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On the third floor of the West Wing, one flight past the stairwell portrait of President Donald Trump talking on his Android phone, is an office once occupied by Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to Barack Obama; Karl Rove, senior adviser to George W. Bush; and First Lady Hillary Clinton. By cramped White House standards, it’s an expansive space, complete with a desk, a conference table, a couch, a bookshelf stocked with a single copy of The Art of the Deal, a duffel bag full of family photos and a couple of pairs of Spanx — and, through the blinds, a view of the Washington Monument. And on this February day, its current tenant, Kellyanne Conway, was explaining how her life had changed in the nine months since she joined the campaign of the man who would ultimately become the 45th president of the United States — for one thing, she now answers to “Blueberry.”
That’s because she’s one of the only officials in the White House, other than President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, to have Secret Service protection — which staffers receive at the special request of the president, who has famously referred to her as “my Kellyanne.” She got the protection, Conway said, after she was sent a suspicious white substance. And then there were the threats. “Most of them are online,” she remarked, “and most of them are very explicit and graphic, and they’re sometimes people who have a history of following through but for whatever reason weren’t prosecuted.”
As a child, Conway picked berries in southern New Jersey, where the acidic soil once served as a lab for botanists attempting to tame the wild bushes. In 1984, when she was 16, she was crowned Miss New Jersey Blueberry Princess (the girl who was crowned Miss New Jersey Honey Queen told a local paper she planned to grow a “bee beard” by sitting a queen bee on her chin and waiting patiently while the rest of the hive, who gravitate to the queen, crowded around on her face). Later on, Conway would earn the distinction of World Champion Blueberry Packer, for the alacrity with which she packed the berries into crates. So when the Secret Service told her to pick a code name that began with B, “I was like, ‘Well, that’s easy!’ ” she said.
That’s because she’s one of the only officials in the White House, other than President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence, to have Secret Service protection — which staffers receive at the special request of the president, who has famously referred to her as “my Kellyanne.” She got the protection, Conway said, after she was sent a suspicious white substance. And then there were the threats. “Most of them are online,” she remarked, “and most of them are very explicit and graphic, and they’re sometimes people who have a history of following through but for whatever reason weren’t prosecuted.”
As a child, Conway picked berries in southern New Jersey, where the acidic soil once served as a lab for botanists attempting to tame the wild bushes. In 1984, when she was 16, she was crowned Miss New Jersey Blueberry Princess (the girl who was crowned Miss New Jersey Honey Queen told a local paper she planned to grow a “bee beard” by sitting a queen bee on her chin and waiting patiently while the rest of the hive, who gravitate to the queen, crowded around on her face). Later on, Conway would earn the distinction of World Champion Blueberry Packer, for the alacrity with which she packed the berries into crates. So when the Secret Service told her to pick a code name that began with B, “I was like, ‘Well, that’s easy!’ ” she said.
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