The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

White House

A Rising Star in the White House: Meet Chappaqua’s Dhara Nayyar

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Chappaqua has had its fair share of well- known residents in the White House but there’s a young rising star there with Chappaqua roots who perhaps you’ve never heard of – meet Dhara Nayyar, a 2014 Horace Greeley High School graduate. Nayyar is the White House Regional Communications Director for the southern half of the United States. In this role, she serves as a spokesperson on the White House agenda, working with state, local and national reporters. From January 2021 to December 2021, she was on the research team in the Executive Office of the President where she worked to protect and defend President Biden and his legacy, including developing a 25,000 page opposition book on Mike Pence for the Biden-Harris presidential campaign.

A quick thinker, effective communicator and skilled researcher, Nayyar is often tasked with fact checking and issuing a rapid response when stories come out that are inaccurate or lack context. For example, if a story on high gas prices is being written, her team will provide information to the media about what President Biden has done over his career to help alleviate the problem and what harmful actions the GOP has taken that could exacerbate the issue. The job is 24/7 but Nayyar has had a passion for politics since she was a young girl. “I’ve always known I wanted to go into politics. I remember asking my parents why the president wasn’t a woman –and them telling me that it was because it was my job to fulfill! It’s actually both heartwarming and hilarious to look back and see old elementary school assignments about my dream job where I wrote about working in the White House. I still have to pinch myself to believe that I’m even here!” Nayyar exclaims.

She often attends press briefings at the White House and interacts with President Biden regularly. Working with state and local reporters, Nayyar spends time staffing interviews both in person and via Zoom on President Biden and his administration’s agenda which can include pitching stories, holding press calls and responding to inquiries. While others might find the work intense and high pressure, Nayyar says she is constantly on her toes and she loves it. “I truly live for the hustle and bustle,” she notes.

Photos courtesy of Dhara Nayyar

Nayyar developed a love for writing and communications while working on The Greeley Tribune. “It taught me the importance of always keeping a pulse on the news cycle,” she said. She was also president of Cooking for a Cause, which prepared soup for Midnight Run and held bake sales for charities. “This helped me fuel my passion for public service,” she adds. While at Greeley, she formed a close relationship with Gary Lanza, who was an audio-visual technician at Greeley and served as a mentor. “He instilled in me to always be true to myself, to chase my dreams, and the value of genuine human connection,” she commented.

After Greeley, Nayyar attended American University in Washington DC where she obtained a Bachelors in an Interdisciplinary Studies program focusing on communications, legal institutions, economics and government. Nayyar has no plans of leaving DC anytime soon. In fact, she hopes to run for office one day. “I haven’t decided when. I just know it’s down the line for me!”

As a first generation American in the White House, Nayyar credits her parents Johanna and Ajay as key influencers in her decision to pursue her dreams. “They instilled in me at a young age to find passion in the process and to never take anything for granted but rather to enjoy each moment at face value… On a lighter note–my mom always jokes I got the “gift of the gab” from my father–which certainly helps me in the communications world where I spend 98% of the time interacting with others,” she jokes. 

Nayyar, like so many of us in this town, is also in awe of Chappaqua’s most famous residents, The Clintons. She met Secretary Clinton at the Women’s Leadership Forum in 2016. “I am definitely inspired by Secretary Clinton and former President Clinton… they are embodiments of grace, knowledge, and courage,” she said. After communicating with Nayyar for this article, something tells me she’ll be following in their footsteps to a top position in the White House in the not-too-distant future. 

A Proponent of Dialogue, Armonk’s Don Gregg Shares his Views… on the North Korea Threat, Trump and More

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On April 17, as national news headlines warned of an impending crisis and possible war between the U.S. and North Korea, Westchester native and Armonk resident Donald Gregg was one of the few Americans sitting across the table from a North Korean, let alone a high-ranking diplomat. Gregg, the U.S. ambassador to South Korea under President George H.W. Bush, was having lunch with two senior North Korean diplomats and trying to make sense of the latest flare-up in their countries’ animosity.

“We were sort of laughing at the fact that here we are, speaking to each other very civilly,” Gregg recalls, addressing a small group of locals at St. Stephen’s Church in Armonk. “And the news was full of how North Korea was going to be at the center of the next crisis, and the world may come to an end.”

The meeting was nothing new for Gregg, who for decades has been calling for dialogue between the American and North Korean governments.

Gregg’s long career in public service included multiple stints on the peninsula, including as CIA station chief in Seoul from 1973 to 1975 and as ambassador from 1989 to 1993. After retiring from government, he served as chairman of The Korea Society, which promotes cooperation and understanding between Koreans and Americans.

Gregg’s first trip to Pyongyang came in 2002 at the urging of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung. He has gone five times since, with the latest trip coming in 2014, and has witnessed significant economic growth over that period.

“The people were living better. The conditions were better,” Gregg says of his last visit. “The roads were better, the cars were better, the clothes were better. The body language was better.”

Gregg was in Seoul during some of the tensest moments between the North and the South under the reign of Kim Il-sung, so fear of a sudden attack by the leader of the Kim dynasty is nothing new to him.

But despite the rhetoric coming from Pyongyang, he sees North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, like his grandfather, as a rational actor unlikely to risk his regime through some kind of ill-considered act, like a major attack on the U.S..

“The North Koreans are not suicidal,” Gregg says. “They are not going to use one of their weapons against us, because they know their country would be obliterated.” Even the Kims’ pursuit of nuclear weapons has been undertaken with the regime’s survival in mind, he adds.

“I’ve talked to the North Koreans, and they say ‘We’ve looked at you very carefully. You do not attack people who have nuclear weapons,’” he explains. “That’s the root cause of it. They are scared to death of us.”

The CIA, White House and Two Koreas

Gregg grew up half an hour south of Armonk, in Hastings-on-Hudson. In 1953, he married Margaret Curry, an Armonk native and 1947 Pleasantville High School graduate.

Two days after Gregg’s 14th birthday, Japanese warplanes launched a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor and drew the U.S. into the war already raging across the oceans on each of its shores. In 1945, at the age of 17, Gregg enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he trained as a cryptanalyst. But before he could be sent overseas, World War II ended. Gregg served in the Army until 1947, then attended Williams College in Massachusetts, where he graduated in 1951 with a degree in philosophy.

Don Gregg with his wife, Margaret

Though he narrowly missed World War II, he would leave a mark on the four-and-a-half decade Cold War that followed. He joined the CIA in 1951 and served in Japan and Vietnam, learning to speak Japanese fluently. In 1973 he was sent to Korea, where he served as station chief. There, he helped stop torture by his Korean counterparts and played an important role in the rescue of Kim Dae-jung, who went on to become South Korea’s president.

Gregg worked at CIA headquarters from 1975 to 1978 and then as an Asia policy specialist for the National Security Council under the Carter administration. During the Reagan presidency, Gregg was director of the NSC’s Intelligence Directorate before being appointed Vice President Bush’s National Security Advisor.

When Bush became president, Gregg was appointed ambassador to South Korea. Forty years after joining the CIA in the early years of the Cold War, Gregg now played a role in its end. After Bush’s lone term ended, the Greggs returned to New York and in 1995 moved to Armonk, with Don chairing The Korea Society. He began teaching a course at Williams, looking to get top students interested in public service. In 2014 he published a memoir, titled Pot Shards: Fragments of a Life Lived in CIA, the White House, and the Two Koreas, about his experience.

Gregg has been active locally as well, meeting every month with Armonk neighbors to discuss history, politics and current affairs. “Don has had an immense contribution on the global stage, but he has had an immense contribution locally as well,” says Rev. Nils Chittenden, the Rector of St. Stephen’s, where Gregg is an active congregant. “We as a congregation really appreciate and recognize that we are in the presence of someone that has really had a huge effect on shaping world history.”

A ‘Very Different’ President

Gregg has met eight American presidents. He also met the current president, and though their brief meeting took place years before Donald Trump would seriously consider any political run, Gregg’s view of the 45th president remains broadly the same. “I don’t like Trump,” he says bluntly. “He and I are very, very different people.”

Gregg holds out hope that Trump will change course on North Korea and move away from the escalating rhetoric seen during the first months of the administration. He notes some positives, such as the appointment of HR McMaster as National Security Advisor.

But just as Americans find it difficult to understand Kim Jong-un, Koreans have trouble making sense of Trump’s approach.

“We neither like nor understand the North Koreans,” Gregg wrote in a letter submitted in April to The New York Times, “and fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice that prevents us from thinking vicariously about Pyongyang, its concerns and policy objectives.”