Margaret Williams.

• Author: MCCARTHY, KELLY
• Position: Appointment

Hillary Clinton's former chief of staff finds a new opportunity for action and advocacy on the board of Delta Financial Corp.

BACK IN 1992, Margaret Williams was up to her neck in books, living in an apartment in Philadelphia and finishing up her masters degree at the University of Pennsylvania. Once completed, the plan was to submerge herself in studies, once again, by continuing in that institution's prestigious Ph.D. program at its Annenberg School for Communication. That was the plan, anyway.

Then, a good friend and former colleague called to elicit her help. It seemed that the friend's husband was running for office -- and would "Maggie" be available to help run his campaign in Arkansas? That friend was Hillary Clinton, and her husband was none other than William Jefferson Clinton, the man who would soon become the 42nd President of the United States. Says Williams, "We talked, and I agreed that I would take off the first semester of my program at Annenberg and move to Arkansas to work on the campaign. I saw it as short term. Then, they won in November."

What happened next? As Williams tells DIRECTORS & BOARDS: "Hillary asked me to head her transition team into the White House. It is a fairly big job. It's overwhelming, actually. And then we got to almost the end of the transition and she asked if I would consider being her chief of staff, and to serve as an assistant to the President -- the first time that anyone had ever served in that dual role." The doctorate degree was put on hold. Williams accepted the offer, becoming a member of the Clinton administration from 1993-1997.

While at the University of Penn, Williams was not the typical student. Unlike the majority of twenty-something graduate students studying there, Williams had returned to school while in her thirties, having already acquired a rich background of experience that included working on Capitol Hill with Arizona Congressman Morris K. Udall, serving as press secretary for Robert G. Torricelli's successful bid for U.S. Senator from New Jersey, and acting as associate media director for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In addition, she'd headed up an advertising campaign on teen pregnancy prevention for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., where she ultimately served as that organization's director of communications from 1985-1990. It was there that she first met Hillary Clinton, who was a director of the Children's Defense Fund.

For Williams, going...