president nixon and -- under president nixon and in the 1980s she served as vice president and chief economist of general motors. she's next on booktv discussing her memoir, "the martian's daughter." >> in his 1999 autobiography, the physicist edward teller wrote this of the group of geniuses gathered together to work on the hydrogen bomb: we are martians who have come to earth to change everything. change everything, they did, and among them, of course, was the brilliant mathematician john von neumann, father of what we now call the von neumann architecture for modern computing and, of course, so much more. today is not necessarily about john von neumann, of course, but it is about a martian's daughter, marina von neumann whitman whose own great intellect and considerable business talent have been applied to economic, social and

education frontiers in our country for almost 40 years. in her new autobiography, "the martian's daughter," marina recounts what it was like to grow up in her unique family and then to continue to break new ground as a talented and credentialed woman making it certainly in some of the most male-dominated boardrooms, classrooms and charts of some of the most storied institutions in america. marina was leaning in long before the phrase leaning in hit the popular vernacular. she is professor of business administration and public policy at the university of michigan, a former vice president and chief economist of general motors, she was the first woman appointed to the president's council of economic advisers in 1972-'73. she took that post from her academic position at pitt. she is now retired but had long years of very distinguished services on the boards of directors of alcoa, jpmorgan chase, procter & gamble. she serves on the boards of

harvard and princeton and of the institute for advanced study at princeton, and she holds honorary degrees from more than 20 colleges and universities. quite a woman, ladies and gentlemen. it's my pleasure to welcome her now. please, marina von neumann whitman. [applause] so good to have you here. >> well done can. so good to be here. >> thank you very much. >> i should say, by the way, that i have served on the boards of harvard and princeton, but not smugglesly. >> ah, okay. [laughter] >> that would sort of be like serving on the boards of gimbles and macy's at the same time. >> that's true. [laughter] good point. well, welcome. >> it's wonderful to be here. and i must say this is a fabulous museum. i had a sort of mini tour. i think, actually, the full tour would take days and days, but it's pretty exciting.

>> thank you. thank you very much. it was so much fun to take you around this morning and, of course, to look at what we call the johnnyac, but i know that was not your father's favorite phrase for that computer. >> well, he liked it, but the institute for advanced studies thought it wasn't dignified enough. >> okay. >> that's why it became the ias machine which i think is much more boring. [laughter] >> you've written a heck of a book. i just loved it. and there's so much ground to cover in this. but let's start at the beginning. not long before that picture that's there behind us and is on the cover of the book was taken. you had, everyone, i'm sure, is going to want to know about the time that you spent with your father and your memories of him. but let's start with your mother and your father, because your mother was every bit as remarkable a person in her own way. >> that's true. that's absolutely true. she was very smart, very glamorous.

she had a career that she never spended to and kind of made up as -- intended to and kind of made up as is he went along, and -- although she isn't noted as much in things wring about the book -- written about the book, she also was an important influence. >> talk a little bit about her influence both on you and on john. >> well, they actually, i think, grew up together in budapest. the family lore has it that they met when she was 3 and he was 6 or 7 at a birthday party. and, um, then somewhat later, obviously, they did what i guess today would be called dating, although my mother was very carefully chaperoned. and then in 1930 my father was invited to, as a rockefeller fellow, to teach one term a year at princeton. and he wanted my mother to come

with him and, obviously, that meant getting married. so they did, and my mother, i think -- first of all, he was pretty, in fact, he was young, he was handsome, he was brilliant, and besides, she had very overprotective parents, and i honestly think that she was very happy to put an ocean between them. [laughter] and they, they -- her parents never came here until 1939 when my father said, look, there's going to be a war. you mustn't -- saying to my mother, they were divorced, but she still took his advice. he said you mustn't go to hungary, so she said to her parents, well, if you want to see us this year, you have to come here. well, they were sure they were going to be scalped by wild indians, but they did come for what they thought was a six week summer vacation and, of course, they never went back. >> they couldn't go back to europe at that point. >> no. they couldn't go back to europe.

i mean, they came in june, i guess, and war broke out in august. so, obviously, they couldn't go back. >> uh-huh. >> and so they spent the rest of their lives here, and i guess one of the reasons -- well, my mother went to work during world war ii for several reasons. one is that it was unpatriotic not to. and, also, she had suddenly the financial responsibility for her parents and her aunt who had also come. so she felt she ought to at least make a significant contribution to supporting them. so she went to work as a kind of tilly the toiler, and within three months she was a foreman, and within six months she was supervising the women technicians at radiation laboratory at mit where they built radar sets. and after that she kind of never looked back. >> i think it's fascinating, three very strong-willed,

intelligent women in your father's background. one, mary, your mother, one your stepmother and one, you. now, how to did he deal with all of this as a husband and father and intellect? >> well, as far as wives went, he dealt very badly. [laughter] he was a very gregarious person, but he never really got the hang of marriage. [laughter] and my mother, ultimately, divorced him and went -- it's said that when she was asked why she divorced this great genius and married a graduate student in physics, she said, well, how would you like to be married to a national monument? [laughter] but the truth is that although they divorced, they kind of maintained a lifetime flirtation relationship which drove their spouses crazy. when she was in, sitting out the

six weeks in reno getting her divorce, she would write him letters about what a dreadful place this was, and she would sign off saying do you love me just a little bit? love mary ann. and, you know, she was divorcing him. >> sure. >> so it was an oddball relationship. my stepmother was very intelligent. she never had formal education beyond high school, beyond boarding school in england, but when my father built the stored program computer, she actually became one of the first programmers and did some pretty fancy programming. unfortunately, she was also terribly neurotic, terribly insecure. every day that he was away from her he would write her a letter apologizing for some per sued

sin or other. -- perceived sin or other. and she was also very insecure. sadly, she ultimately committed suicide as her father had. when i lived with them when i was 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 an adolescent i was pretty be impatient. >> uh-huh. your mother and father had a very unusual arrangement for you personally after they divorced, and it was not one you knew about. she was to have custody of you up to a point, and then he was to have custody from that point on. >> that's right. the agreement was, and i have the divorce agreement in my safe deposit box, that until i was roughly 12 or 13 i would live

with my mother during the school year and spend vacations with my father. and then when i more or less reached high school years, the situation would be reversed. their reasoning was, apparently, that, of course, anybody who was john von neumann's daughter should have an opportunity to know him well. but they also thought that he would handle better a relationship with me once i'd reached the age of reason. now, what they hadn't, didn't know because they were too young and inexperienced was that probably the stage of life furthest from the age of reason is a teenage adolescent. [laughter] >> preteen girlses are the biggest martians of all. >> there you are, exactly. so in that sense, it was a mistake. but it was extremely well intentioned. however, they neglected to tell me about this. i don't think they neglected, i think they were nervous about it.

so when this got sprung on me, i was pretty testy about it. >> yeah. >> because i, you know, i thought, jeez, it would have been good of you to tell me. but, you know, i acquiesced, and i went off to live in princeton, and as i say, that had its complications, but it did give me a chance to interact much more with my father than i could have otherwise. partly because those vacations i spent with him, certainly during world war ii, were mostly spent without him because he was always either in los alamos or on a secret trip to england in the middle of the war and to forth. it also gave me a chance to go to a really terrific school. it was something that doesn't exist much now, a sort of all girls' private school. and we had teachers who today would be doctors or lawyers or professors in university, but in those days those options weren't

open to them. so we had these absolutely brilliant women teaching us. and i have to say that when i got to harvard, it seemed easy in comparison to what was demanded of me at, of all things, miss fine's school which has now merge with the the boys' school, and it's called the princeton day school. but it's still an outstanding school. >> so your father arrives at princeton. he's, he's instantly a sensation. in fact, i think the quote in your book is that the, the department at princeton was divided into three categories in mathematics. there were the three relate corral mathematicians, there were the physicists, and then there was john von neumann. [laughter] >> well -- >> were you aware of that? did you have any understanding of your father? >> no. i knew that he was a pretty hot shot mathematician. i don't think i was aware of how much he bridged over into

physics until i became aware of the existence of the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. can't say i've ever read it, but at some point i became aware that he did bridge those two fields. and, of course, after the war was over i learned something about the manhattan project and what he'd done there. but it really wasn't until i went off to college that i began to be more aware of what a remarkable person he was. and, you know, his name didn't become that much of a household word while he was still alive. that really happened after his death, beginning with a famous obituary article in "life" magazine right after he died. so a lot of in this i sort of payment -- a lot of this i sort

of became more aware of as a young adult. >> do you remember when it started to become clear to you? you said you were in college when suddenly -- i think as many children do, i mean, you're slightly aware in many cases what your mother and father do, but all of a sudden if it's something remarkable, maybe the clouds begin to part a bit, and there it is. do you remember that? >> yes, i do. i remember it through sort of anecdotes or incidents. i remember when i was first starting to date the man who became my husband, bob whitman -- >> bob, who's here today. >> over here. >> absolutely. >> and we were down in harvard square having coffee or something, and he introduced me to a fellow graduate student in the math department, and he said this is marina von neumann, and the young man said not the von fewman, and i -- bob says i modestly batted my eyelashes and said, yes. and bob, who was getting a ph.d. in england thought, gee whiz, who is the von neumann?

and so it was really in the harvard environment that all this kind of solidified -- >> uh-huh. >> and later, and this is a story i tell in my book, i'm undoubtedly the most mathematically ill literate economist on the planet. >> i think that's fascinating. >> i could no more pass general exams for a ph.d. in mathematics than fly. and there's a reason for it. directly -- my father, although he never knew it, was responsible for this great irony. because when i went to harvard the first term, i took calculus 1a, and that was fine, it was okay. it wasn't my most exciting course, but it wasn't my hardest one either. and i fully intended to go on to calculus 1b, but one day harvard

in those days had a sort of month between terms, and i was walking down a hallway somewhere, and i ran into the chairman of the harvard mathematics department who was a very well known mathematician in his own right and, actually, had published a paper or two with my father. and i'm sure he thought he was just making small talk with this 17-year-old, and he said, oh, marina, i'm so glad you upheld the family honor by getting an a in calculus. and i thought to myself, oh, my god, what happens to the family honor if i ever get an a- in calculus. [laughter] and from that day to this, i have never taken another math course. [laughter] i could not take the risk. i have audited math courses, i've forced my way through textbooks when i was feeding my first born in the middle of the night. but my last recorded credit in

math is calculus 1a. [laughter] >> and, therefore, the family honor's fully intact. >> fully intact, that's right. >> you tell some fascinating stories, too, about the dinner guests at john von neumann's house. so when you were growing up, who are the people who would just drop by for dinner? >> oh, well, yes. well, the obvious, the edward tellers and the norbert -- [inaudible] and eugene -- [inaudible] and so forth. i think einstein used to come to dinner, but by the time i became conscious, his wife had died, and he became something of a recluse. so i only saw him when i went to the 4:00 teas that the institute for advanced study had every day. but all the people who came to dinner were not necessarily all mathematicians. i still remember arthur kessler,

the famous writer who wrote vehemently anti-communist -- he had been a communist and then wrote some very vehement and very dark anti-communist novels. ask oscar morganstern, of course, the economist who wrote the theory of games with my father who actually courted his very beautiful bride in our living room. so there were all these fascinating intellects around the dinner table, and, of course, i got terribly impatient with these long dinners, because i just wanted to get upstairs and finish my homework so i could get on the phone with my friends. so i was, to put it mildly, not terribly appreciative about what was going on around me. and it's only looking back that i realize what a crowd this was. >> now, your father was a

prolific letter writer. and it's come out as people are now beginning to document his life how many letters he wrote and how many people he wrote to and how much he used that as a way of really working out in his own meaned a lot of the thoughts -- mind a lot of the thoughts he was trying to work out. >> he did. sometimes they were mathematical thoughts when he was writing to colleagues, and sometimes they were very personal thoughts. as i mentioned, he wrote whenever he was away, he wrote to my stepmother, and it was always either apologizing for something he had or hadn't done or trying to reassure her, because she was so terribly insecure. and he wrote wonderful letters to me which would jump from one subject to another without, without a blip. sometimes very personal letters, because he was very unhappy that

i was planning to get married right out of college. actually, i was a whole week out of college. not because he objected to my husband, he quite liked bob, but he thought that any woman who tied herself down to early marriage in the 1950s was destroying any possibility of having a career of her own. and he felt very strongly about making use of one's intellectual talents. so he wrote me these very desperate letters about, you know, don't tie yourself down. don't do this so early. diswhr well, and i think what comes through in those letters as well is that he knew you had special capabilities. i mean, he really saw the intellectual promise in you, and that meant a lot to him, it seems. >> oh, it did. i mean, he yulessed to worry a lot -- he used to worry a lot,

partly when he knew he was going to die so young, but even before he sort of worried about his legacy. and i guess there were two aspects to his legacy. one was his work, and he worried a great deal whether a hundred years after his death anybody would be paying attention, and the other was me. i was his only child, and, therefore, in a sense his link to the future. which clearly, he wasn't going to have. >> uh-huh, uh-huh. >> and i suppose there was a certain amount of plain old parental pride. but also i was a very good student, and i was always first in my class and this and that. and so he expected great things of me, and, of course, in a statistical sense in the 1950s he was absolutely right. that women who got married early sort of became mired in domesticity, and that was that. and, of course, he never lived long enough, i mean, i was 21

when he died, so i hadn't done much of anything yet. and all my life i've really wanted to be able to say to him, you see? i did what i wanted, but i've also done what you wanted, so it did all come together. but, of course, i never had that chance. >> now, you have become the clerker and in some ways -- the collector and in some way it is cure ray tour of all this correspondence. and the second set of letters which i think came to light because of george dyson, certainly george writings in rifting terms -- riveting terms about this rusty upright filing cabinet in your basement next to the boiler. as george put it in his book, it's always next to boiler, whatever it is. [laughter] >> that's right. >> of all the letters that were exchanged between john and clary during all those years. >> that's right. as i said, he wrote to her

constantly. many of them were in hungarian, but some of them were in english. and once long before i had ever looked through them, our son who was then probably in his 20s or something looked through them. he didn't read hungarian, so he just looked at the ones in english, and i said, well, what are you finding there? and he said very simply, a portrait of a disintegrating marriage. and that wasn't far off. i mean, they, in fact, stayed married, and once my father was very ill, my stepmother became a very caring carrytaker and so -- caretaker and so forth. but there's no question that it was in many ways a very dysfunctional relationship. and that's a lot of what's in those letters. there's also some other things. there's a diagram of what george thinks is a diagram of the

computer that was built at the institute. i wouldn't know one way or another, but george got quite excited. >> he did. he found another piece of paper which was crumpled that then smoothed back out which was he thinks maybe one of the first pieces of code ever -- >> that's right. that's right. >> did you -- now, you obviously have become very, um, familiar certainly with everything that he did, but also you have a real sense of history, i can tell just by talking with you and what you write in the book about his role in the history of computing and in game theory and all the other path-breaking work that he did. how much of that have you seen as part of your life's work? >> as part of my life's work? >> yes. >> well, really not at all. i mean, ironically when i decided to go into economics --

and, initially, i intended to get a master's in economics and one in journalism, and, you know, write articles for "the new york times" and the economist or something, and it wasn't until gary beckert gave me a fellowship and talked me into going for the ph.d. that i became an economist. but i was so naive that i didn't really realize how much my father had done in the field of economics. i mean, game theory really hadn't been taken up by economics yet, and i don't think i was aware of the turnpike theorum. i'm sure if i'd realized how much my father had contributed to the field i was going into, i would have chosen a different field. [laughter] but i honestly was ignorant. and by the time i found out, it was too late. [laughter] >> yeah. i -- life's work is probably not the right phrase. not that you've devoted a

tremendous amount of time to this, but you certainly have an awareness and you're on the board at the ias. i mean, it's just a, it's a thread that you can never break. but, also, you've taken this on as a dimension, i think. >> oh, that's true. yes. and it is, it is quite remarkable to sit on the board of trustees of the institute for advanced study where my father was one of the five founding members and to sort of feel his astonished ghost looking down on me there. so, yes, in that sense. and i've tried to be responsive when people have wanted to know things about my father or asked to reprint something he'd written and so forth. i try to respond to these things. and in 2003 when, which was the 100th anniversary of his birth,

i went all over hungary giving talks about him. and in school, in high schools some of them named after him, and i was absolutely astounded that these high school students sort of revered john von neumann with the kind of awe that in the u.s. high school students would reserve for a athlete or a pop singer. and i was just astounded that these kids knew about him, they'd done research. and i'm going to hungary in june, in about two months, i guess, for the opening of a new computer museum in hungary in the second biggest city there. >> uh-huh. >> and, again, there'll be a room devoted to von neumann, and they've asked me to be part of the opening. i secretly or not so secretly hope maybe i can persuade somebody to translate my book into hungarian.

so, you know, i mean, particularly after his death i have in a way become the keeper of the flame. >> uh-huh. >> a little bit to my surprise, but there it is. >> do you feel history is now coming to meet him? do you think that his role and his accomplishments and the singular place that he occupies is becoming better known now? >> that may be for a couple of reasons. one is that he was truly a polymass, and that's sort of a pun because what i mean by that is he made his mark in a wide variety of fields in both pure and applied mathematics. and a lot of people wonder given the way the field as multiplied that if ever again anybody could

do that in as many areas as he did. and, of course, the other thing is that with quite a delay, game theory has now become a major tool in the social sciences. even though that seminal book was called the theory of games and economic behavior. it really wasn't taken up for at least 20 years by economics and other social sciences. it was taken up mainly by the military and by the rand corporation which did analysis for the military. but it came quite late to economics and now to some extent, also, to political science and interestingly enough, to biology. and because that happened with a delay, but it did happen again, more people are aware of him than would be otherwise. i think the computer scientists always were, but that doesn't

mean that the economists and the political scientists and the molecular biologists were which many of them are now. >> uh-huh, uh-huh. well, that's a perfect way 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 colombia and studying with the nobel laureate gary becker, received your ph.d., went to pitt and were on the faculty there at pitt. but i want to pick up the story really with you going to the white house. to be on the staff of the council for the economic advisers. now, let me point out that today as we sit here in 2013, no one really talks about the council of economic advisers that much anymore. but during the '70s, the cea was a big deal because of the things that president nixon wanted to try to do. >> it was. can i backtrack just a minute? >> absolutely.

>> and tell one anecdote about why it is that i got a ph.d. at columbia. .. so i would have to go and talk to the president, the president had been president for 20 years and was about to retire and that conversation did not go well. [laughter] he first responded by saying oh

mrs. swett man i am so sorry we cannot accept a student of your caliber but unfortunately we don't have -- for a woman student. i said fortunately that is not a problem because my husband is an instructor at princeton and we live in the leftover world war ii barracks. princeton and was housing its very junior faculty and by the way those barracks words were supposed to be torn down after the war actually going to be torn down next year. [laughter] at least that is what they said. so after i've made this point about housing there was a long silence and then he said oh mrs. swett manually really wish we could accept you but unfortunately we simply don't have enough facilities for women students. so for the lack of ladies rooms i have had to commute to columbia to get my ph.d. which i did. okay now -- >> ironically of von neumann not being able to get into princeton.

>> exactly. back to the next nixon white house. >> yes. >> well, the importance of the cea has tended to rise and fall with the kind of personal relationship that the chairman has with the president and at that time, there were a string of chairman starting with i guess arthur open and walter heller and john kennedy and johnson and mccracken and george shultz with nixon and nixon, there were two big events that passed economics into the forefront and one was when the united states was having all kinds of problems with the bretton woods agreement, which

works just fine. the theory was that the world would operate on the dollar standard and the dollar would operate on more or less the gold standard so the countries that wanted to trade dollars for gold would do that when they asked. the system works as long as nobody asked, but in 1972, 72 the united states trade deficit current account deficit was getting bigger and bigger and the french were threatening to add demand gold. one fine day nixon abrogated essentially our commitment, ended the bretton woods system. i remember that happen to be the day that i was leaving the council to go back to the university of pittsburgh as i had decided i could no longer ignore the likelihood that the

president was mixed up in the watergate scandal. and the chairman, the assistant called me up and said marina fisher and listen to the radio tonight because the president is really going to drop a bomb. so i hung up and turned around and said to my family, oh the president is really going to drop upon tonight in my daughter was about eight years old. her pigtails kind of stood on end and she hid under the kitchen table and she said he is going to drop a bomb here? any way he did. he abrogated the bretton woods system. he put into effect the infamous wage price control program and so there were two big economic issues on the table. one was the wage price controls and because i briefly served on the price commission i was kind of the public face of the wage price controls when i went to the council and the second thing was that the united states tried

very hard to develop a new blueprint for the international monetary system because the bretton woods system was gone. and that was my field. i am an international economist and i found myself serving on a group headed by the paul volcker trying to redesign the international monetary system. we had an absolutely beautiful blueprint. it never got used because national politics. the two things that i was heavily involved in were kind of front and center in those days. also, since then, the white house as is so typical of many institutions, had kind of proliferated. now there is not only the council of economic advisers but they national economics counsel and the treasury is deeply

involved so there has been a kind of metastasis of organizations around the president dealing with economic and the intersection between economics and political issues. >> how would you describe the environment in the white house? >> well, the little problem of watergate which gradually i could no longer ignore. it was very exciting. i mean the thing that people forget about richard nixon is that almost every piece of progressive economic legislation that we have was either passed or tried to be passed and didn't during the nixon administration. i mean the epa, the eeoc, you name it. in fact he and daniel patrick

moynihan tried to put in the negative income tax and they couldn't get it through congress, but they tried. i remember a few years ago bob dole 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 and in fact in many ways his economics word to the left of barack obama's. and of course he opened up china and he made the first salts or 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 that i left but as i said it increasingly donned on me that it could not have been unaware of what was going on.

>> and you make that point in your book that you felt it is a matter of principle after watergate and all the revelations afterwards you couldn't stay. >> that's right and i tried to tell this to the then chairman of the council and a good friend and a man of great personal integrity but also a huge loyalists to the president. and i try to tell him that i was going to leave. he simply didn't believe me. so finally i wrote a letter for the nation to the president and sent it and left a copy on his desk. then he believed me and he really did regard it as a personal betrayal. >> did he tell you that personally? >> yeah, pretty much. it was clear, let's put it that way. >> you entitled that chapter in your book the end of innocence. why was that like that for you?

>> well, because as i say, i had always you know sort of taken the institutions like the presidency at face value and i had tried for as long as i could to evade recognizing the fact that there was a very dark side to the presidency, which as i say had a lot of very exciting and progressive things going on. and it's in that sense that i meant the end of innocence and you know, ever since then i have tended to look at institutions, whatever institutions they are, a little more weight than i would have before. >> you move from their two years

of an incredible board service at some of the biggest companies in america and it's interesting you just made the observation about being critical of the big institutions after you leave the white house. manufacturers hanover trust, westinghouse and you served on the board there and png. this was a fundamental social change for women in the 70s and before we get into your observations about the boards and the companies which you are very candid about throughout the book can you just talk about what it was like being a woman, sought for these board seats almost and were there any cases in fact in which you were not the first woman to take these words seats? no. the boards i sat on, i think i was always the first woman. in fact, ben lynn martin who had

been secretary of labor signed the proctor & gamble board she said i don't remember this but she said you know marina you greeted the wind i first came saying lynn i'm so glad to meet you. i waited 17 years for you because i always wanted to be one of two or more women on the board of directors. the reason i was courted by ford's is because in the 70s companies, big companies in particular were beginning to feel the pressure with women on their boards. there was a lot of women do have the experience and background that women days -- nowadays but there weren't ben. so i have this rather hype profile as the cea, suddenly companies wanted me and i was courted by lots of companies. i got to pick the cream of the

crop. manufacture hanover by the way went through three of four changes into what is now jpmorgan chase. i was on the board through hopeless changes. >> what were your observations about board service in general and nh of the way corporations would govern during this. mass? >> one of the things that really startled me is that the first board i joined was manufacturers hanover and i hadn't the slightest notion what distinguished they profitable bank from an unprofitable bank so when i joined the board i said look i really would like a short course in money center banking and i said before each board meeting i would like to meet with the head of one of your major businesses or one of

your major staff to learn a little bit about this. they were very accommodating and they set it up for me but they asked -- acted as if i were the first person you ever ask. i wondered how other people learned and it turned out that i would sit there and listen for a couple of years until it all sank in and then started could she beating and of course there was no way i was going to be quiet for a year or two while i learned about nanking. now of course there's a whole cottage industry of educating corporate directors and lots of folks as a wonderful cash cow to give short courses at various times. it was unheard of in those days. people say what was it like to be the first woman on a board and how did they treat you?

yes there were some initial looks of shock and i still remember the little round southern gentleman who came about to my shoulder who was the head of reynolds tobacco. we were talking and a conversation going on. he said dam and then he looked up at me and he said oh pardon me maam. i thought you know if you heard what i heard on the college campuses in the 1960s 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 i didn't feel a lot of

difficulties. but it was a wee bit lonely. >> did you feel in a unique position to ask did you feel you could relate to the other directors are not so much? >> i did. i did. i remembered telling the chairman when he asked me to join the board i said look i recognize that i'm 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. >> and they took you want. >> and they took me on. >> this was a time in the 70s of enormous economic upheaval and political and social of people regulatory change you are talking about. what did you observe about the nature of corporate leadership in the 70s in that kind of environment? >> well, what had it happened and it didn't all happen in the 70s. in fact it's a process that still is going on today and that is corporate boards began to

take their oversight from students more seriously. yes they became a bit more converged and there were women and minorities and so forth beginning to join the boards but the heat was on them and that started in the 70s when they grew up what was sometimes called the market for public control where companies were merged or there were hostile takeovers or whatever and the notion of governments became more serious. this wasn't just his chairman's cronies voting yes. although boards vote usually tend to be unanimous but that is because you don't hold a vote until you know that you're going to get the support of the board.

the haggling if there is any goes on before. and when ross perot voted no on the general motors board, this was headline material. and of course now as you know from reading the newspapers, the whole question of the role of corporate boards and what they are responsible for and the whole question of executive pay and what kind of role the board should be playing, all of this now is much more front and center than it was. and so i was there for a fair part of this revolution in corporate governance. it really wasn't a revolution. it was more evolution and of course starting, well actually it started in the early 90s, and it started when robert

sampled the chairman of general motors was pushed out by the board. and then there was just a rash of ceos being pushed out on the part of the tractors which is something i think is really never happened before and actually simple's departure by coincidence happened within six weeks of when i left general motors. i left her for quite different reasons. telling gm unless you wake up and smell the burning pot, you know you are going to be in serious trouble. i couldn't get the top management to get their heads out of the sand long enough to see that their world was changing and that they would have to change. but it was worked out by the board and the head of american

express and a whole host of companies. the same thing happened in that was really unheard of at the time and the process was still going on now. playing out to corporate directors who have a major responsibility. >> let's talk about your career at general motors, about a decade and a half. a lot of that is vice president and chief economist. what did you find when you got there? >> it actually happened here. i was on a years sabbatical at the center for advances that he and the behavioral sciences at the stanford campus, actually now it's part of stanford. it wasn't then. paul mccracken who was then chairman of the cea when i was there on the staff called me and said there is demand from gm called robert smith who wants to

come and talk to you. his daughters at the stanford business school so he is going to be out there anyway. i said fine, and i will ask him to lunch at the center. the center had wonderful lunches. i suppose i was one of the few people on the planet that didn't know this man would become the next chairman and ceo of general motors. so we chatted and then he said how would you like to be vice president and chief accountant must at general motors? this guy was very blonde and had very fair skin and he looked quite ready. i thought, he had too much sun. what a shame. [laughter] but it turned out he was serious and i have been teaching for quite a number of years and i was always up for a new challenge. i have turned down several college presidencies so it appeared as my children told me, apparently mom that isn't what

you really wanted to do. i think what intrigued me, two things. one, the company at that time was big enough to upset the national economy and i was kind of macrointernational economist. the other thing was, here i had this whole economic training and i think of training in a field as kind of creating a mental filing cabinet into which you break down problems and you reassemble them. and i had this mental filing cabinet and the vocabulary that went with it and i was presenting it always to a captive audience. i thought gee it would be interesting to see if this can be effective with a noncaptive audience who doesn't share my vocabulary or my mental filing cabinet or whatever. so, i became intrigued.

actually this was in january and i didn't say yes until may or april because it would clearly affect my marriage. as long as we had a child in the home i was going to do that. our son was already at yale but our daughter was in high school. she for a set of reasons of her own wanted to go to boarding school. she did not want to go back to the school she had been in pittsburgh which we were intending to go back to so i thought well if she gets into the boarding school that she wants to go to which wasn't over, then i will accept the job. she did and i did. that is how it all started. >> what did you hope to do as the chief economist and how did that align with what gm wanted you to do? >> well, the chief economist before me who retired which is

why the job is available, had really mainly been kind of an assistant to the chairman who wrote speeches for him and so forth and set out the content of the speeches. i really wanted to make it a bit more useful to the operating side. so i did a number of things, but one thing i shifted the analytical framework of the staff from just focusing exclusively on the u.s. economy to focusing on the global economy. i am sure that came partly from my own background as an international economist but also i was beginning to be convinced that this was becoming a global industry. and, so i've reoriented that staff in that direction. >> this is 1978 when you joined.

this huge transition started. the pot was on fire as you said. >> the pot was on fire and the management kept insisting that you know this was a temporary phenomenon and it would all go away and then when the japanese started to build plants here, my boss who is the vice chairman said well wait until they have to work with american labor. >> we will push them back into the sea. that's right, that's the title of one of the chapters. you talk again and again about the real lack of urgency at gm and understanding and responding to each competitive pressure. what was your observation about why that was happening? >> well, gm was so used to being the big kahuna. in fact when i went to work for gm i was congratulated by friends and going to work for

generous motors which was kind of the nickname. it wasn't bad at the time. it had half of -- more than half of the u.s. market share. it just couldn't adjust to the fact that this was changing and changing rapidly. smith smith in some ways had a vision of the future but it was a vision that, the things he tried to do to fix fix it were t not successful. he was not capable of making that course corrections. i mean, he tried to do a lot of automation without recognizing that was not the japanese secret. he bought hughes and eds hoping these high-tech companies would track the gm culture but he

treated them as financial transactions. he never really saw two functionally integrate them into general motors where it's a very different kind of job and they never were functionally integrated into general motors. and he brought in a lot of people from the outside. at the vice president level which had never been done before, hoping that would update the culture but every one of those people he brought in, johnson who was deputy director of oak ridge lab authorities. he brought in bob frosch who had been head of nasa. he brought in elma johnson, all kinds of very high-level people and every one of us, male or female, either retired or left the company frustrated because we could not crack that culture.

and don't misunderstand me, there were insiders who were trying to do the same thing but there weren't enough of them to form a critical mass. and i remember i got so frustrated that i left. and i said privately, not publicly obviously, gm and -- are going to join hands and jump off the cliff together and of course that happened in a rather spectacular -- >> we all became shareholders. we have a lot of great questions from the audience so let me ask a few of those before we talk about what you've been you been doing since you left gm in michigan and other places. i want to begin with this question because i just love it so much. you talk about what it was like to ride in the car with your dad who was not a very good driver. what was the sunday drive like

with your father? >> well, my father was a notoriously terrible driver. he and my mother both god driver's licenses i going down to trenton and taking the drivers test and then putting up a 5-dollar bill and a cigarette case and offering a cigarette to the cop. they both god driver's licenses but that doesn't mean they learn to drive. and i still remember it wasn't just the sunday afternoons but i did once drive across the country with my father from princeton to santa barbara where he left my stepmother and he while he went off for the atom bomb tests. i loved it as i have the chance to have this unbroken time with my father. even though i was only 11, in

that picture i had enough sense to -- for my life that we would get there and we did. somebody once asked my father why he drove a cadillac because that was a very unacademic thing to do. he said well, it's only because no one will sell me a tank. i guess the cadillac was the closest he could come to a tank. he managed to crumple a lot of cadillacs and survive. on their honeymoon he crashed the car in the windshield wiper went through my mother's throat. that had created a lifetime problem. in those days in order to prevent -- they gave far more radiation than they do now so late in her life she was plagued with not life-threatening but very annoying cancers which came

from the radiation which came from the fact that he had crashed the car into a tree which he did with some regularity. >> there is a card here. arnold friend that worked with her father and always referred to him as johnny. did anyone referred to him as johnny. was he known as johnny von neumann? >> everybody did. when he moved to the united states became johnny and i don't know people either call him johnny or professor von neumann. i don't know that anybody ever called him john except for his brother nicholas who wrote, it's not quite a book he wrote about his brother. he was a very formal man and he called him john but i don't know of anybody else that did very. >> here's a more substantive question. do you know what the most

radical vision of the future of computing was at ias around the time of your father and did it come close? >> well, i don't know so much but i know what my father, his radical vision. at some point, i guess it was right after world war ii, he wrote a letter to friedman dyson who was george dyson's father and a longtime friend of the institute. he said i'm now thinking about something much more important than bonds. i am thinking about computers. his main goal, scientific goal for the very high-powered machines was in long-range weather forecasting and ultimately whether control. he felt that any future international conflict it with the weather control and not

bombs that would carry the day. and there is an institution and i have forgotten now with the initials are in boulder colorado which used high-powered computing to work on weather forecasting. of course what happened is that computers have made possible much better short-term weather forecasting than there was before. but as i understand it for long-range weather casting is still the farmers at home in that. i guess the reason for that, when my father was alive the theory which that essentially no you can't forecast what the weather is going to be like. so in that sense, he was disappointed. he always assumed that computers would be used only for scientific research and probably

a dozen in the world, maybe 20. but the notion that you know every single one of us would have a whole lineup of these electronic objects, some of them so small that you can hang them around your neck like a pendant, a flash drive and that they would be used for children to play games on and people to write love letters on including love letters to people they shouldn't be writing love letters to, that would have absolutely blown his mind. and they were still using vacuum tubes. he also was very concerned that mankind would wipe itself out before 1980 because we really didn't have the social controls

to manage these technological marvels like the hydrogen bomb and so forth. he might be quite pleasantly surprised that we are sitting here talking about all of this in 2013. >> did you hear hungarian spoken at ias, at-home? >> i don't think they ever spoke hungarian. i asked most of the people who worked with my father were americans. he and my stepmother did often speak hungarian to each other. my mother of course was american so i never heard hungarian and her house. basically there was no hungarian in our household. my father and stepmother did speak hungarian particularly if they wanted to talk about something they didn't want to talk about in front of me which meant as a teenager i understood

a certain amount of it. [laughter] but it has all gone away. i'm told that i spent a year in hungary when i was very small, about two and a half to three and a half when my mother was getting divorced and remarried. i am told that i spoke perfect german and perfect hungarian but i came back here and went to an american nursing school and within weeks i had suppressed both languages and i really don't, like so many americans, don't speak anything but pigeon french today. >> here's one final audience question about your view as an economist and i have a couple of final questions before we do a reading. do you fall into the us 30 camp or the stimulus camp? >> oh, like most economists, both. what i mean by that is that we

needed the stimulus. it probably should have been bigger and lasted longer than it did. at the same time, we need a specific and credible program for gradually reducing the budget deficit which to my mind means both increasing taxes and you can do it by closing loopholes without changing tax rates. and also by getting some kind of handle on the growth of entitlement which before too long will swallow up more and more of the federal budget. as i say, i'm not just being facetious when i say both. and instead we have done just the opposite.

we have imposed austerity and the form of the sequester which was carefully designed but was so awful 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 it exactly 180 degrees backwards. >> when you look at the situation washington now, how do you feel? are you optimistic and you think we have the wherewithal or the will? >> at the moment, no. i am reminded of winston churchill's famous statement about the worst possible system except for all the others that have been tried. right now democracy is at a low point. at least american democracy. we seem to have worked ourselves into an absolute standstill. i am optimistic in the sense

that i presume sooner or later we will get over it, but right now it's a pretty grim prospect. >> the final chapter in your book you call having it all and you really do write in very optimistic enough each terms about your ability to have done that throughout your life. if you were giving advice to a young woman today who is just starting out on a career path, sort of like yours, imagine that, and she wanted to take some cues from that, what would you say? >> well, you can't possibly forecast how your life is going to turn out. they say you know men make life plans and women don't. i'm not even sure that even men make life plans but certainly nowadays the notion you know of getting on one path and sticking to it is less and less, if you

ask and people did expect to work for one company or even in the same field all of their lives, the majority of them will say no. so i think the boy scout motto, be prepared for what comes. on the personal side what i say is when i talk a lot about in my book as you mentioned about what is valuable support my husband has given me throughout my career and how it would not have been possible without that. and they say well what sort of partner should we choose? i say look, i can't tell you. i can't assign for you your ideal partner but i will give you one piece of advice and that is never form a long-term partnership with someone because you think you can change him or her, because you won't. so those are two pieces of

advice. >> okay. good, so we are going to have a reading now. you have very generously agreed to read a passage. do you know the one that you want to read? >> i think i do. yes, there it is. this is the very end of my book, and for all the changes in my life and in the world that surrounds it my fathers presence has never been far away. today i am a trustee of the institute for advances that he at princeton where he came is one of the first members in 1933. as they did in his day leading scholars from all over the world make up a small permanent faculty free of all teaching duties to focus on research, writing and mentoring the large number of younger members who spend anywhere from one term to several years there. the institute's board is probably the most intellectually exclusive collection of trustees and the world. some of its members are billionaires and by the way eric

schmidt and charles are two of them. others are professors but all of them have been chosen for their ability to oversee and nurture the institute as a institute as a place where some of the world's greatest minds can operate in a serving, comfortable environment unhindered by distraction. the tie that binds was in my mind whenever i sit with my fellow trustees in the glasswalled boardroom which looks out on a pitcher buck pond and the woods beyond around which several generations of geniuses have strolled. i find myself conjuring up my fathers astonished ghost. seeing his daughter sitting in the governing body of the institution he helped to found, the place where he spent most of his adult life and built his own prototype of the modern computer. while i am summoning viscose my husband is tending his --

clipping weeting and occasionally replacing a dead plant with anyone. a task he would reform faithfully. he feared it would fatally cramp his daughter's future is doing his part to make sure the fathers memory is not neglected through my fathers presence was closest in 2031 e. station national celebration, raining the hundredth anniversary of his birth. i was invited to participate as an honored guest, and honor they carried with it one of the most hectic schedules i have ever in countered. a couple of weeks after finishing treatment for breast cancer i found myself not only doing talks about my father at nationally intended meetings of mathematical and computer science societies in budapest, but also giving talks about it

in english to students in schools all over hungary. thank goodness it's a small country. bob and i were transported to every corner of it in the cramped elderly vehicle belonging to one of my fathers self-employed promoters who in busiest degree acted as our chauffeur. some of the schools were actually named after him but in all of them students knew who he was and what he had accomplished and they created various exhibitions to honor him. i tried to imagine american high school students according a long dead mathematician this sort of veneration reserved here for sports and entertainment celebrities. that week of talking about john von neumann's accomplishments brought closure for me, a recognition that what i had feared where the conflicting expectations my fathers and my father's and my mother's societies in my own that had shaped my life and finally

converged. i had fulfilled my fathers moral imperative that i'm make free use of whatever intellectual gifts i had. my mothers ugly duckling had developed a swan's poise and self-confidence. a society where women had fortune 500 corporations were half the ivy league universities and several of the leading public ones as well are headed by women and where female has been a contender for the nation's highest office now allows the most daring and talented women expectations that far exceeds mine. by their own lives, my husband and her children have given -- that all three would pay yearly for my career ambitions. my expectations of a close and loving family life have extended to encompass a third-generation. my father's shadow has lifted at last. if we meet again, it will be in

sunlight. >> marina, thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> i put stieg woman in the back because i read over it and it's not that i had any personal friendship with him. i'm just saying i didn't do it out of i know stieg woman. i didn't do it -- it's a case i read. i read the rostenkowski 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 of the place didn't for the post office scandal. i read what he did and he had some shares and was paramount to nothing. the siegelman case is interesting especially the fact that rove refused to give information. >> i don't know why if it was a legal case, but it was just a very fascinating deal and of course abramoff was involved. abramoff was involved. >> abramoff when he came out went to his lectern and i said how much money did you see her away? $20 million. by the way it's not in his book but abramoff after he got out he

spent $20 million. >> and to what purpose into wet and? this man has been in jail and out of jail. >> wrote about it in the book. >> hears the purpose. one, it's about gambling because the amounts of money. siegelman walked in the door through the lottery and the casino owners were the ones who pay the $20 million. the other thing was the judge, the second judge, fuller he secretly honored defense contracts. the bush administration gave that company which has held

$300 million in contracts and nobody knew about it. this cost the military industrial complex and the judge who own 44% of the company. 300 million in contracts and nobody knew about it. >> we will have your book signing. >> no, no. >> i don't know. it's not like i had some desire to have some desire to write about it. i just found it very fascinating when i looked at the facts of the issue of what on earth happened? and then of course abramoff that rove's request spent all that money. >> when i got out of morgantown federal prison or as we prefer an our family the bush housing program at that time -- the. [laughter] i did something i swore i wouldn't do which is to listen to allen rattner telling me that

i needed to do radio. i needed to be quiet and sit around a little bit. she said no you have some experiences and some knowledge. of course i knew who tom hartman was and i had a lot of respect for tom hartman. today in washington you are either to the left or to the right and it doesn't natter how tom would be classified. he is fair and he knows journalism. he has accomplished in other fields and i'd be interested to see some of his books. so i was a little nervous when we did the show and it really went well. i continue to do the whole radio gig and did my own show for a little bit. it was an interesting thing to do but after a while i didn't

like doing "the daily show" so i continued to do talk radio which i continue to do to this day and i ventured over to india. what do you do when you want to recharge her batteries? to go to india. i have a chapter in this book in which i was really delighted to write called incredible india. when i go over there i stayed five for seven minutes watching the dalai lama's residents and the indians and tibetans over there. a fascinating place though it provided me the opportunity to write this book because i was able to go over there for a couple of months and focus on it and come back. in between watching my granddaughter and her recovery program, assistance that i do for some people i was able to write this book and our editors sherry johnson was absolutely amazing and à la rattner who is here tonight, changing lives press. i never thought i would do a book that my cousin god rest his soul frances wallace so i always

told the republicans he coined the phrase the gipper. ronald reagan, that was his successful movie or the one he was known best for so i always give my cousin -- because of that gipper. but my cousin always told me. he said you need to write a book. when i was a little kid at eight years old, i would write a book but i never knew i would write this one a write in this way. i didn't do the book at first. i didn't want to do it and i outlined that in there and then i did 16 minutes with my former chief of staff. neal and i agreed to do 60 minutes together not tell you why i did. we were going to have jack abramoff on 60 minutes and then we'll have neal and about you. neal and i talked it was better to have the two of us. i think it shows more of an honesty factor. if i say this, neal could say no pop or vice versa. in my opinion having the two of

the side-by-side is a better way to do things. i went to india than for a one-month trip and saw 60 minutes actually over there. when i saw it i watched jack abramoff and i will make it clear as to do in the book jack did not do this to me. i did this to myself period so i don't sit here saying jack abramoff made me. i made those decisions but i watched jack abramoff on that system and i could feel empathy haven't been in prison he was in prison and for anybody who has done time but dionne that i just wondered where jack was going with this version of it. when i heard him say 100 members will spend $1 million. he raced not too much for us. i wanted to tell my end of it. i know the headlines for speaker boehner in this book but i wanted to make it more. i told the story of abramoff

because i get asked constantly by former constituents because they still live in ohio and i'm in the district. i get asked all the time what happened to you? what on earth happened to you? this book tells a very complicated story. it's just not as easy as having dinners and going to scotland and arico. it's a complicated story where i have my part and there are other parts so the perfect storm is sort of the way i put together exactly the outside influences that came in to help with the idiocy that i created in the crimes that were committed. also in the book and very important to me and i want to mention this, it deals with iran and our opportunity that we missed as a country to potentially have a deal where iran would be recognized, where iran would have disbanded hezbollah. i sent that deal to the white house and they chose to ignore it. i wanted to state that part of

the terrorist which were recently delisted. i thought it was important on an international basis and i was part of that. the other part is about morgantown federal prison. i was a lawmaker and i became a lawbreaker and i went into the prison cycle which is very challenging and fascinating. i sat with webb hubbell who was up high-profile person who i first met in the back of the anteroom in the finance committee banking committee where i was in handcuffs. congressman mike ox be said remove the handcuffs from the man. he said you can't do that and he said he will here and he did. he came out and testified on the whole whitewater deal. that is how i met webb hubbell the first time. the second time i was headed to prison. i was a self reporter which is reporting for your own firing squad and allen said you have to meet webb hubbell. i sat here and watched i don't

know how me hours with webb, three, four or five i forget and he walked me through how you survive day one and that was the best amount of time i spent. he also gave me an insight is the former chief justice of the arkansas supreme court former attorney general who went to prison. he was very empathetic web was to the plight of a lot of people in prison. i walked out of prison not angry and i didn't walk out of prison thinking up a former congressman. i walked out of there feeling a bond with a lot of people and i need to tell this in the look and i have because things are going on inside of those walls. i don't expect anybody to have sympathy for me but i have the ability to have a network. i have the ability to be on television, to have writers here with radio and the print media and i can write a book until my story. a lot of people don't have a voice inside those walls. we are warehousing human beings. we are not rehabbing them.

we are re-housing them. this government and the current administration too it has statistics that you care about. they take the drug dealers and they put them away. ironically became friends with people who are not the white-collar criminals but the drug offenders. there are a lot of addicts in prison. they have to, this statistic of the jugular put away. they are addicts. the other part of this is my own personal struggle being in recovery with addiction. i have a message i think in this book and i say in the beginning that you don't have to be in politics to use substances to make your life go down. it can happen to anyone. i don't care if you're a waiter or what i don't care what you do in your life's profession a reporter or whatever you are you can ingest substances into your body and lose your focus and not pay attention and you can go down a path that will cause you a lot of personal problems.

i put the 12 step recovery information which i think is important this book. a couple of funny stories about the congress and i give credit to some members of congress both sides of of the aisle in this book. a few funny stories and some things that will shock some people in this book about staffers. congressional spouses which is pretty nice. i came to a conclusion in the book and i almost didn't write the conclusion. i felt compelled to and the conclusion is very simple. jack abramoff and i did and their staffs you know that was the quote biggest scandal of its time etc. but what we did has been codified into a legal situation today. if i am a lobbyist i can take any member of congress or a staffer and i can have a fund-raiser. once we have the fund-raiser i can't take you hunting. i can take you devegas.

some republicans went to a bondage club last year and they had a fund-raiser. i put that in the book. either side of the aisle can do this. citizens united, i find john mccain on campaign finance reform twice. his bill still is worthless and i i will tell you that today. it's as worthless as it was back then. he made loopholes and 527 that you could drive mack truck through but at the end of the day will citizens united ruling and a lack of truth in the campaign finance reform bill that time you have a situation today where the super pac comes along, we can pick on carl row four pic on george soros whichever side of the aisle you want to skewer. the average member in order to counter that needs $3 million which is $10,000 a day they have to raise. they take their staffer and they go across the street on federal time and they get on the telephone.

.. i had an addiction, and today there is another addiction as to the campaign contributions and they need an intervention and it is the public intervention. a beautiful place they can make it even better so i address a lot of issues in the