Balancing my successes and my failures, I left the CEA feeling that I had used my economic expertise as best I could to promote policy choices that would enhance the nation's economic welfare. Once again, I wished that my father could know not simply that I had become a professional success but that, like him, I had to the best of my ability put my mind and my training to use in helping shape our nation's policies, and that my contributions had been recognized in a glowing letter from the president himself. The goals John von Neumann and I supported—the military might of the United States in his case and the effectiveness of the country's economic policies in mine—were controversial, attracting both admiration and criticism. But his commitment to American leadership in global affairs, combined with the ambition to be personally involved, had both been passed on to his only child.
A more direct link with my father's past came from a totally unexpected source. A month after I had left the CEA, the president announced the appointment of my successor, William Fellner, recently retired from the Sterling Professorship of Economics at Yale. According to The Economist, “Mr. Fellner…would not claim to be as pretty or as young (he is 68) as Mrs. Marina Whitman, who has gone back to the University of Pittsburgh and whose place he takes. But he is an academic economist of such distinction…[that] [o]bservers of the Council, who have feared that it was becoming too involved in the political hurly-burly welcome Mr. Fellner's willingness to serve.”10
The same article noted, “Mr. Fellner, who was born in Hungary, has a belief in free markets which accords with President Nixon's philosophy, if not his practice.” What it did not mention, and was doubtless unaware of, was that Willi Fellner had been a close friend of my father's during their high-school days in Budapest, a friendship that ended only with my father's death. That my father's lifelong friend should become his daughter's successor at the CEA gave me, once again, a strong sense of continuity with my family's history.
The angel voices that Senator Sparkman had heard so clearly on my departure from the CEA were muted by the time I returned to Pittsburgh. “Sure enough, there behind the dirty windows of room 416 sits the only woman ever to have served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers,”11 wrote a surprised reporter shortly after I had traded in the spacious elegance of my EOB office for my cramped, dingy academic quarters back in Pittsburgh. Some things had changed, though: I now had a fancy title and higher salary, and the Whitmans had a new house, the old one having been so trashed by tenants that I said to Bob, “It'll be easier to sell it than to clean it up.”
Above all, the high visibility I had acquired in Washington followed me home. I was in constant demand for interviews and speeches and became the poster girl for a New York Times article on a new phenomenon: husbands who were willing to become “trailing spouses,” moving temporarily or permanently away from their own jobs in the interest of their wives' careers.12 But old customs weren't quite keeping up with the realities of change. When the Pittsburgh Jaycees chose me as one of their fifteen outstanding citizens for 1976, I was hailed as “Man of the Year” in the finance category.13
While I was settling into my new role as a local celebrity, the slow torture of Watergate's unraveling was eclipsing everything else that was going on in Washington and the country. Along with millions of my fellow citizens, I followed the drama day by day, on television and in the press: the windup of the televised Senate hearings; the appointment of a special prosecutor for Watergate, Archibald Cox; and his refusal to obey the president's order, which cited executive privilege, to drop the subpoena for the Watergate tapes. Cox's refusal was followed by the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when Nixon forced Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to resign because they refused to fire Cox. After Cox was finally dismissed by Solicitor General Robert Bork, demands for the president's impeachment became widespread, and he felt compelled to declare publicly, “I am not a crook.” A new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was appointed, and the struggle to obtain the tapes continued.
Meanwhile, seven individuals, including the president's highest-ranking aides, had been indicted by a grand jury that secretly named Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator. Finally, on July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the president to hand over the tapes to Jaworski; he complied a few days later. Back in Pittsburgh, I thanked heaven that I was there and not still at the center of the maelstrom.
By the time Richard Nixon, under imminent threat of impeachment by the House and removal from office by the Senate, announced his resignation on August 8, the four Whitmans were on a family vacation in Europe. My mother, who had been appalled that we would go abroad when our own country was in such a state of turmoil, nevertheless put us in touch with a courtly, Old World, Viennese friend from her youth. As he was showing us around his enchanting city, he expressed considerable puzzlement at the Nixon resignation. Why, he asked, hadn't the president simply called out the National Guard and thrown the legislators in jail?
I despaired of explaining the workings of the American democratic process to a monarchist who longed for the restoration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His view of the world, I realized, like that of my parents, had been formed by the turbulence that Europe had endured during and between two world wars. Their response had been a wholehearted embrace of the United States and its form of government, whereas he saw a return to monarchy as the best path to peace and order. I tried to persuade him that the very orderliness of the transition from Nixon to Gerald Ford had shown democracy at its best.
From Vienna, we braved the Iron Curtain to get to Budapest, so we could introduce our children to the birthplace of their maternal grandparents. Even though it was blanketed with the grayness of Soviet communism, Budapest was a beautiful city, and the Hungarians we met were impressively entrepreneurial; the ladies managed to afford their Chanel knockoff suits by working two or three jobs. Again, I wondered how my father, the anticommunist superhawk, would have reacted to what his birthplace had become. Would he have nodded with grim recognition at the restricted existence he had predicted would befall those who came under communist rule? Or would he have been heartened that, as he once put it, the Hungarian ability to go through a revolving door behind you but come out first had managed to survive?
While I was in Budapest, I learned that the new president, Gerald Ford, had chosen Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. I had gotten to know Rockefeller the previous November when, as governor of New York and at the president's request, he had established a National Commission on Critical Choices for Americans and appointed me as one of its members. Assigned to the panel on Energy and Its Relationship to Ecology, Economics, and World Stability, I had found myself in continuous disagreement with Edward Teller, another of my father's childhood friends and famous, or infamous, as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller had argued strongly for making nuclear energy the focus of a national energy program; I had held out just as strongly against putting all our eggs in that particular basket. In the end, it made no difference; the commission's work was halted in midstream when its founder became vice president, and its conclusions were relegated to oblivion, as so often happens, by the changing of the guard in Washington.
With the departure of President Nixon and the inauguration of President Ford, the Watergate drama appeared to have come to a close. But of course it hadn't. Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was widely believed to have cost him election to a full term in 1976, Nixon spent the rest of his life trying to rehabilitate himself as an elder statesman, and the men who went to jail for their roles in the Watergate burglary or its cover-up had their lives forever changed. And a hardening of the lines that began with Watergate, in the attitudes of the public toward government, of members of the three branches of government toward each other, and of decision makers on one side of the political aisle toward those on the opposite side, still shapes the policy-making environment, more brutally today than ever before.
For me personally, the den
ouement came nearly twenty years later. The two rookie investigative reporters who blew the Watergate cover-up wide open, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, reported to the young deputy metropolitan editor of the Washington Post (the Post initially treated Watergate as a local rather than a national story), whose job it was to try to make sure that their reports were accurate. By 1992 that young editor, Leonard Downie, had become the executive editor of the Post and, of much greater importance to Bob and me, the father of the groom at our daughter's wedding. Laura Whitman and David Downie had met as undergraduates at Duke University and, totally unaware of this history, fell in love and married. The result is that we share with Len Downie two absolutely perfect grandchildren.
The change in my own status carried no such drama. It did give me, though, a very different perspective on my professional role; I could now talk about the Nixon administration's economic policies without the constraints on expressing doubts or disagreements imposed by being a member of that team. I believe firmly that you can be an inside adviser or an outside critic, but you can't be both at the same time. This truth is hard for academics to accept, especially in light of the special license that society has given us to speak out freely on any subject without being concerned about the impact on the institution of which we are a part. But academic freedom is only for academics. I had seen several of my colleagues, people of great intelligence and personal integrity, ignore this trade-off when they went into business or government and then be surprised when their internal effectiveness was drastically undermined—generally to the point that they either quit or were fired.
My thoughts along these lines made me recognize a contradiction inherent in the very existence of the CEA, a hard truth that had lain buried under the frenzy of day-to-day activity. It was spelled out in a comment by Professor Carl Christ, one of several well-known economists who had written critical reviews of the CEA's 1973 Economic Report of the President in the American Economic Review: “[T]he report is inherently ‘a somewhat schizoid document.’ It is intended to serve two purposes that are not entirely compatible—first to function as an apology for or celebration of the President's economic program, and second, to constitute a professional job of economic analysis and policy recommendation.”14 Every CEA, both before and since the one I served on, has been confronted with this dilemma without fully resolving it. And I wasn't the only member of that body, I'm sure, who felt twinges of discomfort when the two purposes came into conflict with each other.
Now that I was an outsider, I was filled with a missionary's zeal to explain to as many people as possible the realities of economic policy making as I had come to know them in the trenches. I pushed my audiences to understand the complexities of these issues, and to think about them from the perspective of the nation's long-run economic welfare, rather than focusing only on particular interests and immediate effects. I also used these speaking and writing opportunities as a way of forcing myself to reflect on what contributions I had made to the formation of good economic policy, and what I had learned from the experience.
I had taken away a hard-won realism about economic policies and those who formulate them, lessons I boiled down to three points. One was that you don't bring about enormous changes in policy. If you move things two degrees in one direction or another, that's a pretty big accomplishment. Also, in a job like mine, where your only output is advice and analysis, when a decision goes your way you can never be sure how heavily your input was weighted. And, finally, you discover that a lot of your achievements are negative. You go home at night feeling really great that you prevented something bad from happening.15 The young girl who had dreamed of changing the world had become a woman who recognized both the opportunities and the limitations of the profession she had chosen.
Underpinning this modest assessment was my core belief about how decisions are made in a democracy: there is no such thing as a free lunch, and there are no easy answers to hard questions. And, in a society striving to achieve multiple and often mutually contradictory targets, the role of the economist is to spell out the choices available and the nature of the trade-offs, leaving it to the political process to select among them and determine what the ultimate compromise is to be.16
One offshoot of my high visibility at the CEA was that I began to be offered honorary degrees by colleges and universities, eventually becoming an honoree at more than twenty commencement ceremonies. These events held a special significance for me. Never having anticipated this sort of recognition, I wore with pride my father's plain, black, moth-eaten wool academic robe, until Bob gave me for my birthday the more colorful, less sweltering, sky-blue gown that identified my Columbia PhD. But, whatever the color of the gown, each of these occasions brought back memories of the many times my father had worn the one I had inherited from him at some of the world's most prestigious universities on several continents. When I was asked to give the commencement address, along with receiving an honorary degree, I tried especially hard to make the messages that I delivered, along with the fact that I was being so honored, worthy of his approval—an approbation I craved even long after he was dead.
The opportunity to air economic issues before an audience larger than I'd ever dreamed of came in 1978, some five years after I left the CEA, when I was invited to host a series of hour-long television programs to be distributed through the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network. My first reaction was one of open-mouthed astonishment: “you're asking me to become a TV personality?” I replied in disbelief. Despite the incongruity of the idea, I was instantly enthusiastic about the challenge of making economics more accessible and less intimidating to the general public or, as Bob teased me, “Wonder Woman wants to bring enlightenment to the ignorant masses and convince them that they can enjoy the process.” Once again, my youthful enthusiasm for new experiences, along with a heavy dose of naïveté about what it took to be a successful TV host, led me to say yes.
I'd expected that the hardest part of getting the show together would be choosing topics that would appeal to a PBS audience and persuading high-profile experts to come on as guests. On the contrary, our biggest obstacle turned out to be snowstorms. Bob Chitester, the entrepreneurial president/manager of WQLN in Erie, Pennsylvania, had insisted that the show's pilot be made at his station. On the day scheduled for the taping, a blizzard shut down the Erie airport, and our producer couldn't find a limousine—he even tried funeral homes—willing to drive us there. In the end, Pittsburgh Yellow Cab came to the rescue, and our new program's first guest, the president of the United Steelworkers Union, shared with me a three-plus-hour ride from Pittsburgh to Erie, being tossed about in the backseat while an old taxi with busted springs negotiated slippery, snow-covered roads.
I had a strong sense of déjà vu when, on the day Ralph Nader was to tape a program with me in Washington, much of the East Coast was shut down by a massive blizzard. I managed to fly to New York from a meeting in Bermuda, but getting from there to Washington was no mean feat. It involved a postmidnight ride on a deserted New York subway, lugging a heavy suitcase, three consecutive shifts from one unheated railroad train to another, and a ride hitched on a snowplow before I reached the Washington television studio, exhausted and bedraggled, but triumphant. The staff and production crew managed to trickle in as well, but Nader, who lived a few blocks from the studio and prided himself on not having a telephone, was a no-show. When we finally made contact several days later, he said breezily, “Oh, the weather was so terrible, I figured no one would show up.”
Despite human and logistical problems, we covered a vast array of economic topics over the twenty-six weeks that Economically Speaking was on the air. The format, a panel show with a host and two guests, one on each side of a current economic controversy, was a natural framework for my conviction that there are no simple answers to complicated questions. My guests aired opposing views on issues that included the declining dollar, agricultural subsidies, airline deregulation, the future of American unionism
, the breakup of the AT&T monopoly, affirmative action (where the negative side was argued by a conservative African American economist, Walter Williams), and the financing of health care. Many of those programs could be rerun today with little change; in some cases, even the participants might be the same.
For the finale of the series, we staged an hour-long airing of the running debate on “Why Economists Disagree” with the icons of the two leading schools of economics in the country at the time, Walter Heller and Milton Friedman. Heller, the nation's leading proponent of Keynesianism, had been chairman of the CEA under President Kennedy and the top economic adviser to both Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, whom he persuaded to undertake the War on Poverty. Friedman, who refused ever to accept a position in government, was the country's best-known proponent of free-market economics.
Friedman got the discussion off to a rousing start by declaring that the major basis for disagreement among economists was not a matter of Keynesian versus monetarist or liberal versus conservative, but rather that his perspective focused on long-run results, while Heller's emphasized short-run outcomes. Heller strongly if politely disagreed, insisting that differences in values, or at least in priorities, underlay their opposing views of economic analysis and policies. The give-and-take between the experts and the audience that made up the second half of the program not only underscored the differences between the two leading lights of American economics but also gave audience and listeners alike a quick, intense version of Economics 101. Our experiment, we felt, had gone out with a bang. Overall, the series had fulfilled my goal of demonstrating not only that “there are two sides to every question” but also the truth of Oscar Wilde's quip, “The truth is rarely plain and never simple.”
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