“Well, Marina, you're reaching the crone stage,” opined Margaret Molinari, the expert from Human Resources who had been my in-house consultant on personnel issues, as we chatted about what life after GM might hold for me. Instantly conjuring up a sharp-chinned old witch, I said, “Thanks, Margaret, with a friend like you…” Margaret, a PhD in anthropology, explained that in the anthropological world a crone is not an ugly old woman at all, but rather one whose wisdom and experience made others seek her out for advice and guidance. It took me some time, and some false starts, to find out how right she was.
The career-guidance firm (often called, more bluntly, an outplacement firm) that GM had agreed to pay for when we worked out the conditions of my early retirement, suggested that I explore possibilities for college presidencies, for which my combination of academic and executive experience seemed to make me a natural. But I had been down that road too many times before. Over the space of some twenty years, I had been a finalist for college presidencies several times, in each case backing off at the last minute. After the fourth such episode, my children put the question to me, asking, “Are you sure, Mom, that you really want to be a college president?” Thus starkly confronted, I finally decided that the answer was no. The career-guidance firm did perform a valuable service, though. The consultant there told me that, to turn my resume into a marketing pitch, I should set down in bullet points my major accomplishments at General Motors. Seeing these laid out in succinct black and white made me feel less despairing about what I had actually achieved there, putting closure on that chapter and allowing me to look forward to the next one.
Even during the hectic years at GM, I had at least twice been deeply involved in academic projects focused on broad issues far removed from Detroit and its daily concerns. One was a panel assembled at Notre Dame University at the request of the five Roman Catholic bishops who, after more than five years of study, were composing a pastoral letter on American capitalism, to be presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
When I was asked to lay out my own views for the bishops, I told them that, as a non-Catholic, I wasn't used to making confessions even privately, never mind in public. But I overcame my reticence, apparently to good effect, according to Time magazine: “Their [the invited experts] testimony sometimes strongly influenced the letter. For example, committee members had been leaning toward a call for strong government economic planning, before hearing that approach sharply criticized by Marina von Neumann Whitman, chief economist for General Motors. After Whitman spoke, one panelist said, ‘Well, there goes the emphasis on central planning.’”1 I disagreed with some of the bishops' policy recommendations, but I felt privileged to have been invited to engage in a dialogue with them, particularly since my arguments seemed to have had some impact on a letter that ran to more than a hundred pages.
An even more challenging assignment started with a call in 1998 from Frank Press, a leading physicist who was president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, asking me if I would lead a delegation of ten professors and businessmen to Moscow for a seminar with Soviet academicians and heads of state economic institutions entitled “Economic Growth in Modern Industrial Societies: USSR and USA.” I jumped at the opportunity; we didn't expect to learn much about economic policy or business management from the Russians, but we were curious about their views on economic issues and eager to introduce their leaders to the way a market economy works.
The seminar would have been hard to manage under any circumstances, partly because it was cochaired on the Russian side by academicians from two competing institutions who clearly hated each other and also because the American and Soviet approaches to analyzing economic problems were so different as to make the two groups' papers mutually unintelligible. What really complicated things for me, though, was that on the second day of the seminar, which was supposed to be led by the Soviet side, all the high-level Russians simply vanished. That left me to try to bring order among presenters whose names I didn't even know how to pronounce and to promote meaningful dialogue between two groups that had in common neither language nor experiences nor modes of thought.
Only later did I learn that the reason for my counterparts' disappearance was a suddenly called special meeting of the Supreme Soviet. Its purpose was to adopt a constitutional amendment implementing General Secretary (later president) Mikhail Gorbachev's plans for political reform, including the democratization of the electoral system, which led to a genuinely democratic election of the Congress of People's Deputies in March of the following year. I reported to Frank Press, “Clearly, this is a unique moment in the Soviet Union, and we may be seeing an important new chapter in their history in the making.”2 But neither our delegation nor Gorbachev himself had an inkling that the first step toward the demise of Soviet communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had just been taken in a building close to where we sat.
Now, having closed the book on the GM chapter, I felt the pull to focus once again on the big picture of international issues in the more sustained way that was only possible in an academic setting. Because I wasn't certain how well I would fit back into that world, I decided to test the waters by taking a half-time visiting professorship, divided between the School of Business and the School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Gradually, without my actually noticing it, the university began to look less and less like a way station and more and more like a permanent home.
As I settled back into the life of a professor, I taught courses on international trade and investment, combining information and analysis with war stories from the GM trenches to hold the attention of students who were far more demanding than the ones I had taught at the University of Pittsburgh fifteen years before. I also wrote a book that built on my GM experience to analyze the developments that transformed the dominant, paternalistic multinational corporations of the mid—twentieth century into the lean, mean, global competitors they had become by its end.3 In his review for the New York Times Book Review, Louis Uchitelle complained, “[S]he shares with her readers almost none of what she witnessed at GM or felt in those stressful years…Absent are the anecdotes, the feelings, the judgments from her own experience.”4 Well, Mr. Uchitelle, you have had to wait more than a decade, but here in this memoir is my account of how things looked from the inside.
Most of what I do at the University of Michigan, though, cannot be described in a resume. Having learned as much from my failures in leadership as from my successes as an individual, I try to share the wisdom I've acquired as widely as I can. Now that I no longer have to worry about career building in my specialty, I've been drawn onto advisory committees across the university. More influential, though, than my role in any organized group is the advising and networking I provide informally, one-on-one. I counsel graduate students about their careers and provide my colleagues with from-the-trenches observations on their research. I've worked closely with two successive deans of the Public Policy School, using my broad network of contacts in business and government to help with fund-raising and outreach, as well as serving those same deans as a sounding board on difficult issues.
I sense that I hold more power now, as a part-time, nontenured faculty member—although it is a very soft power indeed—than I did when I was a public figure, high on the organization chart of the U.S. government or the General Motors Corporation. All kinds of people seek my opinion, take it seriously, and even act on it. My credibility comes partly from the wisdom of experience but, even more, from the fact that people know I am not acting for personal gain; I'm not looking for a promotion, a better job, or a big salary increase. Once again, I have a useful double vision; I know the organization as only an insider can, but I have the outsider's disinterestedness and ability to make external comparisons.
Because I am known as a woman who has been there and done that, women and girls at all stages of their lives ask me how I got where I did, what it was like, and how I juggled all the pressures and obligations I felt. The combination of factors that shaped my life included parental expectations, a steadfastly supportive spouse well ahead of his time, a high energy level, and, most critical of all, good luck. A serious illness in the family or a child with special needs could have brought the whole fragile structure crashing down on me. Timing was also critical; I came of age just as new opportunities were beginning to open up for women, and there were not many women as fully prepared to take advantage of them as I was, thanks to my family environment and the path it set me on early in life.
Timing was critical in another sense as well. I had turned down several promising job opportunities when the children were young, but by the time the GM offer came along, they were grown and more or less independent; I had the career-family conflicts behind me not ahead of me. I tell young women today what I first said twenty-five years ago, that “the myth of the superwoman is dying a well-deserved death. One can't do and be everything at once—the choices and the trade-offs are very real. But there is not just one choice; we have some leeway regarding what we give up at various points in our lives.”5 As I pass on these reflections to others, I see that Margaret Molinari was right about the meaning of the “crone stage” after all.
My year of moving on from GM, 1992, was highlighted by two far more personal milestones: Laura's wedding to David Downie in June and my mother's death in December. The wedding was one of those perfect occasions that I would have liked to preserve intact forever but had to settle instead for joyous memories and glorious photographs. Laura's beauty as a bride brought tears to her parents' eyes; David was a beaming, handsome groom, having even cut his unruly curls for the occasion. They were married at St. Andrews, the Episcopal Church whose gray stone grandeur marks it as one of the oldest churches in Ann Arbor. The bride and groom wrote large parts of their own marriage service, which was designed to allow a number of their closest friends, whether Christian, Jewish, or agnostic, to participate in the ceremony without being made to feel uncomfortable.
On that glorious June day, the guests at the reception had a panoramic view of the entire city from the four-sided terrace that encircles the top floor of the university's magnificent, art deco Rackham Building. A trio of violin, harp, and flute played classical music softly before and through dinner, but afterward the bridal pair and their friends, who had gathered from all over the world, danced to the earsplitting beat of a steel drum band. It was a fabulous send-off.
For my mother, that occasion represented the fulfillment of a long-delayed dream. My own wedding had been a small, low-key affair, out of respect for my father's terminal illness. Now she could help plan and be part of the sort of elegant, formal event that she had to forego thirty-five years earlier. But her granddaughter's wedding marked one of the few happy days my mother spent during her brief life in Ann Arbor. Physically frail and beset by depression, she was no longer able to deal with her husband's dementia. These developments forced me to recognize, painfully, that my mother, the awesome figure who had been both my role model and the primary source of my lifelong feelings of insecurity, was now old and vulnerable and desperately in need of support from her children. My brother George and I felt that the only solution was to move her and Desmond from their Long Island home of more than forty years to a retirement residence in Ann Arbor.
We had made this decision with the best of intentions, but our plan misfired badly, leaving George and me with a sense of guilt that haunts us to this day. My mother, torn from her home and her circle of friends and too embarrassed by her husband's mental state to make new ones, was thoroughly miserable, ate almost nothing, and dwindled down to eighty-five pounds. This was one case where superwoman fell badly down on the job. Distracted and exhausted by my battles at GM, I failed to notice how desperately she craved my support. While George and I were away with our families for Thanksgiving—a desertion for which she never forgave us, even though we had invited her to come along with us to our vacation cottage—she had a bad fall.
Although her injury, a hyperextended neck that damaged several vertebrae, would not have been life threatening to a person in good health, it did mean a difficult surgery and an extended, uncomfortable recovery. Confronted with this prospect, my mother developed a variety of complications that led ultimately to her death. Her physical frailty may have made this outcome inevitable, but I couldn't help but be reminded of her own mother who, when her quality of life fell below her minimum standard, simply willed herself to die. In my heart, I wondered if my mother, a proud and stubborn woman, hadn't come to the same decision.
In death, my mother went home to the church she had attended for more than forty years, the one where Bob and I had been married, and to a grave in its churchyard. The occasion was marked by the worst storm Long Island had seen in many years. The car in which Malcolm, Laura, and David drove to the funeral was the last one allowed across the Throgs Neck Bridge from Connecticut, trucks floated on the roads running along Long Island Sound, and the basement of our hotel was flooded, cutting off all electrical power. The funeral service was conducted by candlelight and without the electric organ; a fire truck stood by outside, lest the sparks shooting out of a short-circuited transformer close to the church should start a fire. The rain pelted down on us as we stood at the graveside; it seemed a fitting farewell to a woman as tempestuous as my mother. We privately dubbed the storm “Hurricane Mariette.”
A reporter who interviewed me when my promotion at GM first brought us to Ann Arbor in 1985 wrote, “For Whitman, ‘having it all’ was not so much an aim as a confident expectation. ‘I always assumed I would marry, have children, and work,’ she explains, ‘like my mother.’”6 Yes, by this definition I have indeed had it all, but the truth isn't nearly as simple as this crisp sentence suggests.
Having it all is a many-splendored thing. It means a marriage that has only grown closer with the passage of more than half a century and a husband who insists that I'm still the girl he first fell in love with, as if fifty years and nearly as many pounds has made no difference. It includes children who grew into adults we not only love but enjoy, respect, and profoundly admire. Both have chosen biomedical careers. Malcolm, a cell and developmental biologist on the Harvard medical faculty, conducts basic research on fundamental chemical processes in living and growing organisms, research essential to explaining how things go awry in the human body as a first step toward repairing them. Laura, a physician specializing in internal medicine, is on the faculty of the Yale Medical School, where she supervises the training of medical residents in her field and is an attending physician in a clinic that serves mainly the poor and the uninsured of New Haven. If John von Neumann were around today, he might have mixed feelings about the way his electronic offspring, the modern stored-program computer, has developed and the uses to which it has been put. But he would feel only satisfaction, I know, at the way in which the children of his biological offspring have fulfilled his mandate to use their intellectual gifts to the fullest.
To top it off, Laura and her political scientist husband, David Downie, have produced two bright, thoughtful, caring children of their own. When William sends us a poem entitled “Redemption,” reflecting on his feelings about getting in trouble in school, and Lindsey chooses as her display on the fifth grade's “special persons day” a photograph of her grandfather as an impossibly handsome nineteen-year-old lieutenant in the Army Air Corps sitting on the tail of his B-29 during World War II, I wonder what I have done to deserve such joy.
On the professional side, I have enjoyed the challenge and satisfaction of recognition in three different careers, each of which complemented and enriched the others, and of blazing a trail in two of them. Mine were transitional victories; other women have since risen higher and had a broader impact than I did, in both government and business. Laura Tyson, Janet Yellin, and Christina Romer have chaired the Council of Economic Advisers; Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and now Hillary Clinton have served the nation as secretary of state. In the auto industry, women have been appointed to powerful operating, as opposed to staff, positions: Mary Barra is GM's senior vice president for global product development; and Ann Stevens was executive vice president of Ford and chief operating officer of its Americas Division, which includes the United States, until she left to become chairman and CEO of a technology company. But I led the way, and I hope I cleared away some of the underbrush for those who came later.
Despite having had it all, as I look back, I realize that I haven't completely fulfilled the high expectations I set for myself as a young woman. I take pride in the gap I've filled as a role model, a symbol of what a woman can achieve in different arenas. But in terms of substantively making a difference, nudging the world, or at least some part of it, in the direction I wanted it to move, I'm not completely satisfied. Many of the barriers were external, set up by a society that was beginning to open new doors to women but wasn't yet ready to accord full weight to their ideas or make the changes they were trying to effect. Some of the barriers were inside me—the desire to be liked, to avoid confrontation, to push from inside the golden circle rather than from outside. But if one of the requirements for breaking new ground is to set goals that, like the Holy Grail, will always be just out of to reach, then I have no regrets.
Today, I am more than making up for the things I gave up during the years when I was building my career. I remain engaged in the world of ideas but on my own terms, working only as much as I want and on what interests me. Bob and I travel extensively, aiming, as I once told a US border guard peering suspiciously at some of the more exotic stamps in my passport, to see as much of the world as we can while our legs and wits hold out. We treat our children and grandchildren to three-generation trips, to destinations as varied as the Galapagos, Provence, Namibia, and heli-hiking in the Canadian Rockies, one of the benefits of the affluence my career has afforded us. Another is that we are now able to give back to a society that has given so much to us by donating time, effort, and money to cultural and charitable activities.
All this is possible only because we are blessed with reasonably good health at a time of life when it can no longer be taken for granted. Bob, ten years older than I, is coping with serious vision problems but manages to lead a busy, active life despite the limitations he has had to surmount, including a role reversal in which I have become the driver and he the not so silently suffering passenger. Like so many women my age, I have had to deal with a diagnosis of breast cancer, but now that ten years have passed, I allow myself to look back on it as an unpleasant but surprisingly untraumatic episode—in part because my medically sophisticated children took the news so calmly. Bob and I are acutely aware that these golden years are fragile, that they cannot last forever, but we savor every moment of them.
Looking back from my current vantage point is, of course, very different from the view that lay before me when I was starting out. I knew I wanted a fulfilling career, but I had no idea doing what. I was filled with doubt, uncertainty, fears that I wouldn't be able to handle a family and a demanding job without slighting one or the other, or perhaps both. The fact that I was generally regarded as a freak rather than the role model I later became increased the tension, and I had moments of believing that the conventional judgment might be right. There were nights when I cried silently into my pillow—hoping Bob wouldn't notice—either from a sense of failure on my own part or because I had turned down a tantalizing offer that wasn't feasible at the current stage of our family's life. At one point, as I've recounted, job pressures brought me perilously close to emotional collapse. The ambitious but apprehensive young girl still lives deep inside the woman who now presents a confident and sometimes intimidating face to the world.
The world that confronts women starting out today is different in many ways from the one that greeted me. The overt, explicit barriers I faced have largely been abolished, only to be replaced sometimes by more subtle, unspoken ones that can be even more damaging psychologically. A successful career path requires constant, unabashed self-marketing by both women and men, an exercise I recoiled from and still regard with amazement. Staying on top of things requires becoming comfortable with new technologies at a faster pace than my generation ever anticipated. This is yet another legacy of my father's pathbreaking advances in the tools for collecting and analyzing data and, more recently, for the extensions of human interaction through the Internet and the offspring it has spawned. I warily circle the margins of the world of texting, Face-book, and Twitter in which my grandchildren dwell so comfortably. If I were around to encounter the next generation down, I fear that meaningful communication would be well-nigh impossible.
Whereas members of my generation saw their options as a stark choice between homemaking and professional advancement, the women of today move more freely from one point on that continuum to another at different stages of their lives. My own daughter has so far chosen a work-life balance different from mine. She has opted to work part-time—or at least, to receive part-time pay for what looks to me like a full-time commitment—in order to have more freedom for involvement in her children's activities. She once said to me, “Thank you, Mom, for being a pioneer, which has given me the freedom to make different choices.” Whereas my approach to motherhood was low key and somewhat hands-off, Laura's children are experiencing both the security and the limitations of her fierce protectiveness.
Through all the changes in my life and in the world that surrounds it, my father's presence has never been far away. Today I am a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he came as one of the first members in 1933. As they did in his day, leading scholars from all over the world make up a small permanent faculty, free of all teaching duties to focus on research, writing, and mentoring the larger number of younger members, who spend anywhere from a term to several years there. The institute's board is probably the most intellectually exclusive collection of trustees in the world. Some of its members are billionaires, others are professors, but all of them have been chosen for their ability to oversee and nurture the institute as a place where some of the world's greatest minds can operate in a serene, comfortable environment unhindered by distractions.
The tie that binds is in my mind whenever I sit with my fellow trustees in the glass-walled boardroom, which looks out on a picture-book pond and the woods beyond, around which several generations of geniuses have strolled. I find myself conjuring up my father's astonished ghost, seeing his daughter sitting on the governing body of the institution he helped found, the place where he spent most of his adult life and built his own prototype of the modern computer. While I'm summoning this ghost, my husband is tending his grave in the Princeton cemetery, clipping, weeding, raking, and occasionally replacing a dead plant with a new one—a task he performs faithfully twice a year. The son-in-law John von Neumann feared would fatally cramp his daughter's future is doing his part to make sure the father's memory is not neglected.
My father's presence was closest in 2003, when Hungary staged a national celebration commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth. I was invited to participate as an honored guest, an honor that carried with it one of the most hectic schedules I've ever encountered. A couple of weeks after finishing treatment for breast cancer, I found myself not only giving talks about my father at internationally attended meetings of the Hungarian Mathematical and Computer Science societies in Budapest but also giving informal talks about him, in English, to students in schools all over Hungary.
Thank goodness it's a small country; Bob and I were transported to every corner of it in the cramped elderly vehicle belonging to one of my father's self-appointed promoters, who enthusiastically acted as our chauffeur. Some of the schools were actually named after John von Neumann, but in all of them students knew who he was and what he had accomplished and had created various exhibitions to honor him. I tried to imagine American high-school students according a long-dead mathematician the sort of veneration reserved here for sports and entertainment celebrities!
That week of talking about John von Neumann's life and accomplishments in the land of his birth brought closure for me, a recognition that what I'd feared were the conflicting expectations—my father's, my mother's, society's, and my own—that had shaped my life had finally converged. I had fulfilled my father's moral imperative that I make full use whatever intellectual gifts I had; my mother's ugly duckling had developed a swan's poise and self-confidence. A society where women head Fortune 500 corporations, where half the Ivy League universities, and several of the leading public ones as well, are headed by women, and where a female has been a serious contender for the nation's highest office now allows the most daring and talented women expectations that far exceed mine. By their own lives, my husband and our children have given the lie to the fears of Bob's mother that all three would pay dearly for my career ambitions; my expectations of a close and loving family life have extended to encompass a third generation. My father's shadow has lifted at last; if we meet again, it will be in sunlight.