[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Shanahan: Another of the interesting things that I learned at the Treasury which I hadn't expected to learn was a lot about executive branch-legislative branch relations. I learned rather quickly, maybe by accident, I'm not sure, to take a press call from anybody that I knew to be covering Congress—I don't care what I was doing. If I was on a crash deadline for something for the secretary, take that call. I was liable to get in the form of a question some information we didn't know about what was going on in Congress. I always was very good about returning my press calls, I think everybody will tell you. But I would put those ahead of anything.

I also found out something and it's something the press mostly doesn't understand to this day. How an administration, quote, "buys" a member of Congress. People think that it's with support for a physical project, a dam, a highway or whatever, and that does indeed happen.

Much more often, however, I found out at Treasury and affirmed at HEW, it's with support or at least non-opposition for a piece of legislation the member of Congress is interested in, often a very narrow piece of legislation. Sometimes even what they call a private bill which is just what it sounds like because it's something that affects just one or a small number of named individuals, some kind of relief that they're not entitled to under normal law but they get under a private bill. You can't let those things get out of hand. They're not supposed to establish precedent but de facto people think of them as precedent, so it's dangerous stuff for trying to run a sensible government.

And I discovered that that was how it was done. That, well, okay, you really want such and such in the tax bill and all right, we won't fight you if you'll support this other thing. And I do feel that the press to this day does not fully understand that process.

Also I never knew that the executive branch writes some congressional speeches, especially in the House of Representatives where they don't have a lot of staff. For the 1962 Tax Act—as it went through the House, whenever it was, '61, '62 I guess—I wrote, I don't remember now. In the House, you may realize, a long speech is a five-minute speech. A very long speech is ten minutes. Of course, there are 435 members and a lot of them want to talk. You can pack a lot into a one-minute, two-minute, three-minute, five-minute speech. I wrote something like fifteen or eighteen five-minute speeches for that tax debate, most of which were delivered. Events can move past you and what you thought was going to be a hot issue turns out not to be and so the speech doesn't get delivered.

I was particularly proud—we had a provision in the '62 act that is still supported by a lot of Democrats today that is a business investment incentive. It's called the investment tax credit, designed to encourage business to put more money into expanding or modernizing their equipment. You may or may not ever have heard of it. It's been on and off the books a half a dozen times. Well, it was invented in the Kennedy Treasury by Stanley Surrey and Company. And a lot of liberals thought it was a business giveaway and you shouldn't do this.

One of the people who in fact had concluded that it was a good idea and that a liberal Democrat could and should support it was a congressman, one of the most brilliant I've ever known, Richard Bolling from Missouri. And I wrote a speech for him on why a liberal should support the investment tax credit which was reprinted as an article in The New Republic, which thrilled me no end. His byline, of course.

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Clark: That was great.

Shanahan: Well, in due course I wanted to get back to my profession and started looking for a job back in journalism. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: We were going to talk a little bit about your experiences of being a working mother during the Journal of Commerce and also—

Shanahan: Well, perhaps back to square one.

Clark: Back to square one. I'm sorry.

Shanahan: I left United Press in 1947, five months pregnant which was kind of the unwritten rule at that time. You were supposed to not work when you were, quote, "showing." In fact, there was one guy at UP who said to me, you know, "Aren't you ashamed to go around looking like that?" because I was fully five months pregnant and kind of blossomed early in terms of a really protruding abdomen and got into maternity clothes at about four months. Anyway, no, I wasn't ashamed. But that really was kind of the unwritten rule.

When I quit work, I had no idea of ever coming back to work except some vague day when the kids were all in high school or something like that. And as it turned out, I stayed home just eighteen months, four of them before Mary Beth was born—three and a half—and the rest afterwards. And I think I mentioned that earlier, that I really hated being at home, was bored, I think took excellent care of her but didn't do anything else, almost didn't read, even. Got very down in the dumps and then went out and got myself a job, at my husband's urging. I know I mentioned this the first time.

So from then on, I was a working mother. And for many years, I think even after the kids were in college and maybe later than that, if you had asked me one of these kind of party games things, to describe myself in two words or three words or something like that, my answer would have been "working mother." That was my absolute sense of who I was, which proves that both sides of my life were important to me. And I think that's true of any working mother.

But I remember when I read the first of the great women-in-management books, called The Managerial Woman, written by the two women who created the MBA program at Simmons College, which largely focused on a generation of women ten years older than I am but which I found much to relate to. And they had a list of ten or twelve things that more or less all working mothers did and all but one or two of them applied to me.

And the one or two were interesting. I remember one in particular that they said, "The working mother can't let her family know"—or doesn't or feels she can't—"let her family know that her work is important to her. And she can't let the people she works with and for know that her family, her children in particular, are important to her." Unlike the men, "she does not have pictures of her children on her desk." I always had pictures of my children on my desk. And my family certainly always knew my job was important to me.

Why I was capable of that when so many others of my generation, I trust their reporting, weren't, I don't fully know. The fact that I had a totally supportive husband had to be a very, very central, probably overwhelmingly important part of that. My own father approved because he really raised us to be career women. And I may have mentioned, my sister wanted to be a doctor from the age of ten. I was less clear as to what I wanted to be so I adopted my father's ambition that I should be the first woman ambassador. I was good at languages. And when I changed and wanted to be a journalist, it only took him about a week to adopt my dream and he didn't insist on his, to his great credit.

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So that having those two most important men in my life so supportive of the idea that I would have a career, that I would be a person in my own right and so on, plainly had a tremendous lot to do with the fact that I could not only let my family know my job was important, I could let the people I worked for know that my family was important.

And I don't think it hurt me a bit. I feel sorry for the women who felt they had to hide the importance of their family from the people they worked for. My guess is that they were ingesting some bullshit that society was raining down on them that maybe wasn't true. But maybe it was. It depends on the situation, obviously.

God knows I had some personally very conservative bosses, my Germanic bosses, Dr. Heinz Luedicke and Oscar Naumann at the Journal of Commerce were very old-fashioned men, rather close to their German origins and so on. Not in any Nazi sense, quite the contrary, but that very—a sense of pater familias that is much stronger than it has been in the American culture. Just why, because women crossed the plains in covered wagons or whatever the reason was—they had to cross an ocean, for heaven's sake, to get here—that they proved their bravery and their strength. So that I think as bad as the American culture has been, it's never been really, in general, as oppressive as a lot of others.

In any event, job and family always were important to me and everybody knew it, in both directions.

One of the treasures of my life, and you will find it in my effects when I die, is a copy of a letter that my daughter Mary Beth wrote to a life-long girl friend, then a woman, who had gone back to work with the birth of her first child—who's seven or eight years older than Mary Beth's, so Mary Beth didn't have any kids at that time—in which her friend expressed how conflicted she was about going off and leaving her one-year-old, or whatever this girl was.

And Mary Beth wrote her a letter back which her friend sent to me, and that's why I have it, in which she said, "No, you mustn't feel that way. I remember from earliest days watching my mother walk down the street to work in the morning in her high-heels, her hips switching as she walked, with that long stride of hers and her hair bouncing and happy to be going where she was going. And somehow it sort of released me to be happy in my day, too." I can hardly recount it without crying. I haven't reread it in a long time, and it's more than that, but that gives you the flavor of it.

So that surely in large measure because of my husband, he had to be by a million miles the most important influence, I didn't feel guilty about leaving my children. And my sister had the same experience. Neither one of us was ever asked by either of our children—she has two also, a boy and a girl—"Why don't you stay home like other mommies?" I think it's mostly because they never heard their father say it or even suggest it. But neither one of us ever had that said to us. It seemed right to our children because it seemed right to us and to our husbands. I think that has to be the answer.

So I did it without great feelings of conflict. There were times when my children got in some trouble. Well, she wouldn't care if I said which one. Kate got arrested once for shoplifting. I think most people do it, at the age, whatever age she was, about twelve or so. And I did, too. I never got caught. I shoplifted, little stuff. Stuff in my case that my family really couldn't buy me and in her case not.

And I remember when I got the call from the police department saying, "This is number four precinct, we have your daughter here. We caught her shoplifting in Murphy's Ten-Cent Store." Of course, you're just filled with this terrible moment of terror.

Clark: How old was she?

Shanahan: Twelve, thirteen. Something like that. I think that's the age for it. I know I was at the New York Times and I know it was a Thursday night and I had a piece to write for the Sunday opinion section and I hadn't finished it. And the cops were calling me to say, "You come and get her." And they wanted no

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possibility this kid could lie out of it and wanted to teach her a lesson, I imagine, and hoped that I would participate in that, which I surely did—but I had to get the Sunday piece finished. And I remember saying, "Well, I can't come right away. I have some work to finish." It was about maybe six p.m. And thinking, "Oh, boy, that's what they're going to think, you know. Neglected child with this working mother."

Anyway, I somehow managed to finished the piece—I don't quite know how—and went and got her. And as far as I know, she never stole anything again. I'm sure she didn't. And I added on some punishment. That was a source of dissension in the family. My husband and her older sister both thought she'd been punished enough by the episode and being arrested and all that. I didn't. I felt she needed to have extra punishment and meted it out. Cleaning the garage was one of the punishments—along with being grounded, of course—which badly needed it, I might add.

Clark: Might as well get something out of it.

Shanahan: Right. But even then, I didn't feel guilty. I knew the cops were going to look upon me as a terrible mother who had caused all this by working, or that was my assumption. But I didn't, I really didn't feel that way. I was upset. I wanted to make sure she wasn't started on a life of crime.

Basically I listened to the message that is being aimed with such intensity at women today. "You can't have it all. Don't try." And I think it is not only wrong but motivated by sheer villainy and a desire to push women back into a world that in fact they aren't going to get pushed back into, for a whole lot of reasons.

I think society likes to impose a lot of guilt and a lot of standards on the working mother. Now, I could be a working mother. Sure I worked hard. I was young. I was younger than today's mothers. I was much younger than my children were when they became mothers and that made it much easier. I was twenty-three and twenty-six when my children were born. My daughters were both well into their thirties. And you don't have as much energy. You don't bounce back as fast. And that's a very important difference that made my way a much easier way. And I don't think it impaired my profession at all.

In fact, I've talked some to young women, women who still have their choice in front of them, women in their twenties, especially now, saying—I know women who have a career, a real career not just a job in mind, as well as marriage and motherhood, feel that they'd better get well established in their career before they interrupt themselves and have children.

I think I don't agree with that. I think that maybe doing it early on and then coming back in and not having to interrupt yourself may be the better path, even in career terms. Obviously there are going to be some individual differences. But I'm sure it's true in physically being able to cope with the dual demands. And it was in part because I was young and superbly healthy, as I still am, and have a supportive husband who never did anything around the house but for his day was an incredible father, as good as the best of young fathers today in terms of really participating in the lives of their children. Not half, but a lot.

But there are other things, too. I sometimes think my husband's most valuable trait was not how much attention he paid to the kids but that he doesn't give a damn if there's a dust bunny behind the sofa. I'll see it before he will. He won't see it at all, ever. I mean, the place could be filthy and as long as he's got clean socks in the drawer—which of course I thought was my responsibility to place there—it never in my life—he used to get mad. I mean, if there was not a shirt back from the laundry or clean socks and underwear in the drawer, he really would snarl at me. And it never in this world occurred to me until long after the kids were gone to say, "I'll teach you how to run the washing machine. You can do your own damn laundry." I thought God or my mother or somebody had told me that was my responsibility.

And he'll eat anything. Oh, that's another great benefit. What that means is that you can have a repertoire of five easy-to-fix things and keep repeating them. These were in the days when you had to have meat every night and chops and stuff like that. To make dishes with just a little meat for flavoring, the healthy

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way, today, is a lot more work than throwing a pork chop in the skillet. But having a husband who didn't care what the house looked like and who didn't care what he ate—I suppose he'd have minded if I burned it or something, but generally, I'm not a great cook, but I'm quite a decent cook—was very important in terms of having it all.

I do remember there was an era, though—no, not after the kids were born—there was a time when I ironed his shirts because we didn't have the money to send them to the laundry but that was before the kids. And then synthetics came in right around the time the kids did.

Clark: It was a great liberation for many women.

Shanahan: Absolutely. I remember getting up at five in the morning in the summertime to iron, in the days before air conditioning, when it was still cool, when you had to iron all your own dresses and blouses and anything that didn't go to the dry cleaner, like your winter suits.

Clark: When you did come upon problems or frustrations with trying to handle all these different things, who did you talk to? I gather your sister you were very close with.

Shanahan: She didn't live here. She got married. I can tell you exactly when because I was pregnant with my second pregnancy when I was her six-month-pregnant matron-of-honor. So she left and has never again lived in Washington. So she was not around that much. My two sisters-in-law, one in particular, were great friends. My great college friends had either moved away or, in the case of the one who stayed in Washington, had elected to stay at home with her kids and could not deal with my rejection of that role. So I really had no close women friends—actively friends—except my sister-in-law.

Clark: How about in the journalism profession?

Shanahan: Well, no, not at that time. I basically during the time until my kids were, oh, more or less junior high school age, I worked full-time and was a wife and mother and that was it. I had no extracurricular activities. We didn't do a lot of socializing. My husband's not very social, anyway. I am much more so, so that even to have a dinner party, or we ought to invite the So-and-So's over, he would say, "What do you want to do that for?" And there weren't those demands.

We vowed very early in our marriage never to have anybody in the house for any reason other than that we liked them or thought we would like them. We never did any business entertaining. I think that may have hurt his career some but there was no pressure from him to do it and I didn't, never have, still don't. No United States senator has never been in this house. I could have invited some and they would have come but I've never done it. I have had a couple House members in, including Dick Bolling who drove me home from something once and came in for a drink. That was it.

But when you say, though, your question that when I was managing, trying to manage all this who did I talk to, the premise of that question is that I was having a tough time and needed somebody to talk to. I really didn't feel I was having a tough time. I didn't really feel the need of anybody to talk to that I didn't have. My husband—I'm sure I bitched from time to time about various things. I hate grocery shopping, to this day and hour. And for a time we did it together and then he did it.

And then when Mary Beth got to be old enough to drive, I made the world's greatest deal with her. I gave her a specified amount of money, which would be enough to feed us all the meals at home and their lunches carried to school, and anything she could save under that was hers. But what she bought had to be adequate. I did that out of a sense of having grown up with so much less money than I subsequently had that I wanted to teach her how to manage. I figured as a young wife or something, she'd be poor, too, and I wanted her to know how to shop.

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I found out much later that a lot of that money that she saved was going for cigarettes. But fortunately, I stopped smoking in the 1960s and she was in her twenties then and she saw how hard it was for me and she stopped before she would pick up the weight I would pick up, and so on. And Kate never did smoke. The surgeon-general's report came out before she was of an age to smoke.

But anyway, I got out of the grocery shopping and taught her something which she still values and, of course, at that age when you're just driving, you love to have the car. And we only had one car through most of that period of time. That was all we could afford, partly because by then we had the kids in private school.

And we gave them very good access to the car. I wouldn't have let them have a car even if we'd been able to afford it. Every study shows that whatever your grades are, they go down a point, after you get your own car. But the house rule was sort of: You drive me to where I'm going and then you can have the car. You pick me up at such and such an hour if you've got the car. It was all fine. They thought it was fine. There were no complaints.

I don't feel like I had a hard time. I did not feel—oh, there were days when you were overwhelmed, in any life, but I didn't feel consistently overwhelmed, week after week, month after month, probably not more than a few days consecutively at any time. But I think you have to have some compromises in your life. They weren't compromises to me. Not to entertain a lot was not a compromise to me. I cooked fancy when I felt like it and didn't when I didn't. There was always something to eat on the table. It could be simple stuff, easy to fix. So that I never had that sense of having to have it all.

Then when synthetics came in, I mean rule number one is never buy anything you have to iron. I do now. I like cotton in the summertime and I was ironing this morning, summer shirts, what-have-you. But now I have lots of time. So that I think it's manageable if you're willing to not do some of the things I didn't do, not because I was overwhelmed but because we didn't care whether we did them. And if you have a high-pressure career family where long hours are being worked and there's a sense of needing to do a lot of business entertaining—oh, oh, I forgot.

Another secret. Live on a bus line so your kids can get themselves to their own ballet lessons. I had to drive them to their piano lessons because the piano teacher was way out in the burbs. But then I used to drop them off at the piano teacher's and do the grocery shopping out there in the burbs and pick them up, so it wasn't that much of a waste of time. I didn't just sit there during the piano lesson. John drove sometimes, too.

That's very important. It's harder in the burbs. There aren't any buses that go from here to there in the burbs, for the most part. Of course, the other thing is what kind of household help you have. And I got smart about that, after some mistakes early on. We never wanted a live-in, never had a house where we could have a live-in, but we never wanted a live-in. John was quite adamant about that, just "If I want to walk around in my shorts, I want to walk around in my shorts." To which I replied, "And if I want to yell at you, I want to yell at you." He's the quiet, poisonous type in an argument. I scream. He's the quiet, cutting type.

So we never had live-in. But through Kate's years in high school, I had full-time people—well, the day care went like this: I had someone here. I went back to work when Mary Beth was eighteen months old and had someone here until she was old enough to go to day care which at that time was three. And then she was in day care and then was, of course, in school. And then by that time, of course, Kate was here.

So I needed from that time—from the time Kate was born, I guess—I had someone here full-time, that is daytime hours, until they were both in high school, I guess, when I had a part-time person so somebody was in the house when they came home, so that there was never the attraction of an empty house which the best kids in the world can't handle, the kind of people that show up at an empty house. It's not that you don't trust your own children, it's that it's too much to put on a fourteen-year-old, to get rid of those boys you don't want around—and they don't want around, either. Boys and girls, but maybe mostly boys.

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These were all black women. I had basically two and a couple of mistakes in the beginning and a couple of mistakes in between the first one and the second one. I learned lessons which I've been happily passing on to women ever since which is you can really tell in a couple of weeks when somebody isn't going to work out. Fire 'em, before you get all involved in the tragedies of their lives and feel guilty about it, and put it off and put it off, and it just gets worse and worse.

There again, there were some compromises to be made. I wanted first of all—and any set of parents would—someone to be there with the kids who was affectionate and had common sense, who knew what was serious and what wasn't, who knew what kind of a scrape to put a bandaid on and when I should be called, which only happened once or twice. And I thought I'd found such people, much easier than today when a lot of women of the intelligence of the two that I had over a long period of time are black women who are now in the regular labor force and not doing domestic labor any more.

I read somewhere not long ago, the median age of women doing domestic work now is something like fifty-eight. They're going to disappear. It wasn't easy even then to get good people but I did because I learned real fast, "Aagh, two weeks or less!" And look for the next one.

And check the references. Check the references like crazy. That's advice I've given everyone who's ever asked me for advice. The second one I had, I never talked to her former employer. I called the number she gave me and a kid about thirteen answered and said, "Oh, Alberta. We were so sorry when we had to let her go, when my mother quit work or whatever. She was so wonderful. She did this, she did that." And I figured that was all the recommendation I needed, that this kid told me that. I never talked to the parents. She was wonderful. They were both wonderful. She was the part-time one I had, just to do the heavy housecleaning and laundry and to be here when the kids came home from school.

So the short of it is I never felt overwhelmed, except everybody has overwhelming days.

Clark: Did it influence the way that you thought about economic news and economic policy, being a working mother? Looking back through your times—say the end of the Journal of Commerce period and certainly the beginning of—let's say after you would have come to the Times, maybe.

Shanahan: Those things did not integrate in my mind until the women's movement. I was always a feminist in the sense of feeling that neither I nor any other woman should be kept by artificial rules from doing anything we were capable of doing and wanted to do. That's kind of my definition of feminism. But not in the sense of understanding how pervasive the societal hostility was, how much of it had a statutory basis as well as a conventional basis, cultural basis.

I guess one of the first things I got into—and that was before the women's movement, which in my own mind—you can date it from the publication of Betty Friedan's book* and I would. I tend to date it a little more from the founding of NOW [National Organization of Women] which was in the late sixties [1966]. That's when I began really to have an understanding of the institutional structure of anti-feminism. Not prior to that. [Tape interruption.]

But in terms of having any influence on my coverage of economic news, no, with one exception. At that time, the unemployment statistics, which were pretty much what you know today, had a category of adult male, adult female, teenager, black, white, various job categories, broad categories of jobs. There was a category, "married men." This was considered the significant measure of hardship, unemployment among married men. And at that time I became acquainted with a woman named Janet Norwood, who I guess was the number two person, maybe, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and subsequently the head of it, and in fact just

______________________
*The Feminine Mystique, published 1963.

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retired a few months ago from that job, an extraordinary woman. And I spoke to her—I wasn't the first person that brought it to her attention, she was a working mother herself—and said, "What is this? Married men. There are women out there supporting a family." Well, that was a pretty darn radical idea, whenever it was I said it to her, which I think was—I may have still been at the Journal of Commerce then, I'm not sure. It was certainly before the founding of NOW. And she agreed. And I am sure she was a good bureaucrat in the sense of knowing how to make the system work and come out her way. It took several years from the time we had that conversation before they established the category "Head of Household."

Clark: Ah. Interesting.

Shanahan: And I talked to her about it several times in between and in effect she said, "I'm working on it," in a way that made me know she really was working on it. But it took several years. That's the only time I remember my feminist perspective coming into my work. And I started throwing a sentence into my stories which she told me was enormously helpful—I only did it maybe in the last year before she finally won the argument—saying there is no equivalent measure for women who are responsible for the support of a household or a family. And I threw those in.

Clark: Did you ever get any feedback on that from the editors?

Shanahan: Yes. It got in the first several times I did it, and then it didn't.

Clark: We're talking about the Journal of Commerce?

Shanahan: No, we're talking about the New York Times by now.

Clark: All right.

Shanahan: That's right. Maybe this whole thing was during the New York Times. I can't remember the dates. In any event, I noticed it had been taken out and I decided just to cool it for a while and then throw it in again after a lapse of several months because at that time the unemployment figures were page one news, as they are now, in a recession.

It was front page every month when those numbers came out. So I cooled it for a while and then I put it in and it got taken out again. And I think I may have tried it a third time and gave up. Somebody up there in New York, at the Times, was going to take it out as editorializing. But Janet did tell me that the several times I got it in, before somebody decided this was opinion, were helpful.

Clark: Who were some of your women colleagues, not at the Journal of Commerce but at other places, who were covering the so-called hard news, or particularly the news about the government?

Shanahan: I really didn't—well, when I went to the New York Times I was one of three women. I was the third woman at that time, I mean in sequence, the group that I joined when I went there. There were two other women in the bureau, one of whom was the deputy Sunday section's editor, Nona Brown, whose job was more than clerical but she was treated almost as if it were clerical. Subsequently she got the top job and did a little more but she never really had much standing in the place, unjustly, in my opinion, though she was a difficult person to get along with.

The other one was Marjorie Hunter. Maggie Hunter had been hired to cover the White House ladies which was the one and only women's reporting job in the bureau, although Maggie's great predecessor, Bess Furman, fabulous woman, had been hired to cover the White House ladies and snuck off and did other things in her spare time. She did a lot of marvelous coverage of the predecessor agency of Health, Education and Welfare which is now Health and Human Services, called the Federal Security Agency.

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She really covered all of Health, Education and Welfare, basically, and had all the social policy stuff, all of it, until the poverty programs came along and put some of it in a separate agency. Did wonderful stuff, as well as covering the first ladies and writing books about the first ladies, she wrote several books. She had children, too. She had twin children, a boy and a girl. I did not know her well and I regret that. I encountered her a few times on stories when somehow she was up at the Capitol and Congress.

I remember a particular occasion I think I mentioned earlier, when I got thrown into a hearing on something I knew nothing about. And in a way that had not an ounce of condescension in it, she helped it. I don't know how you do that. I hope I do it. I don't know whether I do or not. I remember there was a roll call, so the committee recessed. In those days they weren't electronic, they were oral—well, the Senate still is. And they take a while so they called a recess of the hearing while the senators went and voted. And she just struck up a conversation with me—whether we'd met before that, I'm not sure—and kind of just wove in a lot of background about what the hell was going on in the committee without ever saying, "Well, let me explain this to you, kid." I'll never forget that. I do regret that I did not know her well.

Anyway, Maggie had been hired when Bess retired to cover the first lady. It was not her background. She grew up in North Carolina and had covered, I think, the state legislature and then had covered the Congress here for somebody else. Every woman in town, including me, tried out for that job. My husband was furious with me. "Eileen, you're going to cover that women's stuff, the first ladies and that's not you," and so forth. But I just really wanted to be on the New York Times.

I was still on the Journal of Commerce at the time Maggie got that job. And literally every woman reporter in town with any pretense to any status at all tried to get that job. They hired Maggie. I don't mean to suggest she wasn't first class. She was and is. But basically they hired her because the deputy bureau chief [Wallace Carroll] knew her because he was also from North Carolina.

Clark: So you had applied to the Times before you were actually hired in 1961?

Shanahan: Yes. In fact, I applied another time which I had forgotten about. [Tape interruption.]

Maggie was by disposition and inclination and talent one of the greatest legislative reporters that ever lived. And she took the job because she wanted to get on the New York Times and hated every minute, I think, she spent covering the East Wing, as we call it, the family house wing of the White House and got out of it as soon as she could. It turned out to be when Nan Robertson arrived in the bureau, not much later than I did, less than a year later. And Nan was interested in covering the White House ladies and just in general being a feature writer more than a hard news writer. She was one of the great ones, beyond any doubt.

So Nan took over the first ladies and Maggie managed to get assigned to the House of Representatives, which is where she wanted to be in the first place. But that was the bureau. And no other woman, except for a new deputy Sunday editor, came into the bureau in the whole fourteen years I was there. Is that right? No, that's wrong. I take that back. We'll get to that later when I get back to the Times.

As for women friends and colleagues all this while that I was the only woman doing national economic policy, which lasted into my early years on the Times and beyond, I really didn't have any friends who were women in the business until I joined what was then called the Women's National Press Club which I did, I think, in 1959 when Helen Thomas, subsequently quite famous as the UPI's White House reporter, was president. Helen and I had worked together on the UP radio desk, a dreadful job. We have never been close friends but, boy, we sure go back a long ways.

Helen joined the Women's Press Club while she and I were working together at UP and mentioned to me that she had done so and why didn't I join? Well, I thought of that club at that time, I think not terribly incorrectly,

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as a silly ladies' club, a purely social club. I was probably partly wrong, even then. I had no interest in doing it and of course I had young children and didn't feel I had the time. But mostly I just scorned it. And I said to Helen, "I'll join when you're president," and promptly forgot I ever said it.

Well, years later, in 1959, when Helen was elected president of the club, I read in the paper that she had been elected president of the club and I called her up to congratulate her. And she said, "Well, okay, now, Shanny, you've got to join the club. You promised me you'd join when I was president." And as soon as she said it, I remembered that I had said that. So I did. I was not very active in the club until a couple of years later—it would have been—well, now, yes, it would have been 1963. [End of Tape 2, Side A; begin Tape 2, Side B]

Shanahan: In 1963, Elsie Carper of the Washington Post became the president of the club. She and I knew each other slightly—actually had gone to college together but she was a senior and a Mortar Board when I was a freshman so I didn't really know her but I was awestruck. But we'd sort of known each other very slightly around the Hill.

Anyway, she came up to me in a corridor on the Senate side of the Capitol and said—this is right after she'd become president of the club—"Well, I hear you're an economist. I want to know, do you believe in deficit financing for the Women's National Press Club?" So I said, "I'm not an economist." And she said, "Will you be the budget director of the club? I really need somebody to look at our revenues and expenses," whatever she said, "and really see where we stand."

So I said, "Okay." And I took, I don't know how much time, maybe a couple of weeks in some spare time to look at the books back aways and discovered that they had never paid the D.C. personal property tax which applied to nonprofits, discovered, however, that they had also never gotten official tax exempt status, the so-called 501(c)(3) status which enables you to take contributions tax-free, though they had taken some and if anybody'd ever audited the people that gave them the money, they'd have been in trouble. And upon looking at the income and the outgo, particularly since they had established something called the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Award that committed them to some future expenditures, I concluded that they had to have a dues increase. The dues weren't going to cover what this new professional group that had taken over, beginning with Helen's presidency and then the following year was Frances Lewine of the AP, the year after that, Bonnie Angelo, then with Newsday, now for many years with Time magazine. Then there was a year of retrogression under a woman named Patty Cavin.

Clark: She was from Los Angeles?

Shanahan: No, she was with NBC and then Elsie became president. She had run the previous year and been beaten for the office by Patty Cavin who said: We've got to go back to friendship and sending flowers when somebody's mother dies and other things that had been gotten away from when the club had really turned its face toward a much more professional organization. But then Elsie won the following year and it's been firmly in the hands of professionals from then until the day it merged with the National Press Club in 1984.

Anyway, I looked at the books and realized that they didn't have enough income and was asked to come to a board meeting and present my findings. Elsie didn't ask me what my findings were. So I was petrified as to the reception I was going to get. I had a recommendation for how much the dues increase should

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be and so forth. And I went to the board meeting. I made my recommendation. Well, they didn't literally cheer when I got done but it almost amounted to that. Elsie had known that was the only answer when she asked me to do it. And so had most of the others. They just needed somebody to go down and do what I had done, to sift through all the numbers and see and make a presentation to the membership because obviously that was something that had to come up for a vote of the membership.

So I got into the club then and budget director that year, budget chairman, and I think I was treasurer the next year. And one way and another I was on the board, I think every year from then until I left for Pittsburgh. I'm not sure that's right but—well, if it isn't right it's mighty close to right. I think it is right.

There I made the best friends of my adult life. I think it's hard to make friends after you're out of school. And the friends you make at work are often—Ellen Goodman wrote a column about this some years ago. It's in one of her collections. Friends of the road and friends of the heart. A friend of the road is someone you're friendly with just because you see each other. And as she said, a friend of the road knows whether you still have a cold and what you did last weekend but may not know the truly important things that are happening in your life. And a friend of the heart, whether you see them or not, they know about your life and you know about theirs.

Well, I made friends of the heart in that club, including this group that I still have dinner with most Friday nights, probably forty Friday nights a year, including Elsie and Isabelle Shelton of the Washington Star and Fran Lewine and several other people.

Clark: Fran was reporting for UPI at that time?

Shanahan: AP. She was Helen's competition during the years when they were both covering the White House ladies, as was Isabelle, the first ladies, the wife of the new Cabinet member and all that stuff, some of which has merit but it shouldn't be the only thing anybody's allowed to do. All first-class people, these women reporters. Helen, of course, ultimately got the top White House job.

I don't know whether she says this directly in her interview*—and if she won't, I will, and so will Fran probably—the top guy on the White House for UPI was a guy named Merriman Smith who was talented beyond a doubt. He also was an alcoholic and progressively so. And Helen for a lot of years covered up for Merriman Smith. When I say covered up, it wasn't with her bosses. They certainly knew that Smitty was a drunk, sometimes, a nonfunctioning one. And she wrote hundreds of thousands and millions of words under his byline when he couldn't do it. Finally, when they—I think he was finally fired or told to resign—they did give her the top job because they knew she had done it.

Well, Fran didn't have the horror of covering up for a drunk but she also didn't have the opportunity to prove she could do it, which I think she could. So she never got the top job. It was always the number two person on the White House.

But those people were a very supportive group. Isabelle and I are the only two who had children. Isabelle's widowed now, has been for a long time. I'm trying to think if anybody else was—there's one somewhat younger member of the group, Susie [Susanna] McBee, who is now the deputy chief of the Hearst bureau,

______________________
* Helen Thomas was invited to participate in this oral history project but she was unable to do so.

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who was married later in life. I don't know how old Susie is, maybe fifty-five, younger than the rest of us, anyway, and a very close friend of Elsie's from the days when Susie was on the Post. She married only within recent years and has not had children. The rest of them, I think, have never married.

There's another woman, a non-journalist in the group—it's an interesting story. The mother-in-law of one of Isabelle's daughters—and their children were sweethearts from I think grade school and they had always been the greatest of friends—and her husband died about five or six years ago, or maybe a little less. And Isabelle said, "Come on. Get out of the house. Come have dinner with my group. You'll like them and they'll like you." She's been added to that group.

Clark: You've not consistently been for—

Shanahan: Well, I was not part of the Friday night dinner group for a long time. It goes back before I was in it because I had my children. Isabelle I think was in it earlier. Her husband, in fact—I always think of her as a widow. Technically that's not right. Her husband was an alcoholic and she did divorce him when her kids were about in high school and then subsequently was the only person who took care of him as he lay dying. So that was why I guess I always think of her as a widow.

But I think maybe Isabelle got into the Friday night group because she needed the companionship because she didn't have a husband. I did and do. And so it wasn't until much later—I was invited several times and went and never consistently went until—oh, well, it's been ten or twelve years now, at least.

But those were friends and of course we fought some great fights together. I was late into the fight about the National Press Club balcony just because I was not a very active member of the club until the tag end of that.

Clark: So you were not involved in the letter writing campaign of Helen Thomas to get the—

Shanahan: That's correct, even though I was in the club by then, I guess. But I was really not active until—well, the year Elsie made me budget director, I just really did that one thing. I was not a member of the board. And then I was on the board the following year when Fran was president, which—well, I wasn't at the Times yet. That was 1960-61. And that's when I became active. A lot of that was going on but I was not deeply involved. I was never actually deeply involved in that. I was for it, of course.

Clark: Helen's campaign, just to finish that sentence, was to get the Capitol Committee on Correspondents to host the foreign dignitaries event?

Shanahan: Yes. That had been—you really shouldn't ask me about that because it's going to show up elsewhere in the oral history and I know about it only at second-hand.

Clark: Did you ever feel that you were hampered by not being able—in terms of covering national economic policy, how were you hampered by being in the balcony and not being on the floor of the National Press Club?

Shanahan: Well, a basic thing—I in fact never sat in the balcony.

Clark: Oh, I see.

Shanahan: But I knew about it, of course. And you'll see in Nan Robertson's book, when Marjorie Hunter was sent to cover something in the balcony. And I remember her coming back from that with the steam coming out of her ears, and saying, "At last I understand. I really understand what it was like to have to sit in the back of the bus."

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And that wonderful episode that Nan recounts in her book of Maggie going in and saying to Reston, "Don't you ever send me to the National Press Club to stand in that balcony again," and then afterwards Scotty's—Scotty [James B.] Reston's totally uncomprehending complaint to Wallace Carroll, the deputy. "What's the matter with Maggie?" Well, poor old Reston. We'll get to that. He was a great man, a great journalist. You can't take that away from him. But he never did get it about women.

So that hampered me some. In the next fight, which was the fight to keep public officials from having press conferences on the fourteenth floor of the National Press Club where we couldn't set foot—I wasn't much involved in that, just going around and talking to the people I covered and making sure that they didn't do it. And that fight, which never became as publicly visible as either the balcony fight or the subsequent fight against the Gridiron Club to force them to admit women members, was largely successful. This was with domestic policy people who, in fact, had their own offices.

Clark: When was this?

Shanahan: Well, also the fight to keep them from speaking at the National Press Club, to have a press conference.

Clark: That was going on back to the days when you were at Journal of Commerce or was that later?

Shanahan: Oh, I can't tell you because I really wasn't active in the club. I was in on the last couple of clean-up years of that fight, not out of any lack of sympathy. It was going on. I didn't ever have any sense of they desperately needed me or anything. I was certainly supportive. And I remember getting one person—he was the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, his name I'm blanking out on, at that time—Kintner, Earl Kintner, who was going to speak at the National Press Club. And I was at the New York Times by then so I was an important reporter to have and I was covering the Federal Trade Commission of which he was chairman. And I just went in to him and said, "You're booked into the National Press Club. Do you realize I can't cover it?" And got him to cancel it. He just had a press conference at his office.

Clark: Let's get you to the New York Times.

Shanahan: Okay. [Tape interruption.]

Clark: Okay. We're going to talk about the New York Times now and how you came there. You said you had applied one other time, other than the time that Marjorie Hunter, you applied for her job.

Shanahan: Yes, I had. And it was the time—virtually all of the time that I was in economics—no, that's wrong. The New York Times, for much of the time that I was in economics, not the first several years, had one person covering economics, Edwin Dale, who's one of the greatest reporters and writers I ever knew and a good friend. Then they were going to hire a second person because the beat had just gotten too big. And I heard about that. And I applied and was given much more of a pro forma interview than at the time I applied for the White House ladies job, possibly because they'd seen me before. I can hardly remember anything about that interview, to tell you the truth.

In any event, they hired Richard Mooney who subsequently was quite instrumental in persuading Reston to hire me, when they sent Ed Dale to Paris to cover the emerging European community, leaving Mooney alone on the economic policy beat in Washington. They needed a second person in Washington and I heard that the job was available from Mooney. I was at the Treasury and already thinking about getting out. And I applied for the job and was interviewed at some length by Reston and Wally Carroll. Mooney was right involved there from the start with the discussions about it.

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Let me digress a little to talk about Scotty Reston.

Clark: He was the bureau chief at that time.

Shanahan: He was the bureau chief. There is simply, in my opinion, no room for argument that Reston was the greatest journalist of his generation. Some would argue. I won't. He was surely one of the two or three greatest of his generation. And it wasn't just his own reporting or his subsequent column, it was what he did to change the New York Times in particular by turning that Washington bureau—which always had some good people in it but not necessarily uniformly—into a bureau of stars, simply superb people in every slot. I have over the years said many times, and I still think it's true, that once I got there, I had to work as hard as I could all day, every day, just to be average in that bunch and that is no false modesty. They were an incredible crew. And Reston did it.

One of the ways Reston did it—Reston had an idea which many people, including subsequently some of his bosses or subsequent editors of the New York Times disagreed with, that Washington reportage was different from other kinds of reporting and you didn't know whether somebody would be a superb Washington reporter unless they'd already worked in Washington. And he therefore did his own hiring.

Washington is a great plum, even today when Washington is relatively less important than it used to be. People get promoted to Washington. It's considered one of the top glamorous, influence jobs, whatever, fun jobs. And so most newspapers to keep people happy, promote from within. It's very hard to get Washington bureau jobs except up the ladder from city hall or some other way you've made you've made your mark back home.

So Reston said nope, I'm going to hire people with Washington experience, and in so doing, he listened very carefully to the opinions of his own subordinates on that staff. Who should I hire? This job is coming open or I want to expand that beat. Who's the best? And after Dale was sent off to Paris and Mooney was alone on this economics beat—which it was long since agreed took two people—Reston asked Mooney, asked John Morris who covered a lot of the economic stuff on the Hill, and I don't know who else, "Who's the best? Who should I hire?" And they said, "Eileen Shanahan."

There were other people who wanted me who I think had less weight with Reston because they weren't his boys. But the financial editor in New York, a guy named Jack Forrest who knew my work, and the guy who wrote economics stuff on the editorial page named Murray Rossant. And they all weighed in and said to hire me.

Clark: Did you have to go to New York for an interview?

Shanahan: Yes, at the very end. Dale, I have to tell you, did not weigh in. I wrote him. He is a good friend to this day. I had lunch with him just a couple weeks ago. I think the world of him. But he wouldn't stick his neck out for me. A very conservative man, a very traditional man, with a stay-at-home wife—I don't know, he and I never—we worked together for fourteen years, we knew each other before that, we are still friends. But I know that he never weighed in with Scotty to hire me. Mooney did, over and over. And the others did.

I really had the job before I had the interviews in New York. But it took them twelve weeks from the time I had the interview until the time they finally said yes. And I was going nuts because that's what I wanted.

Meanwhile, my old boss at the Journal of Commerce, which had a policy against giving leave, so that when I went into the Treasury, I didn't technically have a leave, wanted me back. And I also had a firm job offer from Business Week. But I wanted the New York Times so I was sort of stalling the other people off and wondering how long I could do it.

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I remember one night, sitting in this very room, talking about it to my husband and crying about how awful it was. And he let me cry for a little while and then he said, "Eileen, stop it. Now you've cried enough. Two people want you to work for them and one may and lots of people don't have a job at all. Now, knock it off." It didn't help much. He was right. I knew he was right but it didn't help much.

In any event, I finally—I can't remember how I quite got the news. Mooney was meanwhile telling me what was going on.

Clark: Did you interview with Reston himself?

Shanahan: Yes. Yes.

Clark: What was that like?

Shanahan: You know, it's funny. I don't remember one thing about that interview, really. And of course, I had met him and Carroll when I had applied for the White House job. [Tape interruption.]

The only thing I really remember about that interview was that Reston said to me just flat out, "I'm not interested in economics, I don't know anything about economics, I don't want to know anything about economics but I know it's important and I have to have first-class people to do it." Other than that, I really don't remember what transpired. And Mooney was telling me that he was telling Reston I was the best and Morris was telling him. And he also, I guess, was the one who told me that Forrest and Rossant had both also, and maybe some others in the bureau, I forget. So that Reston was hearing that from his people.

I also learned, either then or subsequently from Mooney, that Reston was saying, "Well, you know, is she a bitch? Is she a troublemaker?" And they were saying no, I was really very nice or words to that effect. And he finally made up his mind to hire me.

Now, Reston had established that he hired into that bureau and there had been a monumental fight some months or before when they tried to send somebody down that New York wanted in the bureau and he just said, "No. I won't have them." So that technically, I guess, I hadn't been hired but I knew I had when I went up to New York for interviews with Clifton Daniel who was then managing editor and Turner Catledge who was executive editor. They were number two and number one. The titles may not have been that at the time.

Clark: I think it was managing editor.

Shanahan: I think it was still managing editor at that time. In any event, I remember—and what's-his-name Goulden* has got this wrong in his book and it made me very sad because it accused Catledge of something that Catledge was not the person who said it. And I was furious—am furious at Goulden.

Clark: He got a lot of things wrong in—

Shanahan: Oh, yes. The basic thesis was right and every detail was wrong.

It was Daniel who asked me, "What is your ultimate ambition?" Well, I knew—back to the days when I was the editor of my college paper and saw what you do when you had a staff to implement more ideas than you could ever bring to fruition when you were just one person. I knew I wanted to be an editor. I liked being an editor and I was a prize-winning college editor. It's a strange thing to still be proud of after all these years but I am.

______________________
* Joseph C. Goulden. Fit to Print: A. M. Rosenthal and His Times, 1988.

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First in our class, which was university of five thousand or more, a weekly in a university of five thousand or more students, Associated Collegiate Press. I've still got the score sheet.

I knew I wanted to be an editor. In fact, it was a little after that when I told my former boss at the Journal of Commerce that I wasn't coming back—Luedicke was dead by then but his successor offered me sort of a number two job, ultimately someday the number one job in New York as editor of that paper. But I decided to take the New York Times and I have not ever been sorry about that.

But when Clifton Daniel asked me that question about what is your ultimate ambition, I knew enough not to tell the truth. And I remember gushing—not my style, but I gushed. "Oh, all I want to be is the best reporter on the best paper in the world. You know, you can be a good reporter on lesser papers but you can't be the best unless you have the best paper behind you." I don't remember what all I said. Something like that. And he replied, "Well, that's good that you want to always be a reporter." That part may not be a verbatim quote. The next sentence is. "Because I can assure you that no woman will ever be an editor at the New York Times." Quote, unquote. So I spent a lot of years after that being thrilled, so grateful that they let me be a reporter on the New York Times and not thinking at all about being an editor, for quite a few years.

Clark: Did you assume he spoke for other people?

Shanahan: Yes, I did. I think I did. Right. Anyway, he said that. Not Catledge, as Goulden erroneously reported. And of course, it wasn't illegal then. That was 1962 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn't get passed till '64 and nobody enforced it as to women until some years after that.

I was hired, plainly, for a secondary job. It was made very clear to me when I was hired there was—okay by me—that Ed Dale—oh, I'm sorry. Dale was on his way back from Paris at this point and then Mooney was going to go to Paris, so that I worked with Mooney as my colleague only for a few weeks and then Dale came back. Well, maybe a few months. Not long.

But it was made very clear to me that Ed Dale was number one and I was number two. I had some specific assignments, a lot of regulatory stuff. Most significantly, as it turned out, the Securities and Exchange Commission—which in that early first years of the Kennedy administration was going through an incredible reform move, very interesting intellectually, a lot of fun to cover, really patching up all the holes they'd left in the early Roosevelt administration laws, all the loopholes everybody had found and more than that. Intellectually very interesting stuff. I made some good friends on that beat whom I see today.

And bank regulation which had a period of being interesting and housing which was still a bore and antitrust which was very exciting. Well, that's another story. I was the backup, though, on the hard-core fundamental economic policy stuff, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Federal Reserve, the budget and so on.

And in fact, it had been so clearly spelled out that I was number two that Ed Dale, I think with no malice, would let me do a story while it was still sort of an inside-the-paper story and then take over the story when it got to be page one. And I think he thought that's what he was supposed to do. I have reason to think that. And that bothered me, to say the least. He had in fact done some of that to Mooney when Mooney was the number two to him.

One day, Reston's secretary—I'd been there a few months—asked me how I was doing, or something. My guess is he must have told her to ask. And not belaboring it too much, I said, "Well, I was a little bit unhappy because I didn't really realize I'd be in such a secondary position." Well, that day or the next day, Reston called me in for a little chat and berated me for my attitude. I hardly got a chance to answer him. It was so staged because he really just finished his lecture when his secretary came in and said, "Mr. So-and-So is waiting," which was true. There was somebody out there. And I think he timed it so that he would have just a

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few minutes with me and I would have no chance to answer back. However, as he said, "Well, I've got to see this guy," or whatever he said, he said, "Well, you and Dale work it out."

So Dale and I had lunch. It's the only time we ever had lunch together at the Times. We used to lunch a lot when I was at the Journal of Commerce but this was the only time we ever had lunch together when we were at the Times together. And I told him that it just didn't feel fair to me. And he, nicely, sort of said, "What do you want?" I said, "I want taxes. I want taxes to be all mine." And he said, "Okay," in effect, "you got it."

So between that and the Securities and Exchange Commission and a lot of other stuff, I carved out such a good life for myself, that not many people really realized that I was always number two. I think a lot of the readers didn't. And there were other things that I did. One of them that I thought was significant when I was looking through management jobs later on. The New York Times—the president's budget used to be much more important than it is now, partly because we didn't have divided government and what the president recommended, Congress—they'd hick it around the edges, but they didn't throw it in the trash the day it arrived, as happened in the Reagan-Bush years.

So coverage of the president's budget, the New York Times used to run the entire text of the president's budget message which ran, I don't know, eight, ten, twelve pages in the paper and quite a few stories and so on. Somewhere, I don't know, maybe about the fourth or fifth of my fourteen years at the Times, they decided, for good reason, you didn't really have to run all that text. What we needed was more stories that explained and analyzed.

Journalism was changing at that time, doing more analytical stuff. The times were changing. And the then number two in the bureau, Bob Phelps—Wally Carroll had left to go back as the editor of his hometown paper in North Carolina—said to me, "I need somebody"—he was the number two in the bureau—"to read every word of the budget copy and make sure there are no conflicts, make sure there's nothing that fell between the cracks," and would I like to do that. And I said yes.

Well, even the very first year I did more than that and made suggestions as to what should be highlighted and so on. And by the second year, I went to Phelps when we knew the budget was coming—because you always knew the date in advance—and said, "You know, I think we really ought to do more." We always had some discussions about how we were going to cover it in advance to make up an assignment sheet, think about how we wanted to structure things and where we put some odds and ends and so forth.

So from that time on and then more and more, I just absolutely took over the editing, the planning and the whole editing, of that special section. I was a one-day phenomenon in the paper and then I always had to write a couple of stories of my own. Dale wrote the main story and also wrote a couple of sidebars. And when I was subsequently looking for an editing job or a bureau chief job, I would tell people I had done this. Of course, there was nothing that said I had done it in the paper. But it was good training and valuable. And what I invented is the way that every major newspaper covers the federal budget now.

Clark: Could you explain that a little more for people who, you know, want to almost see it visually?

Shanahan: See it visually. What's in it was—you break it up into pieces. In those days, of course, the military budget, which I decided was going to be called military and not defense, and made that stick—I mean, what were the big segments in those days were military and then various subsegments like social policy, housing, non-defense foreign affairs, and economic, that is, the economic impact of the budget was always a very important story when the size of the federal government and deficit were not nearly, nearly—especially the deficit, in terms of percent of the gross national product what they are now. Actually, it's not far different in terms of spending and the percentage of the gross national product. But everybody knows about the deficit these days.

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But even then it had a significant impact on the economy so there were those side stories to do. And then there were the programmatic stories: law enforcement, justice and some other agencies—it was done by function, not by agency, and that was the concept. That was the concept. It seems so inevitable now you wonder why it was never done that way before. I invented it. The Washington Post copied it the very next year, the Wall Street Journal a year or two later, and everybody does it that way now, as far as they do it at all, which isn't so much in these Reagan and Bush years of divided government when the budget is "dead on arrival," as they say, the president's budget, when it gets to Congress.

But that's when I first really got into graphics as something I love. The government, as part of the budget document, gives you all sorts of pie charts and bar charts and fever lines and so on, which are designed to tell the story the way they want it told. And I could see that I didn't always agree that that was the right way to represent it and would take the same numbers and do them in a different way and ship them up to the chart makers in New York so that we had our own charts with the budget story.

I was far ahead of my time on that. I had no artistic ability and why I was good at that conceptually without any visual talent at all, I'm not sure. But it may be just because I have a brain for thinking conceptually about numbers and I knew what should look big and what should look little and what should look like a steep slope and what shouldn't look like a steep slope, which all depends on how you scale things. And which figures you should be using at all in graphics to tell the story fairly.

So that basically that section—three or four stories would start on page one, the main story, usually the economic consequences story at that time, the military story and maybe one social program story, something like that. And then they would jump inside and then the other stories actually started on inside pages.

I can't tell you now how many different stories we had—twelve to fifteen, I suppose—that really said, okay, here's what the president wants to do. Today, with divided government, a rather small percentage, bigger than before of what the president proposes, is changed, so that much of what the president proposes is what happens, even now. Though less, a lot less.

So anyway, I did that and got great pleasure out of doing that.

Clark: When you did those kinds of innovative things or won publisher's awards, how was your success received? Did Reston call you in to thank you for what you had done? Were there ways in which you were rewarded or not rewarded?

Shanahan: I don't remember. I don't remember ever being called in by Reston. Max Frankel—I'll get back to rewards—Max Frankel, when he was bureau chief, was a great note writer. And if he had to criticize you—which he did maybe twice, or even once, once I remember clearly—he would call you in. But if it was something he liked, you'd come in the office—in all news bureaus everybody has a little mailbox. He used little blue half-sheets of paper and when you saw one of those blue notes in your box—sometimes it would be a story suggestion or Max would want to talk to you about X, Y or Z.

But often it was a note of praise. I saved most or many of them. One just says, "Bravo!" And there are others that say things like, "I never understood it before." Max was wonderful about that.

I don't remember really any explicit compliments from Reston while he was my boss. The only compliment I actually remember from Reston was after he was no longer bureau chief. There was a famous old 1930s lefty in Congress named Wright Patman who was the chairman of the Banking Committee and very much a lefty and enemy of the Federal Reserve which he thought Congress should control and of bankers and business generally. And he died. And I had advanced warning from his top staff guy for about five days that it looked like the old man was going to check out.

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So I had some time to do some research. And going back through the clips, I found that this guy had been more influential than I had ever imagined, that many things he had advocated—initially to jeers and ridicule—had ultimately become law. So when I got called and told that he had indeed died, I had the obit just about done and finished it up and it started on page one. This was around the time of Watergate when the Times was taking a lot of criticism because the Post was beating our pants off on the story.

Clark: This was when Frankel then was—

Shanahan: That's right. Scotty was then just writing a column. He was no longer my boss. He came by my desk the morning that Patman obit ran and said to me, "Well, whatever else they say about us, they still die best in the New York Times." And it was true. Obits are a journalistic art form that I very greatly admire. The major obit on a major figure which tells you about a man in his time, a person in his or her time, mostly men still. Most journalists don't like to write junky, little four-inch obits about people. I read a lot of obits to this day, not just the major figures but of fairly ordinary folks who get four inches.

I don't remember many compliments. If you worked for the Times, you were just supposed to be the best every day—which was impossible when you were up against great journalists on the Post and the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Star in particular. I remember Bob Phelps being effusive about what I had done with the budget coverage. And the day the Wall Street Journal finally followed us and did it our way—three or four years later, I think, more than two—I came into the office and he waved the paper under my nose, "Hurrah! Did you see where the Wall Street Journal finally woke up?" And he was a slow man with a compliment, too.

There was something—I mentioned the publisher's prize when I was at the Journal of Commerce and Mooney bought me lunch because he won one. I won—as it turned out when we researched it in the lawsuit, in the time I was at the Times, I won more publisher's prizes than anybody but two people in the bureau.

Clark: Do you know how many they were? Do you remember?

Shanahan: Yes. I won fifteen in fourteen years at the New York Times.

Clark: Do you have records of those?

Shanahan: I have some of them.

Clark: Because in the sketch-folder of the Times, I think—we can talk about this—there were only three or four.

Shanahan: Really?

Clark: Yes. Speaking about the status of the sketch-folder at the Times.

Shanahan: What is the sketch-folder?

Clark: In addition to the byline clippings that are in the morgue, there's a folder having to do with personal achievements, awards won, times your name was cited in other publications or in the New York Times, which is largely often incomplete. It's not as systematically clipped as others.

Shanahan: Well, I know. And it's in my deposition.

Clark: Okay. I'd be interested to see them.

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Shanahan: It's fair to compare me to people in the Times bureau because you did have more opportunities. You covered bigger stuff in Washington and so on, so your chances of winning them in Washington were good. But only E. W. Kenworthy and Johnny Apple each had one more than I did.

And then there were also what were known as herograms.

Clark: Oh, I didn't know that.

Shanahan: They were messages that came down on the old-time teletype machines, which had yellow paper in them because it's easier to read yellow paper than white, so they look kind of like a telegram which used to be on yellow paper, too, when they had telegrams. They were directed not to the person who had done the praiseworthy job but to the bureau chief and so there'd be a note saying: Reston, Frankel, whomever, a great job from Shanahan on Story X and Jones on Story Y, or something like that. Also known as mentioned in dispatches. You'd come in from a hearing or something and find out one of those had come in and somebody would say, one of your colleagues would say, "Look on the bulletin board. You've been mentioned in dispatches," or herograms.

And I never counted those. I saved a few of them, usually in cases where I was particularly proud of what I had done. I got a couple of publisher's awards for stuff I wasn't all that proud of. I don't think I ever got one for one I was really unhappy about but there were things where I—

[End of Tape 2, Side B; begin Tape 3, Side A]

Clark: The publisher's award.

Shanahan: Yes. And I see you've got three of them out of the file, out of fifteen that I won. And there's a very interesting story about this particular one which compliments—Eric Heinemann, who was a financial writer in New York, and I share this award for just a bang-up, they thought, straight news reporting story. I mean, it was a breaking story. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates on a Sunday, in the face of a year-long or close to it effort by Lyndon [B.] Johnson to get them not to do so.

Clark: Let's just read the headline, too.

Shanahan: And the headline was "Freedom of Defiance." I guess the Federal Reserve—maybe I might have written—maybe Eric Heinemann did the breaking story, I don't remember, and I might have done the analysis piece—or it could have been vice-versa. The headline "Freedom of Defiance" refers to the fact that the Federal Reserve is not part of the administration. Technically it's an agency of the Congress. The president has no control over it except for the appointees he makes to its seven-member board and who must also be confirmed by the Senate.

And Lyndon Johnson, good Southwestern easy-money man that he was, had been doing everything he could possibly think of to keep the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates. This was in 1965 when the cost of the Vietnam War was moving up very rapidly and there were great concerns the military expenditures could be inflationary, as they subsequently were, because Congress wouldn't raise taxes to offset it.

What is amusing to me, to see this publisher's award all these many years later is what I now know from a book about the Johnson administration written by Joe Califano who was the head of domestic policy in the White House in the Johnson administration which told me something about that whole episode that I hadn't known, though I was covering it. So a little humility about just how much the press really knows is called for here. I got an award and was praised for my excellent coverage of this stunningly surprising story.

What I learned from Califano's book is that during this long fight with the Federal Reserve when Johnson was trying to put pressure on them not to raise interest rates—I knew this part, I had written this part—

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the Federal Reserve Board was divided, to oversimplify, three more less easy-money people and four tight-money people, high-interest-rate people, including the chairman, William McChesney Martin. And one of the four tight-money guys was retiring or his term was expiring which meant the board would be tied three to three and Johnson would have the next appointee to the board.

Well, the person he appointed was the first black member—and only black member to this day—to serve on the board, an economist named Andrew Brimmer. And at the time of the appointment, Johnson in fact had a very good record about appointing both women and minorities. And at the time Brimmer was named, I thought, oh, well, goody, there goes Johnson again putting qualified blacks into jobs. Hurray for him!

What I learned from Califano's book is that Johnson was determined to get another easy-money, low-interest rate person on the board so that the Federal Reserve would not tighten up. And as I wrote at the time, and it's quoted in Califano's book, William McChesney Martin was telling anybody who would listen that if he became part of a permanent minority on the board, he would resign. So what to do?

What Lyndon Johnson did—and I didn't understand it at the time—was figure out who he could appoint who'd be an easy-money man and put Martin in the position where he couldn't resign. Why: the first black! He couldn't possibly resign and have it look like it was a protest against the first black on the Federal Reserve Board. And I never knew that until I read Califano's book.

Now, the cream of the jest was Andy Brimmer turned out to be rather conservative and voted for the rate increase which I got a herogram for it.

But that sort of thing gives you a lot of humility about what we in the daily press find out. I recently saw the wonderful C-Span book review program, "Bookmarks," that comes on on Sunday night, and they had Don Oberdoerfer, for many years the Washington Post foreign policy person who had just written a book about foreign policy over many decades and who spoke about the number of things he had learned interviewing people for the book like Secretary Shultz, George Shultz, who was secretary of state, of course, and the things that he hadn't known when he was covering foreign policy. So a little humility on the part of all of us in the press is definitely called for. We just don't know as great a percentage of all that's going on as we tend to think we do. [Tape interruption.]

I was right when I had told Clifton Daniel that you can't be the best reporter unless you work for the most famous newspaper. I knew that people would answer my phone calls faster when I was with the New York Times compared to the Journal of Commerce or anyplace else that I had worked. What I hadn't realized in advance was that I'd also get rid of something else, which was people thinking that a woman couldn't possibly be competent—or at least wondering whether you were some kind of a weird, flaky, how the hell did she get to be doing this? If you're on the staff of the New York Times, people assume you've passed some threshold of competence and I no longer had to do a lot of the things that I had done to sort of try to demonstrate my competence to people who didn't know me and people I was covering.

I used to do things I look back on and I think they were silly but I think they also worked, like at the beginning of an interview, asking a very technical, often very narrow question, to kind of establish that I had some depth, you know. Well, what is this problem with Section 240 depreciable property, something like that. I didn't have to do that any more. With people who knew me. There was still a problem as recently as in my last years at the New York Times. [Tape interruption.]

During the oil embargo which was '73, '74, in there, I didn't cover any of the energy crisis. I got sent off to cover a press conference one time when the regular reporter wasn't there—which is something that happens all the time in journalism. It was a big press conference in the auditorium in the old Executive Office Building

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that seats about four hundred people. Whatever it was, it was important and there were a lot of questions. And I kept hopping up, trying to get recognized and I couldn't get recognized and I couldn't get recognized. And finally some people were getting a second question and even a third question.

The person was a guy named Frank Zarb who was the energy czar, didn't know me because I didn't cover that beat. Finally, whoever was the White House press secretary at that time—I'm pretty sure it was Ron Nessen. I saw him walk over and whisper something in Zarb's ear and the next instant Zarb recognized me. I never checked but I believe that Nessen, who knew me, went over and said, "Hey, that woman is the New York Times. You ought to recognize her." So that was still happening.

I don't think I ever again got accused of sleeping with sources as Percival Brundage thought. That kind of thing still plagued women as recently, though, as when I was on the Washington Star in the 1980's. There was a woman there on the financial staff named Bailey Morris, which doesn't sound like a woman's name, obviously, a very good reporter and now the editor of a magazine in international economics.

She got some kind of a major, major scoop out of the Treasury Department a day or two early and then went to the press conference at which it was formally announced. It was one of these press conferences where they ask you to identify yourself and so Bailey stood up and said, "I'm Bailey Morris of the Washington Star," and the undersecretary of the treasury or the assistant secretary who was having the press conference said, "Ah, I didn't know Bailey Morris was a woman. Now I know how you got that story." She came back with smoke still pouring out of her ears, I can assure you, and told it to the rest of us, and the smoke began pouring out of our ears. And after waiting twenty-four hours to see whether I'd cool off—which I didn't—I wrote a letter of protest to the official who'd said it. He never replied.

Well, okay, so that's ten or eleven years ago but my guess is that somewhere in the last six months the same thing has happened to some woman. A lot of that crap is still out there.

But basically at the New York Times and on my own, I didn't have any source problem. I had one very interesting problem that never went away, though, as a woman. There's a strange organization still in existence called the Business Council.

Clark: I know that.

Shanahan: It's a fraternity, basically. It's a self-selected, self-anointed, self-perpetuating group of top business executives. Now they have a hundred active members, they used to have sixty-five when I was covering it, almost every one of them the chairman of the board of a Fortune 100 company. And they meet twice a year at some elegant resort, usually the Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, to listen to government officials give them inside dope behind closed doors. And the press that covers it is always trying to find out what really happened, what secrets may have been divulged or what-have-you.

Those business executives, who certainly by the time I left the New York Times and was no longer covering it, 1976—there still weren't any women members. The EEO law had been on the books for a decade by then but there were no women. There are darn few yet in the top reaches of corporations like that so they didn't know any women as anything close to equals. And they were bad enough. Some of them were particularly bad to me. They weren't equal opportunity discriminators. They hated the male members of the press, too, and wished we would blow away and get out of their hotel, but especially me, in some cases.

The wives were an interesting case. This was before the day when men like that had trophy wives. They were mostly that bunch—maybe they still are, that particular bunch—still married to their first wives who were approximately their ages, not terribly good-looking by and large, even for women of fifty and sixty—but well-dressed and tastefully dressed and all that. You know, it was a scrounge operation since you couldn't get into the meetings and you would go up to people at lunch and—was it rude? Yes, I suppose it was rude but we

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were trying to get a story and do our work and they were furious—the wives were furious at this interruption of their social time.

The wives—these were neglected wives, by and large. These guys are hard drivers who don't pay much attention to their families—or certainly didn't in those days. I may try to cover the Business Council again and I'm going to be interested to see how the sociology has changed. But the wives loved to come because they had time with their husbands. They also tended to make friendships among the other wives. And they really liked to come and they damn well didn't want some reporter interrupting their basking to talk to their husband at lunch or down by the tennis court or whatever.

But me in particular, I was—well, by the time I left the New York Times I was what—forty-two, I guess. No, sorry, fifty-two. But earlier, I guess when I was at the Journal of Commerce and younger and seemed more threatening to these women, I have never been so nastily treated by anybody in my entire life as by the wives of those corporate executives. They were petrified. They were almost without exception at that time women who had had no careers of their own. I think they were all or nearly all college educated and perfectly intelligent. But their whole lives depended upon being Mrs. Important. And a woman in her twenties or thirties, even one who was certainly never a knock-out, which I certainly wasn't, was a terrible threat. And on two occasions, women literally with their hands pushed me away from their husbands, they were so threatened. I felt sorry for them, of course.

That's all, for now.

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