It’s been attacked by aliens in The War of the Worlds. Clark Kent had an office there when he filed stories for the Daily Planet. Joe Friday walked its ornately decorated, high-ceilinged halls. It’s Los Angeles City Hall—a building, thanks to Hollywood, whose facade is synonymous with justice and service, and a downtown monument that is arguably the most famous local government building in the nation.

It’s also where Julie Wong ’94 heads to work each morning. On the third floor of the 64-year-old, 500-foot-tall structure sits the office of the mayor of Los Angeles. As communications director for Mayor Jim Hahn, Wong handles the day-to-day activities of running the mayor’s communication with the press and the public—everything from interacting with City Hall reporters, to throwing events for Los Angeles citizens, to responding to public crises. This is no small feat in the nation’s second largest city, sprawling over 465 square miles, with 3.5 million residents speaking dozens of languages.

The West Wing fans will recognize Wong’s position: “I do the same job as C.J. Cregg, Allison Janney’s character,” says Wong. “People tell me that all the time when I explain my job to them. Besides working with reporters and handling events, I have to do a lot of the weird things like C.J. does on the show. I’ve been on my hands and knees crawling under tables at a campaign rally, because it was the quickest way to a candidate through a huge crowd.”

Wong is a California native—she grew up in the Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek—and first developed an interest in political campaigns while at CMC. A government major, she spent a semester in CMC’s Washington Program during the fall of her junior year, landing in D.C. in the heat of the 1992 presidential election. “The political consultants that year—George Stephanopoulos, Mary Matalin, Dee Dee Myers, James Carville—took a very high profile,” she recalls. “While I knew I didn’t want to run for office, the idea that there were these people that help people run for office wasn’t something that I really had thought of as a profession until that year.”

As a senior she interned for Kathleen Brown, the democratic candidate in the 1994 California gubernatorial race, and worked on her thesis, which analyzed the roles of female staffers in presidential campaigns. Her faculty adviser, government professor John J. Pitney Jr., still remembers her work. “It made a genuine contribution to political science by analyzing an important but neglected topic,” he says. “There is surprisingly little scholarly study of campaign staffs, and most of it focuses on men. Julie explained why women play different roles and face different problems. Her work shrewdly drew on an eclectic array of intellectual sources: journalistic accounts of campaigns, standard political science, workplace sociology, and even linguistic studies.”

After graduation, Wong was hired by the Brown team full-time. As a cub staffer, she’d wake every morning at 4:30 and comb a dozen newspapers for articles on the race between Brown and incumbent Pete Wilson. When Brown lost the race, Wong headed to Sacramento to spend a year with the Senate Fellows Program, following it with two years at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. After graduation, she joined Senator Barbara Boxer’s successful 1998 re-election campaign, staying as a press secretary when the campaign ended. “The Boxer campaign was the first time that I ever had the title ‘press secretary’—it was perhaps my favorite campaign,” Wong says.

Wong left the Boxer camp to work as the California press secretary for Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign; when Bradley lost to Al Gore, she joined Jane Harman’s successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives. Each job meant long hours and a 24-hour work ethic. “I’d get calls at 5:30 a.m. at home from reporters,” she said. “Other times, I’d be out in the field until 10 or 11 at night.”

In 2000, after living off civil servant wages for three years, and with a handful of campaigns under her belt, she considered leaving politics altogether. Then she met Los Angeles City Attorney Jim Hahn, a candidate for mayor in a crowded race of a half-dozen serious contenders.

“I didn’t know very much about Jim Hahn,” she says. “The city attorney in L.A. does not get much press coverage––I couldn’t learn a lot about him by reading clips. So I took a chance with him, and he took a chance on me.”

Hahn recalled his initial meetings with Wong. “It’s true that we both took a chance on each other, but she was highly recommended,” he said. “I remember her as being bright, young, and enthusiastic, but I really didn’t know how good she would be for the job until we were in the thick of my campaign.” More than proving herself, Hahn commends Wong for being “unflappable.

“I think now that we’re in office, it’s just as hectic, if not more so, than during the campaign,” he said.

Today, Wong is the mayor’s go-to person, serving as his official spokesperson and leading a team of four press office staffers. A typical day begins at 8 a.m., with a meeting of the mayor’s executive staff, where they review the important topics of the day. Perhaps it’s coordinating the announcement of new LAPD chief William Bratton, former commissioner of the NYPD, or coordinating the mayor’s response to a proposed new football stadium. Wong works with the deputy mayor for communication and policy to formulate official stances on important issues, but “it’s all driven by the mayor,” she says.

Says Hahn of Wong, “No matter how many requests we have coming through, she’s able to handle whatever we throw her way, and she always does it with a smile. She’s always cheerful and upbeat.”

Julie Wong didn't know much about Jim Hahn prior to signing on with his mayoral campaign in 2001, she says. "I took a chance with him, and he took a chance on me."