Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  Even worse, I ran into the chairman of the math department, a renowned mathematician named Garrett Birkhoff, who was both a coauthor with and a sometime adversary of my father in the world of higher mathematics. Making what he thought was pleasant conversation, he commented, “Well, Marina, I'm glad to see that you've upheld the family tradition by getting an A in calculus.” I smiled and said nothing but thought, “Good Lord, what would happen to the family honor if I ever got an A—?” I vowed not to risk it, and that chance encounter ended my formal study of mathematics on the spot. Although I eventually worked my way through a book on mathematics for economists while giving my firstborn his late-night bottle, and informally audited a math course or two after beginning my own teaching career, I remain surely the most mathematically illiterate economist of my generation.

  Even though my father may have, indirectly and unwittingly, truncated my education in this particular direction, he continued to contribute to it in others by the intellectual dialogues he carried on with me in his letters. In one he responded at length to a question in my previous letter to him about whether the indeterminacy at the heart of the quantum mechanics description of reality supported the idea that human beings do have free will, and that we must therefore take responsibility for the decisions we make. He had clearly thought long and hard about the question, and had changed his mind about the answer somewhere along the way.

  I did work on causality, free will and quantum mechanics in 1927 and thereafter, up to about 1931. I belonged—and still belong—to the “extreme” denomination who think that quantum mechanics points the moral that the laws of nature are not strict, but in most cases only prescribe the probabilities for otherwise “free” events. At that time I also thought—which I don't think now—that human “free” will may be due to such causes. What I now think is that the quantum mechanical indeterminacy may affect some physiological matters, e.g., a lot in genetics and most in mutations, but not necessarily “free” will. I would be more inclined to think that the “freedom” of will, at any rate as experienced, is a subjective illusion, which means primarily that we are not conscious of the sources of our decisions…I think that W. James pointed out that the Great Unknown, that we feel so often so close to us, and to which we are inclined to attribute such esoteric significance, may be nothing more than our own subconscious. That would make it very physiological, non-wonderful and home made.

  The letter concludes with typical self-deprecatory skepticism: “Such is life. Of course it may well be that it is not such. Much love, Daddy.”1 Along with my expensive Harvard education, I continued to receive a complementary one for free.

  Once Bob Whitman and I had accidentally found each other, we got together nearly every day. That meant I had to make sharp choices about how I spent my time. Three major occupations vied for my dorm mates' waking hours: studying hard enough to get good grades, going out on frequent dates, and joining the endless games of bridge that went on day and night in the small kitchens on each floor of our dormitory. I figured I could successfully pursue only two of the three, so I foreswore bridge.

  I managed to handle the two balls I had chosen to keep in the air pretty well. In a letter I wrote to Bob after the end of my first exam period, I enthused, “I got two A's and two A—'s, which all goes to prove that it is not study but inspiration (yours) which does the trick, and I shall make it a practice for the rest of my academic career to go out every night of exam period.”2 I did have some awkward stumbles, though. Right at the beginning of our freshman year, a friend and I met with the director of volunteers at Mt. Auburn Hospital to offer our services; I had been a candy striper, as junior volunteers were called, at Princeton Hospital and had thoroughly enjoyed it. But our schedules soon overwhelmed us, and we never returned to follow up. It was only after I had been dating Bob for a while that it dawned on me that the elegant, white-haired Mrs. Whitman to whom I had made an unfulfilled promise at Mt. Auburn was his mother.

  As Bob and I got to know each other better, my conviction that I had been right in that first snap judgment about him grew firmer. He treated me as an intellectual equal—for once, I didn't have to try to downplay my bluestocking tendencies—and, at the same time, showed a sensitive appreciation for the gap in life experience created by the ten-year difference in our ages. I appreciated his positive reaction, promising to encourage and support me in whatever career I chose, when I voiced my own ambitions, which had put off more than one prospective swain in the past. And, unlike some of the other young men I met, he was in no way influenced by my father's fame, which was particularly notable in the Harvard environment. When he chanced to introduce me to a friend in the math department, the immediate response was “Not the von Neumann?” When I responded with a modest nod, Bob's silent reaction was “Who on earth is this von Neumann?” His puzzlement must have showed, because the friend quickly launched into a brief biography.

  Bob cemented his romantic stature in my eyes with all kinds of gestures during that first year. To celebrate my eighteenth birthday, he single-handedly mounted a perfect dinner for ten, complete with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding; the only store-bought item was the cake. To this day, he is the chief cook when we entertain, although he leaves the baking to me.

  After taking me to a production of Der Rosenkavalier, Bob presented me with a lovely silver pin in the shape of a rose. I admired its beauty but failed to recognize its significance as a proposal, despite the fact that, in the gloriously romantic poem that accompanied it, he referred to it as a symbol of “The multifoliate roses of our love,” writing, “It's just to mark the passage of a year / Since I became your Rosenkavalier.” A couple of years later, while we were planning our engagement party, I mockingly complained that he had never formally proposed to me. Appalled that I had missed the point of his gift, he insisted that I read the libretto of Richard Strauss's opera. How could I have been so dense?

  Much more significant than dinners and jewelry was the powerful emotional support Bob gave me through a variety of crises, physical and emotional. When I totaled my car in a frightening accident on the overcrowded Merritt Parkway during an Easter Sunday return from Princeton to Cambridge, with five classmates along, it was Bob who insisted that I “get right back on the horse” by getting behind the wheel of his own car the next day. And when he realized how much my father's pressure on me to get stellar grades weighed on my self-confidence, he took it upon himself to write a letter to a formidable figure he had never met. In it, he urged my father to stop putting pressure on me to excel academically, telling him that I was already putting quite enough pressure on myself. It was this unstinting offer of emotional support, from the very beginning of our relationship, that underpinned me every step of the way as an adult, enabling me to take the chances and make the decisions without which my career could never have taken the path that it did.

  Despite my immediate conviction that Bob was the man I wanted to spend my life with, seventeen seemed a bit early to commit myself to an exclusive relationship. The shy, quiet Princeton student who escorted me at the white-tie-and-tails Debutante Assembly and New Year's Ball, an elegant if anachronistic New York ceremony I participated in mainly to please my mother, visited Cambridge at my invitation. But, in the course of that weekend, I managed to maneuver him back-to-back with Bob to assure myself that the sweater I had been endlessly knitting for this first steady boyfriend could be successfully transferred to my new love interest. In another brief relationship, I found myself helping a student at the Harvard Business School finish up his case analyses—always due on Saturday evening—in time for us to go out. The fact that I could participate successfully, if clandestinely, in one of the most dreaded assignments in an MBA program that women were not allowed to enter nourished my growing awareness that arbitrary barriers based on gender were ripe for breaking, and that I just might have what it took to do it.

  Two of my three college summers were spent at my mother's new home, the Villa Francesca in the quai
nt village of Old Field on Long Island. It was a turn of the century mansion overlooking Long Island Sound, designed and built by William de Leftwich Dodge, an American impressionist painter and one of the artists who had decorated the interior of the Library of Congress. Inside its dour gray stone exterior were a living room fireplace and mantel imported from France and one in the dining room brought over from Spain, with ersatz plaster columns painted to match, ornate ceilings painted by the artist-owner himself, and faithful replicas of Greek caryatids holding up the side balconies. The house nicely reflected my mother's flamboyant side; the real estate broker had shown it to my stepfather only after he mentioned that his wife was a “crazy Hungarian.”

  They were able to pick up the house at a fire-sale price, partly because it was so eccentric but also because the bank that had attempted to repossess it when the owners failed to make mortgage payments was desperate to unload it. Those owners, former circus performers, had bought the house with a fortune acquired by making and selling fake French perfume during World War II. Once the real thing became available again, their business collapsed. After selling off everything in the house that wasn't nailed down, including a little Italian statue that topped the mosaic fountain on the sun porch, they stubbornly resisted the bank's efforts to evict them by holding off any possible purchaser with a shotgun. Undaunted, my mother somehow penetrated the firearm barrier and made a deal: the besieged owners would vacate the house in return for cash equivalent to three months' rent on a New York apartment and a promise never to reveal their whereabouts to the many creditors who would surely come looking for them. With that, the derelict mansion was ours, and my mother wasted no time restoring it to its former elegance, although the fountain's statue was never replaced.

  I spent a lot of time during these summers swimming, sailing, playing tennis, and partying, trying to ignore the fact that, in all of these activities, my brother's talents cast my own lack of them into sharp relief. By the time George reached adolescence, he was already a first-class sailor, horseback rider, dancer, and tennis player and, at the age of sixteen, manager of the major horse show that took place annually just down the hill from our house. I, on the other hand, was famously clumsy. My family never let me forget the time that Desmond put me in charge of tying our boat up as he docked it. I jumped nimbly ashore and tied the ship's line neatly to the metal cleat provided for the purpose, only to discover that I had neglected to tie the other end to the boat, which was drifting steadily away from the dock. And my “clumsy cow” view of myself was reinforced by my mother's shout from the top of the bleachers, “Get the lead out of your ass,” when I missed a shot during a local tennis tournament. She meant to spur me on to do better, but she had a laserlike capacity to hone in on the gaps in my self-confidence and didn't seem to recognize how much such public humiliation hurt.

  By the time of these humiliations, I had ceded the field to George in the athletic and social arenas, while regularly besting him in academic performance. It was only as adults, each with our own successful and rewarding career, that we became close friends and mutual supporters and could commiserate with each other on the way in which our parents—that is, our mother and my stepfather—had unwittingly made each of us feel inferior to the other. The sense of personal inadequacy that has dogged each of us throughout our lives, the feeling that we have failed to live up to their expectations, was surely implanted by the messages, spoken and unspoken, that pervaded our growing-up years.

  A quite different humiliation was caused not by my mother's outspokenness but by her irresistible charm. As I came downstairs to greet Paul, the wealthy, debonair Frenchman I went out with a few times one summer, I surprised him trying to make out on the sofa with my still glamorous mother. She was resisting valiantly, but the scene was too much for me, and that was our last date. As a wedding present when I married Bob, Paul sent a set of very expensive French crystal sherry glasses. They're meant to wipe out his guilt, I explained to Bob.

  I had a real job during those Long Island summers. I earned my first paycheck—forty dollars per week—working as a summer replacement at a weekly newspaper in Huntington called the Long Islander, whose major claim to fame was that it had been founded by Walt Whitman. Because my job was to fill in for whoever happened to be on vacation, I got a taste of every aspect of the newspaper business, from writing up wedding announcements to taking classified ads over the phone. Once or twice I was even allowed to write an editorial, which I did with my fingers crossed behind my back, since the editor-publisher's views were a lot more conservative than my own.

  Mostly, though, I was a reporter, and it was in that capacity that I discovered my enthusiasm for journalism as a profession. The accounts I gave in my almost daily letters to Bob sounded a bit jaded: “I get to write up such fascinating items—weddings, silver weddings, golden weddings (my God, what a rut), Lion's Club elections, old men honored after 179 years with the Podunk Manure Co., etc. Also such fascinating meetings as that of the stockholders of the Hotel Huntington Corporation, which lasted 2 ½ hours and was all Greek to me. I wrote it up under the theory that no one else understood it either so it didn't matter if I mixed up par and market value.” (Luckily, by the time I became an economist, presidential adviser, and corporate director I had learned the difference.) But in the next sentence I wrote, “In all seriousness, I'm having lots of fun.”3

  Somewhat later I wrote, “I also find myself police reporter, which is one helluva job. I know the inside of every police station for miles around, the life history, tastes and ‘line’ of every cop, and drew a rather caustic comment from the Judge yesterday when I fell asleep in the jury box [where reporters were allowed to sit during nonjury trials] in Justice Court yesterday.”4

  Beneath the mock insouciance of a would-be sophisticate, the enthusiasm of a young woman thoroughly enjoying her varied perspectives on the everyday world comes through. And I actually admitted to being impressed, not to say frightened, when I found myself peering down the barrel of a shotgun wielded by an angry landowner, who was not at all pleased by my effort to write an investigative story on his employment, and mistreatment, of the itinerant farmworkers who tended his cucumbers.

  Bob visited as frequently as he could during those Old Field summers and fitted in easily with my family—Mother, Desmond, and George. That meant a lot to me, since the three of them had made subtle but merciless fun of earlier boyfriends who, in their view, did not measure up. Bob's visit to my father's home in Princeton was a different matter. Once we had settled into what promised to be a long-term relationship, we both felt that Bob should get acquainted with the other side of my family as well. It was a visit that he looked forward to with real apprehension, partly because of my father's renown and even more because he knew how much I yearned for paternal approval.

  In preparation for the visit, Bob went to the Widener Library to look up some of my father's writings. Among the many impenetrable mathematical titles, one offered a ray of hope: The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Encouraged by the fact that he was pretty good at both bridge and poker, Bob started to read. With some effort, he told me later, he got all the way to page fifteen before a thicket of equations stopped him.

  When we got to Princeton, my father must have sensed how tense Bob was and did his best to put him at ease. He offered to show Bob the computer he had built at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Bob, curious to see this revolutionary machine, agreed enthusiastically. Once they got to the building, however, my father pulled out a large ring of keys, muttering as he went through it, “Here's the key to my office at Los Alamos, and here's the one to our house in Budapest.” He was unable to locate the proper key on that ring, however, and Bob never did get to see the construction of vacuum tubes that marked the dawn of the computer age. But my father was a gracious and amusing host throughout the weekend; Bob relaxed, and I sensed that the two had gotten along much better than I had feared.

  While I was absorbed in my busy but shelter
ed college life, my father was caught up in a whirlwind at the center of which was Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, who, as head of the Manhattan Project, had successfully led his team to victory in the race against Germany to produce an atomic bomb, was enjoying the adulation of a grateful nation. In 1947, he had become both the director of the IAS and chairman of the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), “the group which, more than any other, made the government's decisions about atomic weapons.”5 But, in the process, he had made two mortal enemies: Edward Teller and Admiral Lewis Strauss. Both men were strong proponents of building a hydrogen bomb (also known as the H-bomb), which Oppenheimer was known to oppose. But both had personal reasons for wanting to bring him down as well. Teller felt that Oppenheimer had never given sufficient recognition to his, Teller's, role in Los Alamos's success, and Strauss had never forgotten that he had been made to look foolish by Oppenheimer in the course of a 1949 government hearing.

  While the nation was glued to its television sets in 1954, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings that ended Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt, another drama was being played out behind closed doors. That was a hearing on whether Oppenheimer should be stripped of his security clearance, which was essential to his participation in any matters related to national security. In fact, Lewis Strauss had been working behind the scenes for some time to bring Oppenheimer down. Strauss, a retired navy admiral, wealthy businessman and banker, and confidant of President Eisenhower, who made him his White House adviser on atomic energy shortly after his own election, had quietly arranged Oppenheimer's ouster from the chairmanship of the GAC when his term was up in 1952. But the following year when Strauss, now chairman of the AEC, threatened to have him stripped of his security clearance, Oppenheimer refused to acquiesce without a fight. The result was a hearing before a three-person personnel security board, whose members were selected by Strauss himself.