Rachel Wildavsky

Specialty: Writer/editor.

Fields most served: Health care, financial service; Corporate History Project.

Interview:

Q: How do you describe to friends what you do at WHWG?
Wildavsky: I write histories, speeches, opeds, presentations and more, for CEOs and other senior executives in a wide range of industries.

Q: What is most satisfying about your work for your clients?
Wildavsky: Turning clients’ hastily expressed thoughts into readable documents that cause them to say, “That’s what I meant.”

Q: What skill has helped you most in your work at WHWG?
Wildavsky: Versatility. I understand a wide range of industries and can write in either a male or a female voice, in any style and at any level of formality.

Bio:   Rachel Wildavsky, Director of the Corporate History Project, has written not only histories, but also speeches, opeds, presentations and other documents for dozens of CEOs and other senior executives. Her clients can be found across a range of industries, including financial services and particularly health care. Ms. Wildavsky has written for the CEOs of numerous pharmaceutical companies, a health-care lobbying organization and a major data analysis company. She was a speechwriter for the former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mark B. McClellan. Ms. Wildavsky has also served on the staff of the President’s Council on Bioethics, where she cowrote and edited an anthology (Being Human, W.W. Norton & Co., 2004) with then-Chairman Leon R. Kass.

Before joining the WHWG Ms. Wildavsky acquired more than twenty years of experience in journalism and government. This included eleven years as a writer in the Washington Bureau of The Reader’s Digest, where she attained the rank of Senior Staff Editor, and three years in the Washington Bureau of The New York Post, where her beats included the White House, Congress and financial. Her journalism has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Harpers, New York, The Washington Post, The Public Interest and other publications. Ms. Wildavsky has served two Presidents, both in the White House and in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Ms. Wildavsky was educated at the College of the University of Chicago. She lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. with her husband and children.