[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: I want to just ask you a couple of follow-up questions from last time.

Shanahan: Fine.

Clark: One was you mentioned your father's socialism. And I wanted to know, since he was in Chicago at one point, at the Workers University—and also working for the railroad?

Shanahan: Yes, a company that serviced the railroad.

Clark: Yes. Did he have any connection at all with Eugene Debs*?

Shanahan: Absolutely.

Clark: I want to hear about it.

Shanahan: I don't know a lot. I don't know a lot about it.

Clark: What period would you say this was in?

Shanahan: This was in the nineteen—late aughts and early teens, I guess, pre-U.S. involvement in World War I which is when he came to Washington.

Clark: Was he opposed to the war?

Shanahan: No. He was blind in one eye. That's why he didn't serve. The victim of a childhood accident when lime got thrown into his eye. But no, he was not, as far as I ever knew. And I don't know whether the socialists were pacifists then or not, but—

Clark: Debs was a pacifist.

Shanahan: Was he? Okay. That would have been later. And he was an organizer for the Cigar Makers Union at one time. And I really don't know a great deal about him. It's odd that you forget to ask your parents things you wish you knew.

But Debs was jailed in a conspiracy at a time when organizing a union was a criminal act. And that was not repealed until the early 1930s. Fiorella La Guardia, subsequently mayor of New York, was the chief sponsor, as a member of the House, of the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act which said a judge could not enjoin labor organizing on the ground that it was a conspiracy. And Debs was jailed. And my father was one of those who served a day or two in jail as a result of that. Debs was jailed for longer but there were several—

Clark: Yes, ten years.

______________________
* Eugene Victor Debs (1855-1926), American socialist leader and labor organizer, founder of the American Railway Union.

Page 33

Shanahan: Was it ten years? Was he in jail for ten years?

Clark: No, he was pardoned early.

Shanahan: Yes. Right. But there were a number of lesser figures who served sentences of days. And I don't know how many. And I wish I knew.

Clark: And I think we missed getting your sister's name, for the record.

Shanahan: Kathleen, known as Kay in her adult life. She's a doctor. She's a psychiatrist.

Clark: And what is her last name?

Shanahan: She also uses her maiden name but her last name is Cohen; her husband's name is Cohen. She's actually done various things, including hyphenated.

Clark: Just for the record because we index the names at the end of the interview. I wanted to make sure to get that.

And then you said there were some more things you wanted to talk about the Research Institute. We're going to sort of double back and talk about the Research Institute and then the Journal of Commerce.

Shanahan: Right. There were a lot of very good things about that job at the Research Institute. Principally that's how I got into economics, by accident, just because it was the job available and I knew somebody—somebody who had the job knew me and hired me to cover price control, mostly, during the Korean War.

It was the most wonderful way to learn about the U.S. economy and how different industries operate because you had to regulate in some conformity with the way they operated. For example, if you're controlling prices on women's blouses then and now—well, not so much now but then they were always sold for some dollars and ninety-five cents. That's less common now but it was almost uniform then. So if you were going to regulate those prices, you had to do it the way the industry always operated. I learned a tremendous lot about different industries and how they functioned. It was a great foundation for my later work as an economics reporter.

It also—you were mentioning my father—it really knocked my father's socialism out of my head, that experience. I came to recognize, or believe—I never convinced him—that the economy was too complicated for government to regulate in that detail. What happened to price control at the end of World War II, I learned retrospectively, and also happened in the Korean War which is the period we're talking about, is that inevitably a war comes and you freeze prices where they are and inevitably there are some inequities, at the moment of freeze.

That happened much later with [Richard M.] Nixon, who cynically froze prices in 1971, so we shouldn't have inflation for the election next year. You catch inequities when you freeze and then you spend the rest of your time adjusting your way out of inequities, always upward because that's where the political pressures are, thereby creating new inequities, and the whole thing ultimately collapses of its complexity.

It seemed to me then and seems to me now that that is inevitable and it's interesting to look back on that now, with the collapse of the Soviet system. I don't know whether that sort of thing, of trying to worry about the inequities—of course in the U.S., we always knew we were going to go back to a free-market system, so that may be quite a different experience from theirs.

Page 34

But it did convince me that the economy was too complex for government to regulate in detail. It doesn't mean I'm against environmental regulation and all kinds of health and safety stuff and some economic regulation today. I'm not. But not comprehensive regulation of everything.

Clark: Is that when you really knew that you wanted to be an economic reporter, what made you decide?

Shanahan: Exactly. I thought it was a good fit for my talents and weaknesses, that I have a kind of mind that really enjoys thinking my way through difficult, complicated stuff to the point to where I like to think I can explain it clearly to anybody who'll take the trouble to read it, and not make it too hard for them to read it. And I enjoyed doing that. I enjoyed going a little deeper and I enjoyed not covering the story everybody else was covering. And I really enjoyed economics intellectually and I still do.

When I say it fit with my weaknesses as well as my abilities and interests—I'm not a great writer. I'm an okay writer. I'm not a talented writer. I never in my life turned a phrase that took anybody's breath away, which Mary McGrory does three times a column, and others. But to work in that field, it didn't matter that much. My ability to explain complicated stuff clearly, even if it didn't dance and dazzle, made me very saleable.

Clark: Looking back in terms of competition, say, being a woman in the field, which was singular, was that a harder or easier place to be a woman than other areas?

Shanahan: Some of both, I think. Right there at the beginning, at Research Institute, I was the only woman in the press room at the Office of Price Stabilization, one of two when I occasionally got over into the materials rationing side of the Korean War, governmental control. But I was very much accepted as one of the gang among the men reporters, I think.

Clark: In general or there?

Shanahan: There, the group. It becomes a group, competing but you're living the same life, in a sense, when you're a reporter on a beat. You have more in common in your work life with the people you're competing against than the people in your own organization because you're dealing with the same problems, the same subject matter, and if you compete honorably, which for the most part I've had honorable competitors, you can have great friendships and you don't stop competing. But you compete honorably. You don't hide stuff and all these things you see in cheap movies about the press.

But I am aware that in that group and later on still at the Journal of Commerce, I was very much accepted as one of the bunch among my peers. And I think the reason may have been in part—maybe a major part—because I was working for a non-prestigious publication. They didn't view me as a real competitor. They didn't view me as having risen above my station. There was one very sexist guy in that bunch, I remember.

Clark: Yes, you told me a little bit about it.

Shanahan: But in general, not. And as for the people I was covering then, there was a wonderful guy named Mike DeSalle who was subsequently governor of Ohio—had I think five daughters and who just kind of liked bright, young females in a wholly non-coming-on way, a really neat guy. At that time, we all thought he might be the first Roman Catholic president of the United States—a very outstanding guy.

Page 35

And the other people in the agency came to understand that I was serious, I was careful, I was thorough. I didn't have any problem getting to the people I needed to under DeSalle, the General Counsel, that second level and so on, none at all.

Clark: How wide a range of people did you need access to?

Shanahan: Well, you needed access to about maybe six top people and then from time to time, lower down, a fairly narrow specialist in a given industry or concerning a given regulation. But my work was read there inside the agency because I was covering it for a publication that was read. The Research Institute had all sorts of new publications that they created for purposes of covering this aspect of the Korean War. So they could see what I did, which was very helpful.

I don't remember—well, I remember one guy I didn't like and he probably didn't like me—and I needed to talk to a little more than he was willing to talk to me, one of the top lawyers. He subsequently got caught up in the Nixon scandals and I giggled a bit.

In general, I didn't perceive problems in that job. I don't really remember being put down by sources at all, or colleagues except for this one guy.

Clark: So you were able to do your job without too many obstacles.

Shanahan: That's what I felt, yes. I certainly did. I did finally decide that I didn't like the newsletter business that much, that I didn't like the—though some of what I was doing—I worked for two publications there. I worked for a newsletter that was sort of an imitation Kiplinger Washington Letter but also for a regulatory publication. It was a daily called Washington Overnight Report.

Clark: Oh, it was daily.

Shanahan: Well, part of it was. It was a thing that went out in the mail and it was just the size of a legal-sized sheet of paper, front and back. But there was daily stuff about what OPS, the Office of Price Stabilization, had done, and the other wartime regulatory agencies. There was also a weekly regulatory letter and then there was this kind of imitation Kiplinger Letter after the Korean War was over.

Now, I was at Research Institute for five years, from '51 to '56, and after the war was over, shortly after [Dwight D.] Eisenhower came in. I then moved over to—they killed those wartime letters. There was no longer any need for them. And I went working full-time for this inside-dope newsletter and discovered myself somewhat uncomfortable with the eternal pressure for getting the story ahead of time, much less opportunity to write explanatory stuff, which I've always loved to do. So I started looking for the way out and that's when two things happened that I may not have mentioned the last time: the interview with Al Friendly at the Washington Post I did mention but the Kiplinger—did I tell you about that?

Clark: We didn't get into that. That was one of the things I wanted to return to.

Shanahan: Well, I figured after trying to get the daily newspaper job and being unable to do so, I thought, well—

Clark: The daily newspaper job at the Post?

Shanahan: At the Post and I think some other places, I thought, well, if I'm going to write for a newsletter, at least why don't I write for the best one. I knew very well a Kiplinger guy who was in the OPS press room, one of my colleagues there, and asked him, you know, were there any openings? And he said, well, he didn't know of any openings. And I said, "Well, I think I'm going to go around and see old man [Willard] Kiplinger anyway."

Page 36

And he really tried to discourage me, and said—and I believe, I'm not sure of this, I believe he told me flat out—

Clark: He knows your work?

Shanahan: Oh, yes, because he was part of that group that covered price control. And you know, even if you don't read what somebody writes, if you're on a beat with someone over a period of time and you're both on the same beat, you can tell a lot about the quality of that person by the questions they ask in press conferences and things like that. Quite a lot. I remember he tried to discourage me and said he didn't think they'd hire me. Whether he said in so many words that they would never hire a woman, I don't know. I can't remember. But I remember he was just sort of gently trying to discourage me—he was a nice guy—but I made up my mind that I was going to try to get a job on the Kiplinger Letter.

So I called and made an appointment and saw old man Willard Kiplinger, the founder of the letter which goes back into the 1920s. And it was the first Washington inside-dope newsletter ever. Everything else is an imitation. And he saw me. And I'll never forget that interview as long as I live.

There must have been some opening pleasantries which I forget but in any event, he just sat there, didn't ask me a single question, and so I told him what I'd done and why I'd like to work for Kiplinger and said what I thought I should say by way of an opening. I stopped and he didn't say anything. And so I talked some more, and stopped finally. And he didn't say anything. I'm thinking, "What in the heck does this man want me to say and why isn't he asking me whatever he wants to know?"

So I talked some more and he still didn't say anything. And finally I said, "Is there some question I'm not answering?" And he said, "Well, I just wanted to see what kind of a woman would apply for a job here. A respectable woman, which is the only kind we would want, couldn't do this work because you're asking people to tell you things they're not telling anybody else." I don't remember the details. I don't think he ever said they're going to want you to sleep with them in so many words, but it was plain, plain as day, that that's what he meant.

As you can imagine, I was angry beyond measure and said something about I didn't have any trouble getting people to talk to me and I'd had many exclusives in my life, and so on. But that was really the end of that. I never did ask him. I thought of it afterwards, "Well, what kind of favors do your male reporters have to give for their information?"

Ah, yes. That was not the first time but one of the more dramatic ones. I don't know whether I told you last time or not when I was trying to get out of United Press, some of the people I talked to. I talked to the news—I was on the UPI radio wire so I went looking for jobs in broadcasting.

At ABC, the ABC News bureau chief—they were tiny, tiny bureaus compared to what they are today. They were just radio and not TV, and a much smaller operation. He told me that he already had a woman on the staff and that he couldn't hire another one because you have to work nights. And she couldn't work nights, of course, and neither could I, and he couldn't tie himself up that much. And I remember explaining to him that I had worked from three p.m. to midnight at the United Press for several years. Well, it didn't cut any ice.

I also went around to CBS where I think for the first time in my life, but not the last, I was asked, "What on earth makes you think I'd hire a woman?"

Clark: Who was this?

Shanahan: You know, I'm trying to think of his name. Even as I talk, it will come to me. He was the CBS bureau chief at that time. Anyway, I was certainly beginning to be aware of those things. [Tape interruption.]

Page 37

I was thinking again a moment about my father and I said correctly that that experience covering price control had shaken me loose from his socialism but not from his posture of challenging the accepted wisdom.

Clark: It certainly came in handy.

Shanahan: Well, it caused me a lot of trouble and it caused me a lot of success and satisfaction, too.

Clark: Did these experiences daunt your basic faith that you talked about last time that each person would or should or could be judged on their individual merits? We talked a lot about—

Shanahan: That was with respect to being Jewish.

No. I think at that time I did not recognize the small, smallish conflicts and rejections—not small to me because I was a woman—as being as systemic as I subsequently came to understand they were. I suppose to some very substantial degree it took the women's movement to—so I feel I have always been a feminist.

Clark: Oh, that's interesting. When would have you have first defined yourself as a feminist?

Shanahan: Did I mention to you the business about the school crossing guards?

Clark: No.

Shanahan: I was in sixth grade and what you may know as the school patrol, school safety patrol, was at that time—I'm in sixth grade, it's what, 1935?—known as the boy patrol because they were all boys. Then in seventh grade—I was in an eleven-year school system at that time. They had seven grades of elementary and four of high school. A seventh-grade boy was chosen to be the captain of the boy patrols. And he was one of these golden boys who had everything. He was smart and he was good-looking and all the girls, including me, had a crush on him. And he was in my section of the grade.

I remember everybody cheering that he'd been chosen to head the boy patrol. And somehow in that moment—it hadn't occurred to me before but it did then: Why should it only be boys? And I recognized in that moment, in sixth grade, that being a school crossing guard like that is a very responsible position because those little kindergartners and first graders will get themselves killed if there isn't somebody there to keep them from crossing the street. And I remember having a sense of why can't girls be given something important like that to do?

Another time, my next real clear memory of that had to do with a guy who was a friend—never a boy friend but one of the guys who was around the house a lot—a friend of my sister, when she was in high school. And she came home one day, senior year, when I would have been thirteen, I guess, her senior year of high school, and told me that Francis had won this incredible scholarship where, you know—I don't know whether it still exists—it was called the Telluride scholarship. And you worked summers on the Telluride ranch and in the winter you went to Cornell with full tuition scholarship. And there were like four—something like that—given in the whole country and he had won one. And she was very proud and happy for him.

And I remember asking her if girls could get it and she said no. And I don't remember discussing it with her or whether she had any sense that it was not fair. I do remember that I thought that wasn't fair.

Clark: So, after you had this series of turndowns, did that change your behavior at all in terms of how you thought about getting the next job or change your aspirations or your ambitions?

Page 38

Shanahan: No. I don't think so. Reserving my right to change my mind on the answer to that question because I haven't thought about that. I don't think so. I think I had a sense—and this was pounded into me by my father, of course—that, you know, you just do your very best and you're very smart and if you do your best, there's nothing you can't do. There's nothing you can't achieve. And he believed that and he made me believe it.

So, I don't think I worked any harder because I was already working pretty hard but I think that was just it. This is the old—a lot of the feminists have written this sort of, you know, waiting to be asked to the prom, kind of, and that you just expect the phone to ring. Or at least you wait, you're passive. I wasn't passive in the sense of working hard, and I did from time to time seek jobs, but no, I don't think it did change the way I worked or the way I went about getting the next job which was at the Journal of Commerce. We're now up to 1956.

I had talked to the Washington bureau chief at the Journal of Commerce, Oscar Naumann, when I had been trying to get out of the newsletter racket. He knew me because he was a bureau chief but it was a small bureau so he was out doing a lot of reporting, too, and so we knew each other. He was nice to me but said, in effect, "Gee whiz, too bad, you're very good but I don't have a job." And then he called me one day and said he had an opening and would I come over and talk to him, and that the editor, Dr. Heinz Luedicke, a very interesting man, not Jewish but a Hitler refugee come to this country with twenty cents in his pocket. [Tape interruption.]

Anyway, Dr. Luedicke, the editor, who was himself an economist, was going to be in town on the next day or a close-by day and he would be there for the interview, too, which happened to be—and I was called and asked to bring what I had written about it—the day that the report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors came out. And so I had a thing I'd written that day for it.

It was just a jolly interview. We were all three of us so interested in this document and where the Eisenhower economic policy was going and so on. We talked a while before I was asked, "Please, let's see what you wrote." And I showed it to them. And we sat there in silence while Luedicke read what I had written and finally, part way through, he said—he had a thick German accent—"'Gingerly approach'—that's the very phrase I used."

So, I got the job. I forget whether it was at that very first interview or not, I negotiated the use of my full name. The Journal of Commerce had had another woman—she was gone by the time I got there—who had covered labor, a brilliant lady named Joan Meyers who had had to have the byline, J. E., I think—I'm not positive of the middle initial—Meyers. They wouldn't run a woman's byline because, just what Al Friendly told me, nobody would have any confidence in an economic story under a woman's name.

But I was determined to—I forget whether it was right there on the spot, I think it may have been, that I said I wanted to have my full name in the byline. And they said yes.

Clark: What were your responsibilities there?

Shanahan: Okay. I covered national economic policy, which by definition in those days—there weren't but twelve or fourteen people in the whole town that did that at that time.

Clark: It wasn't a big economic beat.

Shanahan: It wasn't a big beat. It was a very good beat, with very good people, very wonderful colleagues. That had also been true, to some degree though not as much, on the price control beat, because the slipshod reporters—if somebody by accident assigns them to that beat, boy, they get off it as fast as they can because it's not a beat where you just go talk to people. You have to read stuff, you have to understand. I didn't have a

Page 39

degree in economics. I had a few—I think fifteen hours of college economics and had tried to read [John Maynard] Keynes for the first time—read at it, it's hard to read. You mostly read books about Keynes. I did slog all the way through it, ultimately.

So it was a very good bunch of colleagues and people, with the same kind of turn of mind that I had, that were stimulated by the intellectual difficulty of it and had fun with it. So national economic policy usually, then and now, means covering the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Management and Budget, and all budget and tax policy, in our bureau. In the Journal of Commerce somebody else did taxes at that time. And then perhaps a selection of regulatory agencies and so on. Housing I got into, I always hated it. It was too full of little teeny details. You never could make it interesting. At least I couldn't. It's one of the problems, why we have HUD scandals to this day. Antitrust which is an intellectually very interesting field. Of course, there is no antitrust enforcement any more but at that time it was at its absolute heyday.

In the Eisenhower administration, it was interesting how some conservative Republicans who really believe in the free market believe in enforcing the free market with tough antitrust enforcement. And the best antitrust enforcement I ever covered was in the Eisenhower administration, and a whole lot of cases, some of which ultimately went up to the Supreme Court later on, strengthened the law.

Clark: Any particular cases that you can think of?

Shanahan: There was, at that time, an amendment to the Clayton Act, one of the two basic antitrust laws had just gone into effect closing a loophole about mergers and so there were giant merger cases. The one I remember in particular which taught me a lot about something besides antitrust law was Texaco. Texaco was trying to merge with—I forget, somebody, another big company. And I found out that the Justice Department intended to file suit against the merger. It just was kind of dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's" on the brief. And I wrote the story saying they were going to sue.

I sent the story up to New York where the Journal of Commerce was headquartered, the main operation was there, and they called me back and said, "Well, of course, we called Texaco for comment and they said that was absolutely false. No such thing was happening. And I said it isn't. It was one of those rare occasions then—they are less rare nowadays—when they finally said, "Well, we have to know who your source is, not to tell the company but just for us to know." So I told them.

Texaco threatened the Journal of Commerce and said they were a substantial advertiser, we will pull our advertising, we will cancel all our subscriptions—which they did. But the story ran. I managed to persuade people that I had a very highly placed source. And I puzzled about it for years. Why, if the Justice Department was all but ready to file the suit, why did they want to keep it out of the paper?

And finally, in some subsequent scandals, unrelated to this story, that came out in the Nixon years, I realized—and I called my source and asked him, and he confirmed it—that Texaco thought they could go to the White House and stop the Justice Department from filing. But once it was in anybody's newspaper, their freedom to do that was blocked. And that was a great lesson to learn about the way the world works.

Clark: The impact of the story.

Shanahan: Yes. [Tape interruption.]

They were very growth-filled years for me. Covering Eisenhower's budget was a wonderful story. I'm not one of these complete revisionists on Eisenhower that thinks he was an unequivocally great president. The slowness responding to Little Rock and Joe McCarthy still remain in my mind.

Page 40

But one of the things Eisenhower did, which I knew at the time and reported at the time, though the public at large never seemed to understand it, was the way he kept the Pentagon in control. The monumental budget fights, when the Pentagon was asking for zillions of dollars and Eisenhower, the five-star general in the White House, could tell them no. And they could not effectively complain to anybody. They couldn't go to Congress to get it over-ridden. There were stories many of us got about some of the details of those fights and just how much Ike cut back the Pentagon's wish list.

Another thing that was enormously interesting at that time and fun to think back on now in this era where we've had divided government for so long—I think, if I remember this right, that the House of Representatives was in Republican hands only for the first two years of Eisenhower's term, and the Senate maybe never. And Lyndon Johnson was the Senate majority leader for much or all of that time. But we didn't have a stalemate and we certainly didn't have the poisoned atmosphere that we had during the Reagan and Bush years of divided government.

And in recent years I've reflected a lot as to why not. Partly I think nobody on either side thought it was going to be permanent, the way it has almost turned out to be in the last couple of decades here today. A lot of it had to do with Lyndon Johnson who had a real great sense of what was possible and the art of the possible. But it had to do with both Johnson and Eisenhower and it reflects favorably on both, that they were able to work together. And Sam Rayburn, who was Speaker of the House, I guess, though I have less of a sense of him as the dynamic force here.

I remember once—I saw Johnson a lot during those years. And I think the reason I had such good access to him was that I wasn't covering the stuff everybody else was covering. I'm guessing now but I'll bet I'm right, that he was smart enough to know that when I wanted to see him, I might know something from the House of Representatives or the administration that hadn't reached him yet and that therefore it was worth his time to see me. I don't remember ever having to wait more than a day to see Johnson when I wanted to see him.

And I was often bringing him the first news of stuff. And I remember one time—and he liked smart women, too. I mean, he was a great lecher. He must have slept with hundreds of women in his life. Not a lech, a womanizer. He didn't press himself on anybody who didn't welcome it. I have never heard that he did. I'll get back to that. Senatorial leching. A daily hazard in those years, for a young woman. But Johnson plainly liked—enjoyed smart women.

I've always had kind of an argumentative style of interviewing and never been a passive: "And what did you do next? And what do you think?" kind of interviewer. And I remember one time, I was all revved up about an issue some of the Democrats were pushing, for regional economic development in poverty areas. And I remember asking him why he wasn't fighting harder to get that, and a little condescendingly, which he wasn't generally toward me at that time, he explained to me that Eisenhower had just been reelected with this enormous landslide, that the country was just about a hundred percent behind him, and that he would just be wasting his energies to fight with Eisenhower over this issue now. In effect he said to me, "But stick around. You'll see. That popularity will erode and I will have my chance to get this through." And he did get some of the early social programs through in '58, '59, '60.

Clark: That's a very interesting insight into him.

Shanahan: Yes, because he's considered such a bully and he was.

Clark: But he was that strategic.

Shanahan: Oh, smart. Smart. Don't ever underestimate how smart that man was.

Page 41

I learned a lot about Congress. I learned about Congress with [Walter] Cronkite, I think I mentioned that, and I learned more. But this was the time really when I got into the executive branch of government in real depth, that period at the Journal of Commerce, which then of course moves into the first year of the Kennedy administration, as well. I left there in November of '61 so I covered basically the first year of the Kennedy administration.

I don't remember when I was just a newsletter reporter and it might have been because I wasn't attempting to have access at the level that I did and succeeded getting access on the Journal of Commerce. I don't remember putdowns by sources, as I mentioned when I was talking about the Office of Price Stabilization. But I do at the Journal of Commerce. And I came to realize that one of the big problems, the contrast between people who'd spent their whole lives in business, a guy like Secretary of the Treasury [George] Humphrey whom I mentioned who just couldn't stand the idea of—who the hell was this uppity young broad thinking she was important enough to ask him a question.

The economists were different, the academics were different, and in particular those who had taught at co-educational universities were used to women students and liked smart women. Now, not all of those who had taught at men's schools were uncomfortable with women, but many were. One great exception, I remember becoming very fond of Jim Tobin, who taught at Yale then and now, and whom I've talked to recently, who just apparently understood from the start that I was serious and careful and all those good things.

But I particularly remember—I was then the only woman on that beat, then and before and after, though there was a woman at United Press, briefly, in that time. And that goes back to the Research Institute time, Maureen Gothlin. But I was the only woman really doing national economic policy when I was at the Journal of Commerce.

I remember Walter Heller, for example, who had taught at Minnesota and his successor, Gardner Ackley, who was also a state university guy, and so on. And those men I think really liked bright, young women. Heller was great to cover and hard to cover. He was brilliant, he was forthcoming, he was accessible, and he had great access to the presidents he served—both [John F.] Kennedy and Johnson—and real influence on policy. He was a pretty admirable guy and a great institution builder. He really established some policies and structures and personnel guidelines at the Council of Economic Advisors that exist to this day and was wonderfully articulate. You never went away from talking to Heller empty-handed.

But oh, he was so cranky. Whatever you wrote, he complained about it. It wasn't long enough, it wasn't detailed enough, you didn't give him enough credit. But talking to my male colleagues, I found he was an equal opportunity complainer. He didn't complain to me any more than he complained to anybody else. And of course, I continued to cover him through the Kennedy administration, after I had gone to the New York Times.

But I remember running into some real bigoted people with a background in business. I remember in particular Eisenhower's last budget director, a guy named Percival Brundage, who was an accountant. And I had a lot of sources in what was then the Bureau of the Budget. And I got stories they wished I hadn't gotten. And I found out from one of my sources, that Brundage had actually—this was plainly illegal—a Secret Service man investigating me to see who I was sleeping with to get my stories.

Clark: What did you do about it?

Shanahan: Nothing. I wasn't sleeping with anybody but my husband.

Clark: No. I know that. Did you tell anybody when you found this out?

Shanahan: Not at the time, I don't believe. I don't believe so. He was one of the worst. That whole string of Eisenhower's budget directors—well, [Maurice] Stans wasn't that bad. He was bad in some other ways.

Page 42

You may recall his involvement in the illegal money-raising of the Nixon re-election campaign for which he was acquitted by the jury but not by me.

But Ike's first budget director, Joseph Dodge, was terrible, too. But he was terrible to everybody. He really didn't understand what the press was about. I'll never forget his first press conference. It doesn't have anything to do with being a woman but it was just he said, "I will take questions first on subject A and second on subject B and third on subject C." And the press was having none of that and somebody immediately spoke up and asked a question on subject C—or D or E. "I told you I would only"—well, in five or ten minutes the press conference had simply disintegrated into chaos because he wouldn't answer the questions as they came and the press wouldn't follow his rules. He never had another press conference. But this was the kind of caveman who was in the first Eisenhower administration. The group in the second Eisenhower administration, Brundage excepted, was much more modern, for that time, in its view of the press. The industrialists in Eisenhower's first cabinet really believed, most of them, that what they were doing in the government was nobody's business but theirs.

[End Tape 1, Side A; begin Tape 1, Side B]

Clark: We were talking about Eisenhower's relationship to the press.

Shanahan: Now, I'm not sure I can give you a good answer on that. I must say, decent access. There were people in the Treasury, for example. In the second Eisenhower administration, [Robert B.] Anderson, his chief economist, a guy named Charls Walker who's still around on the Washington scene, became a good friend, good source, the two different undersecretaries under Eisenhower were both very accessible to the press, really more than their Democratic predecessors had been. Ike's first deputy secretary of the treasury, undersecretary he was then, Randolph Burgess, really opened up some things that had been done in secret about the sale of government bonds and so on. He had spent his whole career in banking, which is more conscious of a broader public than the industrialists are. They just talk to each other.

But the second Eisenhower administration people were better. And for a long time it looked like it was continuing always in one direction, toward more openness. That, of course, changed.

I wanted to double back a little bit to the Journal of Commerce in terms of personal things.

Clark: Okay.

Shanahan: That's where I had my first black friend, Rita Maynard Butler, a year or two older than I, smart as hell, not educated beyond high school—I wouldn't be positive she was a high school graduate—who was the switchboard operator and receptionist. And there was no other woman in the bureau. Well, there was another woman, a teletype operator who was just rather a dull creature. I mean, we were cordial to one another but we were never friends.

But Rita and I became real friends. She was and is a pistol. I think you'd probably say we were a lot alike in many ways. She was a widow with a four-year-old—was a widow, today you'd wonder if maybe she'd never been married. Well, I met her husband. Yes, she had been. Not that that would have altered my judgment.

She was very well-connected with black Washington. Well, it was 1956 when I went to the Journal of Commerce and the fallout from the beginnings after the Brown decision [Brown vs. the Board of Education, 1954] and so on had not yet happened. And she knew Who's Who—I met Who's Who in Black Washington at her house, local people, the one local—one of the few local black judges, people like that. She and I are friends to this day.

Page 43

And I got some insights that you don't get going all the way through segregated schools and colleges and never having known a black person. We had a laundress when my mother was dying. I ran the household, as I think I mentioned before but my parents did have somebody come in and do the laundry. That was no relationship. Rita was. And I began to have some sense. Not a lot. She was no militant. In fact, I was told—I wasn't there, I'd gone by the time of Martin Luther King's March on Washington*—that before and while it was being planned, she ridiculed it. "A-ah, what are they coming to march for? What is this nonsense?" Because she was living a middle-class life.

And on the day of the march, where they came from all over in these broken-down buses from the segregated school systems in the South, and Rita looked out the window where a bus had broken down near the Monument grounds, which you could see from that office, and the people were out there pushing the bus. And all of a sudden, something got to Rita and she said, "I'm out of here. You watch your own switchboard. I'm going to that march."

Anyway, we became great friends and I did get some insights from her about what it was to be black in America.

Another interesting thing is that while I was at the Journal of Commerce—oh, I think we became friends in part—I didn't understand this at the time—because I needed a woman friend on the job.

Clark: I was going to say, who did you talk to?

Shanahan: Yes.

Clark: About what it was like to be a working mother, for example.

Shanahan: Well, that's right. That's absolutely right. And clothes and girl talk. I don't think I realized at the time. If there'd been another woman in a professional job there, I'm not sure we would have become as close friends as we did and so I'm awfully glad there wasn't.

Clark: Yes.

Shanahan: Just before I left, not too many months before I left, they did hire another woman. I'll get back to that. I want to finish with Rita.

Clark: Yes.

Shanahan: The Brown decision was, of course, in '54. I'm getting ahead of my story. In that building, which was a downtown old, rather architecturally distinguished—not classy in that day but a nice building, a nice downtown office building, the Albee building, there then moved Johnson Publications, Jet and Ebony magazines, onto our floor. They may have been the first blacks ever to take a suite in a downtown office building in Washington.

Also on our floor was the Chicago Tribune bureau. It was sort of a spill-over press building, that building at that time. And they were still in the grips of the old [Robert R.] McCormick far-right wing of its day. And were actually afraid when we saw these black folks moving in that the Tribune people who were directly across the hall from them—we were down the hall—might be ugly to them and decided to go pay a call. So we brought a bottle of scotch and a bottle of bourbon—

Clark: "We" meaning you—

______________________
* August 28, 1963.

Page 44

Shanahan: "We" meaning the Journal of Commerce bureau. I think there were six or seven of us at the time. And the ringleader was a guy named John King, a very smart guy, a nice guy, a little bit younger than I am. He was the one who had thought of doing it. So we went over and knocked on the door with our bottle of scotch and our bottle of bourbon and said, "We just wanted to welcome you to the Albee building."

So they got the ice and the water and passed the drinks. Then they invited us to all their parties after that. I met Martin Luther King through them and Mr. Johnson, who's still alive, the head of Johnson Publications, and Who's Who in Black America came through that office, and they had parties and they invited us.

Clark: And that was part of your education.

Shanahan: Yes. But what is interesting and sad that awakened me at that time to just how complex racial prejudice was, this same man, John King, who had had the idea that we should welcome them and let them know we were happy to have them, even if the Tribune people weren't—I don't think the Tribune people were ever unpleasant to them, in fact. He ultimately had four sons. I forgot how many he had at this time. Two maybe. And somewhere not too long after Jet and Ebony Johnson Publications moved into the building, John King and his wife and his two kids bought a house in Virginia and John announced that obviously they were going to integrate the schools of Washington, D.C.—in fact, they had started the very fall, the fall of '55, after the Brown decision, and his kids weren't going to school with any—he may well have said "niggers."

And I remember thinking about it and talking to him and saying, "But you're the guy that said let's go welcome these people." "That's different." And it was the beginning of some long thoughts about just how complicated racial prejudice is and the beginning of a little wisdom, not enough, about how tough it was going to be. I think, like a lot of well-meaning, stupid Americans, the category in which I will put myself, I thought, "Oh, get rid of the legal basis for segregation and that's it." Just total failure to understand what two hundred, three hundred years of segregation and deprivation had done to a whole people.

Clark: How do you think this influenced you in terms of your own understanding and struggle as a woman? Or feminism, your understanding of feminism?

Shanahan: Good question. I don't know the answer to that. You tried a minute ago to get me to put that together with what I had come to recognize and believe as someone who'd felt this thing of being discriminated against because I was half-Jewish. And obviously my sense of "everybody's entitled to be judged as an individual" extended to blacks, as it did among more Jews at that time than it did later when blacks started resenting the paternalism of many liberal Jews (and other whites) who were saying, in effect, let me help you be just like us, not understanding that there were good reasons they didn't necessarily want to be just like us. And the more militant blacks started saying, "Get out of my way, motherfucker, I'm going to do it my way," instead of "Oh, thank you, thank you for being so nice to me." And that angered and alienated many well-meaning whites. Great tragedy.

I don't think the black struggle changed anything about what I thought and did as a woman. I think in that sense I was already there, that I was intent upon my own right to do whatever I was capable of doing. I welcomed other women. I was never a queen bee. It wasn't conscious on my part and I think the term queen bee hadn't been invented then. The women's movement invented that. And I was starting to mention that just less than a year before I left the Journal of Commerce, they hired another woman reporter. And she was younger than I, very bright, close to beautiful which I certainly never was.

Clark: Did that make a difference?

Shanahan: No. Well, no. Only I'll tell you why I mentioned it in a minute. And I didn't know until somebody told me afterwards that the guys in the bureau were expecting me to be horrible to her and to be resentful, especially since she was younger and prettier. And I just quite instinctively welcomed her,

Page 45

without thinking about it. Not conscious that I was glad there was another woman so much as just, you know, okay, you know. Then she proves to be for her experience a very good reporter. I helped her some. She needed to have her hand held a little but I was older and knew more. And I liked her. We probably would have gotten to be good friends if we'd had more time.

Clark: Did you get her name down?

Shanahan: Barbara Specter. And it was only afterwards one of the guys, this same John King, told me, "Oh, yeah, we were all sitting around waiting to watch you scratch each other's eyes out." They just didn't get it. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: We are back with the Journal of Commerce at this point.

Shanahan: Yes, that was a very growth-filled and happy experience. I really learned a lot of economics. And a very happy bureau, very happy colleagues out on the economic beat, not resented. As the only woman, I never felt uncomfortable with colleagues. Some of these reactionary officials I had to cover, of course, were another matter.

Again, I think in part that was, as I said before, because of my paper, while known—my clips were read by the people I was covering, which is very important and useful because the Treasury in particular but other agencies as well had a system, still do to this day, of some poor son-of-a-gun's got to come into the office at five o'clock in the morning and clip all the newspapers. Nowadays, of course, they monitor last night's and early morning TV as well and have a package of clips and today excerpts from early morning television news on the desk of the top people whenever they come in. And the top people tend to come in pretty early.

So the Journal of Commerce on the economic policy beat was one of the papers that was clipped. So my sources knew what I was doing. Members of the press could get those clips, too, later in the day, so my colleagues could see what I was doing. I was certainly respected by my colleagues—no question about that—who saw what I did.

There was one occasion where Dick [Richard] Mooney of the New York Times, who was one of my colleagues from another paper at that time—the New York Times then and when I was there had a little system of a monthly publisher's prize given in three or four or five categories. And Dick Mooney won a publisher's prize one month for an exclusive which in fact he had followed up on a story of mine. Nicely, he bought me lunch with some of the money, telling me that he felt a little embarrassed because he knew it was a story that I had broken.

Clark: Was that regularly done, that reporters shared that kind of—

Shanahan: Well, after I'm in print, I don't care who has it. I mean, the reason that was shared—it wasn't really shared, it was a matter of it was in the Treasury clips, so he saw it. He saw it because it was in the Treasury clips. After you've been first with it, you don't care who comes in second.

I was aware that when I went into the Treasury—I'll tell you how I got there in a minute—I had to go through a Secret Service clearance. And when the Secret Service official summoned me—I actually went to work without clearance which was common. It hadn't been finished yet and I had worked there a few weeks when he summoned me to tell me it went through. And he said, "You know, you're really a very unusual person. I don't care who the person is, they always have some enemies. There's always somebody who speaks badly of them. Nobody speaks badly of you. I've never encountered that before."

Well, that's the last time in my life that would have been so, I think, and I don't think I'm the one that changed. I think there was resentment of me when I got to the New York Times.

Page 46

Clark: Did you apply for any other newspaper jobs when you were leaving the Journal?

Shanahan: No.

I went into the Treasury out of a long-felt sense of wondering just how much does the press really find out. How good a job do we really do? What do we tend to get right and what wrong? Two reasons, that was one of them. I really wanted to find out how good we in the press were and what we missed. And the other was a sense of wanting to really understand how policy was made. And I'm telling you it was an education that exceeded my wildest dreams.

I had mentioned to someone in the Treasury, one of my colleagues in the Treasury press room, the AP reporter, Frank Cormier, who was subsequently the White House reporter for the AP, that I would like to take a job in government someday to find the answer to those questions. Well, he thought I was crazy, as most of my colleagues did. But there came a time, a year or more after I had mentioned it to Frank Cormier, when someone in the Treasury mentioned to him that they were looking for somebody to—going to create a new job to have somebody who really could spend full-time doing PR for Kennedy's tax program which took two years to get through, the 1962 Tax Reform Act.

And he remembered that I had said that. And he told whoever had approached him that I might be interested. So the contacts were duly made and I decided to do it. Looking back on it, I'm a little surprised at my daring. I'm not surprised that I wasn't really afraid I couldn't do the job, though I had never done such a job. It was the belief that I could do it and get back into journalism. It just wasn't done.

Clark: You planned to do a short stint?

Shanahan: Yes. I signed on for one year, told them "I'll do it for one year" and actually wound up staying fifteen months. I told everybody under the sun, "I'm going to be back in journalism. Watch out." Well, I don't think anybody believed me. You were a lost soul if you ever went in and did that. I was one of the early ones. There are a lot of people now—David Broder preeminent among them, whom I respect beyond measure, who thinks it's bad for journalists to do that. I disagree with him. I understand some of the points he makes but—

Clark: Why?

Shanahan: Well, he thinks it blurs, that we of the press have constitutional privileges, plainly, and that if we move back and forth like that, it blurs the distinction as to who is the press and who is the government. I don't deride that point. I just find it outweighed by other things. That is really his principal argument. It's not so much the taint that your colleagues may feel you have, though I certainly encountered that, and I encountered situations where I've learned that somebody would not consider me for a job because I had once worked in the government.

Journalists are very self-important people, I'm afraid, in a lot of cases and very narrow people in some respects. The world is far too full of journalists, in my view, who believe that it's the only honorable line of work in the whole world. Well, baloney. [James B.] Reston, who has three sons, really was heartbroken that only one of them chose to be a journalist.

I never had those feelings. I wanted my daughters to dedicate themselves to something more than their own standard of living—and they both have—and I didn't care in what, just as long as they were doing more than a job that would give them a paycheck. But many feel otherwise. And I think most people didn't expect me ever to be back. I kept telling people, kept telling them that, the second time around, too, in HEW [Health, Education and Welfare].

Page 47

So anyway, I got the job. And it was quite an extraordinary experience in any number of ways, an invaluable experience and another great growth period in my life, which Research Institute and the Journal of Commerce had certainly been—Cronkite, every job I ever had, really. And I have left jobs on occasion because I felt I wasn't growing any more. More than on occasion. Quite often.

Clark: What were your responsibilities there?

Shanahan: At the Treasury, I was initially and for most of the time I was there the PR person for the tax program which meant I dealt with press inquiries, mostly oral, a few written, arranged interviews, wrote a lot of stuff explaining our provisions with the technicians. I mean, sometimes I'd sit down and write it and have them look at it to make sure there were no mistakes. Sometimes they'd turn in something and I would edit it into something that people could understand.

Some of it was very hard work. They did administratively, it didn't require a statutory action, a massive change in the whole way that businesses calculated depreciation for tax purposes and put out a pamphlet of—I don't know how many pages, sort of Reader's Digest size or a little bigger—sixty, seventy pages, which I worked on, mostly with two young tax lawyers whom I see to this day, wonderful people.

And that's some of the hardest work I ever did in my life. That stuff is complicated. And for those purposes, I had to go many layers deeper than I would have even as the kind of reporter I am, because this pamphlet was intended for business executives and their lawyers and accountants and so on to use. But I was determined that it should be understandable. And it was. There were people who commented that they'd never seen a government document that was that well and clearly written. I was very proud of it and I must say I made a great friendship out of those two young guys. They weren't that much younger than I am. I still see one of them in particular and he's like five years but—how old was I in 1961?—thirty-seven, it seemed like a lot at that time.

So basically the tax side and, as I say, arranging interviews and so on, as well as writing things and answering queries. I was the first person that the late Phil Stern, who just died a few weeks ago, came to see when he decided he would write a book, the title of which ultimately was The Great Treasury Raid—which was the first popular book ever written about all the things corporations and rich people get out of the tax law that other folks don't. A very good job and he went far beyond me in his knowledge by the time that book was done. But he started with me and that was great fun. He gave me a copy of his book, autographed, when it was published. That was an important book. It changed thinking. It opened that issue up as it had never been opened up before.

Then at some point, I kind of got bored with taxation and moved to another piece of the Treasury, the monetary and debt management side. The federal debt we all talk about as something humongous and horrible, and it certainly is now and was thought to be then. But the management of it, the Treasury sale of bonds and how that affects the financial markets and so on, was an important issue even then. A brilliant guy named Robert Roosa who was the head of that side of the Treasury was on the debt management side of the Treasury. I just got so I'd had enough of taxation.

I used to write speeches for Secretary [Douglas] Dillon, too. That's the hardest and most unrewarding work ever known to the human mind, writing speeches for someone else. You try to adopt their style, you have to say what they want you to say. But my boss, my immediate boss, the assistant secretary for public affairs, told me, "Don't ever go listen to Dillon deliver a speech you've written." But of course, I had to go do it. And I saw why he told me not to go. Dillon not only didn't stop for the periods, he didn't stop for the paragraphs. Just drone, drone, drone, drone, drone—all this rhetoric that I had labored over so. It was awful.

Page 48

Anyway, I'll get back to the monetary policy guy I worked for, Roosa. I went over to that side and unlike the tax side—I want to get into that right now—the assistant secretary for tax policy was a former and subsequently Harvard law professor named Stanley Surrey whom I liked enormously after I got to know him. He was hard to know and most people didn't like him because they didn't get to know him well enough, I think.

Stanley Surrey really believed that everybody on earth could teach him something, knew something he didn't know. And he would ask almost childlike questions which infuriated business executives who thought he was being snide. You know, "Well, why should we continue the oil depletion allowance?" because he thought they might have some reason he'd never heard. And they thought he was just being a smart-ass, because everybody knew what those liberals thought about the oil depletion allowance which was one of the great old tax benefits that's mostly gone out of the tax law for a number of years now. But it was sort of the one that all the liberal static was directed at the oil depletion allowance at that time. It was liberals' public hate number one. And not just tax policy people, the liberal world at large. But Surrey assumed I was there because I knew stuff he didn't know. It was wonderful. And he assembled an incredible staff. These two guys I worked with on depreciation were just part of it. He also inherited a very good career staff. That's a whole other subject which you might not want to digress into, the deterioration in the level of civil service. But I caught some great old guys who'd come in in the Roosevelt administration, in that era when government was growing. And then a whole other additional large cadre would come in in World War II, most of whom could have made three times their salary and more on the outside but really felt the call to public service and an interest in public policy.

So a lot of those great career people were still at the Treasury when I was there, as well as the young lawyers and economists who were attracted because Surrey was there, who was the great god of tax reform as a Harvard professor. So I had a wonderful—he was demanding. Ah, was he demanding. Night and day. There's a story, and I believe it's true, about somebody whose father had died who said he was terribly sorry he just couldn't be there tomorrow or the next day, he had to go to his father's funeral. And it is said that Surrey said, "Why?" I don't think I believe that story.

I suppose, in terms of placing demands on me that were so great I almost couldn't meet them in terms of number of hours of work it took, that's the closest I ever came to not being able to do it because he was so demanding. But that said, I still had a wonderful time.

My kids survived. They were still kids at home at that time. They were—thirteen and fourteen Mary Beth and ten and eleven Kate, in the year-plus that I was there. So they were kids that needed a mother. And I think I neglected my husband in that period, to tell you the truth, because I was working, I don't know, somewhere between seventy and ninety hours a week, probably. Much weekend work.

Clark: What grade were you?

Shanahan: Oh, yes. I was a grade sixteen which is the first of what they call the super-grades. The civil service system has fifteen regular grades and three super-grades, sixteen, seventeen and eighteen. And I was not only the highest ranking woman in the Treasury, I was the highest ranking woman in any of the economic policy agencies, by which I mean Commerce, Treasury, Labor, Council of Economic Advisors, OMB. I don't count the Federal Reserve because they have a different system. They may have had a higher ranking woman at that time, I don't know. So that shows you that they were still the bad old days.

______________________
* Noonan, Peggy. What I Saw At The Revolution: A Political Life In The Reagan Era, 1990.

Page 49

But I was accepted—well, anyway, it was wonderful working for Surrey. I ultimately got fed up with it. I went then to work for Bob Roosa briefly, who acted more like most people act with their PR people. They sit down and tell you what you're allowed to say. And you will not stray beyond those guidelines. And you may be able to discuss it behind the scenes and reach an agreement that will change his mind, somebody's mind, slightly. That was not the case with Roosa. I don't believe I ever changed his mind about what I should be allowed to say.

After a very short time of that, I was dying to get back to tax policy and Stanley Surrey even if it meant seventy-hour weeks. I just abandoned the Roosa shop. I was brain-dead there. Well, it wasn't all that awful. I mean I was able to use my mind somewhat. But basically, on the tax side I was shaping policy—not just tax PR policy, there were even a couple of occasions where I said, "Why are we doing that? Isn't that a problem because"—and it was heard and affected subsequent policy. Not as much as I subsequently did at HEW but a little bit. So I bailed out of the money side. As the year I had committed to drew to a close, I started—well, let's see what else I need to say about that job first, before I talk about leaving. I learned a lot, I learned in depth, and I learned the answer to the two questions I had when I came in.

How good was the press? The answer is that the economic policy press at that time was really excellent. There was one rather irresponsible guy who was the correspondent for a trade paper that's still in business called the Bond Buyer. It strictly has to do with nothing but the financial market for bonds who wrote a story that caused us a lot of trouble and it was dead wrong. I defied the rules of flakdom. I called him up and chewed him out up one side and down the other and said, "You never even called us. You have a responsibility to call us." I probably swore at him. I don't remember. Well, by God, he was sufficiently chastened he never did it again. That was the only really bad episode I remember, in terms of really wrong reporting. That doesn't mean things didn't get out before we wanted them to or perhaps only partially. But there was never another terrible case of a story that was not only wrong but upset the markets.

Clark: Was there a lot that the public didn't know that you did know?

Shanahan: Yes. Oh, yes. At the time, but not eventually. And this is what I learned. What I learned, what I finally learned was that the press really was at that time a very good, serious press corps, small and didn't overwhelm the bureaucracy with sheer numbers which is very much the case today. They got it right in terms of what the policy was, which ultimately got announced and sometimes ahead of time they'd find out, and pretty much understood the thinking that went into those decisions, and why those decisions were made.

What I discovered they almost never found out was about the things that never got past a certain point. If there were two or three contending ideas close to the decision date, they would find that out and write some very good stories frequently and sometimes stories about a fight, sometimes retrospectively, sometimes as that was going on.

But in terms of things that were seriously looked at but never got real close to a decision and why they were discarded and when they were discarded, that by and large they never found out. It caused me to change some of my patterns of questioning, as a reporter afterwards.

Clark: How so?

Shanahan: Well, just that. I would ask questions about—when I knew enough to say, you know, "Well, did you ever consider something?" or "What else did you consider?" or "What else never got higher than some pretty low levels?" You don't always get answers to a question like that. If you don't know what you're fishing for, it's hard to fish. But sometimes I did.

Page 50

About how policy is made, the enormously interesting thing I discovered and reaffirmed at HEW was that with rare exceptions, policy gets made earlier in the process than you think. That at a good staff level—I'm not talking about real lower-downs, I'm talking probably largely about super-grades and maybe even deputy assistant secretary—certain things are discarded very early and never fully staffed out. So that the alternatives, the option papers that reach the secretary or the undersecretary or whoever the final decision-maker is going to be, or even the next-to-final decision-maker, don't contain some of the options that might have been.

It's also true that sometimes staff—and it can be either career bureaucrats or lower-level political appointees, they don't go too well, of course—write a lopsided option paper where they really try to point their bosses in the direction they think the boss ought to go. Write down the word Eisenstadt. It takes a very smart guy at the top to get an option paper and bounce it back saying, "But you didn't look at this. But you didn't look at that. I want more detail on this or that." And I saw—not Douglas Dillon for whom I worked so much do that as Henry Fowler who was the undersecretary. He bounced a lot of stuff back. He knew a lot, a very smart lawyer—Dillon was more of a finance guy—who knew what some of those options were that had been discarded along the way. That was a very useful thing to learn.

I mentioned Eisenstadt. When I was in HEW under [James Earl "Jimmy"] Carter—and of course I knew a lot of the economic policy people. And I also knew [Walter] Mondale from covering him when he was in the Senate, on the finance committee, and he read my stuff when I was at the New York Times.

And there was a time when Carter was considering a major tax reform bill that never saw the light of day. But Mondale was going to do the first kind of toe-in-the-water speech somewhere to see what happened if he mentioned some of these things or the need for a major tax reform even, without specific details. And he apparently had lots of—there were lots of ideas kicking around as to what it should contain. And Mondale had had people try to write this speech for him and nobody could write one to his satisfaction. So he called [Joseph] Califano, who was a good friend of his, and said, "Can I?"—no, I guess he called me and said, "Can you write a tax reform speech for me? Nobody else can do it." And I said, "Well, gee, you know, I'm awfully busy here. I'll have to ask Joe Califano." And Mondale said, "Oh, I'll ask him." So Mondale called him and Joe, who wouldn't be about to offend the vice president of the United States said, "Well, of course." As it turned out, I didn't put a hell of a lot of work into it because the idea died before I had a full draft done. But when I mention option papers, Stuart Eisenstadt, who was a guy I really admired in the Carter White House, wrote an option paper for Mondale, maybe, or the president, which Mondale sent me, anyway, as kind of a foundation for this speech.

That was the fairest thing I have ever seen. And at the very end of each section describing a potential specific proposal, it said, "I think we should do blah, blah, blah." But in presenting the pros and cons, it was just awesomely fair and I had already, I think, identified Eisenstadt as the real class act in the Carter White House, not Hamilton Jordan and not Jody Powell and so on in the Carter White House. But boy, that cemented it. And that's what a staff person should do and a lot don't.

Anyway, those were my great discoveries at the Treasury.

Page 51