So you want to join the Trump Administration? Be a special assistant to a Cabinet secretary? Carry a briefcase in the White House?

I get it. I did too, out of law school and fresh from a clerkship in 1984. And I was lucky — very lucky — to work for two great attorneys general, William French Smith and Edwin Meese, and then White House Counsel Fred Fielding and his deputy Dick Hauser as they served as the personal lawyer for Ronald Reagan. Heady stuff when you are in your 20s. Of course you want to do such things. Ambition to serve at the highest levels of the most powerful government in the world is a powerful thing. The Reagan White House and the Smith and Meese Justice Departments were great places to be seen and not heard, to listen, learn and be useful.