Martian's Daughter: A Memoir
Page 19
I was astonished and angry to discover that the gender issue haunted our social, as well as my professional, life in Washington. Before I joined the CEA, I had encountered the separation of ladies and gentlemen after dinner only in the pages of nineteenth-century novels. But at my first official dinner, hosted by the European Union's ambassador in Washington in honor of the heads of Europe's most important central banks, I was dumbfounded when, following dessert, the ladies were invited to go upstairs to “powder their noses” while the gentlemen enjoyed brandy, cigars, and serious conversation in the living room. Even though I was one of the Nixon administration's most senior international economists, I found myself making small talk in an upstairs bedroom while my husband, the professor of English, listened to Arthur Burns, my old Columbia professor and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, discussing the relationships among the dollar, the mark, the franc, and the pound sterling with his European counterparts. The irony of the situation left me inwardly seething.
It was part of Washington lore that when Katharine Graham—owner of the Washington Post and a leading figure on President Nixon's “enemies list” for having stood firm on publishing the Pentagon Papers—found herself in a similar situation she simply rose from the table, called for her limousine, and went home. I knew I would never have the courage to do likewise. But, after that first humiliating experience, I did tell my secretary, when responding to such invitations, to ask directly whether it was the host's custom to separate men from women after dinner. If the answer was yes, she was to refuse the invitation and explain quite candidly why. So I never did get to dine at the British Embassy. Eventually, this antediluvian practice was abandoned. Mrs. Graham had won her battle, and I like to think that I was one of her foot soldiers.
By the time the Republican nominating convention was held in Miami in July of 1972, it was clear that the wage-price controls program, which was approaching the first anniversary of its announcement, would be a significant issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Those of us in the administration took every opportunity to give the president's program credit for the fact that the economy was expanding and the unemployment rate steadily declining, while overall inflation appeared to be on track to reach the “interim goal” of 2 to 3 percent by the end of the year. The Democrats, on the other hand, could highlight the continuing increase in food prices, which had a particularly powerful impact on family budgets. It was no surprise, therefore, that the three council members were invited to attend the Republican convention and brief various groups there, including state delegations and the party platform's drafting committee.
Because protests against Nixon's escalation of the Vietnam War were in full swing across the country, we expected some heightened security at the convention. But the atmosphere of our Miami Beach hotel was that of an armed camp surrounded by enemy troops. Soon after we arrived, having gone for a swim and a walk on the beach, it took considerable argument to persuade the pistol-packing guards to let us back into our hotel because we had forgotten to wear our identifying dog tags. The next morning our bus to the convention center in Miami, even with a police escort, had to plow through a sea of furious faces, shaking fists, hurled epithets, and worse; one angry young man with an ice pick tried to puncture our tire but was quickly hauled off by the police. The center itself had become a fortress, ringed by two concentric circles of buses ringed end to end, with no space in between (I wondered how Miami's bus commuters were getting to work that day). The anger out there was as palpable as the whiffs of tear gas that seeped into our bus, and later into the convention hall itself.
President Nixon's nomination was unchallenged and therefore a foregone conclusion, so almost the entire convention program consisted of speeches of self-congratulation and discussions of how most effectively to attack the other side. It all culminated in the circuslike atmosphere of a screaming audience of supporters, their voices amplified by the acoustics of an enormous arena, its ceiling covered with thousands of red, white, and blue balloons, which were released onto the heads of the crowd in the evening's finale. The fury of the protesters outside was matched, in words though not in actions, by the scurrilous nature of the remarks made inside by the Republican faithful about Democrats, both individually and collectively.
The tone of these comments was utterly alien to me, and the more I listened the more I squirmed. I was a registered Republican and part of a Republican administration, but my voting patterns had always reflected a fiercely cherished political independence, and there was no way that I could regard a group that included many of my close friends as enemies. Political opponents and adversaries, yes, enemies, no. I vowed that if I were ever again asked to participate in such an ugly partisan event, I would find a polite way to say no.
During the fall of 1972, while the administration's economic policy makers were highlighting progress toward the year-end goals of the Economic Stabilization Program in public, internally we were focused on figuring out what should follow Phase 2. The upshot of intense discussions and a wide range of views on the future of controls was an announcement that they would continue, though in a substantially altered form. Phase 2 would be terminated in January of 1973 and the Pay Board and Price Commission disbanded. The standards for price and pay increases would remain the same as under Phase 2, but, with the exception of a couple of key industries, compliance would now be largely voluntary and self-administered.
In both the 1973 Economic Report of the President and subsequent testimony before the Joint Economic Committee, the CEA stressed that the revised system “still…sets forth precise standards for wage and price behavior consistent with the goal of a lower rate of inflation, and it maintains the ability of Government to compel compliance where voluntary behavior would be inconsistent with that goal.”32 It soon became clear, though, that the shift from Phase 2 to Phase 3 was widely regarded as effective decontrol; one major newspaper headline read “NIXON SCRAPS CONTROLS.” It didn't take long for the inflation suppressed by the freeze and Phase 2 to burst forth, accelerated by the emergence of classic demand-pull inflation as expansionary monetary and fiscal policy propelled the economy toward its capacity limits.
The 1973 Economic Report also attracted attention to an issue entirely new to its pages: the economic role of women. The reactions of both the public and the members of the Joint Economic Committee were predictable. On the positive side, the chapter was praised for highlighting the important role women play in the American economy and for emphasizing that women work outside the home for the same reasons as men,33 thus laying to rest the persistent notion that they work only for “pin money.”34 On the negative side, we were chastised that the tone of the discussion was one of laying out facts rather than explicitly advocating change, and that it did not include policy recommendations. But, despite what it didn't cover, that chapter signified official recognition of American women's growing role outside, as well as inside, the home, making me less of an oddity.
The underlying message of that chapter in the Economic Report—that women's work and working women should be taken seriously—was to my mind both welcome and long overdue. The gender issue continued to haunt my own interactions with the press. It was one thing to be called, accurately, “the chief public defender of the [wage-price control] policy” by Time magazine;35 it was quite another to read in Business Week, “A Nixon aide admits that the White House has a special reason for assigning the most junior Council of Economic Advisers member, as its spokesman at more and more TV press conferences: ‘She's pretty.’”36 A similar comment came from one of the Nixon administration's bitterest enemies, Nicholas von Hoffman, who in one of his columns called me the “Zsa Zsa Gabor of Economics,” thereby casting aspersions on my qualifications, my Hungarian parentage, and my role in the administration, all in a single sentence.37
The women of the Washington press corps also saw me as a symbol, both of women's aspirations and of the difficulties they encountered on the road to fulfilling them. At
that time, female reporters were excluded from the annual White House correspondents' dinner, a high-profile affair attended by the president and other top-ranking officials. When Eileen Shanahan, an economics reporter for the New York Times and a pioneering fighter for equal rights for female newswomen, asked me to send a signal by refusing my invitation to the dinner, I didn't hesitate. Some years later she and her women colleagues were finally invited.
The drumbeat of references to my gender threatened to undermine my right to be taken seriously, a matter about which I had qualms from time to time in any case. It should have been reassuring to read in Parade magazine, “This wise young woman probably has more impact on American life than any other woman in or out of government.”38 On the other hand, when an article in Good Housekeeping asked the children of well-known women in various fields “What Does Mommy Do?” my eight-year-old daughter Laura replied, “She helps the President decide things—like if prices should go up or down—but I wonder if the President pays attention to her.”39 I often wondered too.
There was no doubt, though, that my job came with all kinds of extracurricular benefits for the four Whitmans, and, as I kept discovering them, I felt like a birthday child opening one surprise package after another. One of the perks was the right to request seats in the president's boxes at the Kennedy Center when they were available. This meant that we could attend concerts and plays at Washington's leading cultural venue not only without paying for tickets but in the very best seats in the house and with champagne always available from a small refrigerator in the anteroom.
Part of the fun was finding out when we arrived who else was sharing the box. Once, when we happened to take Malcolm along, he found himself seated next to Henry Kissinger, who, in his pompous but totally authoritative way, gave the mesmerized thirteen-year-old a glimpse into the world of geopolitics, as seen by its master. Years later I was reminded of Kissinger's monologue when I sat next to his brother Walter, a successful investment banker, at dinner. He and Henry, only a year older, had come to the United States at the same time. Why then, I asked him, did he speak unaccented English, while Henry still sounded as if he had just landed on our shores? “Well,” Walter replied, “I'm the Kissinger who listens.”
We could also sign up to spend a weekend or a week at one of several resort areas, originally built by various presidents as retreats where they could get away from the pressures of Washington but no longer used that way. One of these was Camp Hoover, the precursor of the current and more famous presidential retreat, Camp David. The camp in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains included miles of hiking trails amid magnificent scenery and was bifurcated by the clear, fast-flowing Rapidan River, famed for its abundance of trout. Neither Bob nor I had any interest in fishing, but we and the children reveled in the simple but comfortable lodgings, the deep woods, and the clear mountain air. The kids, who saw little enough of me during the work week in Washington, could have the undivided attention of both their parents as we spent uninterrupted weekends together.
The other government-owned facility available for our rare family vacations was a cottage high above Trunk Bay on the island of St. John in the American Virgin Islands. The cottage was simple enough, with two bedrooms, a living-dining room, and a large screened porch, But Trunk Bay, a two-minute walk down the hill, is possibly the most beautiful body of water surrounding the islands—a clear blue-green, bordered by a sparkling sand beach and with no other human beings visible where we sunned and swam. St. John could be reached only by small boat from neighboring St. Thomas, where we had to do our marketing for the week, since the only provisions available once we reached the cottage were the rudimentary offerings of a tiny store serving a nearby campground. We kept meals as simple as possible but delighted in an environment where the rum cost less than the Coca-Cola, and anyway tasted best when sipped from a coconut into which an entry hole had been pounded by a hammer and a large nail.
Sadly, neither the Trunk Bay cottage nor Camp Hoover is any longer available as a retreat for government officials or anyone else; both have been permanently closed, although Camp Hoover has been designated a National Historic Landmark and can be visited on day trips by tourists.
Bob, Malcolm, and Laura thoroughly enjoyed sharing in these once in a lifetime experiences that went along with my job. We all saw them for just what they were, though, experiences to be savored and remembered but never confused with our normal way of life, the one we would return to once my stint at the CEA was over. And these interludes could never completely overcome the nagging pangs of guilt I felt because the routine of everyday life in Washington posed more difficulties than glamour for the three of them.
Cut off from daily interaction with his colleagues, Bob had to contend with intellectual isolation as he worked on the draft of his book on Shaw, and I was too tired by the time I came home to serve as his educated layman critic, a role each of us normally served by reading and commenting on the other's writings. He also had to put up with silly questions at parties. “People are always asking Bob and me if we've exchanged doctorates,” I once said in exasperation, “as if God had decreed that women be interested exclusively in literature and men in economics.”40 At least I recognized and appreciated the strength of character that underlay our lifetime partnership. Obviously you have to be a strong person with a strong sense of yourself to put up with me, I told people curious about our relationship.41
Bob never expressed any concern about my behavior with any of the many men I worked and traveled with. His faith in my fidelity, which I took as another demonstration of his confidence in himself and our relationship, was entirely justified, but I did occasionally have to extricate myself from a potentially sticky situation. I remember in particular a wrestling match in the back of a Paris taxicab with a brilliant, usually delightful but thoroughly inebriated older man, a high official of the International Monetary Fund and a respected colleague in many international meetings. I never felt any threat to my personal safety, and the episode ended uneventfully. But I was thoroughly annoyed when, as inevitably occurred after such encounters, I ran into him the next morning, sober, embarrassed, and contrite, and it fell to me to reassure him that his behavior wouldn't stand in the way of our continuing to work together.
Because I was at work during most of their waking hours, Bob had to take on most of the responsibility for Malcolm and Laura's physical and emotional well-being; my half of our parenting partnership was definitely not pulling her oar. Bob had always been an engaged father, but now his efforts to go the extra mile sometimes took amusing turns. One hot July 9, his birthday, I was at a meeting in Paris and Malcolm was off at summer camp. Alone with Laura, he told her she could choose the location for his birthday dinner. I wonder how many fathers have celebrated their birthdays eating hamburgers with their eight-year-olds at Roy Rogers? I tried to make it up to him by bringing back a particularly elegant and outrageously expensive bottle of cognac from Paris as a birthday present.
Both of the children had to contend with having been uprooted more or less at a moment's notice and adjusting to a new school and new friends in the middle of the school year. For Laura, whose sunny disposition inclined her toward a generally cheerful view of the world, settling into her new school wasn't hard. She was, in fact, delighted with her child-friendly fourth-grade teacher and the inviting classroom, filled with lofts and nooks for reading or collaborating on projects, which he had built himself.
But for Malcolm, a serious, somewhat withdrawn loner who was wrestling with the stresses of early adolescence, having to adjust to a sudden shift from one environment to a totally different one for the third time in eighteen months was traumatic, much as my unexpected transfer from my mother's household to my father's, as stipulated by my parents' divorce agreement, had been when I was his age. We should have sensed what he was going through when his grades dropped from A to C and he came home from school nearly every afternoon gray in the face from a pounding headache. But, although we had him th
oroughly checked for any physical cause of his symptoms, the notion that he might be suffering from what would now be called childhood depression never occurred to us. Many years later he told us that had been the unhappiest year of his life, and I still kick myself that we did not alleviate his misery by at least understanding what he was going through. From Malcolm's perspective, the balance between work and family life had been badly upset.
My second year at the council began promisingly enough. On January 27, the peace agreement that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the representative of North Vietnam, had hammered out in Paris the preceding October was finally signed by all parties to the conflict. Although it did not bring about the “peace with honor” that Nixon had promised when he was first elected, it did end the United States' active participation in a war that by then had become almost universally unpopular.
On matters closer to home, the 1973 Economic Report of the President could still strike hopeful notes on the progress of the Economic Stabilization Program, the discussions of US proposals for international monetary reform, and the preparations for a new round of multilateral trade negotiations scheduled to begin in the fall of 1973. We warned, though, that further progress on inflation would require restraint in monetary and fiscal policy, in order to keep the nation's rapid economic expansion from exploding into a price-raising boom. The overall tone of the report, said Time, “could best be characterized as soberly glowing.”42
Things went downhill rather quickly on the economic front after that. We knew, and said publicly, that inflation control would be harder in 1973 than it was in 1972, because expansion was taking the economy closer to its capacity limits, and inflation did indeed speed up. I continued to explain bravely why we expected it to slow down substantially later in the year, but by the beginning of June, Democrats in Congress were beginning to clamor for the reimposition of a price freeze.43 The president had been listening to arguments, both pro and con, since mid-March. I had thought that the antifreeze side was winning; on June 4 I earnestly told the Journal of Commerce, “I have no doubt a freeze would be popular, at least in the beginning, but possibly it would be counterproductive in the long run…a freeze is not being actively considered.”