Big Star on Littlejohn

Former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart lives in understated splendor in his oceanfront fortress on Littlejohn Island in Yarmouth.

BY COLIN W. SARGENT

Many of us remember Joe Lockhart as White House Press Secretary for President Bill Clinton (October 1998 to October 2000) during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. A publicist’s worst nightmare. How do you remain so warm and approachable (he succeeded) while refusing to reveal things you’re “not at liberty to say”?

Before Clinton, he worked for Walter Mondale, Paul Simon, and Michael Dukakis. After Clinton, he was on the election campaign staff for John Kerry’s presidential bid. Football fans enjoyed it when he surfaced as chief spokesman for the NFL from 2016 to 2018. In 2017, Lockhart sold his Washington D. C. house to pals Barack and Michelle Obama.

Today the Bronx-born, Georgetown-educated (History) journalist, commentator, and CNN political analyst is keeping the volume down about his waterfront mansion on Littlejohn Island. Mainers first became aware of his private digs at 350 Pemasong Lane when Lockhart was talking with Michael Smerconish on CNN in the months leading up to the last Presidential election as the words “Yarmouth, Maine” flickered on the screen above him. He’d just written an op-ed advising Biden not to debate with Trump.

You could almost hear thousands of Mainers Googling “Lockhart” and “Yarmouth.”

He’s been married since 2013 to Giovanna Gray Lockhart (CNN op-ed writer, former Washington D.C. editor of Glamour, former senior aide to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, founder of the New York Women’s Collective, and board member of Republic Restoratives Distillery in D.C.), who movingly recounted her COVID experience in Maine in March of 2020 on social media. n