Cottam to leave Sundlun maelstrom

M. CHARLES BAKST
Publication Date: February 13, 1994 Page: I-01 Section: NEWS II Edition: ALL
Anyone who survives three years as Governor Sundlun's press secretary deserves, if not
sainthood, then at least a column.
So, meet Barbara Cottam, 34, as she prepares to leave to be Citizens Bank vice president in
charge of public affairs, a role she says offers her new challenges. (She also gets a raise over her
current $60,000 salary but won't say how much.)
Sundlun says he learned a lot from her. I ask what. Long pause. "The first thing I've learned I'm
proving to you right now. To think before I open my mouth]"
If true, that would be a major coup for Cottam. But then too, she's been at this game a long time.
She got into politics while at the Lincoln School, answering phones and leafletting in Joe
Garrahy's 1976 drive for governor. During her 1977-81 years at Providence College, she interned
in his office, writing proclamations and handing out name tags at social events.
After college, she worked on the press staff. She rose to press secretary by 1984, Garrahy's last
year in office, then switched to Providence's new mayor, Joe Paolino, and married Garrahy's son
John.
She has been Sundlun's press secretary throughout his stormy tenure.
She says she has enjoyed every day of public service. A happy front? "I'm not pretending, and
people who know me know that I'm not. I am, I think, one of the biggest boosters of public
service, and I genuinely believe that it is a noble profession."
Sundlun says, "I'm hard-pressed to think of another person that I've ever known who has as
sunny a disposition as she has and who is as even-tempered as she is without being artificial."
He adds, "She's very tough in her judgments on people and on issues, but she's never mean."
Cottam's office has three TVs and VCRs.
On a wall is a plaque commemorating her participation in a 1991 staff canoe trip in South
County. She and Sundlun aide Ron De Siderato were in one of the canoes - and not doing well.
"We tipped," she says. "The first time we tipped, we tipped into the mud that came up to our
knees, and you wondered what was down there, and I lost a very expensive camera, a beeper,
food. . . . We lost everything]"
She says she and De Siderato got back in and tipped several more times, and she laughs, "It was
an adventure]"

But she's gone on yearly canoe trips since.

On Cottam's desk sit a radio, a phone with a gazillion extensions, and a bunch of cartoon
figurines, including A.A. Milne's Tigger. She says the characters offer lessons in life: "Poor
Tigger. Everything happens to Tigger. He falls down and he gets stuck and he can't climb the
tree, and he just keeps bouncing back. I have an optimistic outlook on life, and whatever you're
dealt with or face, you just do the best you can and move on."
This is what Cottam has had to face as Sundlun's news secretary:
A governor who can be a loose cannon, going to a night community meeting and, without
warning to his staff, casually dropping a bombshell announcement.
A governor who has found himself in some of the most serioustraumas this state ever faced - the
credit-union crisis and a fiscal crisis that brought layoffs, pay cuts and increased taxes - and
personal ordeals.
Cottam says of her post, "It's a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job. We have a governor who's very
active and very hands-on, involved in everything. But that's what also makes it exciting."
She says a press secretary must be an honest broker: on the one hand, providing information to
the press and interpreting an administration's views, and, on the other, conveying to the
administration the needs of the press.
"The best work of a press secretary is never seen," she says, adding that, often, a press secretary
"has to do cartwheels" to find a document or locate a staffer or department director and, at times,
bang them over the head to make them talk to a reporter.
She says Sundlun's propensity to blab about things he wants to do before the administration has
fully planned the moves is another hazard. He comes across as having an idea but no details,
"and the reporter is going to write that the program's not put together and concentrate and focus
on that."
She says she's scolded him, and he understands. "But he's so enthused about the things he's doing
he wants to share them."
A somber start
Cottam has seen a lot of history.
She remembers a meeting of Sundlun and aides on Dec. 31, 1990. He'd become governor the
next day and close the credit unions. "I remember it because there were fireworks at 5 o'clock,
and they were the First Night fireworks. . . . A very, very somber meeting. And what hit me was
(the contrast between) the atmosphere of the meeting and what was happening outside - the
fireworks and what you knew; everybody enjoying First Night downtown, and I think everybody
in that room sensed a tremendous weight of responsibility."

And then he took office and, between the credit unions and the fiscal crisis, the government was
in a continuous frenzy. She says that, for two months, there was no such thing as a normal lunch.
"We got in at 7 and left at 11:30 or midnight, every day. Maybe Sundays we didn't come in 'til 9
and maybe we left at 8 or 9 on Sunday night after the first week. . . . And usually we'd end up
eating something at 3 or 4 in the afternoon at our desk or grabbing a bite - very often you'd grab
three bites and then be running somewhere."
Former Sundlun aide David Preston says Cottam felt a personal affinity for depositors. He says
she'd field calls on a radio show, return to the State House, and find messages from other people
who had phoned the office. "She would call back every single person, even late into the night,"
he says.
Then came Oct. 22, 1991, when Marjorie Sundlun was struck by a car in New York State.
Cottam remembers being in Providence, talking by phone with the governor as he raced to the
hospital in Rochester. "His voice was choked up. He was in the helicopter and I thought, 'Here's
this poor man facing this all alone.' He told me they didn't know if she was going to make it, and
my heart went out to him."
She remembers calling the hospital, "asking for the director of public relations, wondering how
capable this person was going to be and able to deal with a crisis." She says, "I found him in the
emergency room. . . . After talking with that person for three or four minutes, I thought, 'Terrific,
I'm dealing with a pro.' "
She flew to Rochester to work with him and Sundlun.
She remembers, of course, the June 1993 paternity suit involving Sundlun's daughter Kara
Hewes and having to deal with that explosive situation.
'What next?'
Did Cottam ever think, "They didn't teach me this in press secretary school?"
She says, "A good press secretary is able to divorce themselves from the situation, take a step
back and look at it and think of what the public wants to know, needs to know, and put some
order to the situation."
Events broke around Sundlun so fast she'd sometimes ask, shellshocked, "What next?" But she
says press secretaries can't feel sorry for themselves. "You just focus on doing your job," she
says, likening it to a reporter on deadline "concentrating on getting the information and writing
the story."
September 1993. Sundlun tells her he killed the raccoons. "I said, 'You did what?' "

Q. Did you think, "Oh God, here we go again?"

A. (Laughs). No, I just thought, "Another interesting adventure."
Television covered these stories, sometimes at saturation levels. But, overall, TV is giving less
day-to-day coverage to government and politics, a trend Cottam decries. "It's very alarming to
see a lack of substantive information being provided to the public," she says.
And she doesn't want to hear about a need for ratings. "I don't believe that TV should play to the
lowest common denominator."
I wondered what Cottam's most vivid State House memory will be.
She talks of the halls and the rotunda stairs between her first-floor office and the governor's on
the second, of walking to and fro, up and down, alone. She says she looks at the dome, mulls
what a terrific building it is, and glances at the Latin inscription, which means, "Rare felicity of
the times when it is permitted to think as you like and say what you think."
And she says this is what she thinks: "How lucky I've been to be a part of government."
***
M. Charles Bakst is Journal-Bulletin government affairs editor.