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 panic 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.
Once settled in the United States, he became a key player in the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb and put an end to World War II, as well as in the development of the hydrogen bomb, whose shadow dominated the Cold War. His invention of game theory enabled innovative approaches to military strategy and gave birth to entirely new ways of analyzing and making predictions about such disparate phenomena as business competition, diplomatic negotiations, gambling strategies, and the evolution of cancer cells. And his description of the logical architecture that underpins the modern electronic computer provided an essential base for the development of successively smaller, cheaper, and more powerful machines, up to and including the infinite variety of smart electronics that, together with the Internet, have revolutionized every aspect of modern life and human interaction.
John von Neumann is often referred to as one of the “Martians,” five Hungarian Jewish physicists born in turn-of-the-century Budapest, all of whom spent most of their scientific lives in the United States and made fundamental contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. Four of them—Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, von Neumann, and Edward Teller—were at the forefront of developing the atomic bomb; the fifth and oldest, Theodore von Karman, was a pioneer in supersonic flight. The story goes that some of the participants in the Manhattan Project, speculating on how there came to be so many brilliant Hungarians in their midst, concluded that these colleagues were really creatures from Mars who disguised their nonhuman origins by speaking Hungarian.
As this remarkable man's life was ending, I was just becoming an adult, starting out on a life path that would involve me closely in some of the defining events in the second half of the twentieth century. I was a pioneer in and early beneficiary of the feminist wave that swept the nation in the 1960s and 1970s, opening up new opportunities for women who dared to think that they could have it all. I ventured into economics, a field dominated by men, and climbed the academic ladder by focusing my teaching and research on the economic interdependence among nations long before globalization had become part of our everyday vocabulary.
I became the first woman on the President's Council of Economic Advisers when I was appointed by Richard Nixon, only to resign when I could no longer resist the mounting evidence that the president was implicated in covering up the Watergate scandal. I was elected as the first female member of the board of directors of some of the nation's most powerful companies just as they were starting to feel pressure to invite women into their boardrooms. And I was a senior executive of General Motors during the years 1979–92, struggling to awaken its top management to the threats that confronted it, as the Big Three's dominance of the US auto industry was being relentlessly overtaken by nimbler Japanese competitors and their inexorable decline toward disaster was under way.
To some extent, my involvement in all of these events was possible because I was in the right place at the right time. But my parents, and particularly my father, also played a crucial part. The example he set by his life, the environment in which he embedded my adolescence, his expectations of me, and my responses to those expectations were all critical in shaping my own life.
Were it not for his oft-repeated conviction that everyone—man or woman—had a moral obligation to make full use of her or his intellectual capacities, I might not have pushed myself to such a level of academic achievement or set my sights on a lifelong professional commitment at a time when society made it difficult for a woman to combine a career with family obligations. If I had not grown up in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of a family dinner table around which gathered some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, I might have been less attuned to the economic and political relationships among nations that became the focus of my academic career. And without the example of my father's immersion in the affairs of government, I might not have felt the pull of Washington strongly enough to uproot my family and move there for three different government assignments in the space of three years.
Yet perhaps the most powerful motivator of all was my determination to escape from the shadow of this larger-than-life parent, my desire to prove him wrong in his fear that my early marriage would thwart his hopes and ambitions for my own future. I was determined to prove that his expectations for my intellectual and professional success and my own for marriage and children with the man I had fallen in love with while still a teenager need not be mutually exclusive. With every new achievement in my life, with every barrier broken, came an overwhelming urge to say to my father, “You see, I defied you by doing what I wanted, but I'm also doing what you wanted me to, after all.”
The evidence of his mental disintegration that overwhelmed me in that hospital room brought home the finality of my father's untimely disappearance from the scene just at the beginning of the computer age that owed so much to him. It was also the moment that catapulted me into adulthood, into a life whose shape bore the strong imprint of my heritage and the expectations it carried with it.