For many years, she was the personal secretary to David Levy, whose father was one of the founders of Sears, Roebuck and Company.

In 1952, while working as a secretary in the New York office of the Crusade for Freedom, Mrs. Whitman was recruited by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential campaign staff.

The Ann Whitman File is held at the Eisenhower presidential library and has been deemed an "extraordinary resource" by historians.

[3] She later joined the staff of New York Governor and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, for whom she worked until she retired in 1977.

A biography of Whitman, entitled Confidential Secretary, was written by journalist Robert Donovan in 1988.