Taking Flight
Marion Blakey in Control of Nation’s Airways and her Career
By Neva S. Trenis
Security is tight at the entrance to the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters just off the Mall in Washington, D.C. In the center of the towering lobby, under the yellow Piper Cub that hovers over a bevy of guards, there are three official portraits – of President George W. Bush, of Vice President Dick Cheney, and of a Mary Washington graduate.
Marion Blakey ’70 is FAA Administrator. And as the juxtaposition of photographs indicates, she has carved out a spot within the upper echelons of the federal government. More than 35 years ago, Blakey sat for another portrait – this one for Mary Washington’s Battlefield yearbook. The black and white photo shows the same engaging eyes and smile. In the 1970 Battlefield, though, she is surrounded not by world leaders but by other bright young women who had newly availed themselves of liberal arts educations and sported shifts, plaid skirts, and Dippity-do hair.
This is the story of Blakey’s journey from a place where ideas were valued and traded among keen students and forward-thinking professors – a place that inspired her to soar.
This is the story of how high a young person can climb when she starts with faith that the sky is the limit.
Marion Blakey’s office, just a mile from the White House, overlooks some of the most secure airspace in the nation. It also provides a panorama of the Washington Monument and the buildings of the Smithsonian.
But as FAA Administrator, Blakey rarely gets to take advantage of the nearby national treasures. Since accepting the presidential appointment in September 2002, she has ventured across the street to the Hirshhorn Museum of art only once, and that was for an official function.
Blakey, 58, is in charge of keeping the nation’s airways safe and making them safer. She heads the world’s largest air traffic control system, and she oversees teams of inspectors who make sure pilots and manufacturers follow the law.
“It is very rewarding – and challenging – to come in here every day and step up the safety level of the nation’s airways,” Blakey said.
One of Blakey’s first duties at the FAA was to manage the agency’s participation in the federal investigation of the November 2001 crash of American Airlines flight 587 over a Queens, N.Y., neighborhood. Blakey already was familiar with the accident, which occurred shortly after 9/11, when she was chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, another of her six presidential appointments.
Still, Bush surprised her when he tapped her for the FAA post – it historically has gone to pilots and aviation powerhouses. At first she turned down the job because she was concerned she didn’t have the right set of skills.
“Someone with a liberal arts background was not who I thought would be the most likely choice,” she said.
Besides, she didn’t expect to continue in government when she came to the end of her two-year term at the NTSB, much less assume a five-year tenure administering an agency that deals with airplane manufacturers, pilots, and air traffic controllers – an industry with a language, culture, and technical canon all its own.
“To get up on that horse and ride, I was going to have to devote a lot of time,” she said. “I was going to have to work very hard.”
If she accepted the post of administrator, she knew it would be more than a job – it would be a way of life that would affect her family. That’s why she consulted her husband, Bill Dooley, an emergency room physician who works near their home in Chevy Chase, Md., and her daughter, Mona, then 14.
“Mommy, that is going to be a very cool job,” Blakey remembers her daughter saying. “You can’t not take it.”
“And she was right,” Blakey said. In August of this year, she took Mona to Madison, Wis., to begin her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin.
The White House knew Blakey was up to the task, too. While not a pilot, this polished government administrator had exactly what the FAA needed at a time when the airlines were in financial crisis and the public was clamoring for safer flights: she was a leader. She knew how to keep a strict budget. And she had a long history as a safety advocate with the political savvy to get things done in Washington.
In the late 1980s, after working in public affairs at the direct request of Secretary of Education William Bennett, Blakey got a call from the White House. Howard Baker, Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, asked her to join the Reagan communications team. Besides writing memos and press releases, Blakey studied the president’s speeches, learning by diagramming his discarded cue cards.
“My time in the Reagan White House taught me a lot about how you deliver a message. It taught me effective public advocacy, and how you position an issue to succeed,” Blakey said. “Where better to learn than from the Great Communicator himself?”
Her success in the Reagan White House garnered the attention of the subsequent administration. Secretary of Transportation Sam Skinner, under George H. W. Bush, brought her on as assistant secretary of public affairs, and into the world of transportation. From there, Blakey rose to become the nation’s leading highway safety official: administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It was her job to reduce death and injury in automobiles; she dealt with such issues as seat belt safety, drunken drivers, and SUV rollovers.
After years in public service, Blakey in 1993 combined her skills in communication and transportation safety to build a private communications firm, Blakey and Associates, now Blakey and Agnew.
“I wanted to try my hand at creating something,” she said.
She wasn’t a lobbyist, and neither was her group. Blakey and Associates helped such industry players as Daimler Chrysler and Lockheed Martin craft and deliver persuasive ideas for public transportation policy.
Pulling her away from this venture took another call from the White House. In 2001, at the behest of George W. Bush, Blakey took over as head of the NTSB. There, she improved the board’s accident reporting process and increased the application of safety regulations. She strengthened advocacy and outreach to make travel safer on all modes of transportation. And she furthered the NTSB Academy, in Ashburn, Va., to help train experts in aviation safety and accident investigation.
This summer, Blakey was on President Bush’s short list of choices for secretary of transportation after Norman Mineta resigned in July. At that time, Fox News and MSNBC both cited Blakey’s management skills as what attracted the president’s attention. In the end, former highway administrator Mary Peters was tapped for the Cabinet job, leaving Blakey free to fulfill the last year of her term at the FAA.
Blakey had firsthand experience with transportation even before she came into the industry. After serving under Bill Bennett in the Department of Education’s Office of Public Affairs in the early ’80s, Blakey and her husband took a sabbatical to see the world. They spent more than a year in Asia, trekking through Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India, and China. They traced the perimeter of Australia by motorcycle.
Blakey’s position today allows her to indulge another of her passions, flight. She watched from the Mojave Desert in June 2004 as Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the first civilian spaceflight, soared into the atmosphere. The launch was a preliminary step in commercial space flight. Blakey often travels by plane as part of her job. Recently, she went up in an antique bi-wing that once delivered mail, and she soared over the Chesapeake Bay in an F-16 fighter. The pilot of the jet let her take the controls.
Blakey is fearless. “I will go up in anything,” she said. “I would go up on an eggbeater strung together with a couple of coat hangers.”
Even at 18, Blakey had a sense of adventure. At high school in Montgomery, Ala., she looked far beyond her mother’s alma mater, Mississippi State College for Women. “The ‘W’ as it is called,” Blakey said in a voice as deep and sultry as her birthplace, Gadsden, Ala. “That was a little too close to home.”
Like her grandmother, who graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Va., Blakey wanted a liberal arts education. She also wanted a small school where she could get to know not only students, but professors.
So she pored over brochures from colleges like Mary Baldwin and Vassar (“too far north,” her mother declared). Mary Washington was clearly the best value.
“I had to get my money’s worth, because money was tight,” Blakey said. “The academics were – and are – top notch.”
In August of 1966, Blakey’s parents put her on the train in Montgomery bound for a town and a college she had only read about. More than 24 hours later, as the train departed toward Washington, Blakey found herself alone on the platform in Fredericksburg with only her overpacked steamer trunk.
“There was not a soul in sight,” Blakey recalled. “So I waited for the town to wake up, and for someone to tell me how I could find a taxi.
“I got to campus and I thought, ‘This is beautiful,’ and it turned out just fine.”
With two working parents, Blakey learned independence at an early age, and that first trip to Mary Washington, she said, was one of many events that taught her how to handle challenges. Before marriage, her mother had traveled to Washington to work at the War Department, and Blakey was raised on her mother’s captivating tales of the city and her career. The youngster set her sights on the same.
At Mary Washington, Blakey found the liberal arts curriculum to support her goals in a major that was then called “pre-foreign service,” now “international affairs.” She remembers the influence of her adviser, the late Professor of Philosophy Kurt F. Leidecker, a proponent of tolerance and cross-cultural understanding with a deep love and knowledge of Asia. She also remembers Lewis P. Fickett, Jr., now distinguished professor emeritus of political science, who made an indelible impression on Blakey with his seminar on great works of literature. Forty years later, she still has the reading list.
Blakey spoke at UMW’s 2006 Commencement and was given an honorary doctorate. That day, she told students how fortunate they were to have faculty like Fickett, who now teaches part time at the school.
Fickett, who served in the Virginia House of Delegates for four terms and was a candidate for Congress in 1978, was interested and active not only in teaching, but in the “real world of government and how it worked,” Blakey said. “I am not sure I would have looked on political life as favorably as I have without some of that early influence from him.”
Though Blakey was one of hundreds of students who passed through Fickett’s classrooms, he still recalls the insightful papers she wrote, the lilting southern cadence of her speech, and her precision of thought and word.
“She had the facility, which I, as a lawyer, treasured, of being able to express herself beautifully in brief terms,” Fickett said. “There is a tendency for many bright people with a broad vocabulary to babble – to speak and to write very broadly.”
Blakey remembers Mary Washington in the late ’60s as a stimulating place. Doors were open, she said, both in the physical world of dorms and professors’ offices and in the figurative world of conversation and ideas. The result was a safe place where students could explore and take risks.
“There was that sort of expectation,” she said.
Just 50 miles to the north in D.C., Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon were orchestrating the Vietnam War. It was the time of the Tet offensive and the massacre at My Lai; college students from across the nation amassed on the Mall in protest. In the aftermath of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington went up in flames as people rioted in the streets. Women and blacks across the nation demanded equal treatment and equal rights.
The social climate outside the school and the free exchange of ideas within were a potent mix for Blakey and her classmates, making it, she remembers, almost impossible not to be affected.
“We considered our places in society and what we might want to contribute. We could see we had new roles to play,” Blakey said. “We felt that nothing was off limits to us.”
Susan Wagner Lacy ’70, creator and producer of the award winning American Masters series on PBS, was the editor of the Bullet newspaper when she and Blakey were classmates at Mary Washington. Just after graduating, the two worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Together, the friends bought and renovated a run-down house in an “ungentrified” area of Capitol Hill, she said, and were among the first two single women in Washington, D.C., to get a mortgage together. Later, they were godmothers to each other’s children, and have remained close ever since.
Lacy, too, remembers the pre-coed Mary Washington as a place where academics and ideas ruled the day, where students were not afraid to make waves. At the same time, though, she said, women still had to wear skirts to class, and black students were housed together in the same dorm rooms.
“The best part of it for me, which I always will remember, is the deep bond that grew among many of us because it was a women’s college,” Lacy said. “There is something about the strength of watching your friends be the head of the honor council, the head of the paper. There was something that gave us the sense there was nothing we couldn’t do.”
Lacy and Blakey took that deep bond and Mary Washington’s “no boundaries” attitude with them to the National Endowment for the Humanities, from which Lacy moved to the National Endowment for the Arts and then to PBS. She was senior program executive for the Great Performances series and director of program development for the American Playhouse series before starting American Masters.
While at the NEH, Blakey was also in graduate school at Johns Hopkins with an eye toward foreign service, but that didn’t stop her from rising quickly through the ranks at the Endowment. “She started as the queen of the Xerox machine and ended up being director of communications,” Lacy said. “Marion is my best friend, and I am also Paul Schuster wildly impressed with her. She is one of the smartest people I know, and one of the most loyal.”
But when it comes to commercial flight, Blakey doesn’t throw her weight around, Lacy said of her frequent travel companion. The head of the FAA goes through security – and takes her shoes off – just like the rest of us.
Once, while waiting for a plane to meet Blakey at the Sundance Institute in Utah, Lacy spent half a day on hold in the airport. Cell phone in hand, she called the FAA administrator looking for help, but Blakey was stuck in another airport, and her husband – in still another airport – was suffering a similar fate.
“Marion get special treatment when she flies? No way!” Lacy said. “She gets bumped just like everybody else.”
Lacy describes Blakey as not only a good friend, but also a wonderful mother and a person who lives by a moral code – one that includes civic responsibility, something on which Blakey has based her career.
That commitment to service and a lifelong faith in God were inspired in part by Blakey’s mother and other family members. It came, too, from Mary Washington’s passionate students and professors.
Back in Blakey’s office high in the FAA building, she looks over memorabilia from her years in transportation. There are photos of industry leaders, a model of a Boeing 787 passenger jet, and an elegant origami airplane, a gift from Blakey’s counterpart in China.
She stops at a small painting on the wall closest to her desk, a watercolor of Trinkle Library. “That is the first place I had a real job,” she said.
The memory steers Blakey’s thoughts to her years with the Class of 1970 and Mary Washington’s “forward-leaning and forward-looking professors,” who instilled in students the idea that they could do anything.
“We were very lucky,” Blakey said. “I never felt any limits there, and wherever you go in the world, you take that with you.”