Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Globetrotter: Amy Hughes has been all over the world, but she likes Willow Glen enough to live here and to bring Bill Clinton and Al Gore for a visit. Hughes has also been able to collect art on her travels, including the painting behind her, which she bought from a lawyer in Chile.




Advance Woman

Clinton Administration official Amy Hughes mulling her options on what to do next

By Kate Carter

When Bill Clinton stopped by for a surprise visit to Lincoln Avenue in September, it wasn't the former president's idea.

Willow Glen resident and Clinton aide Amy Hughes was the one who suggested the stop, which became possible at the last minute when the president had an extra hour between fundraising stops.

Clinton likes coffee shops and bookstores, Hughes says, so she suggested the president and his entourage try Willow Glen Books and Le Boulanger. She had already brought Vice President Al Gore to the Willow Glen Coffee Roasting Company in the summer.

"I'm a big proponent of supporting Willow Glen businesses," Hughes says. "I go to only Willow Glen stores when I can."

Hughes has been planning Clinton's travel since she worked on his presidential campaign in 1992, and she has worked on Democratic presidential campaigns since the 1984 Walter Mondale/Geraldine Ferraro ticket.

But all of her work as Western regional administrator for the Department of Defense, White House liaison for Cabinet Affairs in Region 9 (Pacific Northwest Region) and member of the president's national advance staff came to an end last week, along with the rest of the Clinton administration.

"I never anticipated doing this for eight years," Hughes says. "I got into it in '92 to go work the convention and then work another general election as I had done in '84 and '88, but I didn't ever think we would win. And then we won, and the next thing it was two years later and four years later, and we have the reelection, and then it was four years after that."

Hughes has an amazing collection of memories and tokens of her work and travel that most people only dream of. And she has the energy, enthusiasm and directness to balance the many demands of her job and her volunteer work as a nurse for Mountain View-based nonprofit Interplast, and time for her husband, Howard Koch, and two grown stepdaughters, Julie and Susanne.

"I still don't get tired, and I don't know why," Hughes says.

But Hughes' background is health, not politics.

She is a trained nurse and has worked in health care for most of her life, in fields ranging from open-heart surgery at O'Connor Hospital to sales and marketing for a pacemaker manufacturer to public policy for a health-care trade association, and many others.

For the last eight years, however, she has worked for the Clinton administration. She took a job as the Department of Defense's liaison overseeing the shutdown and reuse plans of California's 29 military base closures from 1993 to 1998. Because she lives in California, she coordinated Clinton's travel here. She added the role as the White House's Cabinet Affairs liaison.

"Thursday mornings I do a Cabinet Affairs conference call at 10:30 a.m. All the regional reps from the 10 regions call in at 10:30, and the secretary of Cabinet Affairs, [Thurgood Marshall Jr.], gets on the phone and gives us the president's schedule, the vice president's schedule, Mrs. Clinton's schedule, Tipper's schedule, what our policy initiatives that we're working on for that week, any satellite conferences we have coming up. There's a big public policy side to my job."

Hughes works to solicit support for the administration's legislative initiatives from the federal, state and local governmental agencies in the Pacific Northwest region. She coordinates issue-oriented gatherings of people in her region that are linked by satellite to White House meetings and conferences, allowing students, businesspeople and health-care professionals to join the discussion on such topics as women's issues, free trade, health-care and welfare reform.

"It's a way to kind of get the word out for the people that don't read the newspaper," she says. "It's a lot of dealing with the local media and trying to get media to run stories on it."


Official White House Photo

Unexpected: Amy Hughes didn't expect to spend eight years in the Clinton Administration when she signed up to work at the 1992 Democratic Convention.




Hughes spends most of her time working on these events, giving talks when cabinet members can't make it and also serving as liaison to the president's appointees in the Pacific Northwest. But because of her experience coordinating campaign travel and events, she has also been on Clinton's advance team from his first international trip.

Hughes and her team work with members of the U.S. Embassy staffs and the State Department, as well as their foreign counterparts, to get Clinton and his retinue into and out of foreign countries. The president travels with four or five planeloads of people, including his staff, the secretary of state or defense and his or her staff, a possible congressional delegation and as many as 180 journalists.

Once the planes land, Hughes and her team have to get everyone through customs; give everyone a photo ID; arrange hotels and workspace, transportation and some meals for everyone on the trip, including press; set up podiums, telephones and power; arrange the logistics of the president's activities; secure translators for the different leaders the president speaks with; and negotiate which U.S. representatives get to be in those presidential meetings with their international counterparts.

"It can be a logistical nightmare, just trying to work with all those people," Hughes says. "It's a lot of last-minute stuff. But it's really fun, and if you've done a good job, the trip goes really smoothly. On the White House trips, the better you get at your job, the more time you have available to escape. It's fast and furious."

And it's her eight years of work on Clinton's international advance team and her 13 years with Interplast that are most evident when you walk through her house.

Her home is filled with pieces of art from almost everywhere Hughes has traveled for the White House and Interplast, from inexpensive watercolors on silk from Indonesia to a rare and valuable 300-year-old three-piece scene from Japan.

"It wasn't until I started traveling more on my own that I was trying to collect things," she says. "You can collect all sorts of what we call chachki, which sometimes turns into junk in your house. I just decided I didn't really want to clutter my house with that kind of thing. So what I decided to do in the early '90s was start collecting art."

Hughes says that she takes breaks from her duties traveling with the president by going into art galleries and wandering through art shows. She usually spends time with the artists before she chooses a piece and gets her picture taken with the artist.

"But I don't mind. I've chosen things that have meaning to me," Hughes says. "What happens is, when I walk through my house, especially when I come home from a trip, I remember every memory of where I've been and who I bought the art from and how I happened upon that gallery. It just brings a flood of memories back to me and makes me happy."

In her many trips and repeat visits, Hughes has developed professional and personal relationships with people all over the world that make her job a lot easier and her trips a lot more fun.

They can also prove beneficial when Hughes travels purely for pleasure, as she did last October on a trip to Ireland with her parents and four siblings. Hughes decided this time she was going to let her family handle the logistics and just enjoy the trip.

"I didn't do anything, which was very difficult because it's just my nature," she says. "But the very last stop we did was Dublin, and my brother lost his passport the night before we were leaving. He was not fazed at all, he was like, 'I know you'll figure it out for me.' I just called someone at the embassy: 'Can you help me out here?' and he got out of the country and into the country with no passport. So there are advantages to developing relationships on the road."

But there are some places where Hughes couldn't get the help she needed.

Hughes is a volunteer nurse for Interplast, which sends doctors and nurses into less developed areas throughout the world to provide medical care to poor families. For the past 13 years, Hughes has helped children with cleft palates and lips, severe burn injuries and scars and birth defects lead healthier and better functioning lives.

"The difference between an Interplast trip, which is very dear to me and feeds my soul, and a White House trip is sort of like no-star versus five-star," Hughes says. "The Interplast trips you have no time to do anything."

Top of the World: Amy Hughes with a girl in Lhasa, Tibet, where she was head nurse on an Interplast trip there to perform surgical procedures on children born with deformities such as a cleft palate.




Photograph courtesy of Amy Hughes







As head nurse on an Interplast trip to Tibet a year and a half ago, which she says might be "the most fascinating place I've ever been," Hughes ended up being the one who needed medical attention.

Because of Tibet's high altitude, Hughes and her team, who were from the Italian Interplast group, were instructed to move at a snail's pace and rest during their first day in order to acclimate to the air's low oxygen level.

But high-energy Hughes couldn't wait to check out the country she was so excited to visit. So she and an Italian photographer who was covering the trip set out on their own tour of the city of Lhasa, while the rest of the team spent the day in bed.

The next day, however, her blood oxygen level was 30 percent lower than normal and her brain had swollen until it was pressing against her cranium.

There is no medical cure for altitude sickness, and Hughes' only options were to be airlifted to the lower elevation in Kathmandu, Nepal, or to stay and risk pulmonary edema.

Hughes, as head nurse, didn't feel she could leave in good conscience and chose to make do with the equipment they had brought. Staying, however, brought additional complications.

"I spent 24 hours in a twin bed with the fashion photographer from Milan, sharing the one oxygen mask that I could find, passing it back and forth and going, 'I hope I'm going to learn to like you.' It was awful," she says, laughing.

Her situation had become intolerable, however, when she decided to risk taking a Chinese herbal remedy with "way too many products" in it, she says.

Hughes says she was apprehensive about taking a Chinese herbal remedy, but the medicine worked; She took it for four days, but she was better within the first 24 hours.

"You can call back to the States, but who there is going to have the advice that these people live everyday?" she says. "We had an embassy in every other country I'd ever been to. You could call up the embassy doctor and say, 'I'm an American, I'm in your country, and I'm sick. I need a referral to some health-care provider.' But we don't have an embassy in Tibet."

"A lot of the things that I have that are meaningful to me are pieces that I was given as gifts on Interplast trips," Hughes says. "The very first gift I ever got is my most prized possession. They're these Mayan Indian ladies; they're tall statues made of clay pottery. I got them on the Yucatan Peninsula in a very tiny village where we operated on kids, and a woman made them for me. Howard used to joke that if we ever had an earthquake, the only thing Amy cares about is the Mayan ladies."

Hughes recently returned from Clinton's farewell parties in Washington this month and is beginning to think about her next adventures.

"I have a lot of opportunities, and I'm just trying to decide right now, what degree do I miss health care, because health care feeds your soul," Hughes says. "And even though I've worked in all different aspects: working on [Capitol] Hill, direct patient care, trauma surgery and all sorts of things, I'm trying to decide if I want to go biotech with a company, or do I want to go back into something more personal with health care, or do I want to not do that at all and do something more related to high-tech and corporate communications."

But the world outside Willow Glen and the United States probably hasn't seen the last of Amy Hughes.

"I'm lucky enough that I had an entire career before this, so politics is not my only career," she says. "I'm not that worried depending on which avenue I decide to take and also I'm not that worried if in four years I decide to jump back in again, just 'cause it's fun."

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