that you and the military over this man more than any other in nobody knows what had happened and he faded away. so i try to bring public attention to the collective attention span. >> host: that is a little taste of the newest book save your general's -- this save your general's. also go to but to be to hear a longer version of him in fresno talking about this book. you are watching the tv on c-span2.

>> in his 1999 autobiography he wrote this of the group of genius' gathered together to work on the hydrogen bomb we have come to earth to change everything. change everything they did and among them was the brilliant mathematician and john von neumann father of the architecture for modern computing and so much more but today is not necessarily about john von neumann but it is about to "the martian's daughter" maria von neumann whitman whose own great intellect and several business talents have been applied to other economic social and education frontiers in our country for almost 40 years. in her new autobiography

"the martian's daughter", as she recounts what it is like to grow up in her unique family and then continue to break new ground as a talented woman making it over the most male-dominated boardrooms and classrooms of some of the most torrey institutions in america. maria was leaning in long before a professor of business administration at university of michigan and chief economist to general motors the first woman appointed to the council of economic advisers and she took the post from her academic position now retired but as long years of very distinguished service a jpmorgan chase and procter & gamble answers on the board of harvard and princeton and

she holds honoree degrees from more than 20 colleges and universities. quite a woman it is my pleasure to welcome marina von neumann whitman. [applause] >> good to be here. i should say by the way i have served on the boards of court -- harvard and princeton but not simultaneously. [laughter] that is like serving on the boards of gimble's and macy's. [laughter] >> wonderful to be here. i must say this is a fabulous museum and i had us all tour i think a full one would take days and days but this is exciting. >> thank you. it was so much fun to take you around.

looking at your father's face. >> he liked it but the department did not think it was dignified that is why they called it the ias machine which i think is much more boring. [laughter] >> you wrote one heck of a book and there is so much ground to cover but let's start at the beginning not long before the pitcher that is there behind us. everyone will want to know about the time you spent with your father and the memories of him. let's start with your mother and father because your mother was every bit as remarkable in her own way. >> that is absolutely true. and she had a career she never intended and made up as she went along and she

isn't noted as much but also a very important influence. >> but to talk about on you and john. >> actually they grew up together in budapest the family lore has it they met when he was three and she was six or seven then somewhat later they would take to although my mother was carefully chaperoned. thin in the 1930's my father was invited as a rockefeller fellow to teach one term per year at prince -- princeton and wanted my mother to come with him and that obviously meant getting married so

they did in my mother i think he was young and handsome and billions and she had very overprotective parents and i honestly think she was happy to put an ocean between them. [laughter] and her parents never came here until 1939 when my father said there will be a war. they were divorced but they listen to his advice so she said to the parents you have to come here. they were sure they would be scalped by wild indians but they did come for the six week summer vacation and of course, they never went back. >> host: they couldn't at that point*. >> no. they came in june anwr broke out in august so obviously

com back. they spend the rest of their lives here and one of the reasons another went to work during world war ii for several reasons because it was unpatriotic not to and also and suddenly the financial responsibility for her parents and aunt lou would also, sushi felt she should make a significant contribution to support them. and within three months she was a foreman and within six months she was supervising the women technicians at the radiation laboratory in m.i.t.. after that she never looked back and. >> host: it is fascinating three strong-willed women in your father's background.

your mother, your stepmother and you. , did he deal with this as a husband and father and the intellect? >> with the first wife was badly he was very gregarious but never got the hang of marriage. [laughter] my mother ultimately divorce him and it said the recent when she divorced a genius to marry a graduate student in physics said how would you like to be married to a national monument? [laughter] although they divorced, they kind of maintained a flirtation relationship which drove their spouses crazy. when she was six weeks getting her divorce she would write him letters what

a dreadful place it was and would sign off saying to you love me just show little bit? she was divorcing him. it was an oddball relationship. my stepmother was very intelligent, she didn't have formal education beyond high school or boarding school in england, but when my father built the program to computer she actually became one of the first programmers and did some fancy programming. unfortunately she was also terribly neurotic and insecure and every day he was away from her he would write her a letter apologizing for some perceived said the issue is

also very insecure so sadly she ultimately committed suicide as her father had. when a dividend in high-school she tried very hard to form a good relationship with me but the truth was that she was not easy to get along with and now of course, in my old age i have enormous sympathy for her. but back then as the adolescent i was pretty impatient. >> host: your mother and father had a very unusual arrangement for you personally after they divorced. not one that you knew about but she would have custody up to a point* then he was to have custody from that point* on. >> that's right. the agreement was i do have it in my safe deposit box that until i was roughly 12 with 13 high with that with my mother during fiscal year and spend vacations with my

father then when i reached high school years the situation would be reversed. the reason was apparently anybody who was john von neumann daughter should have the opportunity to know him well but they also thought he would handle better a relationship with me once i reached the age of reason. what they did not know because they were too young and inexperienced was probably the stage of life furthest from the age of reason is the adolescence. >> host: a preteen girl is closest to a martian. >> it was well intentioned but they neglected to tell me about this. i think they were nervous. so when it was strong on me i was testy i thought it

would be good of you to tell me but i acquiesced and i went to live in princeton and it had complications but it did give me a chance to interact more with my father partly because those vacations i spend with him certainly during world war ii were spent without him because he was always at lowe's alamos are on a secret trip to england in the middle of the war and so forth and it gave me a chance to go to a terrific school that does not exist much now with the all girls private school with teachers to do today would be doctors or lawyers or professors but in those days of those options were not off -- available so we

had brilliant women teaching us a when i got toarvard harvard, it seemed easy in comparison to what was demanded of me at the school that is now merged with the boys' school called princeton day school but it is still outstanding. >> host: your father arrived at princeton princeton, instantly a sensation, in fact, i think that'' is the department at princeton was divided into three categories theoretical mathematicians, a physicist ben john von neumann. [laughter] were you aware of that? did you have an understanding? >> i knew he was a hot shot mathematician. i don't think i was aware of how much he bridged over into physics and tell i became aware of the

existence of the mathematician foundation of quantum mechanics but at some point* i became aware that he did bridge the two fields and after the war was over i learned something about the manhattan project -- project and what he had done but not until i went off to college that i began to be more aware what a remarkable person he was. his name did not become that much of a household world -- word. starting with a famous obituary article in "life" magazine right after he died. of lot of this side became more aware of as a young adult. >> host: do you remember when it started to become

clear? in college? many children do if you're slightly aware of what your mother or father do but then something remarkable happened and there it is. do you remember that? >> i do. i remember three anecdotes or incidents. when i first heard it to date the man who became my husband bob wickman, we were down in harvard square having coffee and he introduced me to a fellow graduate student in the math department and he said this is marina von neumann and he said not the von neumann and i said yes and bob was getting his ph.d. and he thought who is the von neumann?

it is in the harvard environment it solidified. later, this is a story i tell in my book, and endowed with the the the most mathematician is literate i could no more pass the general exams now than i could fly and there is a reason. my father although he never knew what was responsible for this of a great irony. because when i went to harvard, a first term by took calculus and that was fine. not my most exciting but not my hardest either. i fully intended to go on to the next calculus class but harvard had a month between terms and i was walking down

the hallway somewhere and i ran into the chairman of the mathematics department who was a well-known mathematician in his own right and published a paper with my father. i am sure he thought he was making small talk and he said marina i am so glad you have upheld the family honor by getting the grade of a in calculus and i thought oh my god what happens to the family honor if i get an a minus? [laughter] and from that day i have never taken another mass course. [laughter] -- math course. i could not take the risk i force my way through what i was speeding my firstborn in the middle of the night but my last reported credit in now -- and matt this calculus.

>> so the family honor is now fully intact. [laughter] >> host: you tell fascinating stories about dinner guests at john von neumann house. when you were growing up who are the people who would drop by for dinner? >> the obvious is edward teller, norbert's, eugene and so forth but by the time i became conscious his wife had died and had become a recluse so i only saw him when i went to the 4:00 t. that the institute had every day but most people were not necessarily all mathematicians. i still remember the famous writer vehemently

anti-communist was a communist then wrote some very dark anti-communist novels and the economist who wrote theory of games with my father and brought his beautiful bride in our living room. there were all of these fascinating intellects around the dinner table and of course, i got terribly impatient with the long hairs because i wanted to go upstairs to finish my homer to get on the phone with my friends. so i was not terribly appreciative of what was going on around me but only booking back there realize what it was. >> host: your father was a prolific letter writer and it has come out as people

beginning to document his life, many letters he wrote and how many people he wrote to. and how much he used that as a way to work out in his own mind his thoughts. >> he did. sometimes they were mathematical thoughts. sometimes there were personal and he would mention to my stepmother it was always apologizing for something he had done or trying to reassure her because she was so terribly insecure and he wrote wonderful letters to me which jumps from one subject to another without a blip or a personal letter but he was very unhappy that i was planning to get married

right out of college. one week out of college. not because he objected to my husband but he thought any woman who tied herself down too early marriage in and '50s was destroying any possibility to have a career of her own so he felt very strongly to make use of intellectual talents. so he wrote to me very desperate letters about don't tie yourself down. don't do it so early. >> host: what comes through in those letters is it he knew that you had special capabilities. he saw the intellectual promise in you and that meant a lot to him. >> it did. he used to worry a lot party when he knew he would die so young but even before he was worried about his legacy and

there were two aspects. one, his work where 100 years after his death anybody would be paying attention and the other was me. i was his only child therefore his link to the future which clearly he was not going to have. and i suppose parental pride that i was a very good student and always first in my class said he expected great things of me and of course, in a statistical stet -- since he was absolutely right women who got married early became mired in domestics and that was that but of course, he never lived long enough i was 21 when he died so i had not done much of anything

yet all my life i have really wanted to be able to say to him see? i did what i wanted but i have also done to you wanted so it did come together but of course, i never had the chance. >> host: you have become the clustering curator and the second set of letters came to life maybe they were known about but george writes in the cathedral about the upright filing cabinet is in your basement in the boiler it is always next to the boiler. [laughter] of all the letters exchanged between john all the years. >> right to. he wrote to her constantly. many were in high gear and some were in english and

long before i looked through them my son who was in his 20s looked through them he did not read hon period so just looked at the english ones and i supported you finding? he said a portrait of a disintegrating marriage. that was not far off. they stayed married and once my father was very ill my stepmother became a very caring caretaker. but no question it was a very dysfunctional relationship. fed is a lot of what is in the letters there is also other things, of a diagram of what george thinks is a diagram of computers i would

not know one way or the other bet george got excited >> and he thinks it could be one of the first pieces of code to. >> right. >> host: you have become very familiar with everything he did but you have a sense of history by talking with you. about his role with a history of computing and game theory and other work he did. how much of what he did has been part of your life's work? >> my life's work? really not at all. when i decided to go into economics i was gonna get a master's and one in

journalism and write articles for "the new york times" or economist. but then i was talked into use of fellowship and ph.d. but i was so naive i didn't realize how much my father had done in the field of economics. that really had not been taken up by economics yet and i don't think i was aware. if i would have realized how much she contributed to the field that was going into i would have chosen a different field but. [laughter] i honestly was a drive-by the time i found that it was too late. [laughter] >> host: life's work was probably not the right phrase not that you didn't devote time you have an awareness and you are on the board of ias, it is a thread

you cannot break each taken on as a dimension. >> that is true. it is remarkable with the board of trustees my father was one of the five founding members. to put his ghost town looking on me there. in that sense that when people want to know things about my father or ask to print something that he had written and in 2003 which was the 100th anniversary of his birth i went all over hungary giving talks about

him some of the schools are named after him and i was astounded with the kind of odd the of high school students would reserve for the athlete or the pop singer i was astounded that these kids knew about him, had done research, and i am going to hungary in june for the opening of a new computer museum witches in the second biggest city there. again there is a ram named von neumann and a vast me to be part of the opening and i secretly hope i can persuade somebody to translate my book into hungarian. particularly after his death

, i have been away become a keeper of the flame a little to my surprise but there it is. >> host: day you feel as history is coming to meet him, his role and accomplishments and is the singular place that he occupied is becoming better known? >> maybe for a couple of reasons. one is he was in mass but he made his mark in a wide variety of fields of pure and applied mathematics and a lot of people wondered given the way the field has multiplied if ever again could do that in as many areas as he did. quite a delay w

theory is a major tool of the social sciences even though that book was called theory of games and economic behavior it was then taken up for a least 20 years by economics and other social sciences. . .

to make the transition to your career because i do want to spend the balance of the time on that because it is so fascinating. you mentioned going to columbia and studying with the nobel laureate and received your ph.d. and you are on the faculty there. but all i want to pick up the story with you going to the white house to be on the council of economic advisers. let me point out today that in 2013. to talk about the council of economic advisers that much anymore but during the 70's the cea is a big deal president nixon wanted to try to do. >> it was until one anecdote waukee it is we got a ph.d. in

combia. we were teaching a and had a job at the educational testing service. 1i decided i wanted to go to graduate school. burt, a friend of mine famous for having written the walked on wall street and decided i would like to go get a ph.d. in economics in princeton and the department will conduct both enthusiastically and i was told there was a problem women were not accepted at princeton even grow to but school and i didn't have to go and talk to the president. they'd been president about 20 years and was about to retire and that conversation didn't go well. he first responded by saying i am so sorry we cannot accept a student of your caliber but unfortunately we don't have

fortunately that isn't a problem because my husband is an instructor in princeton and the leftover world war ii barracks at princeton was housing and every junior faculty. by the way they were supposed to be torn down after the war. actually would be torn down last year. we really wish we could have sent you on our program but unfortunately we don't have enough facilities for the students so for the lack of room i had to go to columbia to get my ph.d., which i did. >> back to the nixon white house

, well the importance of the ce day -- cea that the personal relationship the chairman has with the president, and at that time there was the cea chairman starting with i guess john kennedy and johnson and mccracken and george shultz. and nixon, there were two big events that passed economics in to the forefront and one is when the united states was having all kinds of problems with the brentonwood agreement which worked just fine at the feria was that the world operate on

the balance of the dollar would operate on the gold standard. the system worked just great as long as nobody asked. but in 1970 to, the united states trade deficit was getting bigger and bigger and the french would add the goal so one day nixon aggregated e essentially the commitment ended the brentonwood system. that happened to be the day that i was leaving the council to get back to the university of pittsburgh because i decided that i could no longer ignore the likelihood that the president would accept the watergate scandal. the chairman's assistant called me up and said be sure to listen

to the radio tonight because the president is going to drop the bomb. so i hung up and i turned around and said to my family the president is going to drop a bomb tonight, and my daughter was about 8-years-old and her pigtails stood up on indian she hid under the kitchen table and said he's going to drop a bomb here? so anyway, he did. he abrogated the brentonwood system. he put into effect the infamous price wage control program and so there were big economic issues on the table. one was the wage price control and one was because i served on the price commission and i was the public face of the price control when i went to the counseling and the second thing was that the united states tried very hard to develop a new blueprint for the international

monetary system because the brentonwood system was gone and that's my feel i'm an international economist, and i found myself serving on a group to redesign the system. it was a beautiful blue print because the national politics intervene. not just ours. so the two things that i was heavily involved in were front and center. also, the white house, as is so typical of many institutions, have kind of proliferated, one there is and the council of economic advisers, the national economic council and the treasury is deeply involved. so there has been a kind of metastasis of organizations

dealing with economic and the intersection between economic and political issues. >> gradually i could no longer ignore. it was very exciting. it was either passed or tried to be passed in the nixon administration. the eeoc, you name of these agencies and daniel patrick moynihan tried to put in the income tax and they couldn't get it through congress that they

tried. they made a tv series for public television in which he commented that there is absolutely no way that richard nixon could get the republican nomination today because he was far too progressive in many ways and to barack obama. he made the first s.t.a.r.t. treaty with the russians. so it was a very exciting time to be there and it was with great regret and it increasingly dawned on me that she couldn't have been unaware of what was going on. >> you felt just as a matter of principle that after watergate

and all the revelations afterwards you couldn't stay. >> that's right. and i tried to tell this to her son who was then the chairman of the council and a good friend, and a man of great personal integrity. but also huge loyalist of the president. and i tried to tell him that i was going to leave and he simply didn't believe me. so, finally i wrote a letter of resignation to the president and send it and left a copy on his desk and then he believed me and regarded it as a personal betrayal. >> you entitled that chapter in your book the end of innocence. why was it like that for you? >> well because as i say, i have

always sort of taken these institutions at face value, and i have tried for as long as i could to evade recognizing the fact that there was a very dark side to this presidency that had a lot of progress of things going on. and it is in that sense that i met the end of innocence. ever since then life tended to look at institutions, whatever institutions they are a little more critically than i would have before. >> you move to incredible board service and it's interesting you

made the observation of being critical of the big institutions after you leave the white house. manufacturers was the first that he trusted, westinghouse, p&g, we talk about the university boards. this was a time of fundamental social change for the women that in the 70's. before we get into the companies that you are very candid and what in the book, can we talk about what it was like being a woman sought for these board seats were there any cases in fact in which you were not the first woman to take these board seats? >> the boards i sat on and i'm running through them in my mind, i was always the first woman. when lynn martin who had been the secretary of labor joined the proctor and gamble board,

she said i don't remember this but she said you know coming you greeted me when i said i'm so glad, i waited 17 years for you because i always wanted to be one of two or more. the reason i was courted by the boards i think is because in the 70's, companies in particular were beginning to feel the pressure to put women on the board and there were not that many women that had the experience in the background that -- nowadays there are plenty of women ceos and higher ups in the companies there were not then. so i had these rather high-profile disability at the cea, suddenly the companies wanted me and i was courted by lots of companies and i got to take the cream of the crop. the manufacturers by the way

work through three or four changes of what is now jpmorgan chase. and i was on the board through most of the changes. >> what were your observations about board service in general and the nature of the way they were being governed during this period? >> the first board on a joy and was hanover bank i had this notion of what a distinguished successful profitable bank from an unsuccessful so when i joined the board i said look i would like to take a short course of money-center banking and before each i would like to meet with the head of one of your major business units or one of your major staff some units to learn a little bit about this and they

were very accommodating and set it up for me. but i was the first person who ever asked and i wondered how you were supposed to sit there and listen for a couple of years and is a little sink in and tn starteod cntributing and there was no way that i was going toki learned about banking. now there is a whole college industry in the directors and lots in the schools regardless of the wonderful cash cow to give short courses of various kinds corporate directors but it was unheard of in those days and that was really people say what was it light to be the first woman on the board, and how did they treat you? yet with some initial looks of

shock, and i still remember the gentleman that came about up to my shoulder that was the head of reynolds tobacco and there was some conversation going on and he said he looked up at me and he said pardon me. i thought, you know, if you heard what i heard, the college campuses of the 1960's, you would not be so apologetic for that. but by and large, they treated me with respect and eventually began to take what i said seriously. so why didn't feel a lot of difficulties but we had been lonely.

>> did you feel a unique position -- did you feel you could relate to the other directors or not so much? >> i did. i did. i remember telling the chairman when he asked me to join the board i said look, i recognize i am a token but please don't expect me to behave like a token because i promise you i won't, and indeed i didn't. >> but they took you long a. >> this was a time in the 70's the enormous economic upheaval, political, social upheaval, regulatory change you are talking about. what did you observe about the nature of the corporate leadership in the 70's and that kind of environment? >> well, what had happened, and it didn't all happened in the 70's in the process that still is going on today, and that is corporate boards began to take their oversight functions more seriously.

yes they became a bit more diverse the women and minorities and so forth beginning to join the boards. but the seat was on them and it started in the 70's when they're grew up what was sometimes called the market for corporate control where the companies were merged were there were hostile takeovers or whatever and the notion of that governments became more serious. this wasn't just the chairman's cronies voting yes. although the votes tend to be so unanimously that is because you don't hold the vote until you know that you are going to get the support of the board. the haggling if it is any goes on before. when ross perot voted no, you

remember hearing the corporate board and what ther responsible for and the whole question of executive pay and what kind of a role the board should be playing. it's much more intensive than it was. so i was there for a fair part of this revolution and corporate governance. it was more evolution to the and of course starting well it started in the early 90's and it started when robert, the chairman of general motors was pushed out by the board and then there was a rash of the ceo

being pushed out on the part of the directors which i think it's something that never happened before. and by coincident it happened within six weeks of when i left general motors, and i left for quite different reasons. i was tired of being cassandra telling gm on less you wake up and smell of burning a pot, you know, you are going to be in serious trouble, and i couldn't get them to take their head out of the fan long enough to see that the world was changing and that they would have to change, but he was forced out by the board, and then they had american express and a whole host of companies to bid the same thing happened and that was

unheard of at the time and the process is still going on now of winning out to the corporate directors that they do have a major responsibility. >> let's talk about your career at general motors. about a decade and a half a lot of that is the vice president's chief economist. what to do to gm and why pity and what did you find when you got there? >> it actually happened here. i was at the sabbatical for the advanced behavior on the stanford campus. actually not part of stanford. it was and then. paul mccracken who'd been chairman of the cea when i was there on the staff called me and said there is a man from gm who wants to come and talk to you. his daughters of the school and is going to be there anyway. so i said fine and the center

had wonderful lunches. i suppose i was one of few people who didn't know that this man was going to become the next chairman and ceo of general motors so he came and we chatted and then he said how would you like to be the vice president chief economist at general motors and i thought my god, you know, he had a very fair skin and he was looking quite ready. i thought what an insane idea. [laughter] but it turned out that he was serious. i had been teaching for quite a number of years and i was always up for a new challenge. i turned down several college presidencies so my children told me that isn't what you really want to do.

the company at that time was big enough to affect the national economy and i was a maverick on the stand the everything was year i had this whole economic training. and i think of training in a field of kind of creating a mental feeling into which you break down problems and then reassemble them and i had this mental filing cabinet and a vocabulary that went with it and i was presenting it always to a captive audience of students. and i thought it would be interesting to see if this can be effective in ways within on captive audience who don't share my vocabulary or my mental filing cabinet or whatever. so i became intrigued. now, actually, this was in january and i didn't say yes until may or april because it

would clearly and committing to marriage. as long as we had a child at home i wasn't going to do that. welcome our son was already at yale but our daughter was in high school. and she for a set of reasons for roane wanted to go to boarding school. she didn't want to go back to the school she had been in pittsburgh which we were not intending to go back to. so i thought wll, if ghs into the boarding school she wants to go to some of them i will accept the job so she did and i did. >> what do you hope to do as the chief economist and how did that aligned? >> the chief economist before me that retired which is why the job was available, have really mainly been kind of day assistant to the chairman who

wrote speeches for him and said that the content and its more operating the house. so why did a number ings. for one thing, i shifted the analytical framework of the staff so i'm just focusing exclusively on the u.s. economy to focusing on the global economy. i'm sure that came partly from my own background as an international economist but also i was beginning to be convinced that this was the coming of the global industry. and so, i reoriented that in that direction. >> because it is 1978 when you join. the invasion had happened in this transition was starting. the pot was on fire.

>> and the management kept insisting that this was a temporary phenomena and that of the ball go away and then when the japanese started to go to france here they said who's the vice chairman wait until they have to work with american labor and we will push them back. >> that is the title of one of the chapters. there was just -- you dhaka again and again about the lack of urgency and understanding and responding to each competitive pressure. what was your observation on wide was happening? >> welcome a gm was so used to being the big kahuna. i got congratulated by friends for going to work with generous motors which is sort of the nickname and it wasn't bad at the time, you know, it had more than half of the u.s. parts to

share and they simply couldn't adjust to the fact that this was changing and changing rapidly. he did see in some way he had some vision of the future, but the things he tried to do to fix it or just not successful. he was not capable of making the correction. i mean, he tried to do a lot of automation without recognizing that wasn't in secret. he brought them and hoping that these companies would crack the culture. but he treated the most financial transactions. he never really saw but to

functionally integrate them into general motors was a very different kind of job and they never were functional the integrated and general motors. >> and he brought in a lot of people from the outside at the vice president levels which had never been done before hoping that with up to the culture. but every one of those people he brought back again was the deputy director of the oak ridge laboratory's, he brought in the head of nasa and all kinds of high level people. everyone of us, male or female, evert retired or left the company frustrated because we could not crack that culture. don't misunderstand me. there were insiders who were

trying to do the same thing but there were not enough of them to form a critical mass. i remember i said privately, not publicly, gm and the uaw are going to join hands and jump off the cliff together and that happened in a rather spectacular fashion. we have a lot of great questions from the audience. let me ask a few of those before we talk about what you have been giving before leaving michigan and other places. you know, you talk -- i want to begin with this question because i just love it so much to the utah about what of is like to ride in the car with your dad, who wasn't a very good driver. what was the sunday drive like? >> my father was a notoriously

terrible driver. he and my mother both would go down to trenton and then putting a 5-dollar bill in a cigarette case and offering a cigarette to the top and a loaf of driver's licenses. but that doesn't mean that they learned to drive. i remember it wasn't just the sunday afternoon but i would drive across the country with my father from princeton to santa barbara where he left my stepmother while he went off to the atom bomb test >> he was only 11 as in that picture to be frightened for my

life that we would get there and we would need it. but somebody went to ask my father why he drove a cadillac because the was a very u.n. academic thing to do. he said well, it is only because no one will sell me a tank. and i guess the cadillac was the closest he could come to a tank committed and it is true that he managed to crumble a lot of cadillacs and survive to the all the when their honeymoon he crashed the car and the windshield wiper went through her nose and that had created a lifetime problem, which in a way it did because to prevent scarring, they gave far more radiation than anyone would do well so late in her life she was plagued with not life-threatening but very annoying skin cancers which came from radiation which came from the fact he crashed the car into a tree which he did with some

regularity. >> there is a car here that an old friend works with your father and refer to him as johnny. was he known as johnny? when he came to the united states they said i don't know. i think people either call them johnny or the professor. i don't know that anyone ever call them john except his brother nicholas who wrote it's not quite the book but wrote about his brother and he was a very formal man and he called him john but i don't know of anybody else that did. >> here is a more substantive question. do you know what the most radical vision of the future of computing was a around the time of your father and did it come

close? >> i know my father's radical vision at some point i guess it was right after world war ii he wrote a letter to george tyson's father and a longtime faculty member he said ibm now thinking about something much more important. i am thinking about computers because his main goal, his scientific goal for these high-powered machines was an long range weather forecasting and whether control. he felt that in any future international conflict it would be better controlled that would carry the day. so there is an institution and i

have forgotten now with the initials are in boulder colorado of course what has happened is that computers have made possible. the farmer's almanac and i guess the reason for that is something which hadn't surfaced when my father was a life which was chaos which was essentially no, you can't forecast. so in that sense he would be disappointed. they would be used only for scientific research and probably a dozen of them in the world probably 20.

the notion that every single one of those would have a whole line of of these electronic subject some of them that you can hang them on your next and they would be used for children to play games on and people to write love letters in putting people they shouldn't be writing love letters so that would have absolutely blown his mind. i just don't think -- they hadn't come in yet. they were still using backend tools and they were as big as a room. he also was concern because we really didn't have the social control to manage these technological marvels like hydrogen bombs and so forth, so

he might be quite pleasantly surprised you're sitting here talking about all of this in 2013. >> did you hear the hungarian spoken at home? >> i don't think they ever spoke to the he and my stepmother did often become too late does become very into each other. my mother remarried americans and i never heard hungary and in her house. she sometimes would briefly speak hungarian to her presence but basically there was none in that household. if they want to talk about something they didn't want to talk about in front of me. it's all gone away. but i'mtld when my mother was

getting divorced and remarried and spoke perfect german for the family and perfect hungarian to the service but i came back here and went to in american nursing school and within weeks i had suppressed both languages and like so many americans i don't speak anything except for french today. >> here is one final audience question about your view as an economist and then i have a couple final questions before we do a reading. do you fall into the austerity camp for the stimulus can? >> like most economists, both. what i mean by that is that we needed the stimulus. at probably should have been bigger and lasted longer than it

did. at the same time we need a specific program for gradually reducing the budget deficit which to my mind means of increasing taxes and you can do it by closing loopholes without changing the tax rate my vote would be the carbon tax and getting some kind of growth on the entitlements which before too long was more of the federal budget. so, as i say i am not just being facetious when i say vote. instead we have done the opposite we oppose a student in the form of the sequester which was carefully designed to be so all of that it could never happen.

guess what folks. and we have made no progress at all on any kind of long-term reduction in the budget deficit so we have a 180-degree backward. >> when you look at the situation in washington now how do you feel, are you optimistic, do you have the wherewithal, the will? >> at the moment, no we have amassed. there's a stigma about democracy that is the worst possible system that have been tried. right now that democracy is at a low point that we seem to have worked ourselves into an absolute standstill. i'm optimistic in the sense that i presume sooner or later we will get over it. right now it is a grim prospect.

>> the final chapter in your book you call it having it all. you write in optimistic upbeat terms about your ability to have done that throughout your life. if you were giving advice to a young woman to be starting out on a career path sort of like yours, imagine that, and she wanted to take some cues from that, would you say? >> you can't possibly forecast how your life is going to turn out? i'm not very sure that many men who make life plans but nowadays the notion of getting on one path and sticking to eight is less and less. if you ask young people do you expect to work for one company with same field of their lives

the majority would say no. so professionally it is the old boy scout law will be prepared for what comes. on the personal side, and i talk a lot in my book about how you mentioned what invaluable support my husband has given to me throughout my career and how it might not have been possible without that what sort of partners should we choose and i said look, i can't tell you, i can't define what it would look like but i can give you one piece of advice and that is never form a long-term partnership with someone because you think that you can change him or her because you won't so those are two pieces of advice. >> we are going to have a reading. you made a passage do you know

what you want herd? >> i do. there it is. okay this is the very end of my book. through all her changes in my life and the world that surrounds it my father's presence has never been far away. today i'm a trustee for the advanced study in princeton where he came as one of the first members of 1933. as they did in his day, leading scholars from all over the world they get a small permanent faculty fee of all of the teaching duties to focus on research, writing and mentoring the large number of members that spend everywhere from one term to several years. the institute's board is the most intellectually exclusive collection of trustees in the world. some of the members are billionaires' and by the way, eric schmidt and charles, two of them. others are professors they've

been chosen from their ability as a place some of the world's greatest minds can operate in these are lean, comfortable environment unhindered by distractions when i sit with my fellow trustees on the glass wall board room. beyond which several generations of them have strolled. i find myself conjuring up my father's astonished ghosts. seeing his daughter sitting in the governing body of the institution that he helped to found, the place he spent most of his adult life and built his own prototype of the modern computer. while i'm summoning the ghost my husband is attending his grave in the princeton cemetery looking, raking and occasionally replacing it at a plant with a the son-in-law would cramp hise

daughter's future as doing his part to make sure that all this memory is not neglected. my father's presence was closest in 2003 when hungary staged a national solution come riding 100 inversely of his birth. i was invited to produce it as an honored guest and that carried with it one of the most hectic schedules i've ever encountered it a couple 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 computer science societies of budapest but also giving talks in english to the students in schools all over hungary. thank goodness it is a small country. we were transported to every corner in the cramped elderly vehicles belonging to one of my

father's self-appointed promoters who enthusiastically act it is our show for. some of the schools were actually named after john but in all of them the students knew who he was and what he had accomplished. and that created various exhibitions to honor him. i tried to imagine american high school students including a mathematician that sort of the nation deserve to hear for sports and entertainment celebrities. that is talking about the life and accomplishments in the land of his birth brought closure and a recognition that what i feared were conflicting expectations. my father's, my mother's come society and leone that had shaped my life and finally converged. i fulfilled my father is imperative that i make whenever intellectual gifts i had. my mother's ugly duckling had

developed a self confidence. a society that women had the corporations where half the universities and several of the leading public ones as well are headed by women and the highest office now allows women expectations that far exceed mind. by their own lives are husband and the children have given the alliance that all three would pay dearly for my career ambitions. my expectations of a loving family life have extended it to encompass a third generation. my father's shadow is lifted at last and if we meet again it will be in sunlight. >> thank you so much. [applause]

>> in all level conversations i read it and it's not that i had a -- it is a case i read. i read the book mr. chairman and i read that book and tried for the life of me to figure out how he went to prison and the rest

for the post office scandal. i read it and i read what he did the case because he refused to speak to >> on the legal case that it was just a very fascinating deal and of course abramoff was involved. >> when he came out he said how much money did you fear -- he was speaking after he got out. >> this man has been in jail,

all of jail [inaudible conversations] >> the amount of money he wanted to legalize gambling through the lottery [inaudible conversations]

he won 44% of this company and nobody knew about that. >> i just found it very fascinating that i looked at the back and the issue of what on earth happens and then of course abramoff spend all that money. >> when i got out of morgantown federal prison in the bush housing program that time, i did something i swore i wouldn't do which was to listen to hell in radnor telling me that i needed to do radio. this needs to be public, this needs to be quiet i need to sit around a little bit.

she said you have some experiences and some knowledge or working history of the politics and government. the first show that we did i knew who he goes and i think today in washington you are either to the left or to the right. and it doesn't matter how he would be classified, he is there and he knows journalism in other fields i fed the interest to see of his books when i was a little nervous but we did the show and i really went well and i continued to do the whole thing. i did my show for a little bit and there was the interesting thing to do so i continued to do talk-radio which i continue to do to this day and i ventured over to india for a little what do you do when you want to be

charge your batteries you go to india. i was really delighted to write incredible india. and what i do i state that out five or seven minutes it's a mixture of the indians over there and a fascinating place so it provided me the opportunity to actually write this book i was able to go for a couple months to focus and then come back and did between watching my granddaughter and the recovery program the assistance i do for some people i was able to write this book and our editor sherry johnson was amazing and coming over here tonight. i never thought i would do a book about my cousin i always told the republican he claimed the phrase.

that was his successful movie the one he was known best for. my cousin always told me you need to write a book. i just never thought i would write this one. so i put a lot of thought into it. i outlined that in here and then i had 16 minutes with my former chief of staff and we agreed to do 16 minutes together and i tell you why we did we are going to have jack abramoff for 16 minutes and then you and there was better to have the two of us. it shows more of an honesty factor. if i say this you could say no or vice versa. having the two of us side by side with a better way of doing that. i went to india and salles 60 minutes over their. when i saw it i watched jack

abramoff and i did this to myself, period. so we don't sit here saying he made me have dinner or i made those decisions. but i've watched him on at 60 minutes and then i have some empathy for anybody that's done time but beyond that i just wondered where he was going in his version of history. then when i heard him say i got the short end of that stick. he raised not much. so i sat there in all seriousness and i thought i want to tell my end of it. i knew the headlines on this book about all i wanted to make it more than that. he's part of the story and i get asked constantly by the former constituents i live in ohio in the district, parts of the old district and i get asked all the time what happened to you?

and this book tells a very complicated story. it's just not as easy as having some dinner going to scott lynndie and here i go. it's a complicated story where i have my part and some other parts to it. so the store my sort of put together exactly the outside influences that came in. i want to mention this where iran would have recognized israel and iran would have disband hezbollah. i said that deal to the white house. i wanted to state that part of terrorists among us that were delisted to make legitimate on the international basis.

the the pervvijze morgan federal prison. it is very challenging and fascinating and it was a high-profile person i first met in the back of the room. the chairman rightfully said was the handcuffs and he said we can't do that because he will hear and they did and the whole whitewater deal and that is how i met with in the first time. i was a self reporter much like reporting for your own firing squad and he said you have to meet him and he said i want to go in prison.

from day one it is the best amount of time i spent. he gave me the chief justice of the arkansas supreme court the former attorney general who went to prison and at the web was to the plight of a lot of people in prison and people were not angry and i was a former congressman. i walked out of their feeling a bond with a lot of people. things were going on inside the walls i don't think anyone has antipathy for me. but i have the ability to have a network and the ability to stand here tonight and the ability to be on television, to have writers with radio and the print media. i can write a book and tell my story. a lot of people don't have a voice inside of those walls. we are warehousing those human beings. under the current administration they have things to hear the

drug dealers it ironically became friends with people around the white collar criminals. there are a lot of axson present. the drug dealer was the way. the are addicts. they are not getting treatment and the need to have it. the other part of this is my own personal struggle being in recovering with addiction. and i have a message in this book and i say it in the beginning that you don't have to be in politics and abuse substances to, you know, make your life go down to the it can happen to anybody to the i don't care what you do. i don't care if you are a waiter or what you and your life profession, whenever you are coming you can and just substances into your body. you can lose your focus. you can pay attention to what you are doing and go down a path that will cause a lot of personal problems like the 12 step recovery information which i think this important in this book. the funny story about the congress, and i give credit to some of the members of congress,

which both sides of the aisle in this book, some things will shock some people in this book about the staffers with a section on congressional spouses which is pretty nice. i came to a conclusion in the book. i almost didn't write that conclusion and i was pretty simple. it does is it still cannot. but jack abramoff did and i and our staff, and that was the biggest scandal of its kind, etc.. but what we did has been codified in to ray legal situation today. i can have a fund-raiser and then i can take you hunting, i can take you to vegas. last year they had a fund raiser. i put that in the booktv either side of the aisle can do this.

citizens united, i felt john mccain on campaign finance reform twice and his bill still was worthless. it's worthless as it was back then. he made the paulson 527. but at the end of the day but citizens united and bolack of the true campaign finance reform debate reform at that time the other situation today where a super pak comes along and we can take on carvel '04 on george bush, whatever side of the aisle you want to work with the super pact goes after peoples of the average member to counter that $3 million which is 10,000 a day. they take their stature and they go across the street and get on the television to the dcc or the rcc. ..