Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  Bob Stempel and Lloyd Reuss both forged new careers for themselves after leaving GM. Stempel became CEO of Energy Conversion Devices, a Michigan firm known for pioneering work in the development of non-polluting alternative energy sources to power cars and trucks. Reuss, a committed Christian, became the much-admired volunteer executive dean of the Center for Advanced Technologies at Focus: Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides technical training in a variety of fields for inner-city Detroit youths. But for the company they left under duress there has been no such vibrant second life, but rather a humiliating decline into dependency and dismemberment—a fate not even I, GM's resident Cassandra, could have foreseen. That fate has included bankruptcy, a rescue that put the US government in the driver's seat, the forced departure of two CEOs in the space of a year, the sale or abandonment of four of GM's eight vehicle lines, the replacement of most of the Board of Directors, and a management shakeup that promoted a new generation of executives (including Lloyd Reuss's son, Mark) to top positions. Both the company and the new vehicles it is introducing are today commanding new respect. Perhaps, just perhaps, the GM culture against which I did battle in vain has at last been uprooted.

  11

  Having It All

  “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, th
e 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.