Admiral Stephen Rochon is director of executive residence for the White House

A career Coast Guard officer with a deep background in logistics and technical management is bringing the nation’s First Residence into the twenty-first century.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon has a job that combines his skills and his passions: he’s director of the President’s executive residence at the White House and “chief usher,” the historic name for the post.

The Admiral, as he’s still known, is the eighth person and the first African American to serve as director of the executive residence. He was appointed in the spring of 2007 by then-President George W. Bush, and when the new administration took office in January 2009, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama asked him to stay on.

Passion for preservation
Rochon grew up in New Orleans. His passion for history and historic preservation, already shown in contributions to museums across the country, makes him ideally suited to oversee the art and historic artifacts that fill the White House.

He has produced video documentaries honoring Alex Haley, USCG (Ret) and author of Roots. He spearheaded the posthumous award of a gold lifesaving medal to the African American crew of the Pea Island lifesaving station, and has written about their daring rescue near the Outer Banks of North Carolina in 1896. And he was instrumental in preserving historic New Orleans homes after hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Rochon served in the U.S. Coast Guard for thirty-six years, retiring as commander of the maintenance and logistics command – Atlantic. He was responsible for naval and civil engineering and electronic systems support, as well as financial management, personnel, legal, civil rights and contingency planning across forty U.S. states, Puerto Rico, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

At the White House
The Admiral coordinates both official and family life at the White House. He oversees the running of the executive residence, develops and administers the budget for operation, maintenance and utilities and supervises the residence staff.

He coordinates executive residence events with the Executive Office of the President, the National Park Service, the Secret Service, the General Services Admin, the military and other government entities. And he’s taking measures to reduce carbon footprints and conserve energy, including outdoor LED lighting in many areas and solar heating for the White House swimming pool.

Interviewing an old friend
Rochon is an old friend of Diversity/Careers. While he was head of personnel for the Coast Guard, he gave us a thoughtful interview on technical jobs and his efforts to support diversity in the Coast Guard.

Publisher Roberta Renard and editor-in- chief Kate Colborn traveled to Washington, DC to hear firsthand about Rochon’s experiences in his White House job.

Kate Colborn: Please tell our readers exactly what you are responsible for, especially in the technical area.
Admiral Rochon: That’s a really tough one because there’s always so much going on. Essentially I provide for the care and comfort of the President and the First Family and all their guests. But of course that’s not the full scope of the job.
I have ninety-five fulltime and 250 part-time employees. That includes the ushers, my shift guys who run the house for me. They keep track of the President’s and the First Lady’s movements and know exactly what lunches, dinners, receptions, press conferences and bill signings are coming up, what Stevie Wonder needed for his concert in February, how many chairs and tables to set up, and the menu from A to Z.

The social secretary makes the plans but my staff has to execute them. We oversee the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, engineers, painters and operations guys as well as the executive chefs, pastry chefs, housekeepers, butlers, calligraphers, curators and lots more.

Colborn: So you have fulltime people on staff with all these skills?

Rochon: Yes. The engineers keep the White House cooled and heated. I also have twenty-two National Park Service master gardeners and horticulturalists assigned to the White House division. They keep up these eighteen acres of beautiful grounds including an organic First Garden. It’s been a major success, even the honeybee hive.

Colborn: Can you estimate how many of your staff members have IT backgrounds?

Rochon: I only have one IT person of my own, but there’s a huge IT support system from the White House administration so I do have backup, and I am looking for another IT pro for my staff.

Colborn: I’ve heard you brought executive residence communications into the twenty-first century.

Rochon: Yes! My first shock when I took this job was to learn we couldn’t access the Web from the residence. I could email my own staff, but to get in touch with the East and West Wing staffs I had to fax or have a message hand-delivered. Some of it is for good reason, of course: security and privacy. And I also felt we needed secure offsite backup just in case something in our system goes down.

When I looked at the connectivity and backup problems, I realized we needed more bandwidth. I was saved by the White House communications agency, which said, “Admiral, no sweat, we will put in fiber optic cable for you.” I watched them blow fiber optic cables through the system from the East Wing to my IT shop in less than six minutes.

I was ready to pop the champagne, but then I found I couldn’t flip the switch until we met all the requirements of the Presidential Records Act for all the archives that we have here.

I brought in a security-cleared records management specialist who collected every piece of paper for the last eight years plus 300,000 emails. We catalogued them, inventoried them and put them in the right folders by Inauguration Day, and the next day we were given the thumbs-up to flip the switch.

Colborn: You said you’re bringing in another IT pro. Have you had other occasions to hire staff?

Rochon: Yes, but not very often. People stay here forever, unlike the East and West Wings where they are political appointees. We serve “at the pleasure of the President,” but traditionally we stay even when administrations change.

I am very conscious of diversity, getting the right mix of qualified men and women. I have hired a couple of engineers and still have one position open. I have a total of eight engineers on staff, and two are minority. My overall percentage of minorities on staff is about 35.6, higher than the national average, and the overall staff is about 40 to 45 percent female.

Two of the women are in top leadership positions: an assistant usher and my executive assistant. And of course I am the first minority chief usher. It’s good!

Colborn: Can we talk a little about how you got here? I know you joined the Coast Guard in 1970. Do you come from a military family?

Rochon: Yes, I’m proud to say I have family in almost every branch of the military. My great grandfather was a Buffalo Soldier and fought with Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill in Cuba. I had uncles in the Air Force, Navy and Army and my first cousin was in the Coast Guard.

When I joined the Coast Guard in 1970 they still had the draft. I was in college, at Xavier in New Orleans, but my Coast Guard cousin advised me to talk to a recruiter because if I was drafted I could be put in any branch of the service.

I grew up in New Orleans, I like the water, and I fell in love with the Coast Guard mission of saving lives and protecting the environment. Besides, bell bottoms fit my taste, so I picked the Coast Guard.

I went in at twenty as an enlisted man. I went into the boson’s mate field: the boat drivers. When I got out of boot camp in California I was sent to a Coast Guard cutter based in Oregon.

Colborn: Were you the only minority on the cutter?

Rochon: Not only was I the only minority on the cutter, I might have been the only minority in the State of Oregon! But people seemed to embrace me. I never wanted to carry a chip or look at the past, even though growing up in New Orleans was pretty rough.

A couple of people took me under their wings and I made some great friends, but you’re never going to win everyone over. I had a rough experience with one supervisor, but when I left that ship the supervisor was still a third class boson’s mate and I was a second class boson’s mate.

Colborn: Did you have mentors as you moved up in the Coast Guard?

Rochon: I could not have made it without people to give me good counsel and lead me in the right direction. There weren’t many that looked like me or came from the same culture, but I didn’t let that stand in the way. I was willing to grab onto any coattail. Some significant people early on took an interest in me.

One mentor who did happen to be African American was my first recruiter, the nicest guy in the world. He grabbed me, took me under his wing and worked me through the process.

Colborn: Did you eventually go to Officer Candidate School (OCS)?

Rochon: After the ship in Oregon I came back home to New Orleans as a recruiter responsible for all of Louisiana. It was a fun tour.

Then I had just a year left and I was getting ready to get out. But one mentor, a lieutenant, said, “I think you have what it takes to become an officer.” So I went to OCS in 1976. My first command was in Long Beach, CA as an ensign, a young pup in the officer corps.

I did three years as an officer and then I wanted to get my degree. It was tough to go to school and be a fulltime Coast Guard officer, and also a single dad. It was a balancing act. Sometimes I had to sneak my son in on watch to sleep in the bunk with me because I couldn’t find a baby-sitter.

So I left active duty in 1978, but stayed in the reserve program. I went back to Xavier, but I loved my unit in California, so for three years, I returned to California once a month for my reserve weekend. I financed that by buying a huge quantity of Louisiana shrimp, packing them on ice, bringing them along as luggage and selling them in California. It paid for my plane ticket, my officer quarters and my rental car.

Colborn: What came after college?

Rochon: After I got my degree in business I interviewed at twenty big companies. But when I compared the pay scale in those jobs with my Coast Guard pay scale and considered that the Guard was something I loved to do, I came back on active duty full time in 1984. I was stationed in Cleveland, OH for three years as a reserve program administrator and then I went to Coast Guard HQ as a port security specialist.

Colborn: I believe you also attended National Defense University (NDU).

Rochon: I did, in 1998. I graduated in 1999 with a masters in national resource strategy.

NDU taught all five branches of the military, both the actual military folks and civilian workers, how to resource a war and manage people and materials, including strategy and the politics and economics of getting the right resources.

Colborn: Did NDU put you in a good position to rise to admiral?

Rochon: When I left NDU in 1999 I was a captain, and I didn’t think I had a prayer of making flag officer because that’s normally reserved for Coast Guard Academy grads. At that time there were maybe two people in the history of the Coast Guard that ever made admiral coming from the enlisted ranks, and no one at my level had ever successfully switched from the reserve program to an active regular commission.

But I had always wanted a major command, and I had a very great mentor, three-star Admiral Roger Rufe, who said, “You deserve a command, and I am going to give you the highest recommendation.”

Amazingly, my request was approved and I was given a command in New Orleans as captain of port and officer in charge of marine inspections. I was in charge of inspecting all merchant ships and handling all oil pollution cases, flooding and hurricanes and everything in between, from 1999 to 2002.

Colborn: Those must have been exciting times for you.

Rochon: While I was captain of port we had a major oil spill, half a million gallons of oil into the Mississippi River. My district commander, Admiral Paul Pluta, called me and said, “Steve, this is a big one!” I said, “Admiral, I have this under control, we will have it cleaned up in record time.” In less than three days we recovered 56 percent of the light crude oil, twice the industry average for recovering spilled oil.

Colborn: We know you’ve been deeply involved with engineering in your career, but how did you get from that point to admiral?

Rochon: That was a very interesting transition. I had no idea anyone had their eyes on me at that point, and after a couple of years in New Orleans I told Admiral Pluta that I was going to retire.

The Admiral came to me and said, “I have hopes for you, and if you retire you are really going to upset me. Will you stay another year?” So I said yes.

But shortly after I made that decision, they were putting out feelers for President of the Port of New Orleans. That would be a civilian position, working for the state of Louisiana and running the entire port from the civilian side.

I interviewed, and it came down to three of us. But then I received a phone call from the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Commandant Jim Loy. It was on the weekend and I thought, “I must be in trouble, no one gets a call on the weekend.” But instead he said, “I welcome you, Steve, as the newest member of the flag corps,” which meant I was now an admiral.

I was in a state of shock. Even now there have only been four or five of us that did not come from the Academy.

Colborn: Were you the first black admiral?

Rochon: No, the second. I remember the day the commandant pinned on the shoulder boards of the first black admiral, Erroll Brown. There was no way I could hold back tears.

So now I had moved up to commander of maintenance and logistics – Atlantic. I knew I was at the pinnacle of my career.

Actually, throughout my career I’ve always thought each new command was the best, but this was something else. I had 3,300 people, most of them engineers, in forty states and the Middle East, the Caribbean and Africa. My young naval and civil engineers gave me advice and helped me break into the engineering world. They were really a joy to work with, but it was baptism by fire.

Hurricane Katrina happened on my watch. I had to go down to New Orleans to oversee the rebuilding of the Coast Guard stations. I traveled to the Middle East to oversee six patrol boats that were in dry dock for repairs or on patrol in Iraqi waters. It was just a peach of a job!

Colborn: It sounds marvelous if you love work and responsibility! Now, can you tell us how you come to cap off your career with this White House position?

Rochon: Divine Providence! I was contemplating my last hundred days in uniform and getting ready to go back to New Orleans to write my book on the Pea Island rescue.

Then my phone rang, and my executive assistant said, “The White House is on the phone.” So I thought, “What did I do now?” I asked if maybe they should have called the Department of Homeland Security or the commandant first, but it was me they wanted all right.

I learned that they were looking to fill a position at the White House, and Admiral Tom Barrett had dropped my name. They wanted me to interview for the position of chief usher, which meant keeping up the most historic house in the country, managing IT staff and engineers.

Nine interviews later, including an hour with First Lady Laura Bush, I was interviewed in the Oval Office by President Bush. The next day I was told that I had the job. No one asked about my background or my politics; they were only interested in my leadership abilities.

I was also asked to change the name of the job to reflect the current responsibilities, the first change since 1866. So now the title is director of the executive residence, with “chief usher” added on for historic purposes. And here I am.

Colborn: And you are the first African American to hold the job! Now can you tell me what you think of today’s climate for diverse technical professionals in government and the military? What’s different since you set out on your career?

Rochon: Back when I was commissioned there were fifty-eight African American officers in the entire Coast Guard, maybe two dozen Hispanic officers and a dozen Asian officers and very few women officers. Now the figure is over 300 African American officers, the number of Hispanics and Asians has grown, and women number about 1,400. The first woman to command a U.S. ship was with the Coast Guard, and in fact she was in my class at OCS.

The time is ripe for minorities and women to get into IT and engineering fields. I have worked for the government for a lot of years now, and here at the White House, looking at this new staff, the diversity is so refreshing. This new administration has really opened up that whole concept.

D/C

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