a deeply spiritual woman, discovered that friendships suffered as a result of the divisive Willie Horton controversy and she found herself torn between the Republican ideals she embraced and the very real problems encountered as a minority.