From Wellesley to organizer in chief

Wellesley grad Katie Johnson, 27, will be Barack Obama's personal secretary. (Office of the President-elect)

When Katie Johnson visits the West Wing on Friday, she won't be a tourist. Outside the Oval Office, the 27-year-old daughter of a Brookline couple will stop to check out the desk she will take Tuesday when she becomes the personal secretary to the 44th president of the United States.

Since graduating from Wellesley College less than six years ago, Johnson - KJ to some - has been on a rocket ride to the pinnacle of American politics, most recently as a key aide to the manager of Barack Obama's campaign.

Johnson will be in charge of running the new president's daily schedule. It will be a heady, all-consuming job, for which her biggest boosters, past bosses David Plouffe, the campaign manager, and Rahm Emanuel, Obama's incoming chief of staff, say she is highly qualified.

Personal secretaries are vital cogs in the White House machinery but generally maintain low profiles, except for those who become witnesses in scandals, such as Betty Currie, who retrieved gifts Bill Clinton had given to intern Monica Lewinsky, and Rose Mary Woods who tried to explain the 18 1/2-minute gap in a Richard Nixon tape of conversations in the Oval Office.

The secretaries have been typically much older than Johnson, who is among a sizable crew of 20-somethings moving from jobs at Obama headquarters in Chicago to positions in the new administration.

In her post, Johnson will meet visiting heads of state, celebrities, and top officials of the administration. "I can't wait," she said in a telephone interview yesterday. "It's such an honor and such an unbelievable opportunity. This is unlike any other job you could have or any job that exists anywhere else in the world."

She is also prepared for the self-sacrifice. "I've never had a job that didn't consume my life," she said. "Working for the campaign, or working for Rahm was a 24/7 experience."

Before joining Obama, Johnson was Emanuel's special assistant for two years when he led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "She's amazingly organized and is capable of seeing around the corner," said Emanuel, a former congressman from Chicago and veteran of the Clinton White House. He gives her much of the credit for the committee's success, saying, "She basically ran the place."

Johnson's responsibilities in the campaign were wide-ranging, Plouffe said. "She was much more than my assistant; she was part of the glue of the campaign and she kept a lot of us organized," he said. "She could handle five things at once and figure out what was a priority for the campaign and what wasn't."

Johnson grew up in Bethesda, Md., and moved with her parents to Brookline in 1999 before entering Wellesley College. Her father, Bruce E. Johnson, had left the National Cancer Institute for Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he is head of thoracic oncology. Her mother, Georgia M. Johnson, is a management consultant and an elected Town Meeting member in Brookline.

Both parents have been active in Democratic politics, Johnson said, and passed along that interest to the oldest of their three children. In high school, she had an internship in the office of Maryland's then-governor Parris Glendening, and in college was an intern for Hillary Clinton's victorious Senate campaign in New York in 2000. A year later, Johnson was an intern for the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

After graduating from Wellesley with a bachelor's degree in political science, Johnson spent about six months as a paralegal at a prestigious law firm in New York City. But politics beckoned, and she quit her job to be a field organizer for Stephanie Herseth's campaign for an at-large congressional seat in a South Dakota special election in 2004. "I gave up New York for Sioux Falls," Johnson said with a laugh. She also worked on a campaign in Kentucky before becoming Emanuel's all-purpose aide at the congressional campaign committee.

In January 2007, she gave up Washington for Chicago. One of the earliest hires of the new Obama presidential campaign, Johnson, like many of her generation, was inspired by Obama's oratory and call for change.

During the campaign, she and six other young staffers rented a house in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood and each has a memento - a T-shirt that says "The Pad" on the front and the names of all seven on the back. The group includes Jon Favreau, a North Reading native and Holy Cross graduate who is Obama's chief speechwriter, and campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor of Dedham.

Johnson's contact with Obama during the campaign was mostly via telephone, and their working relationship is still developing. "He's very calm, but he's obviously demanding," she said. "He's always the smartest person in the room, so you have to be on your toes."