THIS PROFILE APPEARED IN THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE ON DEC. 1, 2013.
The greatest thing ever to happen to Little Rock in the modern era may not have been the 1992 election of Bill Clinton to the presidency. It may have happened 12 years later, when the presidential library that bears his name opened to the world, and then again, two years after that, the Clinton School of Public Service. Among its localized benefits, it opened a portal by which each year more than a hundred famous, trailblazing, or otherwise important people from all over the world come and speak to us.
And the porter is a 29-year-old named Nikolai DiPippa.
3:01 P.M.
On a dreary Monday early last month DiPippa picked up the keys to his Ford Escape and headed out the double doors of Sturgis Hall.
He’s wearing a blue suit the color of midnight and a tie nearly as gold as King Tut’s mask, and a Clinton School lapel pin. If he weren’t the director of public programs and strategic partnerships, he could be a Secret Service agent assigned to the school.
At that moment Sonali Deraniyagala’s Delta flight 4891 was finishing its approach into the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. That the flight number and the exact time of touchdown are recorded here is evidence not of this reporter’s attention to detail but that he was handed a complete itinerary of Deraniyagala’s 28-hour trip, printed on heavy stock, in color.
No one who doesn’t work at the airport goes to the airport as much as DiPippa. He has been there as often as three or four times a day, at least 200 times a year. “Itinerary” is the right word for his own daily schedule.
“That’s how my entire life is with everything, though. ‘What am I doing here? How did I get here?’ It’s surreal, the experiences of people I’ve been in contact with: 39 former ambassadors, nine former presidents, I mean, you can go through the list. … I’m their first pickup from the airport and the last person they see in Little Rock. I’m the one that they ask the questions to.”
On the fame scale, Deraniyagala ranks a 3, frankly, but DiPippa’s a little uneasy about her nonetheless. For one, she’s not shopping her book “Wave” on the festival circuit. She has given some radio interviews, but not any engagements, not like the one planned for 6 p.m. For another, Deraniyagala lost her entire family – her husband, Steve, and her two boys, Vikram and Nikhil – to a giant wave. The enormity of that doesn’t sit easily with DiPippa, who has had a recurring nightmare of the physical world around him suddenly spinning out of orientation, like motion blur in a photograph.
He appreciates order at every level. During DiPippa’s junior year at Catholic High School for Boys, Father George Tribou died. “I’ve never to this day seen someone command respect just from their presence,” he says.
All four DiPippa boys went to Hendrix College, and are, in order, a haberdasher-lawyer, an Outback steakhouse proprietor, a healthcare worker and a programming director at a graduate school. “A testament to our parents giving us the latitude to do different creative things.”
3:14
Inside the baggage claim area, DiPippa scans the new arrivals for Deraniyagala. “I can spot them,” he says. Twenty years ago, the face of your visitor was a mystery, maybe, but now there’s Google Images.
“I almost missed Gov. [Jesse] Ventura. I don’t know whether it was the hair … right, he actually had hair, that’s what threw me.”
From our perspective, DiPippa’s business is introducing all of us to all of them, but the corollary is worth imagining as well – for Deraniyagala and a hundred others like her, DiPippa is their Little Rock docent. For folks like Naomi Tutu or Pervez Musharraf, he is their only local interpreter on likely their only visit here.
“Have you heard of Heifer International?” he asks Deraniyagala as they pull onto the side street that faces the great elliptical headquarters of that nonprofit. She says no, and he tells her it began with some donated heifers, thus the name.
When DiPippa first came on in the summer of 2006, the first semester of the first class of Clinton Schoolers, this was more or less his job. “I was a glorified wedding planner at the time, which was not what I thought I’d gone to college for.”
At Hendrix, he’d double majored in biology and psychology, and his plan was to get his law degree and segue into environmental policy. He studied the entropic effects of wildfire on prairie grasslands. Now, he says, he really tries to get speakers’ itineraries planned to the minute – from touchdown to takeoff. His favorite saying is proper planning prevents poor performance.
He’s more than a planner, though. He’s a curator, a headhunter, a talent scout. And it’s his show.
“Nikolai vetoes me,” says Skip Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School. “I’m the one who sends all these suggestions, and he will say, no. No. No. So, yes, he has a lot of liberty. This is his program.” There isn’t an “honorarium” – the stipend most universities lay out for their distinguished lectures.
DiPippa approached pundit Rachel Maddow through one of her producers. It took more than two years to get her to Little Rock. He was told finally that she used the engagement as an artificial deadline for a book she was writing. That’s what it took.
“Some of those actually happen that way. When you’re doing a hundred [a year], you can count on some of them working that way.”
4:30
Ninety minutes from the big event, DiPippa sits his guest down for a radio interview in the reading room. These are low-tech, to say the least – two microphones, a not-soundproof room, a battery-operated digital recorder the size of a brick. He usually begins with the beginning: How’d you start your charity? Where’d you get the idea for your book? What’d you do in college?
If you’ve ever heard “Clinton School Presents” on KUAR-FM, 89.1 on Thursday evenings, you may have thought, “Who put this guy on the radio?” He sounds very young, and he’s had no voice training.
He was born the last of four boys – his exotic middle name, Shiro, is just Japanese for “fourth-born son” – with a bubble around his heart and a collapsed lung. Within days he was sent home in working order, but he attributes to those earliest ailments his subsequent hearing trouble that led to a slight speech impediment. As a tyke, correct pronunciation wasn’t “imprinting,” he says, and that accounts for his “accent”: He intermittently flattens his R’s and Shh-es his S’s.
All the more reason to let his subject do the talking, he says.
“I mean, from a biology-psychology background, I’m not an expert on foreign policy or … like, today’s [interview], how do you talk to someone who lost their entire family in a tsunami? And, then, she’s a Ph.D. in economics. I’m not a Ph.D. in anything! My strategy all along has always been to get the other person to tell me in their words what it is about them.”
So over the next half hour, Deraniyagala tells him “what it is” about her. It’s an awesome juxtaposition of intrusion and supplication.
He’s interviewed Rachel Maddow and Jim Lehrer, the latter just days after he moderated the first 2012 presidential debate (and was roundly pilloried for the job he did), and conservative jurist Brett Kavanaugh, who helped author the Starr Report that led to Clinton’s impeachment. These are professional inquisitors. Does he ever step back and ask himself, who am I to ask them anything?
“A hundred percent! That’s how my entire life is with everything, though. ‘What am I doing here? How did I get here?'” he says. “It’s surreal, the experiences of people I’ve been in contact with: 39 former ambassadors, nine former presidents, I mean, you can go through the list. … I’m their first pickup from the airport and the last person they see in Little Rock. I’m the one that they ask the questions to. Yeah, a hundred percent – how do I fake it until I make it?”
Days after the interview, Deraniyagala would say of DiPippa that “he was easy to respond to,” that he had some questions “refreshingly different” from the BBC and others, though, “Sorry, I can’t remember the specifics.”
6:05-7:16
Exactly five minutes after the hour, DiPippa and Deraniyagala are behind a curtain, waiting for the cue from Rutherford. From the stage, the dean says something to the effect that Nikolai has created the best college speaker series in the country, prompting fellow staff member Katie Milligan to shoot him a smile and say, “Nikolai! Do you hear that in your sleep?”
Deraniyagala’s cue arrives, and with one hand, DiPippa draws the curtain back upon himself. Deraniyagala steps forward. There’s applause. DiPippa and, by extension, the Clinton School, would like you to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
No, that’s a misreading, says former staff member and colleague Ben Beaumont.
“The speaker program got to be so popular under his leadership that we would joke with him about being the ‘face of the Clinton School.’ People would come up to me and ask if I was Nikolai DiPippa, and I would say, ‘No, but I can try and get you an autograph.'”
Deraniyagala begins, “December, 2004, I was on vacation in Sri Lanka with my family when the tsunami hit on the southeastern coast of Sri Lanka, and only I survived to tell the tale, as it were.” It’s the first time she has discussed the book, maybe even the death of her entire immediate family, before an audience.
For all his tedious work getting the London economist to this moment in time, in front of several dozen students and Little Rockers who pay nothing to see this, he whiles away the speech in a corner of the hall so far off to the side even Deraniyagala can’t see him. If there’s a moment when DiPippa is “off,” this is it, when the speaker is on.
“The programming schedule is so robust,” says Eric Wilson, a former Clinton School staff member and a contemporary. “That’s why Nikolai works extremely long hours, [and] it’s not uncommon to find him at the school on weekends welcoming school groups. I think he enjoys … being the first impressions for the best and brightest minds coming in from all over the world to Arkansas.”
After Deraniyagala’s speech and a short question-and-answer session, DiPippa directs the crowd to a small table of about two dozen “Wave” books for sale from WordsWorth. Deraniyagala signs – and WordsWorth sells, at $26 each – nearly every one.
As the hall empties out, Rutherford, DiPippa, fellow staff member Katy Grennier, and four Clinton School students escort Deraniyagala to Copper Grill for a late dinner. DiPippa eats out, usually here but occasionally Doe’s Eat Place, several times a week, which is why he takes such great pleasure in cooking at home. All DiPippa men are excellent cooks, Wilson says, and the DiPippa Feast of the Seven Fishes is the most exquisite home-cooked meal in town – the last one he got invited to, in 2009, he sat with Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine.
Throughout the afternoon and evening, Deraniyagala was pleasant but guarded. At dinner, she relaxed. Everyone does. “I will have a lasting memory of that evening, because it’s the first and only public talk I’ve given about my book,” she said days afterward. “I accepted the invitation to speak solely because of the school’s focus on global public service, and yes, I would consider coming back if I could help promote its goals in a useful way.”
“I thought Nikolai was a good handler, a very comfortable presence.”
“When they leave, when they get home,” DiPippa says. “I hope they say, ‘You know, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the Clinton school, and met these amazing students, and the community was so engaged. It was not what I was expecting, but I was pleasantly surprised,'” until, one day in the future, it’s no longer a surprise to anyone.
