Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read online

  The Martian's Daughter

  A Memoir

  Marina von Neumann Whitman

  The University of Michigan Press

  Ann Arbor

  Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2012

  All rights reserved

  This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

  Published in the United States of America by

  The University of Michigan Press

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  2015 2014 2013 2012 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Whitman, Marina von Neumann.

  The Martian's daughter : a memoir / Marina von Neumann Whitman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-472-11842-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-472-02855-9 (e-book)

  1. Whitman, Marina von Neumann. 2. Economists—United States—Biography. 3. Jews—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  HB119.W4W44 2012

  330.092—dc23

  [B] 2012005031

  For Will & Lindsey

  The rising generation

  On whom, as always, the hope of the world rests

  Acknowledgments

  This memoir would never have come into being were it not for unremitting pressure from my dear friend, Susan Skerker. When mere words were ineffective, Susan combined the nimble mind that had brought her to the executive level at one of the nation's leading automotive companies with her tireless typing skills to coax out of me the seventy-six pages of stream-of-consciousness memories from which this book was born. From there, it was the investigative prowess of three research assistants, James DeVaney, Christine Khalili-Borna, and Google, that filled in the vast gaps in my memory. The two human assistants were, at the time, students in the Master's in Public Policy Program in the Gerald R. Ford School at the University of Michigan. Christine was at the same time a candidate for the JD at the University of Michigan Law School, and the search skills honed at the Michigan Law Review enabled her to unearth references that I feared would remain forever undiscovered. Funding for research assistance was provided by the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan; both schools have my thanks and appreciation.

  The list of people who responded to the myriad questions with which I peppered them during the writing process is so long and varied that I am bound to have left some out; to them I apologize in advance. The ones that remain in my notes are, in alphabetical order, William Bowen, Robert Chitester, Gerald Corrigan, Ernest Courant, Paul Courant, Edwin Deagle, Robert Durkee, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Paul Ericson, Géza Feketekute, Tibor Frank, Frank Giarratani, Marc Good-heart, Ann Halliday, Martin Liander, Micheline Maynard, Paul McCracken, Mustafa Mohatarem, William Pelfrey, Craig Perry, Karl Primm, Mary Procter, Deborah Purcell, Edward Rider, William Rhodes, Albert Sobey, Maryll Telegdy, Linda Weiner, Edward Wuntsch, and my brother, George Kuper.

  Several expert friends gave me invaluable editorial advice that guided the numerous revisions this book went through before it took final shape. They are Nicholas Delbanco, Sylvia Nasar, Philip Pochoda, and, above all, Leonard Downie. My editor at the University of Michigan Press, Tom Dwyer; his capable assistant, Alexa Ducsay; and my own indefatigable administrative assistant, Sharon Disney, all provided invaluable skills in steering this book through the publication process. Finally, my beloved husband and life partner, Robert Whitman, not only helped me with recall and gently corrected many faulty memories but also, though legally blind, struggled through multiple versions of the manuscript, improving virtually every sentence and paragraph as he went. It is Bob who, above all, gives meaning to the title of my concluding chapter, “Having It All.”

  Contents

  Foreword by Sylvia Nasar

  Prologue

  The Golden Couple

  Saving Civilization

  Walking on Eggs

  Engaging Head and Heart

  You Can't Go Home Again

  He's Going to Drop a Bomb

  The End of Innocence

  A Lady in the Boardroom

  Roger and Me

  We'll Push ’Em Back into the Sea

  Having It All

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  Foreword: A Mind of Her Own

  For the past decade, my ninety-four-year-old father, who is a Muslim from Central Asia, had one question and one question only for me: “Is your book almost finished?” All conversations with him ended with an injunction to “Finish it soon!” For as far back as I can remember my father's ambitions for me dominated our relationship. Perhaps partly because he was an immigrant to this country, his hunger for his children's success was greater than theirs. My adolescent vision of the future involved marrying “a rich man who'll let me sit around and read all day.” My father, I later learned, dreamed of my becoming a New York Times reporter.

  When I did become, more or less by accident, a journalist many years later, Marina Whitman was already the chief economist at General Motors and one of the few women at the top of the economics profession. The book in your hands is an evenhanded, if often wry, account of what it took for a woman to succeed in a man's world one generation before feminism and the Pill helped to break the male monopoly on the best jobs. It is also a coming-of-age saga about a young woman who wanted it all in an era that insisted that women must choose between work and family. Most of all, it is a moving story about fathers and daughters and what they want from and for each other, in particular the tension between a father's desire to mold, protect, and live vicariously through his daughter and the daughter's equally strong determination to develop a mind and life of her own.

  The Martian of the title refers to John von Neumann, Whitman's father and arguably the most important mathematical mind of the twentieth century. Pampered, precocious, and rich, fond of strong drinks, dirty jokes, and fast cars, von Neumann was one of the geniuses who joined the Jewish exodus from Hungary in the 1930s and, in 1933 at age twenty-nine, joined Albert Einstein at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. For the next twenty-five years, von Neumann was involved in and responsible for some of the biggest mathematical and scientific breakthroughs of the century: game theory, the bomb, and the programmable computer.

  Considered the smartest man alive and capable of concentrating on mathematical problems in the middle of raucous parties, von Neumann hardly fit the popular stereotype of the abstract thinker perfectly at home in the crystalline world of ideal forms but hopelessly lost in ordinary life. True, his wife claimed that he didn't know where ice cubes came from, and he often read weighty books in the bathroom, but he dressed like a banker, preferred the company of generals and politicians to that of academics, and displayed an exceptional talent for dealing with large bureaucracies and running large projects. Moreover, he was not afraid of making decisions or taking a stand. He chose A-bomb targets in Japan, advocated a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, and was the most influential member of the Atomic Energy Commission. At the time, in the treacherous atmosphere of the McCarthy years, he avoided the political blunders that wrecked the careers of other science stars like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller.

  “It doesn't matter who my father was, it matters who I r
emember he was,” Anne Sexton, the poet, once observed. Rather than recalling the public figure, Whitman focuses on the private man. For all his charm and generosity, however, he comes across on these pages as a man who never learned to feel comfortable in close proximity to other human beings and for whom intimate emotional terrain would always remain an alien environment. When Whitman's mother, the beautiful, hot-tempered, socially ambitious Mariette, left him for one of his graduate students, taking their two-year-old daughter with her, he was more puzzled than heartbroken. He remarried quickly, within a year of his divorce, impulsively choosing a woman he met on one of his visits back to Hungary and who he hardly knew. Klara Dan turned out to be unstable, as well as neurotic, and von Neumann spent the rest of his life mystified by her fluctuating moods and frustrated by his inability to placate her fears and jealousies.

  One of the most intriguing aspects of Whitman's upbringing concerns the unusual child custody arrangement with his ex-wife that von Neumann insisted on. In what was either a modern experiment in child rearing or a bow to the traditions of the European elite, Whitman was to live with her mother until she turned thirteen. Then, having reached the age of reason and capable of benefiting from proximity to genius, she would live entirely with her father in Princeton until she went off to college. She would be Eliza Doolittle to his Professor Higgins.

  Judging by the outcome, the experiment was a success. Whitman flourished intellectually and socially in Princeton. While her stepmother could be difficult, her father showered her with affection, advice, and more tangible tokens of his esteem such as furs and cars. Whitman responded by working hard at school and winning admission to Radcliffe. Once there, she proceeded to get straight As, including in a calculus course. Relieved that she had not besmirched the von Neumann reputation for mathematical prowess, she declared her formal education in that field over.

  In her senior year, Whitman announced that she intended to marry a young English instructor immediately after graduation. Her mother, who had long feared that Whitman's brains and intimidating pedigree would discourage suitors, was delighted, but von Neumann was devastated. His frantic appeals, which Whitman quotes at length, are a testament to the depth of his misgivings, and fears that she was closing off any chance of a significant career or, for that matter, material comfort. She liked money too much to be content on the salary of an academic, he warned her.

  By then von Neumann was dying. He was fifty-three, confined to a wheelchair, the great head riddled with cancer, the lightning-fast brain barely able to calculate the sum of two single digits. When Whitman visited him in the hospital, she was overcome with grief and guilt. Another girl might have canceled the wedding. Whitman would not. However much she had absorbed her father's values, she had a mind of her own, and enough backbone to stick to her guns.

  It was a good thing. In 1956, when Americans were marrying young, having babies, and moving to the suburbs, von Neumann could not possibly have foreseen the seismic changes that would make it possible, less than twenty years later, for President Nixon to appoint a female economic adviser, or for the country's number 1 company on the Fortune 500 to appoint a woman to a highly visible position on the management team. Mostly, though, he simply underestimated the emotional intelligence that let his daughter fulfill her own dreams as well as his.

  Sylvia Nasar

  Tarrytown, New York

  July 8, 2011

  Prologue

  In September of 1956, I was sitting in the anteroom of an elegant hospital suite at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in a VIP wing reserved for the president and other high-ranking individuals, both civilian and military. I was trying to distract myself by watching Elvis Presley's gyrations on a small, fuzzy black-and-white TV set. But not even Elvis could calm my apprehension as I waited to be called into the hospital room where my father, the mathematician John von Neumann, lay dying of a cancer that had by then spread throughout his body and into his brain.

  My father had been given this suite partly out of respect for the central role he had played, first as a key member of the Los Alamos brain trust that produced the atomic bomb and later as a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a senior adviser to several high-ranking military panels and committees, all deeply engaged in maintaining US nuclear superiority in the Cold War.

  The more important consideration, though, was national security. Given the top secret nature of my father's involvements, absolute privacy was essential when, in the early stages of his hospitalization, various top-ranking members of the military-industrial establishment sat at his bedside to pick his brain before it was too late. Vince Ford, an Air Force colonel who had been closely involved in the supersecret development of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), along with General Bernard Schriever and my father, was assigned as his full-time aide. Eight airmen, all with top secret clearance, rotated around the clock. Their job was both to attend to my father's everyday needs and, in the later stages of his illness, to assure that, affected by medication or the advancing cancer, he did not inadvertently blurt out military secrets.

  I hadn't seen my father since the spring vacation of my senior year in college, the preceding April. My final exams and June graduation had been followed only a week later by my wedding at my mother's home on Long Island, which he had been too ill to attend. Right after I changed out of my wedding gown, my new husband and I had set out for the wilds of Maine, already a day or two late for the beginning of his summer job as the director of the junior division of a boys' camp. There we had lived in our own little honeymoon cabin in the woods and had quickly become Mama and Papa Woodchuck to his eight- to ten-year-old charges. Surrounded by the campers' energy during the day and the tranquility of the Maine woods at night, the world we had left behind seemed very far away.

  Now I was returning to a particularly grim reality. I had been spending the past few months on an emotional high of academic triumph (I had graduated from Radcliffe at the top of my class) and newlywed bliss, while back in Washington my father and stepmother had been struggling every day with the disease that was destroying not only his body but, even more unbearably, his amazing mind.

  To compound my guilt, I knew only too well that my father had been deeply upset and disappointed by my insistence on getting married so young. He feared that such an early commitment—particularly to an impecunious young English instructor at Princeton—would thwart my own opportunities for intellectual and professional development, miring me in the full-time domesticity that was expected of married women in the 1950s. In letter after letter—he often expressed in writing feelings he could not bring himself to talk about—my father had begged me, “[Don't] tie yourself down at such an early age” and thus “throw away any chance of fulfilling your own talents.”

  My father had already been hospitalized and unable to walk when I had last visited him, but his mind had still been in high gear. My stepmother had kept me posted during the summer regarding the inexorable advance of his illness, so I thought I was prepared. But I couldn't entirely conceal my shock when I entered the room and leaned down to kiss him. Tension and awkwardness choked my voice as I murmured, “Hello, Daddy.” He looked small and shrunken in the bed. And though he still spoke in the clipped, analytical manner that had always defined him, his sentences were short and focused exclusively on his own condition. Terror of his own mortality had crowded out all other thoughts.

  After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest—if not the greatest—mathematician of the twentieth century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like seven and six or ten and three, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I could remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the pa
nic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of his intellectual powers remained.

  I could only choke out a couple of these pairs of numbers and then, without even registering his answers, fled the room in tears. Months earlier we had talked, with a candor rare for the time, about the fact that, at a shockingly young age and in the midst of an extraordinarily productive life, he was going to die. But that was still a father-daughter discussion, with him in the dominant role. This sudden, humiliating role reversal compounded both his pain and mine. After that, my father spoke very little or not at all, although the doctors couldn't offer any physical reason for his retreat into silence. My own explanation was that the sheer horror of experiencing the deterioration of his mental powers at the age of fifty-three was too much for him to bear. Added to this pain, I feared, was my apparent betrayal of his dreams for his only child, his link to the future which was being denied to him.

  My father had been shaped by, and then played a central role in, the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century. His youth was punctuated by global upheavals. Hungary had been on the defeated side in World War I and had been punished by the loss of two-thirds of its territory in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. His family had fled in fear of their lives from a revolutionary communist government that seized power in Hungary and held it for 133 days in 1919. And he had made a prescient shift across the Atlantic, as a precocious young professor of mathematics, to Princeton from the University of Berlin just as the collapse of the impoverished and embittered German nation's democratic government paved the way for Hitler's rise.