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"In terms of how he treated all of us, he was really respectful. He was intellectually curious, and encouraged the same of us."

That was what Alyssa Mastromonaco told MPR News guest host Tiffany Hanssen she learned from President Barack Obama.

Mastromonaco left the White House before the end of Obama's second term after having joined him while he was still a senator from Illinois. Upon leaving, she was deputy chief of staff for operations and assistant to the president. Before that she worked as a deputy scheduler for John Kerry's presidential campaign and briefly for Bernie Sanders.

She writes in her new memoir, "Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?", that political memoirs are usually "written by men — because most of the people who work in politics are men — and they're usually preoccupied with legacy: reliving the glory days, dispensing tidbits of 'insider' drama, and making the writer look like he has single-handedly triumphed over adversity."

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But Mastromonaco said she "wanted to write something that was super accessible" and showed other women that they could "have a place in history."

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Alyssa Mastromonaco, a former deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House, has a new memoir that she dishes on what it's like to be a woman in male-dominated Washington and the  lessons she learned from our first African-American president.

MPR guest news host, Tiffany Hanssen spoke to Alyssa Mastromonaco, the former assistant to the President in the Obama White House about her memoir, "Who Thought This Was a Good Idea."

'You're gonna say I'm being Pollyanna:' Inside the Obama White House

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