Martian's Daughter: A Memoir
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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.
The Golden Couple
My parents first met as small children. According to family lore, Mariette Kövesi rode into Johnny (in Hungarian, Jancsi) Neumann's life on a tricycle at the age of two and a half, as a guest at the fourth birthday party of one of his younger brothers. Unfortunately, there is no record of my father's reaction; he was just eight years old. The Neumann and Kövesi families (the hereditary nobility bestowed by the Austro-Hungarian emperor on my banker grandfather, Max Neumann, which allowed my father to add von to his surname, came later, in 1913) were friends and summertime neighbors, both members of the Jewish but highly assimilated Hungarian haute bourgeoisie, which flourished in Budapest in the years preceding World War I. These families, and others like them, were at the heart of the brief, shining moment when Budapest was not only co-capital, with Vienna, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also vied with its sister city for the title of intellectual capital of Europe.
Both my parents spent their childhoods in the privileged, warmly protected environment of highly educated, professionally successful, affluent, and close-knit families. Both families lived during most of the year in large, elegant apartments in the heart of the Pest—or more commercial—side of Budapest. The apartment my father grew up in occupied one floor of a building purchased by his grandfather, who used the first floor for his agricultural implements business and installed each of his daughters, their husbands, and their children on one of the floors above. And both families spent summers in elegant “country” homes in the Buda hills overlooking the flat Pest area. The distance between the summer and winter residences was less than five miles, but each family made an annual hegira between them, with maids covering the city furniture with dustcloths and packing huge trunks and wardrobes for the trip.
My father's upbringing was singular, though, because his extraordinary precocity was recognized very early and his education was tailored to make sure that it was fully developed. His instruction at one of Budapest's three best-regarded secondary schools, the Lutheran Gymnasium, which also produced the Nobel Prize—winning physicist Eugene Wigner, was supplemented, beginning at age eleven, by private tutoring from prominent mathematicians at Budapest University. His first published paper was written jointly with one of those tutors when Johnny was seventeen. The paper, on a very abstruse theorem in geometry, already reflected a key characteristic of all his contributions to pure mathematics: his ability “to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of [pure] logic.”1
But my father's intellectual appetite was by no means narrowly confined to mathematics, and his passion for learning lasted all his life. He was multilingual at an early age; and until his final days, he could quote from memory Goethe in German, Voltaire in French, and Thucydides in Greek. His knowledge of Byzantine history, acquired entirely through recreational reading, equaled that of many academic specialists. My mother used to say, only half jokingly, that one of the reasons she divorced him was his penchant for spending hours reading one of the tomes of an
enormous German encyclopedia in the bathroom. Because his banker father felt that he needed to bolster his study of mathematics with more practical training, Johnny completed a degree in chemical engineering at the Eidgennossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, at the same time that he received a PhD in mathematics from the University of Budapest, both at age twenty-two.
While my father was growing up in a family environment that involved structured discussions of philosophy, politics, banking, science, literature, music, and just about any subject on earth around the family dinner table—discussions in which Johnny and his two younger brothers, Michael and Nicholas, were encouraged to participate—my mother, Mariette Kövesi, was experiencing a very different sort of childhood. She was an only child, six years Johnny's junior (he was born in 1903, she in 1909). Her father was a highly regarded internist and professor of medicine at the University of Budapest, also with a wide range of intellectual interests, centered on music. But he was extremely busy, rather domineering, and reputed to be a chronic womanizer. He was also, for a considerable period of his adult life, addicted to drugs he first took for relief of postoperative pain; as a physician, he had easy access to supplies. My grandmother's response to boredom and neglect was to become a first-class hypochondriac; her immediate reaction to any family conflict was to take to her bed.
However difficult her parents' relationship with each other was during Mariette's girlhood, there was one matter on which they were in complete agreement: the importance of building a protective wall around their beloved, headstrong only child. She was not allowed to go to school until she reached high school age. Her father's fear of childhood infectious diseases, stemming from his experience as a physician in the days before vaccines or antibiotics, had been exacerbated by a near fatal bout of diphtheria Mariette had suffered as a small child. But Géza Kövesi also believed that classroom schooling would not allow enough time for other pursuits he regarded as important: languages, music, and above all sports. And Mariette did indeed become a first-class tennis player in her teens and, she proudly reminded her children, the first woman in Hungary to earn a diploma in dressage from the famed Spanish Riding School in Vienna, home of the Lipizzaner horses.
Mariette's academic isolation was by no means lonely or deprived of fun. She was at the center of a tightly knit group that included four other girls her own age from her parents' social circle. The bonds of friendship formed among the five members of this self-styled “cooking club” endured until their deaths, sundered by neither the Atlantic Ocean nor the Iron Curtain, which separated the ones who lived much of their adult lives in the United States from those who remained in Hungary. And they clearly had very good times together. As old women, they frequently regaled their relatives and one another with tales of the mischievous tricks they had played on their siblings and each other.
When she was in her teens, though, Mariette was moved to frustration and rebellion by the constraints her parents imposed on her social life. Even after she had entered Budapest University, majoring in economics, her parents insisted that she be driven to parties by the family chauffeur and that he wait for her to make sure she arrived home safely at the appointed time. Once, when she got home after curfew, her father met her at the head of the stairs with a sharp slap in the face, never mind that she was twenty years old and already engaged to be married.
This extreme protectiveness was all the more irksome because Mariette was very popular, a belle in her social circle. She was what the French call a jolie laide, actually quite homely when analyzed feature by feature but so witty, vivacious, and fashionable that the overall impression was that of a beauty. As her youthful charm matured into elegance, she retained this quality until the end of her days.
The privileged, family-centered lives enjoyed by both the Neumann and the Kövesi clans during Johnny and Mariette's childhood and youth were played out against the background of continuous turmoil in Central Europe. The upheavals began with Hungary's participation on the losing side of World War I, starting when Johnny was ten and Mariette four. There followed, in quick succession, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 133 days of “Red Terror” brought on by Béla Kun's coup and declaration of the Soviet Hungarian Republic, and the successful countercoup of Vice Admiral Miklos Horthy, the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.
Horthy's regime brought a degree of stability to the chaos-wracked nation, but a rising trend of nationalism and anti-Semitism was exacerbated by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, under which Hungary lost some two-thirds of its territory to its neighbors Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Of particular importance to the parents of sixteen-year-old Johnny was the passage of the so-called Numerus Clausus, sharply restricting the access of ethnic Jews to higher education. Over the two decades that followed, Hungary engaged in a variety of arrangements and alliances aimed at regaining its lost territories, the ultimate effect of which was to push the nation increasingly in the direction of the Nazi-Fascist alliance.
The two families were outwardly relatively unaffected by the conflict that engulfed much of the world in 1914–18. The boys were too young for military service, and both families were able to maintain the accustomed patterns of their lives. Only when the communist coup of 1919 actually threatened the lives of well-to-do bourgeois families did the two households decide to flee the country. The von Neumanns sat out the 133 days of the Red Terror at a vacation home on the Adriatic coast, near Venice. They returned to Budapest to find their apartment and belongings unscathed as soon as the takeover ended.
Once back in Budapest, the families were clearly troubled by the growing anti-Semitism in their homeland; the Neumanns' pragmatic response was to send Johnny to the less restrictive environment of the German Weimar Republic for further education, even though anti-Semitism was also taking root there. The ultimate fate of Jews in both Hungary and Germany once Hitler had taken control was beyond their wildest imaginings, as it was for the millions of European Jews who paid with their lives for their inability to foresee the future in time to escape it.
Underneath the apparently unruffled exterior of their everyday lives, both Johnny's and Mariette's views of the world were strongly shaped by these years of turmoil. My father traced the origins of his hawkishness regarding the Soviet Union (he openly favored a preventive attack on that country immediately following World War II, when we had the atomic bomb and it didn't) to the traumatic impact of the 1919 communist coup. In hearings on his nomination to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1955, he was unequivocal: “My opinions have been violently opposed to Marxism ever since I remember, and quite in particular since I had about a three months taste of it in Hungary in 1919.”2 Both my parents retained throughout their lives a cynicism, a be-ready-for-the worst attitude toward world events, that contrasted sharply with my optimistic American worldview.
This difference was brought home to me in the summer of 1974 when, as the Nixon impeachment proceedings were under way, I was about to set off on a monthlong vacation in Europe with my husband and children. My mother was aghast that we would leave home at a time so fraught with uncertainty. My response was that, while I had no idea who would be president by the time I returned, I felt confident that my credit cards would continue to be accepted in Europe and that we would be greeted by the same grumpy but benign customs officials when we returned. It took the catastrophe of 9/11 to shake the American sense of security that separated my weltanschauung from that of my parents.
The relationship between my parents blossomed from childhood friendship into romance during the summers of 1927–29, when my father came home to Budapest on summer holidays from his position as a privatdozent (assistant professor) at the University of Berlin. Things accelerated rapidly from an unannounced engagement to marriage when my father was invited to spend a term lecturing at Princeton University from February to May of 1930 and wanted to take my mother with him as his wife.
By the time of their elaborate wedding on
New Year's Day, 1930, Johnny had acquired international fame in mathematical circles on the basis of the thirty-two major papers he had published, at a rate approaching one a month.3 Some of these papers were major contributions in different areas of pure mathematics, including logic and set theory. Others laid the foundation for his mathematical formalization of the new physics—the probabilistic approach of quantum mechanics that was replacing the determinism of classical Newtonian physics in explaining the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles. This latter work culminated in the publication in 1932 of his book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, which is today still in print and regarded as a significant advance in modern physics.
Von Neumann's name is not always associated with the origins of quantum mechanics, but he is universally recognized as the father of game theory. A paper he published in 1928 set forth a proof of the minimax theorem, the basis of that theory, which he later developed in the pathbreaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, coauthored with economist Oskar Morgenstern. The crux of this proof was to show that, in any precisely defined conflict (which he called a “game”) between two individuals where one's win is equal to the other's loss, there is a strategy that guarantees the smallest maximum loss or largest minimum gain for each player, regardless of what his opponent does.