Ask a typical 17-year-old what he or she wants to be, and the answer is usually vague and not very well thought out, if at all. Ask Carolyn Lipka, and you get an answer so convincing and passionate, she makes you believe it will happen: “I want to be Chief of Staff for the President of the United States,” she declares. “It’s important that before you look forward you have to look back, which is why I love history so much. I can take all these lessons from the past and apply them to today. I want to do something that makes the world better with this knowledge, which is why I want to help make policy.”
Carolyn’s vision for the future is driven by her passion for the past. She is a senior at West Windsor Plainsboro High School North, founder and president of the National History Day Club, and an accomplished documentary producer. She is the current National Champion of the National History Day competition, awarded a gold medal and $5,000 by the History Channel for her documentary on Lyndon Baines Johnson. The 10-minute documentary, titled “Legislation by Johnson: Man and Moment,” takes a critical look at the policies and legacy of the 36th president of the United States. It took first place out of more than 500,000 students nationwide and for Carolyn, came on the heels of a second-place finish in the 2008 national competition. She also took the top prize as New Jersey state champion four out of the last five years.
The documentary is riveting, but what makes it especially noteworthy are two key figures who are included: Helen Thomas, a living legend and longtime dean of the White House press corps who has covered every U.S. president since President Dwight David Eisenhower; and Luci Baines Johnson, the president’s younger daughter.
The Johnson interview happened by a stroke of luck and a little bit of chutzpah. Carolyn’s dad had taken her to the LBJ library in Austin, Texas, last January, to do some research in the presidential archives. “Luci Baines Johnson was there giving a press conference on the upcoming Obama inauguration, and I kind of crashed the press conference,” recalls Carolyn. “I asked one of the librarians if I could stay, and she said just sit in the back and be very quiet. At the end I went up to Ms. Johnson and asked if I could come back and interview her the next day since I didn’t have my camera with me. She left, came back, and told me the LBJ library had a studio and we could use it. So I only had a few minutes to get ready and I was madly scribbling down some questions.”
It was exciting to interview the president’s daughter, says Carolyn, but she loves the feeling she gets whenever she does original research, literally holding history in her very own hands. “I felt shivers when I was holding the actual index cards that President Johnson used when he delivered the Great Society Speech in Ann Arbor in 1964. I also held his daily diary which had his schedule with his handwriting from the day the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was passed.”
Her interview with Helen Thomas took no less chutzpah and a high degree of creativity. “I found out she eats every Monday at this restaurant in Washington, D.C., so I called the restaurant four Mondays in a row and asked if I might speak with her there. That didn’t work, so I looked up her E-mail address online at the Hearst newspapers where she works. I E-mailed her and also mentioned that I had called her four times. She said I admire your journalistic persistence and told me to call the next time I was down in D.C. I went to Washington, called and told her I was in town. She gave me her address and said be here at five o’clock.”
What was it like asking hard questions of the woman who’s made a lifetime out of asking hard questions? “It was fascinating,” says Carolyn, “especially since she was a noted critic of LBJ. She had smashed him on deficit spending and his policy on Vietnam. And yet, when I asked my first question about him, she said he was perhaps the greatest president of the latter half of the 20th century and next to FDR, one of the greatest ever, and it was amazing for me to hear her say that.”
Is it at all intimidating approaching people like these for interviews? Carolyn says it’s easier than it used to be because she’s discovered people are so willing to share their stories. “My parents drove me to Washington in middle school to do interviews at the Smithsonian Institution. The theme for National History Day that year was communications. I E-mailed the assistant curator and asked if I could look through the archives. And he said, ‘why not, you’re a seventh grader, what damage can you do?’ I ended up interviewing both the assistant curator and the curator right in the national archives. That’s when I became hooked on doing interviews because I realized the thrill of talking to amazing people.”
Carolyn says she’s very lucky to have parents who have nurtured her passion for history and have given her the support to follow her dreams. Her father, Andrew, is an eye surgeon in private practice in Princeton and also chief of ophthalmology at the University Medical Center at Princeton. Her mother, Wendy, is an executive with David Yurman Inc., the designer jewelry company in Manhattan. Older brother Matthew, 23 and a graduate of Yale, works for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in Washington, D.C. Younger sister Rachel, 15, is a freshman at High School North. The family lives in the Windsor Ridge neighborhood of West Windsor.
Right now Carolyn is hard at work gearing up for this year’s National History Day competition, with regionals next month, followed by the state competition, then nationals in June. Her project this year is the neutron bomb and the nature of innovation. “It’s like a senior thesis every year,” she says. “Typically, I start background research from July to December, reading, looking in the archives. Then over the winter I’m doing interviews, writing, putting it all together. It’s hard work, but I love knowing all this information and I want to share it with everybody.”
In addition to her own documentary projects, Carolyn worked for noted documentarian David Grubin as an intern on “The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” a documentary which aired on PBS last January, and was nominated for two Emmy awards. She also served as head research and set intern for the forthcoming PBS documentary titled “The Buddha.”
Like most seniors, Carolyn carries a full load of classes and activities, including Model U.N., Model Congress, and Debate Club. But her first love is history because she sees it as giving her a path toward making a difference. “What I really want to do is have an impact, come up with an insight or a truth that can actually add to the world’s knowledge. When I studied the Cuban Missile Crisis, I found that the Bush Administration used an interpretation of it to justify its pre-emptive war policy that I discredited in my documentary.” Carolyn brought this discovery to the attention of one of her interview subjects, Pulitzer Prize winning American historian Martin Sherwin. As a result, he has extended the focus of his forthcoming book on the Cuban Missile Crisis and has retained her as his research assistant for the last two years.
“Even more than a sexy interview or the cool feeling I get from an archival document, to me, this is the thrill of studying history,” says Carolyn. “The endless hours that go into my projects, the hard work and insightful thinking that they require can result in a clarity, a new truth or a fresh interpretation that can help make good policy. This is why I study history, and this is the path to the White House I seek.”
