Martian's Daughter: A Memoir (42 page)

A reporter who interviewed me when my promotion at GM first brought us to Ann Arbor in 1985 wrote, “For Whitman, ‘having it all’ was not so much an aim as a confident expectation. ‘I always assumed I would marry, have children, and work,’ she explains, ‘like my mother.’”
⁶
Yes, by this definition I have indeed had it all, but the truth isn't nearly as simple as this crisp sentence suggests.

Having it all is a many-splendored thing. It means a marriage that has only grown closer with the passage of more than half a century and a husband who insists that I'm still the girl he first fell in love with, as if fifty years and nearly as many pounds has made no difference. It includes children who grew into adults we not only love but enjoy, respect, and profoundly admire. Both have chosen biomedical careers. Malcolm, a cell and developmental biologist on the Harvard medical faculty, conducts basic research on fundamental chemical processes in living and growing organisms, research essential to explaining how things go awry in the human body as a first step toward repairing them. Laura, a physician specializing in internal medicine, is on the faculty of the Yale Medical School, where she supervises the training of medical residents in her field and is an attending physician in a clinic that serves mainly the poor and the uninsured of New Haven. If John von Neumann were around today,
he might have mixed feelings about the way his electronic offspring, the modern stored-program computer, has developed and the uses to which it has been put. But he would feel only satisfaction, I know, at the way in which the children of his biological offspring have fulfilled his mandate to use their intellectual gifts to the fullest.

To top it off, Laura and her political scientist husband, David Downie, have produced two bright, thoughtful, caring children of their own. When William sends us a poem entitled “Redemption,” reflecting on his feelings about getting in trouble in school, and Lindsey chooses as her display on the fifth grade's “special persons day” a photograph of her grandfather as an impossibly handsome nineteen-year-old lieutenant in the Army Air Corps sitting on the tail of his B-29 during World War II, I wonder what I have done to deserve such joy.

On the professional side, I have enjoyed the challenge and satisfaction of recognition in three different careers, each of which complemented and enriched the others, and of blazing a trail in two of them. Mine were transitional victories; other women have since risen higher and had a broader impact than I did, in both government and business. Laura Tyson, Janet Yellin, and Christina Romer have chaired the Council of Economic Advisers; Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and now Hillary Clinton have served the nation as secretary of state. In the auto industry, women have been appointed to powerful operating, as opposed to staff, positions: Mary Barra is GM's senior vice president for global product development; and Ann Stevens was executive vice president of Ford and chief operating officer of its Americas Division, which includes the United States, until she left to become chairman and CEO of a technology company. But I led the way, and I hope I cleared away some of the underbrush for those who came later.

Despite having had it all, as I look back, I realize that I haven't completely fulfilled the high expectations I set for myself as a young woman. I take pride in the gap I've filled as a role model, a symbol of what a woman can achieve in different arenas. But in terms of substantively making a difference, nudging the world, or at least some part of it, in the direction I wanted it to move, I'm not completely satisfied. Many of the barriers were external, set up by a society that was beginning to open new doors to women but wasn't yet ready to accord full weight to their
ideas or make the changes they were trying to effect. Some of the barriers were inside me—the desire to be liked, to avoid confrontation, to push from inside the golden circle rather than from outside. But if one of the requirements for breaking new ground is to set goals that, like the Holy Grail, will always be just out of to reach, then I have no regrets.

Today, I am more than making up for the things I gave up during the years when I was building my career. I remain engaged in the world of ideas but on my own terms, working only as much as I want and on what interests me. Bob and I travel extensively, aiming, as I once told a US border guard peering suspiciously at some of the more exotic stamps in my passport, to see as much of the world as we can while our legs and wits hold out. We treat our children and grandchildren to three-generation trips, to destinations as varied as the Galapagos, Provence, Namibia, and heli-hiking in the Canadian Rockies, one of the benefits of the affluence my career has afforded us. Another is that we are now able to give back to a society that has given so much to us by donating time, effort, and money to cultural and charitable activities.

All this is possible only because we are blessed with reasonably good health at a time of life when it can no longer be taken for granted. Bob, ten years older than I, is coping with serious vision problems but manages to lead a busy, active life despite the limitations he has had to surmount, including a role reversal in which I have become the driver and he the not so silently suffering passenger. Like so many women my age, I have had to deal with a diagnosis of breast cancer, but now that ten years have passed, I allow myself to look back on it as an unpleasant but surprisingly untraumatic episode—in part because my medically sophisticated children took the news so calmly. Bob and I are acutely aware that these golden years are fragile, that they cannot last forever, but we savor every moment of them.

Looking back from my current vantage point is, of course, very different from the view that lay before me when I was starting out. I knew I wanted a fulfilling career, but I had no idea doing what. I was filled with doubt, uncertainty, fears that I wouldn't be able to handle a family and a demanding job without slighting one or the other, or perhaps both. The fact that I was generally regarded as a freak rather than the role model I later became increased the tension, and I had moments of believing that
the conventional judgment might be right. There were nights when I cried silently into my pillow—hoping Bob wouldn't notice—either from a sense of failure on my own part or because I had turned down a tantalizing offer that wasn't feasible at the current stage of our family's life. At one point, as I've recounted, job pressures brought me perilously close to emotional collapse. The ambitious but apprehensive young girl still lives deep inside the woman who now presents a confident and sometimes intimidating face to the world.

The world that confronts women starting out today is different in many ways from the one that greeted me. The overt, explicit barriers I faced have largely been abolished, only to be replaced sometimes by more subtle, unspoken ones that can be even more damaging psychologically. A successful career path requires constant, unabashed self-marketing by both women and men, an exercise I recoiled from and still regard with amazement. Staying on top of things requires becoming comfortable with new technologies at a faster pace than my generation ever anticipated. This is yet another legacy of my father's pathbreaking advances in the tools for collecting and analyzing data and, more recently, for the extensions of human interaction through the Internet and the offspring it has spawned. I warily circle the margins of the world of texting, Face-book, and Twitter in which my grandchildren dwell so comfortably. If I were around to encounter the next generation down, I fear that meaningful communication would be well-nigh impossible.

Whereas members of my generation saw their options as a stark choice between homemaking and professional advancement, the women of today move more freely from one point on that continuum to another at different stages of their lives. My own daughter has so far chosen a work-life balance different from mine. She has opted to work part-time—or at least, to receive part-time pay for what looks to me like a full-time commitment—in order to have more freedom for involvement in her children's activities. She once said to me, “Thank you, Mom, for being a pioneer, which has given me the freedom to make different choices.” Whereas my approach to motherhood was low key and somewhat hands-off, Laura's children are experiencing both the security and the limitations of her fierce protectiveness.

Through all the changes in my life and in the world that surrounds
it, my father's presence has never been far away. Today I am a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he came as one of the first members in 1933. As they did in his day, leading scholars from all over the world make up a small permanent faculty, free of all teaching duties to focus on research, writing, and mentoring the larger number of younger members, who spend anywhere from a term to several years there. The institute's board is probably the most intellectually exclusive collection of trustees in the world. Some of its members are billionaires, others are professors, but all of them have been chosen for their ability to oversee and nurture the institute as a place where some of the world's greatest minds can operate in a serene, comfortable environment unhindered by distractions.

The tie that binds is in my mind whenever I sit with my fellow trustees in the glass-walled boardroom, which looks out on a picture-book pond and the woods beyond, around which several generations of geniuses have strolled. I find myself conjuring up my father's astonished ghost, seeing his daughter sitting on the governing body of the institution he helped found, the place where he spent most of his adult life and built his own prototype of the modern computer. While I'm summoning this ghost, my husband is tending his grave in the Princeton cemetery, clipping, weeding, raking, and occasionally replacing a dead plant with a new one—a task he performs faithfully twice a year. The son-in-law John von Neumann feared would fatally cramp his daughter's future is doing his part to make sure the father's memory is not neglected.

My father's presence was closest in 2003, when Hungary staged a national celebration commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth. I was invited to participate as an honored guest, an honor that carried with it one of the most hectic schedules I've ever encountered. A couple of weeks after finishing treatment for breast cancer, I found myself not only giving talks about my father at internationally attended meetings of the Hungarian Mathematical and Computer Science societies in Budapest but also giving informal talks about him, in English, to students in schools all over Hungary.

Thank goodness it's a small country; Bob and I were transported to every corner of it in the cramped elderly vehicle belonging to one of my father's self-appointed promoters, who enthusiastically acted as our
chauffeur. Some of the schools were actually named after John von Neumann, but in all of them students knew who he was and what he had accomplished and had created various exhibitions to honor him. I tried to imagine American high-school students according a long-dead mathematician the sort of veneration reserved here for sports and entertainment celebrities!

That week of talking about John von Neumann's life and accomplishments in the land of his birth brought closure for me, a recognition that what I'd feared were the conflicting expectations—my father's, my mother's, society's, and my own—that had shaped my life had finally converged. I had fulfilled my father's moral imperative that I make full use whatever intellectual gifts I had; my mother's ugly duckling had developed a swan's poise and self-confidence. A society where women head Fortune 500 corporations, where half the Ivy League universities, and several of the leading public ones as well, are headed by women, and where a female has been a serious contender for the nation's highest office now allows the most daring and talented women expectations that far exceed mine. By their own lives, my husband and our children have given the lie to the fears of Bob's mother that all three would pay dearly for my career ambitions; my expectations of a close and loving family life have extended to encompass a third generation. My father's shadow has lifted at last; if we meet again, it will be in sunlight.

Note: All the materials cited in this book that are currently in my personal collection will ultimately be deposited either with the rest of the John von Neumann papers in the Library of Congress (JvN's letters in Hungarian to Klari and Klari's unpublished autobiography) or in the Schlesinger Library of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (my own unpublished writings and correspondence between JvN and me).

CHAPTER 1

1
. Freeman Dyson, “A Walk through Johnny von Neumann's Garden,” talk given at Brown University, May 4, 2010.

2
. “Nomination of John von Neumann to be a Member of the United States Atomic Energy Commission,” March 8, 1955, JvN Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in Giorgio Israel and Ana Millán Gasca,
The World as a Mathematical Game: John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science
, Science Networks Historical Studies, no. 38 (Basel, Boston, and Berlin: Birkhauser Verlag, 2009).

3
. Norman Macrae,
John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 145.

4
. Kati Marton,
Enemies of the People
(New York, Simon and Schuster, 2009), 12–13.

5
. Macrae,
John von Neumann
, 139.

6
. Ibid., 169.

7
. Ibid., 171.

8
. John von Neumann to Rudolf Ortvay, Princeton, March 17, 1938, in
John
von Neumann: Selected Letters, History of Mathematics
, vol. 27, ed. Miklos Redei (American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society, 2005), 194–96.

9
. Ibid., 195.

10
. John von Neumann to Rudolf Ortvay, Princeton, February 26, 1939, in
John von Neumann: Selected Letters: History of Mathematics
, vol. 27, ed. Miklos Redei (American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society, 2005), 199.

11
. Clay Blair, “Passing of a Great Mind,”
Life
, February 25, 1957, 96 (citing an earlier interview).

12
. Dyson, “A Walk through Johnny von Neumann's Garden.”

13
. Tibor Frank, “Double Divorce: The Case of Mariette and John von Neumann,”
Nevada Historical Society Quarterly
34, no. 2 (summer 1991): 361. Mariette's letters are translated from the Hungarian by the article's author. I have left his syntax, spelling, and punctuation unchanged.

14
. Klara von Neumann,
A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass
, undated and unpublished manuscript. Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

15
. Ibid.

16
. John von Neumann to Stan Ulam, Princeton, October 4, 1937, in
John von Neumann: Selected Letters, History of Mathematics
, vol. 27, ed. Miklos Redei (American Mathematical Society and London Mathematical Society, 2005), 251.

17
. JvN letter to Klari, August 27, 1938. All the unpublished letters cited in this chapter were translated from the Hungarian by Gabriella Bollobas and are in my personal collection.

18
. JvN letter to Klari, August 28, 1938.

19
. JvN letter to Klari, October 23, 1938.

20
. Robert Leonard,
Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 244.

21
. John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?,” in
The Fabulous Future: America in 1980
, ed.
Fortune
magazine (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 34.

22
. JvN letter to Klari, October 4, 1946.

23
. Von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?”

24
. Quoted in Israel and Gasca,
The World as a Mathematical Game
, 17.

25
. Ibid., 83.

CHAPTER 2

1
. Robert P. Crease,
Making Physics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 20. The participant cited was William Higinbotham, a physicist at Los Alamos and, later, at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

2
. Klara von Neumann,
A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass
, undated and unpublished manuscript. Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

3
. JvN letter to Klari, July 13, 1952.

4
. JvN letter to Klari, September 17, 1952.

5
. JvN letter to Klari, October 15, 1955.

6
. Crease,
Making Physics
, 17–18.

7
. Ibid., 32.

8
. Mariette K. Kuper, transcript of “Living with the Atom,” radio talk on station WHLI, June 1, 1948

9
. Ibid.

10
. Mariette K. Kuper, typescript of graduation speech delivered at Medford High School, Medford, New York, June 1948.

11
. George Gamow,
One, Two, Three, Infinity
(New York: Viking Press, 1947).

12
. JvN letter to Klari, August 28, 1938.

13
. September 2, 1938. All the letters to Klari cited in this chapter were translated from the Hungarian by Gabriella Bollobas.

14
. JvN letter to Marina, December 16, 1946.

15
. Ibid.

16
. Letter from Marina to JvN, December 5, 1945.

17
. Letter from Klari and Marina to JvN, undated.

18
. Letter from Marina to Klari, August 28, 1945.

CHAPTER 3

1
. Kati Marton,
The Great Escape
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 152.

2
. Klara von Neumann,
A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass
, undated and unpublished manuscript. Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

3
. Silvan S. Schweber,
Einstein and Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius
(Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 16.

CHAPTER 4

1
. John von Neumann to Marina von Neumann, May 23, 1953, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

2
. Marina von Neumann to Robert Whitman, June 13, 1953, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

3
. Ibid.

4
. Marina von Neumann to Robert Whitman, September 3, 1953, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

5
. Priscilla J. McMillan,
The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York, Viking Penguin, 2005), 2–3.

6
. United States Atomic Energy Commission,
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board and Texts of Principal Documents and Letters
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 726.

7
. Ibid., 649–50, 656.

8
. John von Neumann to Marina von Neumann, October 28, 1954, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

9
. John von Neumann to Marina von Neumann, April 19, 1955, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

10
. John von Neumann to Marina von Neumann, May 13, 1955, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

11
. John von Neumann to Marina von Neumann, October 9, 1955, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

12
. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5

1
. Norman Macrae,
John von Neumann
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 377.

2
. John von Neumann,
The Computer and the Brain
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), xi.

3
. Father Anselm Strittmatter, “Allocution Pronounced at the Obsequies of Professor John von Neumann,” Chapel of Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, DC, February 11, 1957, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

4
. Interview with Jean O. Rainey for “A Few Good Women Oral History Collection” (Penn State University Archives), September 30, 2004.

5
. Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association,
Region with a Future: Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region
, vol. 3 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963).

6
. Office of the Coroner, County of San Diego, California, “Investigative Report CC# 1772–63,” November 10, 1963.

7
. Klara von Neumann Eckart,
A Grasshopper in Very Tall Grass
, undated and unpublished manuscript. Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

8
. “Dementia in the Second City,”
Time
, September 6, 1968.

CHAPTER 6

1
.
Nixon: A Presidency Revealed
, History Channel documentary, directed by David C. Taylor (first airing February 15, 2007), DVD.

2
. U.S. Department of State,
Foreign Relations, 1969–1976
, vol. III (summary), Foreign Economic Policy, 1969–72;
International Monetary Policy
, 1969–72, 1.

3
. Marina Whitman to Paul McCracken, memorandum, May 4, 1971, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

4
.
Economic Report of the President
, January 1972 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), 165–66.

5
. Paul Volcker and Toyoo Gyohten,
Changing Fortunes: The World's Money and the Threat to American Leadership
(New York: Times Publishers, 1992), 73.

6
. Ibid., 73.

7
. Marina Whitman to Paul McCracken, memorandum, August 27, 1971, Marina v.N. Whitman Personal Collection.

8
. C. Jackson Grayson Jr, with Louis Neeb,
Confessions of a Price Controller
(Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1974), 64.

9
. “The Economy: A Blurry Banner for Phase II,”
Time
, October 18, 1971, 15.

10
. Richard M. Nixon, “The Continuing Fight against Inflation,” radio and television address, October 7, 1971.

11
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, January 24, 1972, Conv. No. 654–1, tape subject log, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, National Archives and Records.

12
. Ibid.; Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, January 28, 1972, Conv. No. 659–1.

13
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 654–1; Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 659–1; Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, January 29, 1972, Conv. No. 660–8.

14
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 654–1; Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 660–8.

15
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 654–1.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 659–1; Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 660–8.

18
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 659–1.

19
. Richard Nixon recorded conversation with H. R. Haldeman, Conv. No. 660–8.

20
.
Boston Sunday Globe
, January 30, 1972.

21
.
Detroit News
, February 1, 1972.

22
. Richard F. Janssen, “Woman Nominated for First Time to Serve on President's Economic Advisers Council,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 31, 1972.