Mary Dixon Papers

Mary Dixon

Mary Dixon (aka Mary D. Trullinger) worked in the Carter 1976 presidential campaign in the first congressional district of Virginia, where she was the first person to pre-file for presidential caucuses as a Carter delegate in Hampton, Virginia. She recruited other caucus participants and helped elect delegates to the Democratic National Convention for Carter. During the summer and fall 1976 campaign, she worked advance and press outreach for visits to Virginia by then-Governor Carter, Rosalynn Carter and Jack Carter, and she headed up Virginia state media outreach for the second presidential debate held in Williamsburg, Virginia.

A family move to Northern Virginia led to a job at the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1979. She was detailed to the White House that same year to develop and manage a project on energy efficiency and use of renewable energy called the SHINE project. She was also asked to contribute to speechwriting for President Carter by Gordon Stewart, Deputy Director of Speechwriting.

After the Carter Administration she worked as Special Assistant in the Energy Office of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at One World Trade Center in Manhattan. Returning to Alexandria, Virginia in 1985, she worked as a consultant, later becoming Director of Communications and Legislative Aide to Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier (D-WI) for four years.

She joined the Clinton Administration in the Department of Energy as a speechwriter for Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary in 1994 and in 1996 moved to the Office of Defense Programs, home to the U.S. nuclear weapons program, as a Special Assistant. PostClinton Administration, she continued to work nuclear weapons related programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) where she was a consultant. Currently (2018), she is Senior Advisor, Government Relations for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in the lab's Washington, DC office. Her experience across both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, in addition to her communications expertise, has been to identify, integrate, solve problems, and handle sensitive assignments at the highest levels for federal agencies, Congress, and the White House. Mary Dixon is a seasoned speechwriter, having served President Carter, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, and U.S. Representative Robert W. Kastenmeier, among others, in that capacity.

She holds a BA in history from Auburn University, and an MA of Liberal Studies in American Studies from Georgetown University. She is the author of Felix Frankfurter: a Study in Contrasts, published by Georgetown University and The Artisanal Nuke, published in 2014 by the Center for Unconventional Weapons Studies (now the Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies - CSDS) at Air University.