Janet McConnell Philips ’77 got one of the first glimpses of the iconic White House image captured inside the Situation Room May 1: President Barack Obama, mouth tense, face full of consternation, sits amid his national security team awaiting news from Abbottabad, Pakistan. A photograph taken later that evening shows the president in the East Room. The tension is gone. He is in mid-speech. Osama bin Laden, hunted for a decade, is dead, he announces. Philips sifts through the thousands of daily photographs captured by four White House staff photographers who document a presidency. Some are mundane. Some, like this one, are monumental. Philips takes utmost care with each of them. As the White House photo archivist, she is on the front lines of the record books. She writes the captions and preserves them for the ages. Philips has held this role through five administrations, beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1988. Her road to the White House began at Mary … [Read more...]
Pursuit of Justice
Childhood Tales of the Killing Fields Cultivate Passion for Human Rights
Sophi Monh spent four years of her youth in a child labor camp hundreds of miles from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Monh was just 8 years old in 1975 when the infamous Khmer Rouge regime began its campaign that left a quarter of the country’s population dead. She worked from dawn to dusk, subsisting on one meal a day. These are the stories Monh told her American-born daughter, Farrah Tek ’10, when she insisted her daughter take nothing for granted, that she seize each opportunity and work hard in school. Monh spoke no English when she immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1981. She did not finish high school. Tek, deeply affected by her mother’s stories, set her sights on college and beyond. She majored in English and human rights at the University of Mary Washington and went on to earn a 2010 Fulbright Scholarship to return to her family’s native country. She took her Cambodian grandmother – Monh’s mother – with her. Thirty years had passed since the … [Read more...]