You saw a photo in the Washington Post with Defense Secretary James Mattis’s phone number scrawled on a Post-it note. So you decided to contact him for an interview?
I didn’t really think about it; it just kind of happened. I called the number to see if it was him, and when the call went to his voice mail, I hung up and then sent him a text message asking for the interview. I didn’t think about the fallout or what would happen if he called back.
How did you and your editor, Jane Gormley, go about shaping the interview?
We knew that I would ask policy-related questions, and Jane would ask human-interest questions, because of our interests. I love reading about politics, foreign policy, and military history, while Jane is more interested in finding stories that can relate to our audience, especially high schoolers. I made a lot of questions up on the spot after we ran out of questions because Mattis kept talking.