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White House Letter: A Rookie Brings Her Skills to the ‘Super Bowl’ of Social Planning
Deesha Dyer, left, the White House social secretary since May, in the East Room this month. In the past, “anyone new would have had to spend a year just learning the job,” a predecessor said.Credit Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Imagine a week in which you arrange the halftime show for the Super Bowl, organize the trophy ceremony for the World Cup and then, for good measure, plan your daughter’s wedding.

That is the kind of week ahead for Deesha Dyer, the new White House social secretary. President Obama will host Pope Francis on Wednesday, President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday and hundreds of guests at a White House state dinner for Mr. Xi on Friday. The president will then fly to New York to entertain a conclave of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly.

In between, the White House is expecting nearly 15,000 guests to witness the pope’s Wednesday morning arrival on the South Lawn.

“We’ve never had anything like this before,” said Jessica Andrews, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s chief of protocol. “It’s the Super Bowl of Super Bowls.”

The person Michelle Obama has entrusted to handle this crush of extraordinary proceedings is a former hip-hop reporter for Philadelphia City Paper and a community college graduate who became a White House intern at the relatively advanced age of 31. Ms. Dyer’s résumé is a big departure from those of previous White House social secretaries, who from Letitia Baldrige in the Kennedy administration to Desirée Rogers in the Obama administration typically inhabited the world of their guests.

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But Mrs. Obama has been breaking with traditions, first by selecting Ms. Rogers, the first African-American woman to hold the job, and then by naming Jeremy Bernard, the first man and openly gay person in the role.

Now comes Ms. Dyer, 37, the second black woman in the job and for two years the deputy to Mr. Bernard, who trained her for her role as the cheerful but strict coordinator of everything from the White House Easter Egg Roll to the December stampede of Christmas parties. High heels and to-do lists are her standard accouterments as the first lady’s point of contact with the large White House staff of florists, chefs and ushers.

“Deesha may have a nontraditional background for a social secretary, but she has all of the skills and characteristics to be a good social secretary,” said Lea Berman, a social secretary in the George W. Bush administration. “And anyone new would have had to spend a year just learning the job.”

No one disputes, however, that the next several days will be a test for Ms. Dyer. “This will indeed be a busy week for the White House social office,” Mr. Bernard said in an email. “But I have no doubt that Deesha and her team will execute each event masterfully and carefully.”

Patrick Rapa, a senior editor at Philadelphia City Paper who paid Ms. Dyer $50 a week to write a column on the city’s hip-hop music scene, said he was not surprised that she had landed in the White House. “She’s a smart go-getter who works really hard, and she’s nothing but pleasant,” he said.

Requests over many weeks to interview Ms. Dyer were politely declined by the East Wing, where newspaper reporters are about as welcome as crusts on tea sandwiches.

Ms. Dyer grew up in West Philadelphia, where her parents divorced when she was in elementary school and her mother worked as an administrator in a church. In previous interviews, Ms. Dyer pointed to her years at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa., a full-scholarship boarding school for underprivileged students, as the place where she learned to get along with people from diverse backgrounds.

Trymaine Lee, a reporter for MSNBC who attended Milton with her, said Ms. Dyer had moved effortlessly across the many lines, visible and not, that divide teenagers.

“In high school, everyone gravitated to her, and she had friends in every single clique,” Mr. Lee said.

After dropping out of the University of Cincinnati, Ms. Dyer worked as an assistant at a Pennsylvania real estate company, traveled the world and explored Philadelphia’s hottest nightspots. She eventually received an associate degree from the Community College of Philadelphia, landed a White House internship and then worked in the White House Travel Office. She became social secretary in May.

Popes have visited the White House twice before, and they present unique challenges not the least because just about everybody — sometimes including the president — is at least mildly star-struck.

“It’s quite different from any other type of visit that we would receive from a leader of a foreign government in the sense that the pope is the leader of an incredibly important institution that is deeply valued by many, many Americans, and he’s also a prominent, if not pre-eminent, moral and spiritual leader around the world on a whole host of issues,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, said somewhat breathlessly in a phone call with reporters last week.

The state dinner for Mr. Xi poses other challenges. Two party crashers at a 2009 state dinner, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, infamously got past a phalanx of security guards and the glamorous Ms. Rogers, which eventually cost Ms. Rogers her job.

Security has been tightened since then, but the Chinese are highly sensitive to violations of protocol. It could all go sideways if the visit is similar to the one in 2006, when the visiting Chinese delegation was outraged that a noisy protester from the Falun Gong spiritual sect interrupted remarks by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president at the time, and a White House announcer mistakenly referred to China as the “Republic of China,” the formal name of China’s archrival, Taiwan.

“There are all sorts of places where offense could be taken, so you have to work very closely with the State Department,” said Gahl Hodges Burt, a social secretary during the Reagan administration. “I’m sure Deesha has them on speed dial.”

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