[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Clark: —a little bit to when you began reporting on economics and talk about what kind of beat there was in economics.

Shanahan: Yes, I do want to double back a little bit and mention the fact that will puzzle people otherwise. There really was no such thing as coverage of economic policy per se, really prior to the Korean War and its aftermath. The war wasn't exactly what caused it but there was just a confluence there. In World War II, a bunch of people, most of them ten or more years older than I whom I think I mentioned last time—Sterling Green, Bart Rowan, Charlie Eagan, Joe Laitin, and so on—covered the mobilization which obviously was an incredible story of one night Singer is making sewing machines and the next day they're making gun turrets or whatever they're making, and the conversion of the auto industry to make airplanes. But in terms of national economic policy there was little recognition among the public that the federal budget has an enormous influence on that, and even less recognition of the real range of what the Federal Reserve could do. Though the Federal Reserve was created back in 1916, it didn't have a lot of its powers until much later, the powers it has now.

So that the whole idea that—I guess the best way I could demonstrate, that people didn't know anything about economics, really, until—or economics as we understand it today or government influence on economics, some of which sprang from Keynes' famous book,* published, I believe, in '36 or '37, but some of which developed in a lot of other minds—in a way in Franklin Roosevelt's mind, who never read a word of economics, as far as anybody knows—more or less simultaneously. Keynes met Roosevelt, somewhere around 1940 or '41, and was vastly disturbed and unhappy to find that Roosevelt had never read his general theory, because Roosevelt was following a lot of those principles.

In any event, the best evidence that even governmental leaders had no understanding whatever of the impact of economic policy prior to roughly 1950 or so—some during World War II—is the fact that the 1937 recession occurred—it is absolutely crystal-clear in retrospect—was caused by the imposition of the Social Security tax, which took several billions out of the pockets of workers and didn't put anything back because obviously it was savings to pay for Social Security benefits in the future. But the recovery from the Great Depression, which had been just perking along very nicely, thank you, all of a sudden stalled and went into reverse. Nothing like as big as the Great Depression but a real recession, in '37-'38, because January 1, 1937, was when that tax went into effect.

Roosevelt never regained his belief that the government could really successfully deal with the economy because of this seeming mystery of why the '37-'38 recession happened. And at the time, I'm aware of only one person—he was on the staff of the Fed—who said, "Watch out! This is taking too much money out of people's pockets. This is a dangerous thing to do. It's going to have terrible consequences." But that was not understood. It would be so elementary today to say, "Oh, well, you're taking a lot of money out of people's pockets in a tax. Of course it will have a downward effect on the economy." But that was the state of our ignorance at that time.

World War II came along, and a lot of people like to say, point out that unemployment was still very high at the time we began to get into the World War II buildup in 1940 and to make the argument that therefore that proves that none of the New Deal programs worked. That's not correct. The fact is something interrupted

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* John Maynard Keynes (1993-1943), English economist and author of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936.

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that progress and it was the Social Security tax in 1937. The economy came back from that but not the way it would have without.

Then, of course, the war buildup began. And then by the time we got into the war, there were people who understood the demands that were being made on the economy for war production and that meant workers' wages were being paid but there were no automobiles to buy, nor any kind of electrical home appliances and so on, because all of the industrial capacity was going to war material. And what are you going to do? People have got all this money but there's nothing to buy with it except food and not even a whole lot of that by the time you get around to supplying twelve million men, three thousand miles away, in the armed services.

So we had basically what the economists would call forced savings, that is, we bought our war bonds—I bought my first car for cash. We bought our first car cashing in our war bonds in 1947.

Clark: How much did you pay for it?

Shanahan: $1440, I happen to remember. So it's about ten times that now for an equivalent car; it was a bottom-of-the-line Ford.

So the whole—I was in college and taking a little bit of economics during World War II and I remember the professor talking about—"Well, war bonds, you know, they're saying 'Buy a share of freedom' and so on, but the real reason is this is what an economist would call forced savings." So that economics was growing as a field and more and more was being understood, but not widely.

And I came into economics reporting, of course, initially just because there was a job. I didn't know I had any interest in it, covering the price controls that were imposed during the Korean War, for the same reason. That war was a very large war, in terms of its demand on the economy, much larger than Vietnam. People don't realize that.

And a great institution had been created shortly before World War II ended, because Congress and everybody else feared that with the end of war production, there would be a terrible recession. It didn't happen because people had all those savings in War Bonds. It is now not an important institution but for many years an important institution, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. It's been superseded now in most of what it does by the budget committees, which look at the whole economy and look at federal spending and taxing in the context of the economy.

Clark: What did it do? How did it function?

Shanahan: But basically, it was not a legislative committee, it didn't have any power to approve a bill and send it to the floor of the House or the Senate. It was basically a committee that held hearings and studied and made reports. And it was wonderful to be a young reporter coming onto the economics beat at that time because I would guess that probably somewhere in the neighborhood of two thirds or four fifths of everything I know about economics to this day and hour, I learned covering hearings of the Joint Economic Committee which was educating its members, and members of the press like me, that group of my colleagues, and also members of Congress who weren't on the Joint Economic Committee.

I remember one day walking down a corridor with my then friend, subsequent colleague Ed Dale, who was probably on the Herald Tribune then and I was on the Journal of Commerce, and seeing an old foof of a senator—not on the Joint Economic Committee for whose intellect nobody had much respect—with a copy of the monthly publication the committee put out with all the statistics in it, called "Economic Indicators"—they do it to this day—and saying, "Senator Watkins is reading the 'Economic Indicators.' Isn't that just thrilling that he knows enough to know he ought to know those numbers?" It was such a different world.

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I remember other times. I remember concepts. I remember Charlie Schultze, now at Brookings, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Carter administration and budget director under Johnson, who was then a young professor at the University of Indiana, coming before the Joint Economic Committee and explaining how he had discovered something about the true impact of federal spending on the economy. And it wasn't the budget deficit as such, it was a concept he created called "The Full Employment Budget," not the change in the actual budget but the change in what the budget spending would have been if we had full employment.

And I don't need to go into the details but he described this. He also, in those pre-computer days, described how he sat up for something like over forty-eight hours straight running the calculations with just the little hand calculator and with just no sleepiness, no sense of tiredness, as he did the numbers year after year after year and they all pointed to the same conclusion. I wonder if it would have been as dramatic if he had had a computer and been able to do it in half an hour.

But I remember Ed Dale and I going out of that hearing so excited we could hardly talk, at this incredible break-through as an economic analytical tool, and going off to lunch together, as we often did after those hearings, and just talking, talking, talking to each other about this exciting new concept. And I could get it into the Journal of Commerce. He very often got it onto the front page of the New York Times.

And there were subsequent things. I remember the day after I got to the New York Times when what used to be called the Wholesale Price Index came—the Consumer Price Index was always a page-one story, especially in the heavy inflation days. But the Producers Price Index, as it's now called, and the Wholesale Price Index, as it was then called, was just for what today we'd call the policy wonks.

Clark: The policy—

Shanahan: Wonks? It's a Washington term, I guess. W-o-n-k. It's "know" spelled backwards. Actually, I first heard of the term used for studious people, what my generation called the "greasy grind," just a smart kid who was supposed to study real hard and you didn't like him very much, et cetera.

But one day the Producer Price Index did something way up or way down, I don't remember which, and I remember that I was covering it that day. And I realized it was really important, maybe that there wasn't going to be any inflation or something. And Ed and I talked about it—we were both at the Times by then—and decided this story belonged on page one. So he marched right up to the news desk with me and we made the case that this was a page-one story. And that was all part of it, too, educating your editors as to what was important and what wasn't, among the new statistics and among other developments.

Clark: Where did you get your statistics? Who was producing the kind of data that you need and could you outline some of the different areas of data you tried to draw from?

Shanahan: Well, most of the basic statistics then and now were government. Interesting little piece of history. Many of them go back to about 1929—and it doesn't have anything to do with the Great Depression. It has to do with Herbert Hoover who was secretary of commerce before he was president. And he started many of those statistics. He was secretary of commerce until 1928 when he became president, in '29. And they came to fruition later—the Gross National Product, for example, now a slightly different concept called the Gross Domestic Product starts—those numbers begin in 1929, some other statistics like the Federal Reserve's Index of Industrial Production, less important now than it used to be, as manufacturing becomes a decreasing portion of the economy. That one goes back into the twenties but it was so crude. Somebody told me once they derived the number for production of machinery from the number for production of steel on which we had some real facts. I mean, that's how crude they used to be.

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On the Gross National Product, I remember the guy who really took the basic concept from an economist named Schumpeter,* who really devised the concept, a guy at the Commerce Department who greatly refined it. And sometime I guess in the middle fifties—yes, it would have been one of Eisenhower's three recessions—the quarterly Gross National Product figure came out. And I was talking to this man whose name was Louis Paradiso about it, and it had declined a lot. And he said, "Well, you know, I was on vacation when those figures were finally put together. If I'd been here I'd have made it three billion higher." Three billion was a lot in those days, when the whole economy was maybe four hundred billion. I don't think anybody would say that today. There's a lot less estimating and a lot more facts. Each of the statistics have just gotten much, much more detailed and much, much more accurate, which isn't to say totally accurate, and anybody who knows anything will tell you that, too. But as accurate as people can make them. Those who work on the economic statistics are absolutely honest, I believe.

The two economic statistics the public pays the most attention to, the unemployment figures and the Consumer Price Index—both come out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Labor Department, which interestingly enough, in terms of the women I ever knew and covered, which were hardly any at that time—there were a lot of women in the Bureau of Labor Statistics and some people believe that the reason for that was, "Oh, well, you know, prices, what you have to pay at the grocery store, that's sort of a woman's"—I don't believe it was that at all. The man who headed it for decades and really made it into the great institution it is was named Ewan Clague—his wife was an M.D. And I think he just didn't have any prejudices about women and so he hired women, including the—well, not his immediate successor. There was a woman who was the head of it for a large number of years until a couple years ago named Janet Norwood.

Anyway, to get back to your original question, mostly government: mostly the Commerce Department which did—did and does—the Gross Domestic Product and things like the housing statistics which are Commerce and not HUD, the manufacturer's orders, inventories, personal income and so on; Labor, which does—everything to do with work, hours worked, as well as employment and unemployment, the actual survey is done by the Census Bureau but they did the analysis and put them together; and the Federal Reserve which does most of the money and banking statistics and the industrial production index. So they're mostly government.

There used to be some private sources. For a long time the government didn't have any good construction figures and there was a private organization that did those and was able for years to lobby against the government getting the money to do a comprehensive series because they didn't want their little piece of action to be competed with by the government. There are areas to this day where the government doesn't do the statistics and one of them is a lot of the stuff in the petroleum area. Production imports and so on are done by the trade association of that industry, American Petroleum Institute.

My opinion is that we saw at that time that when the statistics come from an advocacy group they're not necessarily believed. During the oil shortages of the middle seventies—we had the two big ones, of course, the '73 oil embargo and then one of lesser impact late in the decade of the seventies. And people didn't believe there was really a shortage. And I think one of the problems here was that the figures came from the industry. The public thought they were cooked. I don't really know what I think about the API figures. I do think the government figures do have integrity. There is a famous story—there are people who think the government cooks the figures. I don't. They are mostly done by career people of great integrity.

There was a very important episode that happened in the Nixon administration. When Nixon wasn't actually asking the Bureau of Labor Statistics to change the unemployment figure, he merely put some pressure on, real pressure, down the line on the Labor Department—the Bureau of Labor Statistics is part of Labor—to change the way it presented them, just change the press release, in effect, change the interpretation, not actually change the numbers. And the career people resisted.

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* Joseph A. Schumpeter (1883-1950) Czechoslovakian-born American economist, author of Theory of Economic Development, 1911, English translation 1934.

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Clark: That's interesting.

Shanahan: And three of them got shunted aside to other assignments or non-jobs because of this and, in due course, all left. Many people remember that Nixon at one time—and it's on the tape—said there were too many Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's the genesis of that. People don't remember what caused it. The three guys that did that were named Goldstein, Stein and Henley—Henley was Jewish, too—and that's the genesis of Nixon having made that rather shocking remark, that's right on the tape. And people remember he said it but they don't remember why. I think to this day and hour, in all of the statistics-producing agencies, they are people of great integrity.

I was very annoyed during the 1992 presidential campaign when the figure came out of the Commerce Department—the quarterly figure on the Gross Domestic Product came out on the 28th of October, just a routine date, a routine announcement, which was just five days or six days before the election, and it showed the economy was making a better recovery from this extremely—rather shallow but extremely prolonged recession that we've had ever since the middle of 1990. I saw one economist actually quoted on the wires as saying, "They cooked the numbers."

Well, I knew who he was and he's just somebody who'll say anything to get quoted. And I actually called my office, which sometimes will insert a good quote from the wires in your story and said, "If you put that quote in my story, I'll come down there and kill you with my bare hands. The figures are not cooked. They are estimates, in addition to facts that go into those figures, but I believe they're made with integrity. Subsequently, the next set of figures came out and they were even higher.

You've got to have a head for it. You've got to enjoy numbers, which I do. But it's very important to really get into those numbers and understand them.

In any event, what I started out wanting to say was that I was a participant in the creation of the national economic policy beat. I was present and participating. I suppose if I look back over my entire career I would have to say that rather than being proud of individual stories—and I certainly did some I was proud of—my sense of the great contribution—I don't want to say "great," the serious contribution that I may have made, was that I did participate very importantly in the creation of two beats, and I'm still hoping that something else I participated in will become a recognized beat. I participated in the creation of the national economic policy beat and I participated in the creation of the women's rights beat, very much so. We'll get to that.

I hope that Governing magazine and the degree to which it has created an understanding of how much state and local government needs to be covered as a national story, not just what your state or local government is doing but how it fits in with what's happening elsewhere. That hasn't become a beat yet but I'm still hopeful that it will, and if it does, I will have made a major contribution to that, too. So you didn't ask but—

Clark: Oh, I'm glad to know.

Shanahan: But I think maybe that's what I'm proudest of.

Clark: A couple of questions about the creation of the economics beat: When did it, in your mind, become a recognized beat, important not only to newspapering but to candidates for office, to campaigns? When would you say that? When would you locate that?

Shanahan: Well, I think probably any time you had a bad economy, it was bad for the incumbent, whether we understood the workings of the economy as well, certainly not perfectly, as we do today. But I would date it somewhere in the zone of the Korean War, partly because there was something else pretty complicated that happened to greatly enhance the understanding of the role of central banks and the Federal Reserve simultaneously, not cause-and-effect, really, from the Korean War, something that happened in 1951, called the

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Treasury Federal Reserve Accord in which the Federal Reserve asserted its right to go after inflation, whether the government had to borrow a lot of money to run a war or not.

Clark: Could you spell that out a little bit?

Shanahan: Well, okay. During World War II, the cost of the war was so enormous—people won't believe it but you could look it up. In the peak year of World War II, which was 1945—the fiscal year, the peak year of expenditures—the war cost one-half of the Gross National Product. And the important thing was to be able to fund it. And I mentioned earlier the, in effect, forced savings because people bought war bonds because there wasn't anything else to buy, therefore they were saving, not spending.

But the Federal Reserve also, with its power to create money—never mind the technicalities, just take my word for it, it can create money—created enough money so that over and beyond what people and institutions were willing to buy by way of government bonds, to give government the money to run the war because the federal deficit was huge, the Federal Reserve created enough money so that the money would be out there to finance the war. And part of that was keeping interest rates down—you don't need to know what the techniques were.

Then after the war was over, there was a long dispute and stalemate. The Federal Reserve wanted to be free to really tighten up. There was a tremendous inflation in post-World War II because there had been full-scale price controls during the war and once the price controls were lifted, there were prices that doubled and tripled almost literally overnight because they had been artificially held down during the war. And the Federal Reserve really wanted to be able to tighten up and restrain that inflation—sounds very familiar, and yes, it is, those so-called sound-money people in any central bank.

There was a long battle about it and finally in 1951 it was resolved with what became known as the Treasury Federal Reserve Accord. Federal Reserve policy, though more technically detailed and refined now than it was then, is basically what was established in 1951. And in many respects, that was the beginning of the economics beat as we know it today, with an understanding of the interrelationship between the federal budget, fiscal policy so-called, and monetary policy. Someone else who lives in a different time might disagree with my judgment on that. I think you are influenced by having seen a change, though I wasn't deeply into it at that time.

Anyway, does that answer your question?

Clark: Yes. Would you be able to characterize how economic reporting differed, for example, from straight political reporting?

Shanahan: Ah! Sure could. First of all, it's not just economic reporting. It's—I don't like to say substance versus not, though I suppose I sort of feel that way about it. There are certain areas where—all right, I'll back up and say what I really mean.

Political reporting has been often compared to sports reporting, the horse race, the ball game. It has a beauty about it—there's a score at the end. You know who won or lost. You may argue for decades about why. And political reporting is right out there: A says this, B says that, very little is hidden, you don't have the kind of lack of access to the principal players that you have often, usually to some degree or another, once the government is installed.

To be one of the great political reporters—say David Broder, for example—I don't think that's any easier than what I do. I do think that to be adequate and hold a job as a political reporter is a hell of a lot easier than to be good enough to hold a job and do it in some other fields. It isn't just economics. By sheer accident, the sheer accident that we sat next to each other in the New York Times Washington bureau, Harold Schmeck, a medical reporter and I, became very good friends. And his life as a medical reporter,

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his intellectual life, was very similar to mine. You had to read a lot of stuff, and political reporters don't read very much, though they read speeches which are all simplified to begin with. They don't have to slog their way through stuff and learn a whole separate jargon and all that.

When I say any of this, by the way, I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining. Quite the contrary; I enjoy that. I also have always enjoyed doing it, I think in part because I think being willing to work at it pays off in a field like mine, or like Harry Schmeck's or many other fields. Even in covering the Pentagon and the State Department, there are people who do those things in a sloppy way and manage to hold their job. But the great ones are the ones who really sit down and read thick tomes and don't just read government reports, they read the books that are written about it and so on. So that in that sense there is, I think, in general for the beats that are heavy on substance, theory, analysis—that's also true of the good Pentagon reporting.

Something that is not done very well, covering the Department of Transportation, I'm not sure anybody does that at the depth they ought to be. Or HUD, you wouldn't have had the scandals if somebody had been sitting over in HUD from the Washington Post watching all that stuff go on.

Clark: That's very interesting. Could you say a little bit more about that?

Shanahan: Well, I think I am very critical of the degree to which the press does not cover most of the executive branch of government. There are a couple of things. Politics is one. That's at its worst covering the horse race and its best as a Broder does it or a Johnny Apple on the New York Times has done it, looking at the people and the trends and how they interact and not just presidents but governors and state legislators and so on.

That gets covered. Legislators get covered, legislatures get covered, whether it's city council on up—not counties, that's a whole separate story. That's the worst-covered unit of government in this country and that's a shame because in many states county government's a very important government. But legislatures get covered, whether it's Congress or a state legislature or a city council. And it's biased. I don't mean the reporting's biased, I mean the source is biased. If you only cover Congress and only get a congressional view on something, you're only getting a part of the story. The ax that they have to grind may be entirely legitimate. They may be right sometimes when the executive branch is wrong—or lying. But you don't know the whole story unless you get in there and cover the executive branch, too, in Washington or elsewhere.

There are only about five executive agencies that are covered, regularly, with some attempt at depth: the White House, the State Department, not except by a very few papers the Pentagon but a very few, maybe the Justice Department, sometimes—that's about it. There's that whole enormous government out there, everything from the Agriculture Department which is quite an expensive department, four or five million people and a lot of corporations that take a living from Agriculture. And HUD and Transportation and Ed [Education]. Actually, the federal role in elementary and secondary education is not that big.

But on Health and Human Services and on and on, they are scarcely covered. I'm not even sure the wire services have somebody sitting all day, every day, in some of those departments. Nobody else does, in most of them. And I'm very critical of that. I think we are not doing our job. There are all kinds of things that happen and shock us. They could be scandals, they could be programs that didn't work. The idea of ongoing evaluation of programs by the press. Very badly done. And that's not new.

Clark: Looking at it from the other angle, do you think—and I'm not thinking of you in particular because you've actually covered a lot of scandals or broken the news—

Shanahan: Not a lot.

Clark: Well, not a lot but some. Do you think that there may ever be a tendency on the part of economics reporters to not see the political angle of the story that's unfolding?

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Shanahan: Yes. I think that can be a fair criticism, including of me.

Clark: What stories do you think you might have missed?

Shanahan: Oh, I don't know. Even today as we talk, in December of 1992, if I have a story on the employment statistics, I have to remind myself to put in something about how it affected the campaign. Poor old Bush. The economy started to turn up actually before the election but the figures weren't there to prove it. I'm not sure it would have made any difference because I don't think the voters at large actually look at the statistics. They know whether their sister-in-law just lost her job.

But I think that can be a fair criticism of maybe any of the substance departmental beats, that I'm just guessing now, almost—someone who covers the Food and Drug Administration will think about—well, that's not a fair one. I was going to say reporters may just look at the rules and the warfare between what the drug industry wants and what the regulator wants, and can forget that the ultimate point here is the safety and efficacy of drugs, but that's not really a fair example. I don't think they do lose sight of that.

Clark: Well, I was thinking of the length of time it took to break the savings and loan scandals, in particular.

Shanahan: Oh, yes, a very good criticism, I mean, it was terrible. And that happened because the people that covered banking and savings and loans wrote for the financial pages. There is in fact a very good article in last Sunday's Washington Post Magazine by Howard Kurtz, their media reporter, who has done an excellent, excellent piece about how the press blew it. I agree with just about every word in that piece. It details the fact that there were reporters, including on his own paper—I admire the Post for letting him say what he said about how many different times the Post itself dropped the ball, where some of it was known.

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

Clark: We were talking about the Washington Post piece last Sunday.

Shanahan: I think that is an example of the failure to find the savings and loan scandals and the degree to which that whole industry was threatened with insolvency, at great, great multi-hundred billion dollar cost to the taxpayer. I think that was not so much a case of failing to see the political implications. I think that was a case of what I was talking about a minute ago. There were people covering it but they were covering it from the point of view of the financial pages, kind of what's with this industry—though there were people on the financial page of the Post who wanted to get into it more. But it just wasn't considered a very interesting story.

That's also true of economic coverage in a quiet time. I noticed that just this week, the first week of December, the unemployment figures, which showed an ongoing improvement, the Washington Post and I think my paper [St. Petersburg Times] as well—I haven't seen it yet because it was in the Saturday paper—put the unemployment figures back in the business page. We're off page one. It looks like the economy is finally recovering, so boop, off the front page.

I don't quarrel with that decision because, yeah, it is sort of more of the same now. The economy is still not good enough but getting better. But the savings and loan scandal, if there'd been more interest on the part of top editors—I was really shocked by the degree to which, as Kurtz reported, that one of their reporters in particular, over and over again asked for some time to really look into this and was told no.

Clark: Can you think of any other examples, looking back over your career, of stories that might have been broken sooner?

Shanahan: Well, I can think of one in New York City, the famous New York City near bankruptcy. Nobody, nobody had a piece of that. Whoever was sitting down at City Hall wasn't the kind, for the Times and everybody else, was not somebody who was looking at the extent to which they were mortgaging future tax collections—

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which I learned later, I didn't know it at the time—one of the classic signs of impending municipal bankruptcy, exists when you start borrowing money against future tax collections.

And that's what New York City was doing. And whoever was at City Hall was covering the mayor and whatever they were covering, and didn't find it. That's an example of people thinking economics and budgeting and public finance is a bore. Well, it isn't because if things go wrong, they affect everybody. They cost everybody. But that still is a somewhat hard case to make.

There are probably a number of other cases I could think of. As Eisenhower said, "If you give me a week."

Clark: We'll give you a week.

To move slightly into another area, you mentioned that you had covered a few women in government but there weren't that many when you were starting out. I had a question, going a little bit back even further, about women that you might have observed—and then we'll move into the question of coverage—through just being in Washington, growing up in Washington. I was thinking of Eleanor Roosevelt as one example. I was wondering about Frances Perkins also. And I'd like to hear you talk about it.

Shanahan: I was certainly aware of Eleanor Roosevelt, growing up. And I remember—she did her daily, her several times a week, I think, column called "My Day," which I did not read. We didn't take the paper that carried it. She also wrote a once-a-month column for the Ladies Home Journal which was one of the few things my mother read regularly. And there was a time—I'm not sure what generated it, maybe we were starting in '36 or whenever this was, to have a lot of kids killed in drunk driving accidents or something. But anyway, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a piece for the Ladies Home Journal in which she said, "The time has come to teach our children how to drink responsibly." Don't just tell them no and so on. Sounds reminiscent of something else today, doesn't it?

Clark: It does.

Shanahan: And there was a fire storm of reaction. And I remember my mother saying, "She's right," and admiring her for standing up and saying that. My mother actually had very little interest in public events, very much totally focused on the family. But I remember hearing her—almost the only argument I'd ever hear about a public policy issue from her—that was a private policy argument but about public figures.

Yes, Eleanor, I believe in common with most women of my generation, that I was unconsciously influenced by Eleanor Roosevelt, that the sense of this woman who of course, as many have observed, she was Roosevelt's legs. She went out, went into the coal mines, or went and did a lot of things, and reported back to him. She was his good, reliable, on-the-scene reporter. And while there was much ridicule and much hostility toward her—you have no idea—the fact that this woman held a non-traditional position within that marriage that plainly was valuable and valued was something I think I absorbed without knowing it.

And I must have because I remember my senior year of college, when I was editor of the college paper, Eleanor Roosevelt came to speak at George Washington University. It was a Monday that it was announced and that was the day we put the weekly paper to bed. It was the only time I tore up the whole paper and made it all over again to have a banner headline that Mrs. Roosevelt was going to come to speak.

And it wasn't just that she was the president's wife. It was who she was. So that I think the sense I was getting from my father—you're smart enough, you can achieve anything you want, just all you have to do is be willing to work for it—I think that was reenforced by Eleanor Roosevelt, at very young ages. I can't summon a conscious memory of that but I think it was there.

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Frances Perkins, I have a memory. When [Wendell] Willkie ran for president—and that was 1940, so I was just sixteen, and I believe—I'm not sure I'm right, I think it was in his acceptance speech when he won the Republican nomination—that he said, "I will appoint a secretary of labor from the ranks of organized labor, and it won't be a woman, either." And I remember being incensed.

So I had absorbed—as I say, my first feminist memory goes back to sixth grade. I remember thinking, "What's wrong with that?" Probably my father having once been an active unionist, he may have been aware—I can't recall—he may have been aware that she did a lot about worker safety and other things. I may have been hearing good things about her. I don't constantly remember that but I remember being incensed that he said that.

No, there really weren't women in significant enough positions in government for me to cover, for a very long time. I remember the only one I had a lot to do with was a woman who did her job superbly, named Virginia DePure who was the press officer for the Bureau of the Budget, the predecessor agency of the Office of Management and Budget. And it was just as important an agency then as it is now, very important.

And boy, I'm telling you, she was one of the best press officers I ever dealt with. Whatever you needed, she got it for you. She didn't leak anything. But she got you the information. And she ran an incredible operation on the day when the president's budget came out. And they literally handled thousands of press calls in twenty-four hours and I never heard of anybody who didn't get a call back the same day.

I subsequently found out—I think I interviewed her, maybe when she was retiring or something, and found out she had been a Grade 14. I remember being shocked because the super-grades, of course, started at 16. So she wasn't even the highest ranking regular grade, which was a 15.

Clark: And when did she come in?

Shanahan: I don't know. She was there when I got there, I think. My first budget was Truman's last. And I think probably she was there then and she was there through—oh, at least the early sixties.

So there really weren't many. Janet Norwood I actually didn't know until she became the deputy head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and then the head of it. And I was aware of some others. There was a man besides Ewan Clague, whom I mentioned before whose wife was a doctor, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a man who also hired a lot of women, and that was the research director of the Federal Reserve. His name was Ralph Young. And he had a wife who was a professor of political science, I think. And that was another case of my being aware that there were a lot of women, economists and statisticians, in that very important unit of the Federal Reserve. And there again, I think it was because Young was married to a smart woman who had her own career, way back in the forties and fifties, and so he didn't have any biases about women.

I dealt with a few of those women at the Fed. Not a lot because Young was accessible and you could talk directly to him. But I was aware they were there. The first woman of any rank anywhere on my beat was Marina Whitman who was the first, and until this day and hour in 1992 the only, woman ever to serve as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, which has three members. And she was a Nixon appointee. Brilliant woman, no question about it. Most of the members of that council have been brilliant people. They've had very few turkeys over the years—or even so-so people. They've been a very smart bunch.

I remember interviewing her. She was from Pittsburgh, long before I ever lived there, and her husband was an English professor. And she had children. I remember the first time I went in to interview her, to do I think a profile on her. And she talked some about her husband and her children and moving. And they were going to be commuting and this was certainly in the days before that was very common.

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As you might expect from a Nixon appointee, she was rather conservative and I am not. But I remember going out of there thinking, "Gosh, um, boy, we really are a lot alike." And then upon reflection thinking, "No, we're not that much alike. She believes this, I believe that. But she's a woman and she's married and she has children. The structure of our lives is the same." And this was the first time I'd ever interviewed anybody who had a life like mine, as a top-drawer presidential appointee and source. And there haven't been all that many ever since, sorry to say.

You know, when you ask me about women, though, I want to double back on something else I got to think about which was the importance of my membership in the Women's National Press Club and being active in that for so many years and the friends I made and so on. There were some wonderful benefits of that, aside from the friendships, that I wanted to mention. There are two of them.

One, since there weren't any other women on my beat—there was a woman named Maureen Gothlin who was on it for a couple of years for United Press but basically over the years I was the only woman doing it until right toward the end, like seventies. So these women in the Press Club were people I could talk to about our professional lives. And it was not only having a gang of friends to do that with, they were covering other things. Many of them were covering the East Wing, the first lady's, family wing of the White House, and often got thrown into covering the West Wing, the president's wing, when the regular person was gone.

Clark: Let's name some names here to flesh out—

Shanahan: There were people like, of course, Helen Thomas of the United Press, famous now and the senior White House reporter now, whose basic job was to cover the first lady but who filled in for her drunken boss, Merriman Smith, who was a talented guy, God knows, but he was increasingly an alcoholic. And so she covered and covered up for him over the years. Frances Lewine who was there for the AP. Isabelle Shelton for the Washington Star who also had a column for a little agency called North American Newspaper Alliance who rummaged afield beyond the White House. Those were the best friends.

But there were others. Vera Glaser of Knight-Ridder and some other places. The point being that they would talk—obviously, as we all did—about what they were covering. And I learned a lot about Washington, about government, about different kinds of coverage from my friendships with them. And I wanted to mention that, that that enhanced my intellect, my knowledge.

Clark: Could you give some specific instances?

Shanahan: No, I don't know that I can. It was more an incremental thing. I learned, I learned about. And of course, the view of the president from the first lady's side is also very—oh, and Bonnie Angelo is someone I also should have mentioned, a wonderfully insightful reporter, then with Newsday and subsequently for many years with Time.

They saw things. And they saw things not just about the first lady, they saw things about the president that the men weren't reporting, that enhanced your sense of what kind of a person the president was. And it was a different kind of coverage. And that was valuable to me.

Clark: That's very interesting. Did these discussions mainly happen when you were together there at the National Press Club or did you—

Shanahan: [Laughter.] The Women's National Press Club.

Clark: Excuse me. Not enough coffee! The Women's National Press Club.

Shanahan: That's their press club.

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Clark: Yes, I understand.

Shanahan: I still think of it as their press club.

Clark: Absolutely. Did you ever have times that you would be at work or you'd be on a particular story that you would call each other up? Was there that kind of collaboration?

Shanahan: No. No, that was not. It was a matter of just the casual contacts, all the many years, I think eleven, that I was on the board of the Women's National Press Club, in one job or another. Usually, we'd go out and eat afterwards and sit around, a changing group, it wasn't always the same people but there were at least three or four or five or six of us and so on. And that's when people would get to, you know, telling their yarns about what was happening and of course, press women reporters generally know how to tell a story entertainingly so it was a lot of fun. But I also learned.

No, there was not anything formal like that. I think maybe once or twice I might have called somebody for an idea about a story.

But that's only point one. Point two about the value of that was that I learned—I cared about that club. I cared what it should be doing. I don't know, I was always very professionally oriented. I enjoyed the social aspects enormously, participated in them, but what I cared about was what it could do to enhance the professional status of women in journalism. So that every decision was something I cared about, whether it was one of these borderline membership cases which are a big headache for any press club, whether somebody should be admitted, or a question of programs and speakers, and so on, and all the things that came up at the board meetings. I cared quite a lot about how very nearly all of them came out.

I wouldn't say I learned how to argue persuasively. Isabelle always said she was amazed that I would sit there and listen and something could have been twelve to one one way and by the time I got finished speaking last, it was thirteen to nothing the other way. That did happen a few times. She exaggerates a bit.

Whether I learned how to argue persuasively or, what I really think, that arguing points like that with women was just a wholly different thing for me, intellectually or maybe even emotionally, than arguing with men.

Clark: How's that?

Shanahan: Because they weren't trying to put me down and I wasn't trying to put them down. With men I am afraid to this day and hour, I am too quick to say, "No, that's not right," and to be angry and not think as clearly as I might because I'm angry. Whereas with them, even when I thought somebody was being perfectly dippy, which occasionally I thought, I'd hear them out and think about it, and then be very careful not to put them down in the process of countering them.

I was extremely interested—I am sure we all were, all of us, everybody I know practically. And I'm sure you have read Deborah Tannen's book about men and women talking [You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation]. And I wish to heaven she'd written that book twenty years ago because one of her basic points is that women talk to create or enhance or restore a relationship and men talk to establish who's up and who's down. Boy, you talk about an insight that enlightens my life. And I wish I'd had it earlier.

And I'm afraid that in discussions with men, I often fall into their pattern of needing to win, trying to establish who's up—me—et cetera. I'm so bad about it. I'm not as bad as I used to be. When I got into HEW and I was the boss, I encountered a lot of challenges to my legitimacy—not a lot. Not as many as I have elsewhere. But encountered a lot of people who were hoping they could dispatch me and my interests and pay no attention to them, that I actually literally sat there late one night when I was in a terrible battle with the

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education side of the department, thinking, "Now how did I so frequently manage to persuade people to my view on the board of the Women's National Press Club?"

I remember sitting there alone, ten or eleven o'clock at night, trying to think through how I could be a more effective arguer. And coming to an insight that was not fully formed until I read Tannen's book but understanding that I had to appear to listen more than I was. I think I really was listening. I think I have a fast-action mind and I can see to the end of sentences and I do interrupt people. But I learned something about that and started consciously using it when I got into that first managerial job at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

So it was more than just the wonders of friendship that I got out of the Women's National Press Club. It was those other two things.

And you asked me some other question. I didn't answer the question you asked me.

Clark: I don't remember what it was—she said honestly. But I do have another question. I'd just like to know a little bit about your actual history at the Women's National Press Club and some of your activities. You referred to several occasions where you made presentations to the board or had conflicts and what some of those were.

Shanahan: Oh, well, that—no, actually, that was the thing that got me into the club was just the analysis I did of the budget.

Clark: The budget analysis.

Shanahan: I think I mentioned that. And came to the conclusion—I was scared to death and was greeted with open arms when I said, "You can't there from here. You've got to raise dues." I was afraid they'd throw me out on my ear. And then the very next year I was elected to formal office in the club, as budget director and then treasurer and then a variety of things.

We had ongoing problems about—as I say, there are borderline cases as to whether you're a press person or not. You'd be surprised how many borderline cases there are.

Clark: What does that involve?

Shanahan: Oh, you don't want to know. It's just the question of whether the publication is an independent publication rather than the house organ of something like the National Association of Home Builders or whatever. You'd think that was black or white. Well, it isn't. Then toward the end it got complicated with what amount to television press releases and producers of those and so on. And the whole question of who you try to get for speakers and things like that. But no, that one presentation was before I was actually on the board.

Clark: What was the ethnic mix of the club?

Shanahan: Oh, well, I'm very proud of that club. The first black woman who ever applied was admitted, routinely. Alice Dunnegan was her name. She's dead now. And she applied and she worked for a group of publications, black publications. I think maybe they were all weeklies but it added up to a daily news service. And according to the standard rules, the membership committee looked into it, found out, you know, who she was, what she did, who employed her, recommended approval to the board,the membership chairman proposed it to the board, the board discussed it, bing! Voted in. It wasn't even a long discussion.

Meanwhile, the Men's Press Club, as we always referred to it, had a fight that I believe lasted eight years over admitting their first black member, a guy named Lewis Latiere. Finally, the good guys won and he was admitted.

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And we admitted Alice Dunnegan at some point during the pendency of that fight. So we had our first black member before they had theirs. But we said, "Hey, this is a professional club. This person is a professional, let her in."

Clark: Do you think that you were different, say, than other newswomen's clubs around the country?

Shanahan: I don't have any information on that. The only thing that I remember that's comparable, I was a Mortar Board in college. I don't know whether you went somewhere where they had it. It was the senior women's honor society.

Clark: Yes, you mentioned that.

Shanahan: Did I mention letting in the first black?

Clark: Yes.

Shanahan: And that was done by an overwhelming vote. So I don't know what was happening with other press clubs around the country. I have no idea, although most of them were unisex clubs from the start, unlike the National Press Club here. And I think even today—and I say this to black students, for example, when I teach—I'm not about to tell you that white women aren't racists or can't be racists or even, I'm sorry to say, that feminist women can't be racists. But your chances that a feminist woman won't be a racist are better than with men or anti-feminist women.

And I think that was true then and it is true now, that we do see the analogies. It's dangerous to see too many because race is much tougher than sex in this country and maybe in—well, this is the only country I know about. But it's a much tougher problem. To explain that view, I usually start with pre-natal nutrition. We get the same pre-natal nutrition as our brothers. We grow up in a house that does or does not have books in it, the same as our brothers, and so on. And we lead integrated lives, in the gender sense. The degree of absolute isolation along racial lines in this country is still enormous, certainly residentially and even in the workplace. I don't deny that great progress has been made but we've come a short way on race in this country and the progress is slow, very slow. It is for women, too, but women are—it's just not as hard a problem.

Clark: Doubling back one more time to when you took the job at the Treasury in 1961, I'd like to know a little bit more about what constituted a super-grade. And I know that you were the only woman super-grade in the Treasury, Commerce, Bureau of the Budget, Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve System.

Shanahan: Well, it's just that the civil service system has a variety of grades. The objective here is since it's the taxpayers' money, there shouldn't be any favoritism in pay and therefore you establish this elaborate system which then winds up having all kinds of rigidity. And civil service, of course, goes back to when [William] McKinley was shot, I think, by a disappointed office-seeker. And so grades are established. There really isn't any difference in terms of how you get there between anywhere from being a Grade 1 to a Grade 15, the regular grades, and being a 16, 17 or 18. Your protections from being fired are the same. There's a new wrinkle called the SES, the Senior Executive Service, that didn't exist at the time I was in the government, where the protections are less, and so on.

It's almost an arbitrary statement. They were called super-grades because they didn't always exist. They were established sometime before I came into the government so that it would be just as accurate to say I was the only woman who was above a Grade 15. In some respects, it's a distinction without much of a difference.

Clark: At the time that you applied and got that job, were women able to apply to any position within the Federal Government or were there still separate civil service lists for women and men? Do you know?

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Shanahan: I didn't know there ever had been separate lists. You've told me something I didn't know, that there had been separate lists. No, at that time there certainly weren't any separate lists.

Clark: At that period when you were working in the government, did you have a sense that you would have more room to move inside the government as a woman or in the world of journalism?

Shanahan: Oh, that wasn't the reason I went into the government. No, the reason I went into the government— I never intended to make a career of it. I intended to do exactly what I did, get in and get out. And my reason was that I wanted to see what it was like on the inside. I wanted to find out—ultimately for journalistic purposes—what the press found out and what it didn't find out. I wanted to find out how decisions were made. I'd never been inside of any organization, except journalism where decision-making is often instant and done just by one person. You don't go through a great hierarchy to do it, usually. And I just wanted—I'd covered government for all those years, by 1961, and I wanted to see what it was like on the inside, and with the sense that I would come back—which I always intended to do and rather quickly—a better reporter, that I would simply understand things I never understood. And I did.

Clark: Just generally on the question of the government's information to the press, '61 was a year in which a lot happened—the Bay of Pigs—and I'm wondering what your perspectives were then and if they've changed on national security issues and whether the government has a right to keep certain information proprietary.

Shanahan: I think—it's always hard to remember what you thought at time past—I think I always considered that it has some rights. And at that time, the government was much more open than it subsequently became, for a lot of very complicated reasons, one of which is the growth of the press corps. It also has a lot to do with just how open the president is. And his views come down the line.

I left the Treasury with a secret in my mind that I carefully never told anyone in the press. It's obsolete now. During the time I was in the Treasury, there were some attacks on the price of gold by international speculators. Gold was still the underpinning for our currency. That link was broken by Nixon in '71 but it still existed then. So it was potentially very dangerous to the U.S. economy if the speculators were able to drive up the price of gold dramatically.

The big economic powers got together and established a collective action—the gold pool—to make sure that the speculators couldn't win. They would intervene and sell gold, dump it on the market to undermine the speculators, make them not try that any more. And I knew how that worked. And if anybody ever knew how it worked, the speculators could defeat it again. So when I left the Treasury with that knowledge—and that was quite an important thing at that time—I at some point told my colleague Ed Dale that I knew how the gold pool worked. If he was ever going to write anything about the gold pool, show it to me and I would be able to tell him if it was wrong and fix it and make it right, but I wouldn't tell him how it worked.

Now, I thought I had that responsibility, not to tell that, because there was a case of legitimate secrecy, that a significant public policy could be thwarted and undermined if it became known how it worked. There are those in the press who would disagree with me, certainly. But I think there are some things. I think officials generally exaggerate the degree to which letting the people know will undermine things.

I had a marvelous experience with that when I was covering the Securities and Exchange Commission during a very reformist period in the Kennedy administration—

Clark: Was this in sixty—

Shanahan: Sixty-one, two, three—somewhere in there. Kennedy had appointed a brilliant guy named William Carey from Columbia University as the chairman of the SEC. The Carey Commission set about finishing the job that hadn't been completed in 1933 and 1934 to clean up the securities business which still had a lot of insider stuff going on that disadvantaged the ordinary investor. There was a particular rule the SEC wanted to

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impose on specialists who work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange—it was World War III between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange. Negotiations went on and on and they reached a stalemate. And I'd been covering that, spending probably a third to a half of my time covering the Securities and Exchange Commission and this attempt to put in place a whole new batch of regulations to end insider advantages.

I finally one time—it was a piecing-together job and I pieced together what the hangups were, why the Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange just couldn't reach on agreement on this, couldn't reach a compromise. And the SEC was prepared to, boop! order it! if they had to. But they'd rather have had a compromise.

So I was writing a story saying the Commission will not back down further than one, two, three and the New York Stock Exchange will not give further than four, five, six. And I remember calling the chairman of the SEC after I had this kind of all put together, saying, "Okay, I'm writing a story for the Monday paper"—it was Friday—"that's going to say this." "Oh, Eileen," he said, "you believe in what we're trying to do. I know you do. And don't write that. It will blow the whole thing out of the water."

The chairman by that time was a man named Emanuel Cohen. And I said, "Manny, they're not paying me to keep news out of the paper. I'm going to go ahead and write it." Oh, he pleaded with me. Anyway, he called me at home that evening, about eight o'clock, saying, "Did you write it?" "Yes, I did." "Oh, you're going to be sorry," you know, "you're going to ruin everything."

Well, as it turned out, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, Keith Funston, read my story on Monday morning, called Cohen and said, in effect, "If Eileen's story is right and you're just insisting on one, two, three, I think we can make a deal." And Cohen replied, "Why don't you get down here and talk?" Funston was on the nine o'clock shuttle, I think, came down. And there was another couple of weeks of hard negotiating but basically it got settled.

Obviously I love to tell the story because it's self-serving for the press. But I think that it's not uncommon for that sort of thing. That was just a real clear-cut case of where a story—that both sides thought would blow everything out of the water, that it would make the two sides harden their positions and they'd never get it settled. I was an honest broker, in effect, by just being a reporter. I wasn't trying to broker. I was trying to cover what was happening.

That's just the clearest-cut case I was ever involved in. You often hear that argument used when union negotiations were a more important part of the economic scene than they have become, with the declining importance of unions. "No, no, no, don't tell. It will blow everything out of the water." Well, my friends who had covered labor negotiations, which I hardly ever did, had the same experience and in effect they were fulfilling an honest broker function.

Clark: Was there ever an occasion that you did delay a story or double-check with someone about whether to run it?

Shanahan: You know, I do remember one.

[End Tape 1, Side B; begin Tape 2, Side A]

Clark: I had just asked you if there was a time you'd ever delayed a story.

Shanahan: I remember once in that same era, suddenly—also when I was covering the Securities and Exchange Commission, this would have been 1964. And in those days, stocks that weren't traded on an exchange, that were traded in the over-the-counter market, were subject to almost no regulation. And that was one of the things the SEC set about changing and had to propose legislation to do that—and did so.

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Somehow, the American Bankers Association—at that time, their executive director was a guy who had been in the Treasury in the Republican years, a guy named Charlie Walker, Charls Walker—with no "e". C-h-a-r-l-s. He had been in a high Treasury position under the Republicans. And then when the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration came in, he was the paid director of the American Bankers Association. He was quite a good guy.

I forget what I had heard. Bank stocks at that time were almost entirely traded over the counter so it was subject to no regulation—or almost none. I heard that they were going to oppose it, I guess, come down and testify against it. Or maybe I had heard that they changed their position. I think I heard they had opposed it.

Anyway, I called Walker. And he said, "Well, now can I tell you something off the record?" And knowing him as well as I did, and having some trust that he wouldn't have asked me to listen to something off the record, I agreed. I forget what he said exactly. But basically he said, "I locked myself in a room for three days trying to write testimony opposing the coverage of banks by this legislation. And it just wouldn't write. Banks that require everybody to disclose everything before they'll give you a loan cannot be in the position of saying, 'But we won't disclose our business publicly.'"

And he said, "But I've got to turn my board around on this one." He said, "I've already started." I think maybe I'd heard that or something. "I've already started and I think it'll only take me another few days. But can you hold the story and give me time to turn them around."

And I think I gave him an instant answer which was, "Okay. But I think anybody's who's going to write that story would undoubtedly call you, as I have. You've got to promise me that the minute you hear any other reporter sniffing around, you will call me and release me to do the story."

And he said, "Okay. That's a promise." As it turned out, nobody else caught wind of it. He called me several days later and said, "Okay. You go ahead now."

I thought that was a good bet because I knew that anybody that would do that story would have to call him. And I also knew he was an honorable guy.

I probably am a little more willing to accept the legitimacy of something like that than some other reporters. What's really terrible to me is the way that the whole atmosphere has changed so dramatically over the years in relations between the press and public officials. It's Nixon, it's Watergate.* You're a lying, no-good bastard, by definition, if you hold any kind of a government job. I don't believe that.

It dates back to—well, I didn't say Vietnam, did I? That's probably the most important. Vietnam, Watergate and Nixon personally, even apart from Watergate, are what caused that. And I think that's too bad because I don't think they're all lying sons of bitches. I've known a great many admirable people, conservatives and liberals alike, people that I really admire, people I really respected in government. And I think it is unfortunate that the idea that everybody is a liar has taken such deep root in the press corps.

We'll have to see what happens now with the Clinton administration. I think they will be pretty open to begin with. Most administrations are. Even Nixon was open to begin with. Then as they see more and more stuff in the press they don't like, the relationship tends to go downhill. I hope there will be more civility, but civility isn't the ultimate point. The question is what kind of information reaches the people. And if I'm saying to you, in effect, "Yes, I know you're a liar. You're no good. You're just in it for yourself. You're probably stealing money, too"—well, how are you going to treat me?

______________________
* Watergate, 1972-1974, a series of political scandals during the Richard M. Nixon administration involving a burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, and a cover-up of the illegal actions by Nixon.

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Clark: Yes. Well, that's a point, I guess.

Shanahan: Part of it also has to do with the enormous expansion of the press corps. Back as recently—well, recent in my life—but probably into the early and middle seventies, there were only about fifteen reporters in this town whose full-time job it was to cover the national economy. We formed a little club we called the Gross National Press Club, to set up background briefings with officials and so on. And there were a few people we left out, who complained, who worked mostly for a rather narrow, vertical trade publication that we didn't let in, only three or four. We were broad-based newspapers and news mags.

Now I have no idea how many there would be. And furthermore, something else that happened. The growth of financial wire services. And Agence France-Presse has one, or some French agency. And Reuters, of course, and Dow Jones. At the time, early in my career, there was always a Dow-Jones ticker. But it didn't have the kind of competition that it has now, to the point that people who work for these various financial wires—and I can't begin to tell you how many there are—get fired for being two or three seconds late on a statistic, one of the main statistics. And it doesn't lead to good journalism. But I don't see what will reverse it. And that troubles me a lot.

Clark: In terms of your access to sources, when you first came to report for the New York Times, for example, how did that change by virtue of being at the New York Times?

Shanahan: Oh, it changed, yes. There's no question but that most officials call the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal back fastest. And I saw that. On the Journal of Commerce, unlike the job I have now on the St. Petersburg Times—and I will get into that—my access was pretty good because I was covering a defined beat and the Journal of Commerce was one of the papers that the agencies I covered clipped every day.

Most of your federal departments have a clipsheet they send around. Some poor so-and-on has to come into work at five o'clock in the morning and read all the papers and clip and paste up on sheets all the stories dealing with that agency and related agencies' work. And then they copy it and send it out. They have copies ready, you know, for top people who get in at 7:30 in the morning and they've got one on his desk. And then later in the day, they're circulated into a broader list.

Well, the Journal of Commerce was always in the Treasury and Budget and CEA [Council of Economic Advisors] and so on clipsheet. So even though it was a small paper with small circulation, my work became known. And I had access because of that.

Today with the St. Petersburg Times, though it is widely known among journalists as one of the dozen or so finest papers in the country and richly deserves that reputation, to officials of the now-outgoing Bush administration—as we speak, I'm just another regional reporter and there are thousands of them and obtaining access is extremely difficult. I have never been able to get an interview with [Michael] Boskin, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, which kills me. It just drives me crazy.

I'm hopeful that [William J. "Bill"] Clinton is going to appoint some people who know me, which is the way to put it. It looks like he might, according to the rumor mill. It's just really very hard. I do send people copies of my stories to show that I'm careful and serious and not trying to wrap anything around anybody's neck. And I've had some success with persuading people of that. But it's hard when you're one of such a mob scene.

I don't think the Times, in my era at least, is as favored as some people think, that—oh, well, you know. You work for the Times and they just dump it all right in your lap. You don't have to do any work at all. That's not so. I'm sure it's not so today and I know it wasn't so when I was there. You do have to work hard.

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And you have to work real hard if you're inner-motivated, which I think that people who get that far usually are. You're expected to be the very best every single day of your life. And it's not possible when you're up against first-class papers like the Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Clark: Just to give us a sense, in the your early days of reporting at the Times, how far up did your sources go? Did you have sources in the White House itself?

Shanahan: Well, that's not the right question. To cover what I was covering, you didn't need a lot of White House sources. You needed to be able to get to the Secretary of the Treasury and down to the assistant secretary level. Those are the policy people, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, the director of the Bureau of the Budget, and so on. Budget, of course, is technically part of the executive office of the president in the White House. But it really feels like a separate agency.

Once you're at the New York Times, you don't have any problem getting to those people. I didn't have any problem getting to them when I was on the Journal of Commerce. I saw people like that regularly when I was at the Journal of Commerce, when the press corps was so much smaller, and was included in any background briefing groups or whatever automatically, I think as much when I was on the Journal of Commerce as I was at the Times. The crucial difference was they called a Times reporter back within a couple of hours, instead of a day or so.

Clark: You say you had a loosely formed association, the Gross National Press Club. Were there ever times that you were exempted from briefings, say, for example, that were given in the National Press Club, because you literally had no access to them?

Shanahan: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And that became quite a large fight, that the Women's Press Club undertook. The Press Building has sort of thirteen and a half floors. There's a fourteenth floor—I guess it's a full floor but only part of it is used for open things. In any event, there were rooms on that floor where they used to have small briefings and even some larger press conferences. And no woman was allowed to set foot on the fourteenth floor. And so there were times when I couldn't get in there. And there were people I appealed to not to go there, like Earl Kintner, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, whom I mentioned earlier.

Then of course, there was the long, long fight—the balcony fight, so called—to get women into the Press Club luncheons, which I think I've told you. I was not an important figure in that fight. There were other things. There were lunches occasionally at places like the Cosmos Club, where there was a women's dining room and they would have a luncheon in there. But I protested about that because women couldn't be members.

I don't remember any press conference ever being scheduled at the Metropolitan Club but the publisher used to have the bureau's Christmas party at the Metropolitan Club. The New York Times' just semi-retired publisher, Punch [Arthur Ochs] Sulzberger, who—and women could come to these evening affairs in certain parts of the club, but the club, of course, had no women members and there were all kinds of areas of the club that women couldn't set foot on.

I remember one night after one of those publisher's Christmas parties, on some upper floor of the Metropolitan Club—and there was one elevator or two, whatever it was, it was a long way for the elevator, and I thought, "What the heck, I'll walk down." And I did it in all innocence. I wasn't trying to prove a thing. But I was just tired of waiting for the elevator. And I started walking down and I set foot on some forbidden floor—three guys in white coats came up and almost carried me out. "No no no no. No no no. You mustn't come on the third floor," whatever it was. It turned out they had a few rooms for rent by the night, apparently, there and that was the floor I had inadvertently intruded upon.

And after that, I wrote Punch a nice letter saying, "I really wish you wouldn't have the party at the Metropolitan Club. It is really—even though there's no problem with my coming to whatever room it was the

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party is in, it's demeaning to know that this is a place where I am considered a person unfit to associate with at lunch time and other times." Nothing happened. He kept having the parties at the Metropolitan Club and so I stopped going. I heard later he was furious about my letter and my boycott, though he was always cordial on the rare occasions when I saw him.

Clark: Very interesting.

Shanahan: That was about the last couple of years I was there. I just didn't go.

Clark: Maybe we should stop here for lunch.

Shanahan: All right.

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