Corporate communicators, the president can empathize.

He, too, knows what it’s like to be overworked and underpaid, because he once held a job writing and editing corporate newsletters.

In a review of David Maraniss's massive new book, “Barack Obama: The Story,” The Wall Street Journal says that the president was “was paid an $18,000 salary to help to write and edit newsletters for American companies doing business overseas” while working at the company Business International.

“And the young Barack Obama hated it,” writes Jonathan Karl for WSJ. The president left the job after one year.

(Obama discusses the job—his first after earning an undergraduate degree from Columbia University—in his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”)

For “Barack Obama: The Story,” Maraniss interviewed Obama’s former boss, Lou Celi, the former vice president of Business International. Celi reflected on the conversation he had with Obama when the young corporate communicator tendered his resignation:

“He just seemed not exactly clear of what he wanted to do. I told him he might be making a mistake, leaving a job when he did not have any plans except a vague notion that he maybe would do some public sector work.”

Read the full review of Maraniss’s book at WSJ.

And according to his LinkedIn profile, Celi is now president of Oxford Economics Americas, a business forecasting consultancy.

(Image via)