In an Uncertain World

by Robert Rubin

  My mother’s family had been in the United States for many generations. My grandfather Samuel Seiderman was a lawyer, an investor in real estate, a political activist, and a major figure in his Brooklyn world. He knew everyone; his close friend Emanuel Celler was elected to Congress in the 1920s and remained there for five decades. My grandfather was also a founder of a synagogue in Crown Heights, where he lived. Samuel’s wife, my grandmother Ella, presided over the proper Victorian house they built for themselves. Her parents, my great-grandparents, the Schneiders, had been very successful in their own right and lived in the house next door.

  My grandfather Seiderman’s great love was politics. He was closely involved with “Boss” John McCooey, the power broker who controlled Brooklyn’s Democratic political machine for the first few decades of the century, through the Madison Democratic Club. At the club’s headquarters in Crown Heights, McCooey would hold court several nights a week, receiving supplicants for jobs, union cards, health care, or other kinds of assistance. He dispensed favors and collected votes in return.

  After McCooey died in 1934, he was succeeded by my grandfather’s friend Irwin Steingut, the Speaker of the New York State Assembly and a close ally of New York’s governor, Herbert Lehman. When Irwin Steingut died in 1952, his power and positions passed to his son Stanley Steingut. For many years, my grandfather ran the club for the Steinguts while they were away at the legislature in Albany. Family legend has my grandfather and his colleagues sitting around in the basement of what I remember as their enormous house at 750 Eastern Parkway and choosing judges.

  My grandfather Seiderman died in 1958, when I was a sophomore in college, but his influence remained with me: he had made politics seem appealing and his example had helped seed my desire to become involved in the world. I always had a sense of my grandfather as a large presence in his community, mostly from my mother, who admired him enormously. My parents made the point that he was deeply engaged in politics but never dependent upon it financially, and they thought he was effective in his political work partly because he didn’t need anything from it.

  I remembered this years later when I became involved in politics, although my focus was on psychological rather than financial independence. Relying on politics for your sense of who you are greatly impedes your ability to remain true to yourself, your views, and your values. Feeling you can walk away allows you the freedom to decide how much to accommodate to the demands of a political environment. And financial freedom—though neither necessary nor sufficient—can help contribute to psychological autonomy.

  My mother grew up in her father’s Democratic political milieu. She saw Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated in Washington, D.C., in 1933—staying during her visit at the Jefferson Hotel, where I subsequently lived for my six and a half years in Washington. Unlike my father, my mother had a stable, cosseted childhood. The family was prosperous enough to send her on a trip to Italy during the summer of 1930—though by the time my grandparents died, the family money had been greatly diminished.

  My mother met my father at a dance at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in 1933. As he tells the story, he was there with a law client of his who was being honored for a large donation he was giving to a hospital. He and his client were sitting at the head table, and the client was saying that he had made a big mistake by not marrying. My father should avoid such a mistake—in fact, he should ask this young woman sitting nearby to dance. My father looked at the woman and said he didn’t feel like dancing.

  Then he looked up at the balcony and saw my mother. “Now, there’s a girl I’d like to dance with,” he told his client. My mother’s father, who was also at the head table, overheard this remark.

  “You’d like to dance with that young lady?” Samuel Seiderman said. “That’s my daughter.”

  My parents are in some ways an example of opposites attracting. My mother has a positive outlook and a comfortable sense of self. When problems arise, her attitude is that everything will work out for the best. My father has a strong and incisive analytic mind, and he is confident in what he does, but he is also something of a worrier. He doesn’t like to leave important details to others, whether they’re about business, health, or family. These descriptions are as accurate about them in their nineties as I gather they would have been in their thirties. They’ve been happily married, despite the differences in their outlooks on life, for nearly seventy years.

  I WAS BORN IN 1938, when my parents were still living in Neponsit, Queens. When I was three, we moved to an apartment in Manhattan on West Eighty-first Street across from the American Museum of Natural History. I went to Walden School, a progressive private school on Central Park West, a few blocks from our apartment building. Walden stressed creative expression, cooperation, and social concern. It was the kind of place where the students called their teachers by their first names. My third grade teacher, whom I remember fondly, was Thora.

  After graduating from Columbia Law School, my father joined the law firm of the father of one of his classmates, which became Rubin & Hetkin. The firm specialized in real estate but also had as a client The New Yorker magazine, whose board my father’s partner came to join. My dad’s specialty was challenging property-tax assessments. My father also kept a hand in what little was left of his father’s businesses after the crash. One of these was a money-losing mica mining operation centered in the town of Sylva, North Carolina. Mica was an essential strategic mineral used as a wire insulator for airplanes. In the 1930s, it came cheaply from the East Indies and so wasn’t worth much. But when World War II broke out in Europe, that supply was threatened. My father wrote to the War Department, offering to give the mines to the government for free. After Pearl Harbor, the War Department got in touch with my grandfather, asking him to go to North Carolina to run the mines. He volunteered my father, who had spent several summers working in the mines, and my father’s job for the duration of the war became running the operation, supplying sheet mica to the government at a fixed price. When I was four, we moved to the nearby town of Asheville, North Carolina.

  The North Carolina Highlands was a beautiful place, but poor and remote. The people in the town called my father “Jew man” and “Mr. Jew.” It was a bit much for my mother, who felt as if she’d woken up in the wrong century. She rather quickly moved back to Manhattan with me and my sister, Jane, who was born in 1942. My father would come home by train every few weeks for a visit. The mining operation roughly broke even, and my grandfather sold it for a pittance after the war.

  When I was nine, we moved from Manhattan to Miami Beach. Florida meant a calmer, more pleasant life for my father, who also wanted to be nearer to his father. After we moved, he continued to do some legal work, built a shopping center, studied stocks and investments, and played golf. My mother also played, and she had a shelf full of local club trophies.

  I have only dim memories of not wanting to change homes and of trepidation about my new school. At North Beach Elementary, my new teacher, Miss Collins, introduced me as the new boy. “Robbie Rubin has gone to a private school in New York and has never learned script,” she announced to the class. “So let’s all be very nice to him.” As a result, I assume, of this suggestion, I was elected president of my fourth-grade class on my first day. My protests that I didn’t know how to be class president fell on deaf ears. Far-fetched though it may sound, I think you can draw a line from that day to my becoming Secretary of the Treasury forty-eight years later. I wasn’t the class president type, but in a funny way the designation stuck with me. Though I was never a class leader, I held class positions intermittently throughout my school years, including senior class president—which later helped me get into Harvard, and so on down the line.

  For a kid like me, Miami Beach was an easy place to grow up. I rode my bike a mile to school every morning and added to my enormous collection of painted lead soldiers. For a while, I had a morning paper route delivering The Miami Beach Sun. I read Hardy Boys mysteries and listened to The Lon
e Ranger, The Phantom, and The Shadow on the radio. I was a regular participant in basketball and baseball games at Polo Park. To this day, I can summon the starting lineup of the 1954 Brooklyn Dodgers: Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Duke Snider, Junior Gilliam, Don Hoak, and whoever might be pitching—Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, or Carl Erskine.

  The rabbi at our temple was an interesting man named Leon Kronish, who tried to get a group of us involved in Jewish thought when I was a junior in high school. Rabbi Kronish told us he didn’t believe in God in a conventional sense. His point wasn’t to shock us, but rather to engage us in ethical and philosophical debate. Those discussions were my first exposure to the term “humanism.” But more than any specific ideas, what I took away from talking to Rabbi Kronish was a sense of questioning and of intellectual exploration—qualities that would become core to my being in later years.

  People seldom think of Miami Beach as being part of the Deep South. Yet, growing up, my sister, Jane, and I attended segregated schools and our Woolworth’s had “colored” and “white” water fountains. Jane registered her protest by drinking from the “colored” water fountain and sitting in the back of the bus. I can’t remember ever hearing expressions of racial prejudice from the people I grew up with, but neither was there any evident awareness of the immense injustice being done to so many.

  My parents are sociable and always had a large circle of friends in Miami Beach. They enjoyed the kind of social life that was then normal there, playing golf and cards and spending time at the cabana club at the Roney Plaza Hotel. Yet both of them are thinking people, interested in politics and the wider world. We always had a lot of books around the house.

  Then as now, I was an avid and eclectic reader. Even at the busiest times, when I was at Goldman Sachs or in Washington, reading has been an integral part of my daily life—history, biography, unusual voyages or lands, or whatever caught my imagination at our local bookstore. For example, not too long ago, I picked up Adam Nicolson’s history of the King James Version of the Bible, which provided a graphic look at an era and described a deep commitment by many people, and Simon Winchester’s book about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. I’m usually reading two or three books at the same time and often go back and reread parts of books. When I went down to Washington to join the Clinton administration in 1993, for instance, I took with me two famous books about Africa that I’d read a decade earlier: The White Nile and The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead, as well as Philosopher’s Holiday, a collection of lively essays by Irwin Edman, which I first read as a teenager. Edman was a professor of philosophy at Columbia when my father was a student there in the 1920s.

  By the time I entered Miami Beach Senior High School, I had begun to fish. My friend Bobby Birenbaum and I used to fish in creeks and canals—mostly in places that are dense with hotels and condominiums now. As we got a bit older, we took our rods and tackle all over the place. Most often, we’d drive down to the Florida Keys. The Keys were different then—we could fish off the old bridges for mangrove snapper and sometimes catch something more exotic. My mom didn’t want our fish in the house, but when we caught enough, we’d sell them to a local smokehouse for pocket money.

  Fishing became a much more important part of my life in the late 1980s, when I first visited Deep Water Cay on Grand Bahama Island and saw people casting with fly rods. Fly fishing has been a passion of mine ever since—it gives me a feeling of total absorption and removal from the here and now. I can spend eight hours stalking bonefish on the saltwater flats in the Bahamas, or casting to trout on a river or creek, and the time just disappears. My mind focuses completely on the wind, the water, what kind of flies to use, and where to cast. Whatever external concerns I bring with me quickly evaporate.

  Back in Florida, we fished with old-fashioned spinning rods. On weekends, Bobby and I would sometimes rent a small skiff with a 10- or 15-horsepower engine to cast for barracudas and dolphin in the Gulf Stream. Or we’d go around the mangrove swamps and back into the Everglades to fish for snapper or sea trout. Once we motored far in and then ran out of gas. Instead of the motel where we expected to be sleeping, we spent the night in the boat, fighting off mosquitoes and wondering how we were going to get back to civilization. The next day, the people we’d rented our boat from sent out a search party that found us. Luckily, no one phoned my parents until after we’d been rescued.

  ANYONE WHO IS HONEST about having done well will acknowledge the enormous role played by chance. Chance certainly played a big part in my getting into Harvard. My grades were good but not outstanding, and I came from a regular public high school. I’ve always had the feeling, though with no substantiating evidence, that a particular fortuitous incident may have made the difference. My father and I ran into a lawyer he knew at a Harvard Glee Club concert. And this friend of my father’s introduced me to his friend, the Harvard dean of admissions, who was passing through Miami.

  When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1956, I felt overwhelmed. Half my class came from academically intense prep schools that were feeding grounds for the Ivy League. And much of the other half came from top-notch public high schools. I, on the other hand, had taken four years of French in high school, and when I got to Harvard I couldn’t pass the exam to get out of the entry-level course. In math, I couldn’t even get into the entry-level course because I hadn’t had calculus, and I had to take remedial math.

  On the first day of orientation the freshman class met in Memorial Hall. The dean of freshmen tried to reassure us by saying that only 2 percent of our class would fail out. I looked around and thought that everyone else was lucky, because I was going to fill the entire quota by myself. One of the first people I met was a kid from Staten Island whom I saw looking through the course catalogue. But he wasn’t looking at courses. He was looking at the prizes listed at the end of the book, to see which ones he might win. I thought, What a curious way to go through life. I was looking through the same catalogue for courses I might be able to pass.

  The dominant emotion of my freshman year at Harvard was anxiety. For solace, I read a little inspirational book that my dad sent me, A Way of Life by William Osler. The book was an address that Osler, a professor of medicine, had delivered to students at Yale in 1913. Osler’s message was that the best way to deal with the fear of failure was to live your life in “day-tight compartments.” At some point, you should climb to the “mountaintop” and engage in self-reflection. But on a daily basis, you should close the door to your larger worries and focus on the task at hand. I tried to take this advice and block out questions about whether I was capable of doing the work at Harvard.

  To everyone’s surprise, especially mine, my grades that year were good—so good that my academic adviser called me in for a meeting. He asked if I was okay.

  “Why shouldn’t I be okay?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he responded, “you’ve done very well and nobody thought you would. Are you sure you’re not overstraining yourself?”

  Even after freshman year, I still had a tenuous feeling about being at Harvard. At the beginning of my second year, the teacher of an English literature class was trying to figure out what books to assign that everyone hadn’t already studied. He asked for a show of hands of those who had read various books—classics of English literature by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Makepeace Thackeray. The other students, graduates of places such as Groton, St. Paul’s, and Andover, put up their hands as he named more and more obscure titles by these authors. My hands remained in my lap. It wasn’t only that I hadn’t read these books; I had never even heard of most of them.

  For most of those who came from prep school, Harvard was just the next step in their intellectual development. For me, it was all so new, so completely different, that I was forced to rethink everything. Sophomore year, I took a yearlong introduction to philosophy course with Raphael Demos. Professor Demos was a genial little Greek man with white hair an
d a wonderful gift for engaging students in basic questions. His style was unadorned simplicity. Demos would walk onto the stage in the lecture hall, turn over a wastepaper basket on a desk, and use that as his lectern. He communicated a feeling of vast respect for those philosophers he regarded as great thinkers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Spinoza. Trying to understand what these authors were saying was very challenging for me. Then, some way into our yearlong course, Professor Demos assigned the work of several authors whose thinking was not so rigorous. They were easier to understand, but we quickly became aware of the fault lines in their logic. We then went back to Aristotle and Kant with new appreciation for their intellectual power.

  Although Demos revered philosophers such as Plato who believed in provable certainty, he instilled in us the view that opinions and interpretations were always subject to revision and further development. He would turn to Plato or one of the other philosophers to demonstrate to us that proving any proposition to be true in a final or ultimate sense was impossible. Demos encouraged us not only to understand the logic of the analysis but to find the point at which the edifice rested on hypothesis, assumption, or belief.

  These ideas struck a chord with me; I even considered majoring in philosophy. Although I didn’t ultimately do that, my year with Demos spurred my developing tendencies toward skepticism and critical thinking. I often encapsulate my Demos-inspired approach by saying, “There are no provable absolutes”—a stance bolstered by the larger Harvard ethos of that period. The mind-set among my classmates was one of not accepting dogma, of questioning authority—and in retrospect, I’d say the most valuable development I took away from college was the attitude of never taking propositions at face value, of evaluating everything I heard and read with an inquiring and skeptical mind. But the seed that Demos cultivated and that Harvard nurtured didn’t lead to just skepticism. Once you’ve internalized the concept that you can’t prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, choices, and trade-offs. In a world without provable truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding.