White House Fellows

Dr. Martin is an emergency physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and his career is defined by his work at the intersection of clinical care and public health.

As a White House fellow, Dr. Martin was a senior advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris, and as the CEO of a Healthier Democracy, he directed efforts helping patients register to vote and assisted eligible families access cash assistance benefits.

Today, Dr. Martin is back home in his native NYC.

He s living in Queens, and as a top health official in a city of about eight point five million people, he s a very busy man.

So handing it back to you.

Absolutely.

And it s, it s crazy because, uh, we were just talking about how it s been years since we saw each other, but the last time was when you were in that role as a, as a White House fellow.

So it s become full circle here.

I had a teacher in high school, so often that's true, I'm sure probably for you too, where a teacher loved her subject so much that she made me feel that this is what I wanted to be.

And then it was really the relationship with Lyndon Johnson as a White House Fellow when I was only 24 that took that love of history into presidential history.

We had a curious relationship to begin with because I'd been in the anti-war movement, written an article against him before I was selected as a White House Fellow, and it suddenly appeared in The New Republic with their title, How to Remove Lyndon Johnson, in 1968.

And I thought that would be the end of my being a, a White House Fellow.

But instead he said, "Bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can." So that's how I began to be interested in the presidency.

Before you know it, I've studied Lyndon Johnson and Lincoln and Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, and 50 years have gone by and I've been a presidential historian.

It covers...

the White House Office, which is the Chief of Staff's office, and the White House Counsel's Office that covers everyone who works on the NSC, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Domestic Policy Council, the Office of Administration, the Executive Residence, the Commission on White House Fellows, the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

The Presidential Records Act is a bit of a misnomer.

It's really the White House Records Act.