In the second half of the 1960s, three developments together transformed American culture: the civil rights movement, the emergence of feminism in the form of a definable women's movement, and the mass protests against the escalating Vietnam War. The coalescence of these three movements—which spurred a broader economic, social, and cultural radicalism in many professors and students—permanently altered the face of American college campuses and, ultimately, of the nation itself.
No one knows exactly how and when mass movements originate, but two events, both in 1963, were important markers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr articulated the goals of the civil rights movement in his unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered to some two hundred thousand demonstrators in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28. At about the same time, Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique struck a chord with many American women as she described the frustrations and limitations of the housewifely role that postwar American culture defined as a return to normalcy. This consciousness-raising, together with the increasing availability of the Pill, which enabled women to make individual decisions about birth control and the connection between sex and motherhood, created a powerful launching pad for the developments that, over the succeeding decades, vastly broadened women's choices in shaping their own lives. And I, who had started out without role models for encouragement, gradually acquired more company in knocking down gender barriers and had to spend less time defending the path I had chosen.
While the impact of the women's movement built gradually, in an evolutionary and nonviolent way, the civil rights movement spurred powerful responses. The positive response was the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the brightest spot in the legacy of President Lyndon Johnson. The negative responses were both numerous and horrifying. They included the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi during the “freedom summer” of 1964; the brutality with which local police responded to the peaceful marches for civil rights in Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama; and the Ku Klux Klan's assassination of one participant in the latter march, a white wife and mother from suburban Detroit named Viola Liuzzo, because she was riding in a car with a black man. And the mid-1960s were scarred by riots in the black ghettos of many large American cities that caused deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction of property. The worst one was in Detroit in 1967; after more than forty years, the city has still not recovered.
I blush now to admit that I never took part in the marches or other public protests that marked these tradition-shattering developments. Although I was a trailblazer for feminist goals in the conduct of my own life and career, I never tried to advance feminists' political aims, or those of the civil rights movement, through public declarations or actions. In later years, I came to regret this passivity, wishing that I had spoken out more forcefully against the wrongs these movements were committed to righting. I came to recognize that being the mother of two small children (Viola Liuzzo had five), preoccupied with work and family, was not an adequate excuse.
It was years before I fully acknowledged how much the political and cultural changes stimulated by the women's movement had spurred my own professional advancement. And throughout my life I have exerted pressures for reform by working inside established institutions rather than protesting against their failings from the outside. I genuinely believe that both kinds of behavior are essential for change, but I can't deny that my desire to be liked rather than reviled, included rather than excluded, shaped my own choices.
There was no escaping, though, the impact of the Vietnam War and the escalating protests it engendered. American troops were first sent as combatants to Vietnam in the summer of 1965, and by 1966 teach-ins, sit-ins, and more violent forms of protest were erupting on college campuses all over the country. In many cases, protests against the war melded with black students' grievances. On my own undergraduate campus, a black Harvard student named Franklin Raines called for revolution from the steps of Widener Library, and at Bob's alma mater, Cornell University, a black student named Tom Jones, leader of a group occupying Willard Straight Hall, was photographed on the building's steps, a rifle over his shoulder and a cartridge belt filled with bullets across his chest. No one could have foreseen that, in their middle years, both these men would become pillars of the establishment as top executives of major financial institutions, nor that Frank Raines would chair the Harvard Board of Overseers.
The storm of violence at our leading universities became minor ripples when they reached the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt students, many of them the first in their families to go to college, were more interested in joining the establishment than tearing it down. But there were noticeable reverberations in our university environment. I wasn't particularly shocked by the eruption of four-letter words in students' everyday conversation (my mother had been expert in the use of profanity, after all), but I was taken aback by the fact that they didn't seem to have any other vocabulary at all. There were also more serious pressures on the faculty. Male students had to maintain a certain grade-point average to avoid losing their student draft deferments, and more than one student informed me ominously that the C grade I had just given him could be signing his death warrant. Thus grade inflation was born, and, though I tried to resist it, I soon found myself giving more As and fewer Cs and Ds than ever before.
Several of my colleagues in the economics department, along with some of the graduate students, joined the Union of Radical Political Economists, better known as URPE. Their rebellion was cultural, as well as political, and faculty-student pot parties became regular events. My husband, God bless him, showed himself deserving of a medal for squareness; at one such party, he mentioned to me that it smelled as if dinner was burning. I explained to him that the sweetish odor came from burning marijuana.
At one point a group of URPE members, joined by like-thinking colleagues from other departments, went downtown to picket the Duquesne Club, the city's dining club for the all-white, all-male business leaders of the community and their families. The picketers were humiliatingly driven off by members of the service staff brandishing dishtowels and other household implements. But, to simplify security measures, the club decided to close permanently the side door through which visiting women had to enter. After it was all over, I teased my colleagues who had been involved, “The net result of your picketing has been to allow me through the front door of the Duquesne Club.”
With the rapid-fire disasters of 1968, the ugliness of the turmoil in the world outside broke with full force into the relative calm of our own environment. Jerry Wells and I had just brought our seminar students back to my house on the evening of April 4 for an informal pizza party to celebrate the end of the winter term. His wife, Nancy, who had been setting out food and drink, met us at the door, looking even paler than usual, to tell us that Martin Luther King had just been fatally shot. Our celebration rapidly turned into a wake. Riots broke out all over again in a number of cities as their black residents reacted to the wanton murder of their leader in the struggle for full recognition as human beings and citizens. Barely two months later, Senator Robert Kennedy, President Kennedy's younger brother and his attorney general, was gunned down in a passageway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Lyndon Johnson, reviled by some for his support of the civil rights movement and by others for the escalation of the Vietnam War, had announced in the spring of 1968 that he would not run again, putting the nomination of a Democratic presidential candidate up for grabs. At the party's August convention in Chicago, the public fury that had been building on both sides of the Vietnam War issue erupted into terror when police responded to antiwar demonstrations by using billy clubs, tear gas, and Mace on just about everyone in sight, resulting in numerous injuries but, fortunately, no deaths.8 Even inside the convention hall, surrounded by barbed wire, journalists were roughed up by security forces. The battle for the nominat
ion between the strongly antiwar Eugene McCarthy and the more moderate Hubert Humphrey was virtually submerged by the spectacle of a nation tearing itself apart.
Bob and I, like almost everyone we knew, viewed these events through the lens of our black-and-white TV set, the horror of the images in no way mitigated by their small size and fuzzy resolution. What was happening to our country, one of whose proudest hallmarks for more than a hundred years, since the end of the Civil War, had been its ability to effect orderly political transitions? I never dreamed that I would soon be observing antiwar protests not on a television screen but from the windows of a large stone building next door to the White House.
He's Going to Drop a Bomb
The grim, gray, granite face of the Old Executive Office Building (EOB, later renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue wasn't made any more welcoming by the stern gun-toting Secret Service guard who scrutinized my temporary access pass before letting me through the gate. Everything about the building's massive Victorian exterior, decorated with ornamental ironwork, exuded power and permanence. Built shortly after the Civil War to house the three cabinet departments focused on foreign affairs, the building now contained most of the Executive Office of the President, including my destination, the offices of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The inside of the building was every bit as imposing as the outside, with nearly two miles of black-and-white-tiled corridors and eight monumental, curving granite staircases whose cantilevered construction made them appear to float. If one step were to break or be removed, the whole structure would collapse—a bit of knowledge that at first made my children afraid to use the stairs.
It was 1970, and I was inhaling this heady atmosphere on my first day as a senior staff economist with the CEA. I had actually visited the same offices a couple of years before, when President Johnson had invited a group of young economists to spend what had been billed as a day of informal, interactive meetings with members of his Executive Office, which included the CEA, but which had turned out to be a disappointing session of listening to these members describe their jobs and defend the president's economic policies. Now, though, I was going to settle into one of those offices for a year as an insider, albeit a very junior one, in the Executive Office of the President. That prospect was exciting enough; had I been told that this was only the first of several increasingly significant and visible jobs I would fill as a pioneering female policy maker, against a backdrop of mounting economic and political crises confronting the Nixon administration, I would have crossed my eyes in disbelief.
A few weeks earlier I had been invited by the CEA's chairman, professor Paul McCracken, to spend a year on his staff. One of the smallest government agencies, the CEA had been created after World War II to provide economic advice and analysis to the president. Whether under Democratic or Republican administrations, the economists at the council prided themselves on being defenders of economic logic and the long-run effects of policies against the more short-term views of government departments often dominated by political considerations or special interests. Because of this role, an apprenticeship at the CEA was an opportunity any rising young economist would jump at.
The nonpolitical nature of the job was a major selling point as I pondered McCracken's invitation. Although the chairman and the other two members of the CEA were always political appointees requiring Senate confirmation, these staff positions were deliberately nonpolitical. Senior staffers were generally young academic economists who had established scholarly reputations in their particular areas of specialization, as I had in international trade and finance. I saw myself as a moderate Republican in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, an economic conservative and social liberal on most issues. Above all, though, I prided myself on my political independence. I would have been put off if anyone had asked about my political views or affiliation as a prerequisite for the job, but no one did.
Even so, I had some qualms about joining the administration of Richard Nixon. In foreign policy, Nixon had long been known as an anticommunist hawk and had acquired a reputation as “tricky Dick” when he painted his opponent as a communist “fellow traveler” during his successful race for a Senate seat in California in 1950. Memories of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt in the early 1950s, brought home to me by some of my father's mathematics colleagues as they sat in our living room recounting how they had been hounded out of their academic positions for refusing to sign the loyalty oath required of all public employees in California, were still vivid in my mind.
My worries on this score were offset, though, by Nixon's behavior during the first two years of his presidency. He had apparently become convinced early in his first term that there had to be some alternative to the horrors of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in our relations with the communist world. In line with this thinking, he signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1969 and, some months later, announced a US-Soviet accord on the scope of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1) and the end of the trade embargo against communist China, moves toward easing tensions that set the stage for his historic visits to both countries in 1972.
On the domestic front, the president had proposed dramatic policy innovations during his first two years in office, measures that coincided with my own views about good public policies. Two that he put forward in 1969, the Family Assistance Program, guaranteeing a minimum income to every American family, and revenue-sharing with the states, failed to pass the Congress but became templates for later, more successful efforts. Other measures he introduced became landmark pieces of legislation. These included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. These Nixon initiatives, followed in 1972 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, added up to a program so progressive that, as former senator Bob Dole observed in a 2007 television retrospective on the Nixon presidency, “I doubt that Nixon could be nominated today under the Republican Party. He'd be perceived as too liberal, too moderate.”1
All in all, despite my earlier downbeat introduction to President Johnson's CEA and my initial concerns about the president whose White House staff I would be part of, I was tantalized by the chance to play a role, however modest, in the making of the nation's economic policies. But I worried that uprooting the family for a temporary assignment could threaten the delicate balance between work and family life that was never far from my thoughts.
As he had before, and would many times again, Bob reassured me that together we could figure out how to make the move work for all four of us. Each of us requested and received a year's sabbatical leave from the university, which Bob planned to spend doing research in the Library of Congress for a book on George Bernard Shaw. We rented a pleasant house in Montgomery County, Maryland, noted for the excellence of the public schools our kids would be attending. I knew I would be working long hours, but the flexibility of Bob's schedule, together with the fact that our housekeeper, Josephine Pierce, had volunteered to come with us, persuaded me that my more demanding responsibilities wouldn't disrupt Malcolm's and Laura's lives too much.
By September 1970, when I started my stint at the CEA, Richard Nixon was halfway through his first presidential term. By this time, the dark side of his personality—his secretiveness, his paranoia, his focus on political “enemies,” and his willingness to use a variety of methods, both legal and illegal, both petty and terrifying, to harass them—had taken deep root, although the public did not learn about most of its manifestations until much later. He ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and, despite his announcement of US troop reductions and the “Vietnamization” of the war (neither of which came to pass) that same year, followed up with ground attacks on the enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that bombing had failed to eradicate.
As the war escalated,
so did the protests against it. There were mass demonstrations and arrests in Washington; at one point, National Guard troops were billeted on the marble floors of the Old EOB. Their presence, unavoidable evidence of the war that was going on beneath our windows, made all of us eggheads who were trying not to think too much about it acutely uncomfortable, and not only because, without access to showers, the soldiers smelled. In my enthusiasm for my new job and the exciting policy world I now felt a part of, though, I focused much more on the goals and accomplishments of the administration in both the foreign and the domestic policy arenas than I did on the big dark blot: the escalation of the Vietnam War.
One of the reasons that we young economists serving as the CEA's senior staff were largely unruffled by the mounting tensions between the White House and the world outside was the personalities of the men we were working for, the three politically appointed council members. The chairman, Paul McCracken, was a longtime professor at the University of Michigan Business School, a highly regarded macroeconomist who had himself once served on the council's senior staff. A wisp of a man who looked as if he would blow away in a high wind, McCracken had the courage of a lion. Not only was he totally candid in the economic advice he gave the president, even when he knew it was unwelcome, but he was also fiercely protective of the staff economists who worked at the CEA. Unlike the members, we were not political appointees, and McCracken took the position that, as long as we broke no laws, our political views should be irrelevant in judging our job performance.
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