Working Whitman Breaks Ground

From her marriage partner to her career choices, Marina von Neumann Whitman ’56 has always known what she wanted.

Growing up in the household of a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study—a leading research center in Princeton, New Jersey—meant having Albert Einstein as a frequent dinner guest and a childhood focused on high intellectual standards.

“I was my father’s only child, which means all his expectations were focused on me,” recalls Whitman, whose Hungarian father, John von Neumann, is known as the creator of game theory. “It was pretty intense.”

In fact, Whitman initially wanted to strike a path away from her father’s.

“She said that she wanted to go into a field where her father was not particularly a specialist,” says Morton White, who taught Whitman in Humanities 5 and is an emeritus professor of philosophy and intellectual history at the Institute. “My reply was it’s going to be very hard to find a field like that.”

Whitman says she knew she did not want to be a housewife, the standard model of the times. “I grew up in a rather academic environment and thought, ‘Gee I’m not going to be an academic or marry one’—and I did both,” says the current professor of business administration and public policy at University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

’A TIGER IN A CAGE’

In the fall of 1952, a “sophisticated East Coast girl” arrived at Radcliffe. “I wasn’t terribly awkward,” says Whitman, who was used to eating dinner with Einstein and Edward Teller. “Social situations didn’t faze me a whole lot.”

Roommate Paula B. Cronin ’56 soon gleaned that Whitman, who would go on to serve as co-editor of the Radcliffe News, was unique.

“She was full of energy,” Cronin recollects. “She paced all the time, rather like a tiger in a cage.”

When Whitman received the Jonathan Fay Prize, awarded to the highest academically ranked member of each class, her classmates were not surprised.

“She wrote more in a blue book during an exam than I was able to write in four pages,” Cronin says. “She wrote so fast and was just as thoughtful.”

DOUBLE JUBILEE

As a result of the interactions Whitman had been used to, she says she “veered towards guys who were older.”

On the particular night of a “Jolly-up”—smoky Radcliffe mixers with lax alcohol rules—two graduate students decided to celebrate the completion of their oral exams by doing something mindless: getting jollied-up. One of the doctoral students, who led Whitman’s Gen Ed section, hated dancing with his students. So his friend, Robert Whitman, took her hand—literally.

“I remember going upstairs and telling my roommate: I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,” Whitman says.

That fateful dance didn’t keep Whitman from “enjoying other dates,” she says, chuckling. Her “eclectic” dating history included a theater excursion with Sadruddin Aga Khan where she met actor Christopher Plummer backstage.

Nevertheless, Whitman made her choice long ago that night freshman year. She was married a week after Commencement and will be celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary after her 50th Harvard-Radcliffe reunion.

FIRST LADY

While her marriage put her right with her contemporaries, Whitman still broke out of the mold. “One of the things I did was pick the right spouse,” she says. “If he hadn’t been strongly positive and supportive, I’m not sure what would’ve worked in the 1950s.”

After a lackluster job with Education Testing Services, the government concentrator decided further training might provide her with more options and “economics looked interesting.”

However, a nearby economics department turned Whitman away. “Princeton wouldn’t have me, because I was the wrong sex,” she says. “So I got on the train and went to Columbia.”

After receiving her degree and advancing to a full professorship at the University of Pittsburgh, Whitman worked as a senior staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), and was the first woman to serve on the National Price Commission. Whitman soon landed a spot on the three-member CEA and yet another historical tag as the first woman to join the Council.

Convinced of the veracity of The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, Whitman eventually left the Council.

But 20 years later, Leonard Downie, who supervised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would be the groom’s father at her daughter’s wedding.

ALL BUSINESS ABOUT FAMILY

After she became a coveted commodity with corporate boards, Whitman says she told her recruiters: “Let’s not kid ourselves, I know I’m a token, but don’t expect me to be just a token.” Crisp and clear on the phone, in no way revealing her 71 years, Whitman has always maintained a realistic mentality. “I just went ahead and did my thing, and never went in for the blue suits and little bowties,” says the previous board member of GM, Unocal, and Proctor & Gamble.

Whether it was women at parties or a mother-in-law who was “genuinely disturbed” by a daughter-in-law with two kids and a job, “it’s one thing to look back and say ‘didn’t it all work great,’ but looking forward, there was all kinds of angst,” Whitman says of her career.

When she was asked to join the CEA as a full-fledged member, Whitman cried into her pillow for many nights. Her husband, who had taken a sabbatical for her, was slated to chair Pittsburgh’s English department, and the two didn’t want to commute. “There’s no question that at that point in my life I would’ve turned it down,” reflects Whitman, whose husband ultimately accompanied her to Washington.

A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING

These days, Whitman retains a life of many options. She teaches a little, talks a lot with graduate students about their education and career plans, and spends time with her two grandchildren.

“It’s busy, but it’s nice in the sense that I’ve reached the stage in my life where I can pretty much do just the things I want to—which is a luxury that doesn’t come terribly often,” says Whitman, recently back from Mexico City. While she has relinquished involvement from corporate boards, she still sits on executive boards for research institutes.

During the reunion, Whitman will participate in a symposium titled “Globalization: Sorting Facts From Fiction.”

Even though Whitman and Cronin went their separate ways after freshman year, Cronin says they remained in touch and now vacation together.

“She travels the world, but she doesn’t forget the rest of us,” Cronin says. “When she makes a friend, she makes a friend for life.”

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.