From a brief talk at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Claremont McKenna College Washington Semester Program:
The Washington Program, as we know it, began in the 1970s when Professors Fred Balitzer and Alan Heslop noticed that some programs in Washington would accept Claremont students – but these programs were not up to Claremont standards. The internships were part-time and pretty menial.
So they came up with the idea of a CMC program. Along with Sumner Benson, they had contacts in Washington that could provide excellent full-time placements. Fred would undertake the grueling task of commuting to DC for weekend seminars.
Alan and Fred had the strong support of President Jack Stark, who was committed to the CMC ethos of combining rigorous academic study and practical engagement with the world. (If you look at the CMC icon of the book and globe, that’s the whole point!).
The first class was a very small group: Len Apcar, Cary Davidson, Jay Feagles, Ken Greenberg, and Jeff Klein. I will use their own words. Len Apcar, who interned for Senator Sam Ervin, recalled that their luggage got stolen on their first day: “Not only did some of us lose an unpacked suitcase or two, we lost the work clothes in them. No ties, no suits, no shirts. We called CMC, not knowing what the college could actually do for us, and Alan Heslop dispatched Fred Balitzer to help us get sorted. He even took us shopping for something to wear to work which in those days required traditional business attire. … We all surely wondered what we were getting into. It was a scary start to an otherwise unparalleled experience for a bunch of 19-year-olds. I have never forgotten it and what Heslop and Balitzer did to make it happen.”
Jeff Klein picks up the story:”I caught mono and had to go home for a few weeks to recuperate, so I extended my internship into the summer. The lease was up so I had to move into an apartment in Georgetown on a busy thoroughfare. One day I got locked out of the apartment and had to get a ladder and climb in through a second-floor window. I was sure I was going to be arrested for breaking and entering … We had to learn how to shop for groceries for ourselves and cook meals. I remember we had a shopping cart in the living room where we used to dump all the newspapers. Our neighborhood was pretty run down and never felt that safe, but we loved it.”
Cary Davidson, now one of the top election lawyers in California, interned for Congressman Alphonzo Bell, a liberal Republican from California, when there was such a thing. It was 1973, and he recalls: “All of us read the Washington Post every day to see what Woodward and Bernstein had to say. That could explain why Len [Apcar], Jeff, and Ken ventured into journalism.” Cary goes on:”We did get class credit for our stint in DC. I recall that one class was graded by Balitzer, another by Dr. Benson, and one by Dr. Heslop. I remember writing a paper on continuing resolutions. I think I wrongly predicted that they would disappear if the fiscal year changed. The fiscal year changed, and the continuing resolutions remain. I also worked on legislation to eliminate the SAT. It went nowhere.”
Over time, the program gained a resident director in Michael Goldstein, who had taught at Pitzer College. The program grew and attracted participants from the other Claremont Colleges, including a Pomona student named Ken Miller. Ken interned with a young second-term House member – a CMC alum named David Dreier.
Ken remembers that he answered phones and handled constituent casework, but also took on more substantive tasks, such as rounding up Republican cosponsors for a bill to establish a permanent joint United States-Soviet Communications Center to reduce the threat of an accidental nuclear war.
And over the years, many other program participants would intern in the Dreier office until his retirement in 2012. To this day, Mr. Dreier remains a CMC presence on campus through the Dreier Roundtable.