naelyn / anecdotes #
News commentator Paul Harvey related a story that took place during the Carter administration. Evidently, Amy Carter needed help with some homework. It was Friday and the assignment, a question about the Industrial Revolution, was due on Monday. Neither Amy nor her mother quite understood the question, so mother Rosalyn asked a White House aide to run the question by the Labor Department. Sunday afternoon a truck pulled up at the White House loaded with a computer printout. Someone had assumed that the president needed the information urgently and so the Labor Department had assigned a team to work all weekend to prepare the documents. When Rosalyn learned that the research had cost hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars she was horrified but Amy went ahead and used the information to complete her homework. She got a “C”.