Martian's Daughter: A Memoir
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Corroborating Laura's doubts about whether he listened to me, the president announced a renewed price freeze on June 13. As Herb Stein recounted it, he and the president were discussing the pros and cons of a renewed freeze when Herb commented dubiously, “You can't step in the same river twice.” “Yes you can, if it's frozen,” the president shot back.44 The freeze was to last for sixty days, until new controls—Phase 4—could be put in place.
By mid-1973, inflationary pressures arising from a worldwide boom, a second devaluation of the dollar, and expansionary monetary and fiscal policies at home, along with weather-related crop failures abroad, combined to prevent the second price freeze from being as effective, even temporarily, as the first. In an interview shortly before I left the government in August, I gave my honest appraisal of the controls experiment, displaying “a highly ambivalent attitude toward the controls program.” The reporter wrote, “She makes no claim they have succeeded…in reducing the rate of inflation from what it would have been without any controls. But her ‘tentative’ judgment is that in a broader sense, the controls ‘have been helpful’ in fostering ‘a more favorable combination of inflation and real growth’…than would have occurred otherwise.”45
Along with the fading effectiveness of the wage-price controls, things were continuing to deteriorate on the international economic front, as the currency adjustments that had been implemented under the Smithsonian Agreement failed to have their desired effects. Although international discussions on the US proposals for international monetary reform were ongoing, little progress had been made when they were effectively overtaken by the economic turmoil created by the oil crisis instigated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1973. Instead, several agreements formalized what had already occurred in practice: the legitimization of floating and a major reduction in the role of gold. The world's major currencies have been operating under a system—or what many observers have called a nonsystem—of “managed floating” ever since.
On the trade side, US policy was heavily influenced by the urgency of curbing domestic inflation, particularly for food and farm products. But when the measures taken to restrain these prices included embargoes on exports of soybeans and several other commodities, our anti-inflation policies worked at cross-purposes to efforts to reduce our payments deficit by expanding exports. I summed up the complexities of the situation we faced: when you're trying to keep prices up at the farm and down at the supermarket, while holding down the burden on the taxpayer and encouraging farm exports, it's a tall order with built-in conflicts.46
Problems were also building in an entirely different trade policy arena, namely, our relations with Japan. Partly in response to the 1971 “Peterson Report” (the one in which my marginal comments brought Peterson and me face-to-face for the first time), which highlighted the decline of the United States' competitive position and the rise of Japan's, twice-yearly consultations between the CEA and our counterparts in Japan's Economic Planning Agency (EPA) had begun in the spring of 1972.
Although the bilateral discussions were invariably well mannered (and lightened by visits to the theater and other entertainments paid for out of our own pockets because the CEA didn't have an entertainment budget), an ongoing wrangle over the appropriate value for the yen dominated the discussions. The Japanese insistence on keeping it ridiculously low, along with their reluctance to open their economy to increased imports, was a major contributor, we argued, to the large and persistent imbalances in trade between our two countries: their surpluses and our deficits. When I led the US delegation to the third CEA-EPA meeting, in Tokyo, we continued to insist that the Japanese should allow the yen to rise further, while they countered that they had already permitted “more than enough” in that respect.
The lines were hardening. Herb Stein ended a memo to the president at about the time of the CEA-EPA meetings by saying “This developing animosity…is dangerous” and urging that we “describe our international economic policies in terms which emphasize our basic common interests and not in terms of a horse race where if we win they lose.”47 But a horse race it was, to the American public. When pollsters asked Americans whether they would prefer to see 4 percent annual growth in the United States and 6 percent in Japan or 3 percent in each country, a majority chose the latter, in defiance of economic logic.
Once, finding myself on a plane next to Congressman John Dingell—a personal friend and a strong supporter of the US auto industry—I protested to him that a restriction he was backing on imports of double-sided galvanized steel from Japan would be hard on American car makers, who couldn't get it at home. His reply was basically, “I don't care if it causes us some pain, as long as it hurts those so-and-sos more.” The United States was finding the adjustment from being the world's sole economic superpower to being in a competitive race with a rising challenger hard to swallow.
If the presence of a female high-level government official occasionally created awkwardness at home, that was nothing compared to the discomfort it caused our Japanese hosts. Having a woman as head of a delegation was unsettling enough, but the fact that from time to time my subordinates would openly argue a point with me was more than the strictly hierarchical Japanese could fathom.
While interacting with our group in discussions was difficult, entertaining us within their rigid protocols was well-nigh impossible. Courtesy required that the chief of a delegation be entertained more extravagantly than the other members, but the elaborate rituals of the geisha house hardly seemed appropriate in my case. So, while my male colleagues were being plied with drink and entertained by beautiful young women, I was struggling to stay awake through interminable hours of Kabuki theater, whose language and gestures were both unintelligible to me. Our hosts rounded up several female professors so I wouldn't be the only woman at official dinners, but the culture gap was epitomized by an elderly vice minister who, unable to contain himself, blurted out, “But what does your husband think of all this?”
The Japanese attitude toward women in high places had changed very little when, some twenty years later, I attended a meeting of Japan's Keidanren, the nation's most prestigious business association. My fellow guest was Sylvia Ostry, a high-level Canadian civil servant who had been her prime minister's “Sherpa,” or senior adviser, in the protracted Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations. Sylvia's brilliant mind and acid tongue were incongruously housed in a petite body, always swathed in the latest designer fashions. When we both had the temerity to argue with one of our hosts, he privately called us “pushy broads.” It was a label we repeated with smiles. With my mother's example always before me, I saw no contradiction in “pushy” and “feminine.”
Despite the fact that the performance of the American economy and our efforts to implement the administration's economic policy goals during the first half of 1973 gave me and my CEA colleagues plenty to be modest about, I managed to hang on to my optimism that I might help to promote a return of the United States to a position of world leadership, presenting a coherent view of an open world economy with maximum reliance on market forces. To me, such leadership was essential in the ongoing struggle for hearts and minds against Soviet communism; promoting it was my own way of carrying on the battle that my father had fought through his contributions to America's military supremacy. But I would soon be forced to face the fragility of these expectations, and my preoccupation with economic problems would seem more and more beside the point as I could no longer ignore the increasingly ominous rumblings of the earthquake that, when it exploded, would shake Washington, and the nation, to their very foundations.
The End of Innocence
My eyes opened wide as Bob and I, along with my two CEA colleagues and their spouses, walked into the elegant dining room tucked away in the northwest corner of the main floor of the White House and stood waiting to be joined for breakfast by the president and Mrs. Nixon. The state rooms of the White House were old hat to me by now, but I had never b
efore been inside the Family Dining Room, which was off limits to the public. With its silk draperies, crystal chandelier, Louis XVI green marble mantelpiece, and polished period furniture, the room looked far too formal for ordinary family meals (the Nixons generally ate in a smaller, more informal room in the second-floor family quarters) and was in fact used by the president for working lunches and small dinners.
The ostensible reason for the president's invitation was to bid farewell to Ezra Solomon, who was about to leave the CEA to return to Stanford. We all assumed that this would be a rather perfunctory affair and had mentally penciled it into our schedules for about forty-five minutes. Instead, we sat glued to our chairs for a full two hours; only Mrs. Nixon left earlier to keep another appointment. After some social pleasantries—it was Mrs. Nixon's birthday, and Bob and I presented her with the birthday cards our children had made for her, decorated with shamrocks in honor of St. Patrick's Day—the president asked the members of the council for their views on what steps the administration should take on the wage-price control program in view of the rapid increases in food prices that were occurring in the early months of 1973.
He quickly discovered the truth of the old adage “Ask a question of three economists, even three Republican economists, and you'll get three different answers.” Ezra favored another across-the-board freeze on wages and prices until at least the end of the year. Herb argued strongly that we should hold with Phase III. I was even more emphatic, insisting that there were serious dangers in a return to a freeze or similarly rigid controls program, which could cut off expansion and increase the chances of recession in 1974.1
Having exhausted that topic, the president embarked on one of the most remarkable monologues I have ever heard. For the better part of an hour, he expounded on the intricacies of global geopolitics, the position of the United States as the world's power balancer and peacekeeper, and the part his vision and policies would play in leading our country to fulfill that role. The brilliance and subtlety of his wide-ranging disquisition was as breathtaking as the arrogance that underpinned it. As the six of us listened spellbound, Nixon broke off and, switching gears, turned suddenly to my husband, the professor of English literature. “But as a teacher who deals with students, Professor Whitman,” he said, “you must know that you can't tell the American people the truth about what you're doing or they won't support you. You have to give them stories that will make them feel positive about what you're doing.”
There, right in front of our eyes, Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde; the brilliant master of geopolitics became the secretive, suspicious, paranoid Richard Nixon we came to know during the Watergate hearings and who ultimately brought about his own downfall and disgrace. Then the spell was broken, and the breakfast ended with the same sort of small talk with which it had begun.
The earthquake that ultimately buried the Nixon presidency had begun a year earlier, deep underground, with an apparently obscure burglary. At 2:30 in the morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into and attempting to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the Watergate, a hotel and office complex a mile or so from the White House. Two days later the Washington Post reported that one of the five was in charge of security for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, but often referred to, sarcastically, as CREEP). On that same day, John Mitchell, formerly President Nixon's attorney general, resigned as head of the CRP while denying any connection to the foiled effort of the so-called Watergate burglars.
I had followed these developments on the front pages of the Post, but, preoccupied with the challenges of the renewed price freeze and the pressures the members of the Volcker Group were feeling to come up with a proposal for international monetary reform, with giving speeches in New York and holding a press briefing on the Consumer Price Index in Washington, I paid them little attention—maybe I didn't want to think about the possible implications. In the months that followed, the Post reported that a check for twenty-five thousand dollars apparently intended for the Nixon campaign had turned up in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars, that John Mitchell had controlled a secret fund used to finance widespread intelligence-gathering operations against the Democrats while serving as attorney general, and that the FBI had identified the Watergate break-in as part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage associated with the Nixon reelection campaign.
Although, in hindsight, the pattern of malfeasance these developments pointed to seems painfully clear, at the time the possibility that they might affect my relationship with the president and my role in his administration didn't occur to me. When a journalist confronted me, much later, asking “Weren't you in denial?” I had to say that I honestly didn't know. Doesn't denial mean pushing something down from the conscious part of the brain to the subconscious? Apparently the American public didn't focus on those front page stories any more than I did; in November 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected with more than 60 percent of the vote, one of the largest landslides in American political history.
I felt the first vague, queasy pangs of discomfort sometime early in 1973. I was listening to John Ehrlichman, one of the president's two most senior aides, briefing newly elected Republican members of Congress. Among other things, these rookies asked for advice on how to respond to the awkward questions they were beginning to be asked about Watergate and some of the people around the president. The gist of Ehrlichman's answer was, “If you're asked, for example, about what Dwight Chapin (the president's appointments secretary) was doing during the early months of 1972, explain that he was very busy making preparations for the president's pathbreaking trip to China.”
This seemed to me like a weaselly answer, but none of the new legislators pursued it further. There were other comments of Ehrlichman's that sounded less than forthright, but I couldn't put my finger on anything specifically wrong. A year or so later I talked with Don Rumsfeld, who had become the US ambassador to NATO, about that Ehrlichman briefing, which both of us had attended. When I mentioned that it had made me vaguely uncomfortable, Don replied, “I had exactly the same reaction.” A few months after that briefing, Rumsfeld had been given the NATO appointment, which took him and his family to Brussels, far away from Washington and its swirling rumors.
Circumstantial evidence linking people close to the president to the Watergate break-in kept cropping up during the first few months of 1973. At the end of January, two former White House aides, G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, were among the seven who pled guilty and were convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping. All seven, it turned out, were directly or indirectly employees of the CRP.
Although rumors abounded, and the Washington Post and New York Times continued to shine a spotlight on the mysteries surrounding the Watergate break-in, all of those involved, with the exception of Mitchell, appeared to be fairly low-level operatives, involved with the campaign committee rather than with the administration itself. The discomfiture created by the Ehrlichman briefing had retreated to the back of my mind when another attack on my comfort level as a member of the Nixon administration came, not from rumors or press stories but from the president himself, at the breakfast in the Family Dining Room.
By that time, investigative stories on the Watergate break-in, written by the team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, had been appearing with increasing frequency in the Washington Post for several months. Gradually, through news and television photos, I began to recognize some of the handsome young faces I'd never been able to attach names to when we had lunch at the round “singles” table in the White House Mess: John Dean, Egil (Bud) Krogh, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Dwight Chapin. All had been high-level assistants or counsels to the president when we ate together, although by early 1973 Krogh had become undersecretary of transportation and Magruder had long since moved to the CRP as John Mitchell's deputy in the 1972 presidential campaign.
As the inexorable drumbeat of evidence linking the White House to the CRP, and th
rough it to the Watergate break-in, grew louder, it began to penetrate my resistant brain. One night in April, I sat bolt upright in bed and woke my husband, saying, “But what if the Washington Post is right?” “Well,” he replied sleepily, “if you really are having such treasonous thoughts, there's nothing for it but to resign.” With that, he returned to his interrupted dream, but I didn't get much sleep that night.
At about the same time, my secretary took a call from the office of H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff and one of the two men—the other being John Ehrlichman—closest to the president. The call was to scold me for a minor infraction of the rules: I had used a White House car and driver, which I was authorized to do only on work-related trips, to drive me some five blocks from the beauty shop to my office in the midst of a downpour—proving, once again, that “vanity, thy name is woman.” When the message was relayed to me, I grumbled to myself, “He's a fine one to talk; he's going to be in jail one of these days.”