Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (17 page)

Several of my colleagues in the economics department, along with some of the graduate students, joined the Union of Radical Political Economists, better known as URPE. Their rebellion was cultural, as well as political, and faculty-student pot parties became regular events. My husband, God bless him, showed himself deserving of a medal for squareness; at one such party, he mentioned to me that it smelled as if dinner was burning. I explained to him that the sweetish odor came from burning marijuana.

At one point a group of URPE members, joined by like-thinking colleagues from other departments, went downtown to picket the Duquesne Club, the city's dining club for the all-white, all-male business leaders of the community and their families. The picketers were humiliatingly driven off by members of the service staff brandishing dishtowels and other household implements. But, to simplify security measures, the club decided to close permanently the side door through which visiting women had to enter. After it was all over, I teased my colleagues who had been involved, “The net result of your picketing has been to allow me through the front door of the Duquesne Club.”

With the rapid-fire disasters of 1968, the ugliness of the turmoil in the world outside broke with full force into the relative calm of our own environment. Jerry Wells and I had just brought our seminar students back to my house on the evening of April 4 for an informal pizza party to celebrate the end of the winter term. His wife, Nancy, who had been setting out food and drink, met us at the door, looking even paler than usual, to tell us that Martin Luther King had just been fatally shot. Our
celebration rapidly turned into a wake. Riots broke out all over again in a number of cities as their black residents reacted to the wanton murder of their leader in the struggle for full recognition as human beings and citizens. Barely two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother and his attorney general, was gunned down in a passageway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Lyndon Johnson, reviled by some for his support of the civil rights movement and by others for the escalation of the Vietnam War, had announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not run again, putting the nomination of a Democratic presidential candidate up for grabs. At the party's August convention in Chicago, the public fury that had been building on both sides of the Vietnam War issue erupted into terror when police responded to antiwar demonstrations by using billy clubs, tear gas, and Mace on just about everyone in sight, resulting in numerous injuries but, fortunately, no deaths.
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Even inside the convention hall, surrounded by barbed wire, journalists were roughed up by security forces. The battle for the nomination between the strongly antiwar Eugene McCarthy and the more moderate Hubert Humphrey was virtually submerged by the spectacle of a nation tearing itself apart.

Bob and I, like almost everyone we knew, viewed these events through the lens of our black-and-white TV set, the horror of the images in no way mitigated by their small size and fuzzy resolution. What was happening to our country, one of whose proudest hallmarks for more than a hundred years, since the end of the Civil War, had been its ability to effect orderly political transitions? I never dreamed that I would soon be observing antiwar protests not on a television screen but from the windows of a large stone building next door to the White House.

The grim, gray, granite face of the Old Executive Office Building (EOB, later renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue wasn't made any more welcoming by the stern gun-toting Secret Service guard who scrutinized my temporary access pass before letting me through the gate. Everything about the building's massive Victorian exterior, decorated with ornamental ironwork, exuded power and permanence. Built shortly after the Civil War to house the three cabinet departments focused on foreign affairs, the building now contained most of the Executive Office of the President, including my destination, the offices of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The inside of the building was every bit as imposing as the outside, with nearly two miles of black-and-white-tiled corridors and eight monumental, curving granite staircases whose cantilevered construction made them appear to float. If one step were to break or be removed, the whole structure would collapse—a bit of knowledge that at first made my children afraid to use the stairs.

It was 1970, and I was inhaling this heady atmosphere on my first day as a senior staff economist with the CEA. I had actually visited the same offices a couple of years before, when President Johnson had invited a group of young economists to spend what had been billed as a day of informal, interactive meetings with members of his Executive Office, which included the CEA, but which had turned out to be a disappointing
session of listening to these members describe their jobs and defend the president's economic policies. Now, though, I was going to settle into one of those offices for a year as an insider, albeit a very junior one, in the Executive Office of the President. That prospect was exciting enough; had I been told that this was only the first of several increasingly significant and visible jobs I would fill as a pioneering female policy maker, against a backdrop of mounting economic and political crises confronting the Nixon administration, I would have crossed my eyes in disbelief.

A few weeks earlier I had been invited by the CEA's chairman, professor Paul McCracken, to spend a year on his staff. One of the smallest government agencies, the CEA had been created after World War II to provide economic advice and analysis to the president. Whether under Democratic or Republican administrations, the economists at the council prided themselves on being defenders of economic logic and the long-run effects of policies against the more short-term views of government departments often dominated by political considerations or special interests. Because of this role, an apprenticeship at the CEA was an opportunity any rising young economist would jump at.

The nonpolitical nature of the job was a major selling point as I pondered McCracken's invitation. Although the chairman and the other two members of the CEA were always political appointees requiring Senate confirmation, these staff positions were deliberately nonpolitical. Senior staffers were generally young academic economists who had established scholarly reputations in their particular areas of specialization, as I had in international trade and finance. I saw myself as a moderate Republican in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, an economic conservative and social liberal on most issues. Above all, though, I prided myself on my political independence. I would have been put off if anyone had asked about my political views or affiliation as a prerequisite for the job, but no one did.

Even so, I had some qualms about joining the administration of Richard Nixon. In foreign policy, Nixon had long been known as an anticommunist hawk and had acquired a reputation as “tricky Dick” when he painted his opponent as a communist “fellow traveler” during his successful race for a Senate seat in California in 1950. Memories of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt in the early 1950s,
brought home to me by some of my father's mathematics colleagues as they sat in our living room recounting how they had been hounded out of their academic positions for refusing to sign the loyalty oath required of all public employees in California, were still vivid in my mind.

My worries on this score were offset, though, by Nixon's behavior during the first two years of his presidency. He had apparently become convinced early in his first term that there had to be some alternative to the horrors of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in our relations with the communist world. In line with this thinking, he signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1969 and, some months later, announced a US-Soviet accord on the scope of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1) and the end of the trade embargo against communist China, moves toward easing tensions that set the stage for his historic visits to both countries in 1972.

On the domestic front, the president had proposed dramatic policy innovations during his first two years in office, measures that coincided with my own views about good public policies. Two that he put forward in 1969, the Family Assistance Program, guaranteeing a minimum income to every American family, and revenue-sharing with the states, failed to pass the Congress but became templates for later, more successful efforts. Other measures he introduced became landmark pieces of legislation. These included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These Nixon initiatives, followed in 1972 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, added up to a program so progressive that, as former senator Bob Dole observed in a 2007 television retrospective on the Nixon presidency, “I doubt that Nixon could be nominated today under the Republican Party. He'd be perceived as too liberal, too moderate.”
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All in all, despite my earlier downbeat introduction to President Johnson's CEA and my initial concerns about the president whose White House staff I would be part of, I was tantalized by the chance to play a role, however modest, in the making of the nation's economic policies. But I worried that uprooting the family for a temporary assignment
could threaten the delicate balance between work and family life that was never far from my thoughts.

As he had before, and would many times again, Bob reassured me that together we could figure out how to make the move work for all four of us. Each of us requested and received a year's sabbatical leave from the university, which Bob planned to spend doing research in the Library of Congress for a book on George Bernard Shaw. We rented a pleasant house in Montgomery County, Maryland, noted for the excellence of the public schools our kids would be attending. I knew I would be working long hours, but the flexibility of Bob's schedule, together with the fact that our housekeeper, Josephine Pierce, had volunteered to come with us, persuaded me that my more demanding responsibilities wouldn't disrupt Malcolm's and Laura's lives too much.

By September 1970, when I started my stint at the CEA, Richard Nixon was halfway through his first presidential term. By this time, the dark side of his personality—his secretiveness, his paranoia, his focus on political “enemies,” and his willingness to use a variety of methods, both legal and illegal, both petty and terrifying, to harass them—had taken deep root, although the public did not learn about most of its manifestations until much later. He ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and, despite his announcement of US troop reductions and the “Vietnamization” of the war (neither of which came to pass) that same year, followed up with ground attacks on the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that bombing had failed to eradicate.

As the war escalated, so did the protests against it. There were mass demonstrations and arrests in Washington; at one point, National Guard troops were billeted on the marble floors of the Old EOB. Their presence, unavoidable evidence of the war that was going on beneath our windows, made all of us eggheads who were trying not to think too much about it acutely uncomfortable, and not only because, without access to showers, the soldiers smelled. In my enthusiasm for my new job and the exciting policy world I now felt a part of, though, I focused much more on the goals and accomplishments of the administration in both the foreign and the domestic policy arenas than I did on the big dark blot: the escalation of the Vietnam War.

One of the reasons that we young economists serving as the CEA's senior staff were largely unruffled by the mounting tensions between the White House and the world outside was the personalities of the men we were working for, the three politically appointed council members. The chairman, Paul McCracken, was a longtime professor at the University of Michigan Business School, a highly regarded macroeconomist who had himself once served on the council's senior staff. A wisp of a man who looked as if he would blow away in a high wind, McCracken had the courage of a lion. Not only was he totally candid in the economic advice he gave the president, even when he knew it was unwelcome, but he was also fiercely protective of the staff economists who worked at the CEA. Unlike the members, we were not political appointees, and McCracken took the position that, as long as we broke no laws, our political views should be irrelevant in judging our job performance.

In at least one instance, his willingness to act on this principle was severely tested. Paul Courant, a junior staffer fresh from his PhD studies at Princeton, was playing a game of chicken with the Old EOB's security guards, the Secret Service. Every night the guards would tear the antiwar posters from the walls of Paul's office, and every morning Paul would put them up again. After this had gone on for a while, one of the president's minions ordered McCracken to summarily fire the miscreant. McCracken refused, and Paul Courant completed the term of his staff appointment. He eventually became a chaired professor, and for a time provost, at the University of Michigan and thus a colleague of Paul McCracken, whose courage in defending him the younger man never forgot.

Herbert Stein, a macroeconomist who had spent his entire career at a Washington, DC, think tank rather than a university, was the council member primarily responsible for macroeconomic issues. I soon longed to emulate his graceful writing style and the dry wit that contrasted sharply with his ponderous body, owlish expression, and drawling speech. McCracken was in many ways a father figure during my stint as a council staffer; Herb was more like a wise, lovable uncle.

The member in charge of international economic issues, and thus my immediate boss, was Hendrik Houthakker. A short, compact Dutchman with rapidly disappearing blond hair and clipped Dutch-accented
speech, Henk looked and sounded every inch the Harvard professor that he was. He was the most ideologically rigid of the three members, firmly committed to the virtues of free markets and liberalized trade and unwilling to compromise for the sake of achieving consensus among different government agencies.

The atmosphere of the council was collegial; hierarchy had little impact on the lively economic conversations that went on more or less continuously. But the pace was much faster than I was used to; the time horizon of assignments was days or even hours rather than weeks or months, and the pressure undermined my self-confidence. One of my duties was to write a “Report to the President on International Finance,” for McCracken's signature, late every Friday afternoon. It was nothing more than a few factual paragraphs on what had transpired in the US balance of payments and foreign exchange markets during the week, but in my early days on the job I was unnerved by having only an hour or less in which to meet a very tight deadline.

At the end of my second or third week, feeling not only insecure but beset by conflicting loyalties because this task would keep me from getting to the rehearsal dinner before my brother's wedding in St. Louis, I burst into McCracken's office on the verge of tears and confessed that I wasn't sure I was up to the job. I missed the dinner, but McCracken's calm reassurance about my competence quickly restored my equanimity, setting up a mentoring relationship that proved critical in every one of my subsequent career moves. Like my real father, he made clear his expectations of me and his belief that I had the ability to succeed. But his expectations, which, unlike my father's, reinforced rather than threatened my own life plan, were all the more influential because they did not have to do battle with my rebellion. Now in his nineties, McCracken until recently came to his University of Michigan office several days each week, and I cannot see him without being reminded of the impact he has had on the course my life has taken.

My training as an economist was key to my work on the CEA staff. But what I had learned outside the classroom while I was growing up was just as important. My parents' backgrounds and the conversations around my father's dinner table had taught me how lives could be disrupted
when countries' behavior toward each other turned hostile, and I had tried to promote peaceful relations, however naively, by joining the World Federalists during high school.

I brought both kinds of learning to bear on the two big issues that commanded most of my attention at the CEA. One was the buildup of congressional pressure for increased import protection, particularly against textiles from Japan, whose growing success was making textile manufacturers in the South feel increasing competitive heat. The administration, meanwhile, was trying to move forward on liberalizing trade while expanding a program of adjustment assistance for American workers and businesses adversely affected. True to my cosmopolitan upbringing, I entered the fray enthusiastically on the side of freer trade and more generous adjustment assistance and against restrictions on imports, and I shared the mood of triumph when protectionist legislation failed to pass.