Longtime CQ Roll Call staffers remember their decades in Washington
When you take a job, you don’t necessarily expect to stay for 20 years. But that’s the case for a handful of CQ Roll Call journalists and non-editorial staffers who’ve helped track Congress for as many as three decades, to the benefit of the company and readers.
As the CQ and Roll Call brands ring in our 75th and 65th anniversaries, respectively, our longest-tenured employees are reflecting back on their time, including their most surreal moments of working on Capitol Hill and how Washington has evolved.
Chuck Conlon and Robert Tomkin came to CQ in 1995 from the Democratic Study Group, a legislative service organization in the U.S House that progressive Democrats founded in the 1950s to be more transparent about the legislation the House was considering.
Before DSG, the legislative process was often mysterious for lawmakers and the public. “This idea of putting together summaries of legislation, objective summaries without the bias, was helpful to all,” Conlon says.
That fit well with CQ’s mission, and when House Republicans ended funding for DSG after winning the House majority in the 1994 elections, CQ turned the nonpartisan parts of the group into House Action Reports. Their detailed legislative analysis is found today on the CQ website under the CQ House tab.
“The entire DNA was infused with this type of nonpartisan, analytical ethos, which essentially is what CQ was all about,” Tomkin says. He and Conlon lead the HAR team as deputy editor and editor, respectively.
Conlon also co-founded the Budget Tracker newsletter in 2004, and he remembers the shock of walking the halls of Congress and having easy access to talk to lawmakers. “You realize what a privileged position that is to be able to do that,” he says.
That proximity also leads to literal run-ins. Principal data analyst George Codrea says years ago, while he was covering a hearing, a man knocked into him, pushing the papers out of his hands. He collided with then-Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana, who would later become vice president to George H.W. Bush.
And senior staff photographer Tom Williams, who’s been with Roll Call since an internship in 1999, accidentally spilled wine on Tennessee GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander while shooting a rehearsal dinner reception. “Luckily it was white wine and he was very cool about it and patted it down,” Williams says.
Williams traveled to Boston in 2004 for the Democratic National Convention, and was tasked one night with finding a front page photo. He headed out to the Faneuil Hall area to look for shots. “This little entourage comes down the street, and I’m looking and I’m like oh, that’s that guy who’s supposed to give a talk in a couple of days,” he says.
“That guy” was then-state Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. Williams tagged along with him to the Illinois delegation party, two days before Obama gave the keynote address that put him on the national political map. He snapped a photo of Obama and then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who would later become President Obama’s White House chief of staff.
Shifts in technology
Some of the biggest changes since the 80s and 90s at CQ and Roll Call have been rooted in technology. Codrea, who came to CQ in 1987 and helped design the company’s websites and data systems, remembers a Joint Committee on Printing hearing where a witness asked lawmakers about using the internet to share information.
“His question was met by stone silence by the members,” Codrea says. One lawmaker leaned over to a staffer to ask, “What’s this internet thing?”
When House Action Reports started, team members would make late night trips to the Hill to pick up legislative papers to analyze for their reports, which were printed and mailed to House offices the next morning. Going digital has saved a lot of time, Conlon says, but the team often works late nights and weekends to produce their detailed analysis of bills and conference reports about to hit the House floor.
Williams says when he started, he used black-and-white film. He later got a digital camera. With the switch to internet publishing, and deals to distribute photos, Williams is tuned into breaking news and shoots a wider variety of photos.
Amy Reiley, who works at Congress At Your Fingertips as manager of congressional directories, says technology has drastically sped up her work. “I literally would cut and paste (with scissors and mounting spray, not a keyboard) someone’s logo that was mailed to us onto their cover selection using a gigantic light table and t-square,” she says.
CQ Roll Call’s longest-tenured staff noted how Congress has changed, particularly the increase in partisanship and difficulty in passing legislation. “They’ve had to use all sorts of workarounds, like reconciliation, continuing resolutions, omnibuses, minibuses, and other measures that were unimaginable when I first started at Congressional Quarterly,” Codrea says.
These staff members worked during the biggest events in recent history. Health care editor Rebecca Adams joined CQ to cover social policy issues in January 1998, when a major White House scandal happened to break. “Every day that month, there was breaking news — the disclosure of the Linda Tripp tapes, the discovery of Monica’s blue dress, Clinton’s denial and so on,” she says about the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The horrifying events of Sept. 11, 2001, also still reverberate. Senior client director Stuart Leibowitz, who joined CQ at the start of that year, saw the attack on the Pentagon while driving to work.
Williams was on the Hill, and recalls watching the news in the Capitol press gallery before evacuating the building. He was “walking around all day taking pictures of people, listening to little transistor radios, senators congregating out on the streets.”
Reasons to remain
Adams met Andy Taylor, who worked for CQ’s magazine at the time, soon after she started her job. They married in 2002, and have three children.
She says the newsroom has kept the “esprit de corps” over the years. “The through line during all of our changes is that CQ and Roll Call have always attracted ambitious but friendly journalists,” she says. “Unlike some reporters in other newsrooms, our staff doesn’t have sharp elbows and we have always done a great job in backing each other up.”
Leibowitz has noted his relationships with clients as a reason he stayed at CQ. He’s worked with one of his biggest, the Government Accountability Office, nearly from the beginning. “When you have passion for a product and you truly believe in everything it does, I find it very difficult to think about going elsewhere,” he says.
Codrea says he had planned to stay for six months, but kept sticking around. “I still find it absolutely fascinating that we basically expose what Congress does to the whole world in such a fantastic way, with all the new technologies, and we’re doing a better and better job of it,” he says.
Operations assistant LaWanda Council, who joined CQ full-time in 1997, has stayed with the company because of her coworkers. But she had a scary start as a temp worker. She was staffing the front desk after lunch, talking on the phone — and inadvertently hit an emergency alert button under the table with her knee, over and over again. Suddenly emergency responders had shut down the street.
“I’m on the phone with my friend, like what is going on with this company,” Council says. “The fire truck is here, the police, they had the dogs and everything.” She hadn’t been told about the emergency button that notified first responders, so she kept her job — and the rest is history.
“It was the people,” she says of why she’s remained with the company nearly a quarter-century. “I tell everybody it was the people there.”
