[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Shanahan: Before we get started today, I wanted to say something about my friend Isabelle Shelton of the Washington Star who died two weeks ago. And I want to say it because I hope that some researchers of the future who read or listen to this oral history will be directed towards hers, which tragically was hardly begun when she died. It only took her up to 1960. I really feel the loss for women's history.

Clark: Absolutely.

Shanahan: The reason I wanted to mention Isabelle is that she and a few like her were very important people in the history of journalism. Isabelle spent the bulk of her career at the Washington Star in the women's section. It was my great pleasure to cover a lot of the early women's movement stuff with her. But I'm talking about an earlier time. She went with the Star in the late forties, early fifties, I forget. And women's sections in those days were women's sections. They had to be all for and about women.

And Isabelle usually, like women of that era in journalism, covered president's wives, interviewed the wife of the president, the wife of the Cabinet member, the senators' wives, but she did it differently—not froth but substance. And many of these women, of course, were very bright and knew a heck of a lot. But they were relegated, almost literally, to tea parties and certain kinds of charitable work which in fact is not to be sneered at. But she reached for the opportunity to get substance into the section and found that the Star would in fact let her write about anything she wanted to for its women's pages as long as it was about a woman or women.

I remember in particular her interviews with newly arrived ambassadors' wives. Often they told me more about the politics and history and traditions of their countries than I've learned in all the years since. Even in those early days, she searched for and found and wrote about that handful of women who were really important in their own right. And she constantly extended the concept of what she was there at the Star to do—and did it and some others followed. But I think for a decade or more, she was really the only person on the paper in Washington—there were some elsewhere who were in this project, like the woman, Vivian Castleberry in Dallas who did some of the same sorts of things in quite a different setting.

But I'm struck by the fact that women like me, who were the first to cover beats like economic policy or science or sports are called and honored as "pioneers." But the truth is all I did was prove that a woman could do the job of covering economics. I didn't change the way it was done, at least not until many years later when the women's movement awakened me to the possibilities. Isabelle was a pioneer of an earlier time, of a different kind—I would argue a more significant time. For most of her career, she worked in an arena of journalism that was the exclusive province of women and she changed its agenda.

Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post is, of course, given the credit for inventing the style section which is now a standard element of newspapers across the country. But I believe that he would not—could not have thought of it if it hadn't been for the work of Isabelle and some few women of her generation who paved the way. Isabelle demonstrated just by going out and doing it what important, serious journalism could be achieved

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through the personality feature, the lengthy interview, that was usually with someone other than the person who was at the center of the news page stories.

Today when the men at the top of newspapers—and the few women who have reached that level—are trying to create a newspaper for the future that will retain what's left of our declining readership, they talk endlessly, endlessly about the need to "put a human face on the news." Isabelle was doing exactly that forty years ago. I think maybe they need, these people who lead our newspapers today, to go back and look at some bylined Isabelle Shelton stories. [Tape interruption.]

Isabelle's oral history, as far as it got, will tell them an awful lot about what a truly talented and creative and determined woman had to put up with and overcome to get jobs in journalism and keep jobs and be allowed to do good stuff, in not just the era before World War II but the era right afterwards when the men had come back and newspaper managers were saying, "Well, we have too many women already." And the way she tells that, without any self-pity or anything but facts of her own life is, I think, valuable stuff that I want to make sure people don't overlook because the interview was truncated when it was hardly begun.

Clark: Well, she is one of the people who spans both phases of this project in a way, the pioneer phase and the women who made their careers after World War II. And as we said, we'll try to locate clips and have them put on record.

Shanahan: Good. Good. [Tape interruption.]

Looking through that vast array of my clips on women's issue stories from the New York Times, I suddenly focused on how fortunate it was that the women's story I covered was the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment. That's the kind of thing the New York Times understands—structure, structure of government and democracy. They know that that is newsworthy even if it's about some weird subject, like equality for women, a congressional fight over a legal issue, again, just the standard thing that male editors consider news and did then. I think it wouldn't have been as easy for me to be able to branch out and do all the other stuff I did in that year, starting in '70 and on until the time I left by '76 or early '77 if it hadn't started with an issue they could not ignore, an amendment to the constitution is heady stuff. So they let me do it, and they let me continue as long as I was doing my important work, of course, economics.

It's a good thing, actually, that in its arrogance the New York Times at that time really didn't look at or care what other papers were doing. Today, I mean the Washington Post is really a competitor for national prestige in a lot of ways. Today they really scoop a lot more stories than the Times, routinely. If you listen to morning radio, the good-morning radio news shows on CBS, for example, the number of times it says, "The Washington Post reports today that blah, blah," versus the New York Times, there are a lot more important national stories that the Post really jumps on first, gets first, and now they watch the Post like a hawk.

But they didn't then, and it was a good thing, because if they had, they would have seen that the Post never had anybody regularly assigned to the women's movement for more than a few months at a time. And they certainly didn't look at other papers. So nobody, I think, focused on the fact that I was being a little weird in devoting all this space to a whole vast variety of things involving women.

Looking back at the clips, I'm really amazed at how many there are and how long the stories are. Partly, newspapers have changed. Newspapers run shorter stories because as more and more the population is dominated by people who grew up with television, it doesn't have tolerance for sitting still and reading,

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doesn't have tolerance for anything that doesn't have fast cuts like TV. Newspaper stories have gotten a lot shorter on the average.

But still, even given what the average length of stories was in those days, I'm amazed at how many of them are well over one column long, somewhere between a column and a half and two columns. I'm amazed in another way to realize—I know at the time I sort of kept mental track—some weeks I spent a whole week on some women's stories. But overall during that whole five or six year period, I think I spent maybe ten percent of my time on women's stuff. And you've seen for yourself how huge the volume is. They should have loved me for my productivity alone.

Clark: I wonder why they didn't.

Shanahan: Ah, trouble-maker.

I do look back at some of my stories and remember things that I had forgotten, like initially when Martha Griffiths first got the discharge petition to take the Equal Rights Amendment away from the Judiciary Committee and got it out on the floor of the House where, of course, the main opponent was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who for forty years had refused to hold hearings. Well, he wasn't chairman that whole time. And Manny [Emanuel] Celler was a guy I covered a lot, even before he was chairman of Judiciary, he was chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee back in the days when antitrust was really being enforced by the federal government. I really admired the guy. And I was surprised, at him pre-eminently, but a lot of other people whose legislative records I had otherwise admired who were just vitriolic opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Celler's case is interesting. I learned somewhere along the line while it was still a live issue that he had a daughter who had died in young adulthood. Who knows—and maybe it's not worth thinking about, really— I remember when I learned that about his daughter thinking, "Well, maybe he feels he failed to protect her in some way and thus has become this "you've got to protect women" person and this was his great objection to the Equal Rights Amendment."

Clark: It's very interesting. Where is he from?

Shanahan: New York. Brooklyn. He was a very typical New York Jewish liberal on other things. I don't actually remember him on race and whether he was good on race or not. A lot of people of that era were great advocates for racial equality until blacks came a certain distance and started to say, "Get of my way, white man. I'm going to determine my own fate. No, I don't want to be just like you."

Abe Rosenthal was like that. He was a good theoretical fan for racial equality until blacks said, "You're not going to run this. We're going to run it." And he became very bad on the subject, Abe did. And Cellar may or may not have been like that. I don't know. I don't remember. But I certainly saw that about race in a lot of people. But Cellar was kind of an interesting case.

It was really great to be on the New York Times at that time, I realize, because what I did had such wide impact. Much more so than today, the Times stood alone as the respected newspaper. Not that there weren't other fine newspapers including the Washington Post. And the Wall Street Journal had become what it is to this day, which is much more than a business newspaper. They have great impact. The L.A. Times was on its way to becoming an enormously influential paper.

But the Times in a sense really kind of stood alone in the public mind, whether that was fair or not, so that if something was in the New York Times it was considered serious and important. I think one of the people who made me most aware of that was an economist named Carolyn Shaw Bell who taught at Wellesley, who had not originally done research on women but started doing it—women in the economy—early in the

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women's movement. She was the one who in various testimony just demolished the knee-jerk reaction of a lot of powerful men that women were working out of choice, you know, just for pin money or just because they wanted to get out of the house, and did the research that showed that as of somewhere in the early to middle seventies, seventy percent of the women in the workforce were either single or, in any event, had no husband present or else their wages were necessary to bring the family income above the poverty level. Very important research that she did.

She was also my great academic ally as I tried, ultimately successfully, which I think I talked about last time, to push the Labor Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, into not just having unemployment data on men, women and married men, as if only married men could be responsible for the economy well-being of an entire household. She kept up a steady drumfire from her corner. And the first time I wrote about her was in that connection, not the later research about how many women were working out of pure need.

She told me that it was her proud boast that she had sent a larger percentage of her students off to earn their Ph.D.'s than any professor of any gender in any college, single sex or both. And that she just remained totally unknown, in her little circle of professors and so on until that piece about that research and all of a sudden her phone was ringing and the world was aware that there was this woman named Carolyn Shaw Bell at Wellesley.

She paid me back in spades. She ultimately got me invited to an international women's conference in Berlin on Women in the Economy which I went to with great pleasure. She suggested that I be invited.

Clark: When was that?

Shanahan: I was in Pittsburgh by then. Probably '82, '83. That's when I learned how backward the Germans still were on this subject. It was a four-nation conference—U.S., U.K., Sweden and Germany. I met a dynamite woman Labor representative in Parliament who the last I knew was still there and some other people. It was a great four or five days.

I had a few other women's stories that I wanted to talk about, having looked at all of them now, maybe because I'm proud of them, maybe because some were breakthrough stories. One of the early ones, in July of '91 [sic], right in the same week as the founding of the Women's Political Caucus—which I believe I did talk about last time. Did I?

Clark: Yes, July '71, you mean.

Shanahan: Yes, which was the story about all of a sudden how the EEOC, which was then very active, was looking into not just discrimination against individual women but patterns that existed under a very interesting man named William Brown who had been a Rockefeller appointee in New York and whom Nixon appointed to head the EEOC and I guess maybe Rockefeller told him he was a good guy. He had no idea how good a guy. He really ran a great EEOC and subsequently was asked to leave. But he put in about three, possibly four years doing very good stuff. They did the AT&T suit, the Sears suit—which didn't turn out well—should have. That's a terrible miscarriage of justice that Sears didn't get nailed on that one. But he did a lot of great stuff. And in particular this story, July 13, 1971.

Somebody I met—I'll bet you covering the ERA, though I don't know who it would have been—must have told me that this was going on at the EEOC, that they were just dealing with a lot of cases that were going to throw out a lot of state laws and bring them to the attention of the federal courts, which would be the thrower-outers of the state laws. Well, my lead on that story was that federal courts across the nation have unloosed a stream of decisions in recent months that appear to be on their way toward wiping out all state laws that prohibit women from working in certain kinds of job, limit their hours of work and decrease their opportunities for promotion. Little things like some states that wouldn't permit a woman in any job where she

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could lift more than fifteen pounds, or less than a six-month-old average baby weighs, and so on, and you carry those around all the time because they can't walk yet.

The EEOC was in fact a very yeasty place at that time, with a whole lot of young people who came to work in sandals and jeans, which was not really acceptable in the government and other agencies at that time—never, really. It's the only time I think I've ever seen fairly high-ranking lawyers in sandals and jeans in a government office. And I was very proud of that story because nobody else had ever done it. Nobody knew until I wrote about it, outside of obviously certain specialized legal circles, that there was in fact this great wave of cases that was going to attack the protective legislation. And of course, it was always the protective legislation that was said to be the reason many of the opponents of the ERA opposed it, that adopting the ERA would leave women without protections from exploitive employers and heartless husbands. As I say, somebody must have told me about it but I was in the right place at the right time to be told and then to go do something about it.

Clark: What do you think the impact of a story like that was then on you, in terms of how you thought about reporting on the women's movement?

Shanahan: I think your question is very sound because I think that may have been one of the first stories that made me recognize there was a whole world of stuff to be done out there, that it wasn't just the ERA and narrowly defined political stuff which is what the Women's Political Caucus was after—getting women elected to and appointed to political office. And I think that was the beginning of my recognition that there was a whole world of other areas to be gotten into.

And in particular, since so much of the discrimination against women was in the economic area, it was kind of a happy accident that I, as the first at the New York Times covering the women's movement, had credentials and sources and the trust of my employers on an economic story, so that I was allowed to do those stories, just without any question. And even, I think, something like that first EEO thing was seen—this was economics, this was job barriers, and therefore it wasn't such a weird and crazy thing for me to be doing.

I remember in particular, too, a whole series that Congresswoman Martha Griffiths ran as the head of a subcommittee of the Joint Economic Committee. Did I talk about this before?

Clark: Not in depth, no.

Shanahan: On the status of women in the economy, that happened to run during one of the major periods of development of the process for getting Nixon out of office. And I covered them for a week—they ran a week—which was the first week of the Senate Committee Hearings on Watergate. So my piece on Griffiths' hearings didn't run anywhere near page one. But they were in the paper. After that first week of the Ervin Committee hearings on Nixon since I knew I was not going to get any economics story, women or otherwise, in the paper during those hearings, I volunteered to do something else.

The New York Times was running enormous excerpts from the Ervin committee hearings. And there was a guy in the office who'd been assigned, I guess, the first week to do the excerpting. That is a brutally difficult job. He was complaining about what a rotten job it was and he didn't want to do it. And I said, "Hey, I'll do it. I'll do it." Partly because I knew I wouldn't get anything else in the paper, anyway, but mostly because I knew that whatever we boiled that hearing transcript down to, there'd be at least a hundred thousand people who would read every word of it, who wanted more than [what] was in the news stories and in the few minutes on television and so on. And a lot of people would see it who'd never read the full transcript which is just more than almost anybody can read.

So I did it and enjoyed it. It was very tough. In the morning you could make notes as to about where in the time certain key things you wanted to excerpt were. And then when the transcript of the morning's issue arrived—

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about one o'clock or so or a little later—you could pretty well zip through that. But while you were doing that and actually doing the marking up and maybe writing in any transitions you had to, you had to be listening to the afternoon session, which you then had to bust your buns to get into the paper on time. It was hard work but I loved it. I got a publisher's award for that job which I think was rather good of them to recognize that that was a really valuable thing that I did for the paper and that it was hard as hell.

But the Martha Griffiths hearings on women in the workforce—women in the economy is a three-volume set of hearings—really wrapped up a tremendous lot. I've got one story here. Those little black dots that you run to itemize items—it's about a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven—eleven-bullet—they're called bullets—story that—this is a Sunday summary piece from the Sunday news and opinion section. They don't call it opinion on the New York Times—news of the week in review or review of the week—just some of the things that hearing uncovered, the injustice of the Social Security system at that time to married women who'd paid taxes all their lives and then they only got a wife's benefit, nothing they'd earned themselves, which was a fraction of the husband's benefit. That was changed sometime later—not too much later.

The women's movement really achieved a lot more than it was ever given credit for. A lot of things you can say, well, it would have happened anyway, you know, with more contraception, people didn't raise eight children any more, and with a lot of the mechanical things that had made housework less burdensome and time-consuming so women could go into the workforce and still run a household under the old rules—which meant Pop sat down in the living room and read the paper while you got dinner after a hard day's work, as hard as his.

Clark: And during the day you wrote the paper. [Laughter.]

Shanahan: Right. I didn't mean John, my husband, in particular, just anybody's husband. That's the way it was. We didn't expect it to be any different. But I think it is also true, though, that a lot of the change wasn't just things that would have evolved anyway, without the women's movement, which had shone a spotlight. The tiny number of women in places like Congress did things and brought it to the fore.

Here's some of the stuff, okay. The Social Security discrimination, that was fixed. Only forty-eight percent of the back pay that's been found to be owed to women because of violations of the Equal Pay Act had ever been paid. The discrimination in the insurance industry. Women live longer but they don't allow for that, fully, and that's still something of a problem. The whole issue of women getting credit and how the discrimination in terms of what's your husband's income and single women not being able to buy.

When my daughter Kate got out of Harvard Law School, no less, in 1975 and was setting up her own apartment, Sears would not give her credit to buy a sofa. She had to buy it on my account and pay me back. And that was '75 when she got out of law school.

Auto insurers often refuse to sell collision insurance to divorced women, not because they have higher accident rates—they don't—but because the companies believe without any factual evidence that juries will vote against divorcées in accident cases. It's still true today that the armed forces require women recruits to be better educated than men. That's partly because they can get away with it because, oddly enough, a lot more women than they need are trying to get in. The tax law discrimination against the working couple, that was subsequently pretty much fixed, even over-fixed in one instance. Unemployment compensation could be paid to pregnant women in most states even if they are laid off for reasons unrelated to pregnancy. And on and on, and all sorts of stuff.

Those were wonderful hearings and I used them in a variety of ways for a long time. I've still got the three volumes.

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I want to tell you about John Kenneth Galbraith, instant feminist. I had forgotten about this. This was the 1971 meeting of the American Economics Association at which he was the incoming president, Christmas week as most of those academic meetings are. Somehow the women in that organization had reached a critical mass and the time was ripe and they came down there to New Orleans with blood in their eyes to change things, including the whole academic hiring system of old-boy networking instead of open lists of job vacancies and job applicants and just the whole business.

And Galbraith had—I don't know how many women economists were there that I knew but a large percentage of them—not so large, I guess, among the young job seekers. But anyway, I knew a lot of them and they were telling me about how their negotiations were going with Galbraith who initially just sort of gave them the back of his hand. And all of a sudden there was a breakthrough. I think it was just that Galbraith was smart enough to realize that he was going to have a fight on his hands, maybe that it would hurt his reputation, or maybe—I give the guy credit, I always liked him—that his eyes had been opened, that he hadn't really realized just how bad academic discrimination was. Economics wasn't any worse than any other field, actually. They all used more or less the same systems.

Well, there were all-night negotiating sessions and non-negotiable demands and all the rest of it. Sixties activism and its spill-over had a lot to do with that, too. In any event, my story at the end and then there was just—he pushed the thing through with what another male economist who was in favor of it described as the greatest exercise in Russian democracy that he had seen outside of the Kremlin. He just barreled it through and called votes over before they were over and all sorts of undemocratic things. And Galbraith pledged to be a strong moral barrier against sex discrimination and said that the hiring system that they used—he called it immoral at some point and committed himself to work for an open listing of all employment opportunities. And that did indeed come to pass. And in many other fields. Galbraith explained that in the economics profession, many jobs were offered and accepted with most members of the profession not even knowing they were available. This was the procedure that Professor Galbraith described as immoral.

So that was kind of fun. I mean, to see those things and to see what a critical mass of women would accomplish—and I don't mean it was hundreds. It was probably somewhere between maybe a dozen and fifteen or eighteen who just went in and said, "Up with this we will not put any longer," and boom, like that. Sometimes it was that easy. Not too often.

Nineteen seventy-four, in terms of political coverage, was a nice breakthrough for me. It wasn't the first time that I was sent up to New York on election night but it was the first time I was assigned to write a piece on the successes and failures of women running for elective office. And there was a national editor of the New York Times named Dave Jones who I know a couple of bad things about but everybody tells me I'm wrong. He was considered a great feminist, as a matter of fact, and he was the one who seeing my schedule line on this story that night went and told the powers that be, "We need to change the front page makeup and get Eileen's story out front. It's the story—unexpected and it's real news." It had to do with the gains women had made in that election.

Clark: Let's read the headline to that.

Shanahan: "Women Score Significant Gains at All Levels of Government." And the lead is "The voters have elected the first woman mayor of a city of more than half a million population." I forget whether that was San Jose or what that was. "The first woman governor to be chosen in her right." That was Ella Grasso in Connecticut. "The first woman chief justice of a state supreme court." That was North Carolina. And seventeen or eighteen women members of the House of Representatives. There was one still in doubt when we went to press. That was not a record, though. There's been a record of twenty back in the sixties somewhere.

Then, sob, the next paragraph says, "Tuesday's election also appears to have improved the prospects for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment because of the replacement of opponents with supporters."

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And of course, that did not come to pass. I specifically mentioned Arizona, Florida and Illinois, none of which ever did ratify. Of course, Illinois had a three-fifths rule. They had a majority right from the beginning but they wound up as an unratified state. But that shows something, too, that that story—there were some gains in '72 also but nobody invited me to write a story about it, back then, just two years earlier.

Of course, what happened to me in 1976 on election night was that I was not even on the team sent to New York because Abe Rosenthal was punishing me for the suit. And it was first time since 1944, when I was just a raw rookie, when I hadn't worked on election night. I knew that was the reason.

I had one other clip I pulled out of the stack. There's all sorts of things. I think I said last time that I'm so thrilled to realize that the microfilm is there and the index is there because there's so much stuff of mine about detail of the women's movement, legal, economic and so on, that when I read that list of things I realize, one, the world really has changed for the better—not enough but it has changed—and that the ongoing reporting there is going to be of real value to some researcher someday, that set of clips. So I'm real happy that the Times—and also glad it's going to be in this file, too.

Clark: Bound together, yes.

Shanahan: I had one other thing here, one of the most demeaning things that ever happened to me in my entire life. In 1975, there was convened a conference on women in the era of the American Revolution. And somebody told me about it and I went over and talked to the woman at George Washington University in Washington and was putting it together, who gave me access to all the papers that were going to be read at the conference and I interviewed her, of course, and so on.

Now, any halfway decent feminist knows all this stuff now but people didn't at the time, that the degree to which women, especially widows, were businesswomen in the period of the Revolution, who kept up the husband's business after the husband died. Betsy Ross was a successful widow in the upholstery business and made flags mostly for military units, as kind of a profitable sideline. And as for the story about George Washington coming to her and asking her to design a flag—there's no basis for it. But she may well have run up a flag on spec to see if she could get them to take it up.

All sorts of things, like Molly Pitcher. There were hundreds of Molly Pitchers who ran water to their men, not to slake their thirst but to cool the guns, which was needed after every shot that those big guns fired. And all sorts of things. A woman who had taken over her husband's plaster business when he died, and supplied some of the ornamental plaster work for Mount Vernon. I thought it was a wonderful story. I had some terrific art that I had gotten for it. Ordinarily reporters don't try to get the art. But I knew where it was and what we were looking for. And it was scheduled to run on page one on a Sunday.

And something happened that somebody—I don't remember who—came up with a story about the latest in the sex revolution, which was that guys on the prowl were painting panel trucks which had no visible windows in the back with all sorts of artistic looking things so that they were quite private and luring young ladies into them for the sole purpose of sex. I suppose some of them didn't have to be lured. But in any event, they were known colloquially—though of course the New York Times would never print such a term—as "fuck trucks."

Well, they bounced my story about women in the American revolution off of page one to put that piece of trash on page one. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been in the paper. It was a nice little sociological story. But I guess I'm still mad, although, since it was in the New York Times, some people saw my story, too.

That's really kind of the end of my little reprise on marching through the clips, unless you want to ask me something.

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Clark: Well, in terms of the clips, I think we've probably covered it, though we could take three and four and five and six runs and we'll just invite people to read through them.

I was thinking about how your own consciousness and your own involvement—preparing for your involvement in the lawsuit, joining up in the lawsuit at the time must have been evolving. I think I was remembering an editorial that the Times had written about Sarah McClendon and your response to it. Could you tell that story? That was in '73, right?

Shanahan: Yes. I don't remember the year but I remember the episode very well. Sarah McClendon, who in fact sometimes asked questions that seemed a little strange but very often asked questions nobody else asked that deserved to be asked.

Clark: We should say for the sake of history who she was.

Shanahan: Sarah McClendon, yes. She was in fact the Washington correspondent for a number of papers over the years. I think her longest affiliation was with the El Paso, Texas paper. I don't know who she worked for at the time of this question. She seemed to have a little trouble holding on to her clients for whatever reason. Anyway, she was a Washington correspondent—well, she was there when I was a young woman in my early twenties and she's still around and still goes to press conferences and asks questions and so on. She must be way up in her eighties. She might even be ninety.

She was a burr in the side of a lot of presidents. John Kennedy was quoted as saying that he couldn't resist calling on Sarah. He always went into a press conference saying, "No, I'm not going to call on her." And then it just became too interesting to find out what she had in mind to ask because she always had a question.

In any event, on this particular question which was Nixon administration, she asked Nixon about what she alleged was just a terrible screw-up in the Veterans Administration where widows weren't getting their checks and veterans weren't getting their disability checks for months on end. The damn place just wasn't functioning, basically. And Nixon just cut her off at the knees—this is absolutely untrue, sort of was his answer. There's no such thing happening.

Well, the New York Times wrote an editorial about how disgraceful it was that this woman was allowed to stand up and ask silly questions. But within about three weeks it came out that everything she had charged was true and Nixon fired the head of the Veterans Administration. Boing! But I was so incensed at their treatment of her that I called the editor of the editorial page, John Oakes at that time who was a very good man, and I said, "This is outrageous. Can I write a letter to the editor?" And I knew staff was never allowed to do that. And I said, "I can sign it Eileen S. Waits, if you like, and tell you why I think it's outrageous." Well, he said, "Sure. Go ahead."

So I wrote the letter. I talked to Sarah and I asked her what were some of the questions she had been proudest of and she mentioned one when [Dwight D.] Eisenhower sent the troops to Lebanon and she was met with the usual guffaws and giggles from the mostly male press corps when she asked him under what constitutional right he had done this without congressional approval. Seventy-three, of course, was in the middle—or near the end, as it turned out—of the Vietnam War. And that question didn't look very silly in 1973, a point I duly made in the letter.

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Well, when it was done, I guess I called John Oakes—maybe I sent it up on the wire, I forget—and anyway, he read it. And he said, "I'm going to have you sign your real name to that." It was the only time until then and maybe the only time until yet that they ever printed a letter from a member of the staff.

Clark: That's what I thought, yes.

Shanahan: My final sentence was something like, "A man who had asked the same questions would not be criticized by the New York Times."

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

Shanahan: It was the next to the last sentence in which I said that Mrs. McClendon is reviled, I think, not because of her questions but because so many people find a strong-minded woman inherently offensive—or words to that effect. Sarah, if I encounter her at a party or something, will still tell people that I wrote that letter. Just fairly recently, she and some young woman—very young, like she was barely out of her middle twenties, who's kind of her secretary and also helps her around, she can hardly walk—she introduced me with that story.

Yet John Oakes had—I don't know the date of that letter but John Oakes had gone through a conversion on the Equal Rights Amendment. He had opposed it and the paper had opposed it for quite some time. And his daughter, Andrea, who's a lawyer, was the one who finally—I think it was the drop of water treatment she administered to him. She just kept at him and kept at him and kept at him—and he wouldn't admit this—until she finally convinced him that the Equal Rights Amendment was a desirable thing.

And he either wrote or had written—obviously an institution like the Times and like the Supreme Court, doesn't go from no to yes without explaining itself. So an editorial was finally written—my guess would be maybe '75—in which he said—it would be worth looking it up—which said, in effect—I'm not sure it said we were wrong. Maybe it said the world has changed. But in any event, they now supported the Equal Rights Amendment. That seemed more important at the time than events have proved it to be because after all, the amendment did not get ratified.

Oakes, of course, was otherwise very much a liberal on all subjects, a great deal more than the New York Times has been since he retired—although I don't know what's happening with the new editorial page editor and neither does anybody else, except that the language has gotten much more obstreperous. It's sort of the death of the old tradition that I knew of under Turner Catledge, who was the first executive editor I worked under and for whom I have enormous respect, who one time when I wrote a major piece about the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had been one of these elite corps, whatever, in the administration, about how these were good people, worked hard, honestly, and did things—enforced the laws they were supposed to enforce and so on. But under Nixon's first appointee who was a nothing guy from his freshman class in the House who had been defeated—you get a lot of bad administrators that way—the place was falling apart.

And I did a two-part series about the Securities and Exchange Commission under this guy whose name was Budge. Good career lawyers commonly said, "Judge [Hamer] Budge is full of sludge." He was just kind of a nothing. He wasn't a bad guy. But the place was falling apart. And I wrote a two-part series essentially saying that, without many quotes in it because people didn't want to be quoted, either the business people who had to come before the commission or the insiders certainly.

But Turner Catledge insisted—in a way that convinced me, I was never angry at him about it—that some of it be toned down. And the reason he said was—I'll never forget—"The New York Times has great power. We must use it with restraint." He was a man I have quite unequivocally admired.

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Lots of little things I admired about him. The fact that when the Pulitzer prizes came out, he never led with the journalistic prize, whether the Times had won one or not, but with something he considered more lasting, like fiction or biography or whatever, and would not print anything about a prize anybody on the Times had won by a sponsored organization—that is, the Firemen's Association award for the Best Reporting on Fires. There are a zillion awards like that and they are not all corrupt. Very often they, in fact, are judged by an independent committee. But Turner said, "No, no point to that." Other awards, yes. I mean, our Pulitzer's always worth a story, but not the lead.

Other papers—I regret to say including the Washington Post—on award stories will highlight the Post reporters who got an honorable mention before they'll tell you who won, and things like that. And a lot of newspapers do. The Post unhappily is very standard in that. Not under Turner Catledge. Of course, I could talk forever about Turner.

My favorite story had to do with the guy who just died, Jack Gould, who was the TV critic, a wonderful guy—a wonderful critic. And there was a guy at the New York Times named Lester Markel who was the Sunday section editor and who was both famous and infamous, notorious. He was a genius. He was a tough, nasty genius. He created those Sunday sections and all honor to him for that. But, oh, was he impossible to work for and brutal toward people and so on.

Anyway, in the fairly early days of television—not super-early because after all, I hadn't come there until the sixties, though not the very beginning, '63—ten years later than that, probably. Channel 13 in New York, the public channel, Markel talked his way into having a program of discussion of public events. It was probably earlier than that because things like Washington Week in Review didn't exist yet.

So in due course, the program went on the air and Jack Gould listened to it and wrote a review. And the review basically said Mr. Markel has a germ of a really good idea here but the program won't be as good as it should be until Mr. Markel learns that he's not supposed to hog the mike.

So he turns it in and the night editor in the bullpen—that's the person who was the top decision-maker on the premises at 11:30 at night or whenever Gould's copy came in—looked at it and turned pale because everybody knew how vengeful Markel was. And so he called Catledge at home. And he said to Catledge, "Jack Gould has written a terrible review about Mr. Markel's debut on Channel 13." And Turner said, "Well, why are you calling me?" And the night editor said, "Well, I didn't want to take the responsibility for running it." And Catledge said, "How would you like to take the responsibility for not running it?" and slammed the phone down. Great man!

Clark: Fabulous. How did that change under Rosenthal, this notion of power and restraint?

Shanahan: Well, I wouldn't say it totally disappeared. I wouldn't have ever expected Abe Rosenthal to enunciate that. I think as a practical matter, there was certainly a sense that we had a duty that went beyond that of just any old newspaper to get it right. And though many the reservations are that I have about Abe Rosenthal, I don't think that changed. There were things that changed. People in New York know more about this than I do and it may be a question—is Betsy's [Wade] interview finished yet, do you know?

Clark: She hasn't finished with them yet, no. We're not finished.

Shanahan: Well, you might pass it on as a question which I think is an interesting one, to Betsy who would know a great deal more than I would. There were always a lot of stories about favorites. It wasn't exactly that Rosenthal had what in our business was known as a "shitlist," people whose names couldn't be mentioned in the paper or there was another name—I forget what it was—for the favored ones who got mentioned often. But you heard a lot of stories like that about Judge Kaufman and other people under Rosenthal. And I can't really

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personally speak to that because they were not political favorites. They were not Washington favorites. So that level of interference did not certainly exist in Washington with respect to the Washington report.

But I think Turner's concept probably didn't exist any more but that the content of the paper wasn't changed as a result. Turner could put it that way and Abe never would have. But still, after all, the idea that you've got to get it right is a pretty good restraining—not just right but fair, balanced. I think that's—the Times is still a great newspaper.

Clark: I'm interested, though, in your particular viewpoints on Rosenthal because he became so important during the period of the lawsuit.

Shanahan: Well, Rosenthal used to love me once upon a time.

Clark: Really?

Shanahan: Oh, Lord, yes. I have one letter from him that says, "Let's incorporate this mutual admiration society." And it really wasn't until the lawsuit that he turned against me. There was an occasion—I don't remember whether I told you this or not—after he became—I'm not sure it was managing editor. This quote is absolutely wrong in that awful book by what's his name, Goulding?

Clark: Gould. No.

Shanahan: Goulding, I think.

Clark: Goulding.

Shanahan: Whatever his name was.

Clark: We'll correct it. Joseph C. Goulden, I think, [author of Fit to Print: A. M. Rosenthal and His Times].

Shanahan: Yes, something like that. It's just full of errors. I mean, the common judgment on that book is that he had kind of the basic thing right and every detail wrong.

Clark: Almost every one.

Shanahan: Right. And in my case, I told him this story and he utterly screwed it up. Here's the correct version. At some point after Abe became managing editor, I was coming up to New York for some purpose or another. And Abe heard about it and he asked me could I come up the night before and have dinner with him. Well, wonderful! So we had dinner at Sardi's. And what he wanted to ask me, since he'd become managing editor over the whole paper where he'd been Metro editor, just over Metro, was he wanted my help in improving the financial section which was a disgrace to the New York Times. It was nowhere close to what the New York Times ought to be.

And sitting there at Sardi's, he said to me, "Eileen, tell me what you would do with the financial section if you were the managing editor. Please note I did not say if you were God." [Laughter.] It's a wonderful way to put it that there's not unlimited power here. And indeed, we sat there—and we had started out with a dinner at some reasonable hour—morning newspaper people start dinner maybe quarter of eight or something like that. And we closed the place down at 2 a.m. because he wanted to hear what I had to say, chapter and verse, about what the financial section ought to cover and who were the good reporters and who were the ones—I told him very early in the conversation that there were some who were on the take, money, gifts of stock, expensive presents from those they were covering. And he wanted to know. I told him.

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And it didn't take him too long to get rid of all of them—all but one, maybe. And I had good reason to think they were on the take, from sources.

Clark: Wow!

Shanahan: Oh, yes. It's a very corrupt world, financial news has been, maybe still is.

Clark: Can you just say a little bit more about—

Shanahan: I recall right after I first went with the Times and one of my first assignments—which I had for ten years, it probably took up maybe a third of my time, on the average for ten years—was to cover the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in late '62 when I came to the Times, the new Kennedy-appointed Commission, then a year old, just about, was coming to the end of a major, major, major study of the securities industry, which in fact there were a lot of problems that didn't get solved or had been loopholed from the original New Deal legislation. And there was a lot of stuff that if it wasn't quite criminal, wasn't far away, going on and no adequate laws, the laws had to be changed to get at some of it.

In any event, when I came to the Times, my original assignments included the coverage of the SEC which the Kennedy administration commission was just on its way to some major reforms that were going to not just hit the fringes like the over-the-counter markets which were much fringier then than they are now, but strike at the heart of the New York Stock Exchange and some things that up till then were legal but were just not the way you should run an honest stock market.

In any event, the top PR guy at the New York stock exchange—I probably met him over the phone or maybe even in person, I forget. But anyway, within a few weeks of the time I showed up in Washington covering the SEC, he called me up and he was coming to Washington next week and would I have lunch with him. Sure!

So he takes me to what was then the most expensive restaurant in Washington, a very fine French restaurant. I probably should have said right then and there I didn't want to go there. And it's, you know, have a drink, have another drink—I forget, I might have had one. Then, have some soup, don't you want this, trying to get me to order the most expensive thing on the menu and trying to get me, you know, to have a dessert, whatever. I don't like that much at lunch. But I also was aware that I was not going to let him buy me a hugely expensive lunch and in fact, had decided in advance that I would not do so.

I had done this before, even while I was at the Journal of Commerce, I found out that they liked to buy you things. So I was always very careful to make sure I had a twenty, a ten, and some singles so that I could memorize the prices for what I had ordered off the menu and when the check came I could lay down exactly the amount of money that was my bill plus the tip—no tax in those days. Oh, he tried to get me to eat much more than I wanted to eat. And finally the bill came and I fished out my—oh, twelve dollars or something, in those days—that's a long time ago, 1963 probably—and put it down on the table. "Oh, no, no, Eileen, I'm going to take you to lunch." "No, you're not, sorry." And back and forth we went. And he kept trying to hand it to me and I'd put it right back on the table. And finally I said to him, "You don't have to pick it up. But I'm not going to pick it up. It'll sit there and that waiter's going to think he died and went to heaven. The whole thing will be a tip."

Well, he must have called New York to say, "Watch out for this woman, she's big trouble," on the basis of that because I heard from—I already had made some friendships on the staff, one of whom just died a couple of years ago, with the wonderful byline of Vartanig G. Vartan, a wonderful guy, Tahnny was. And he was covering sort of the politics of Wall Street, not the regulatory stuff but the factions and what they were fighting about and so forth. Tahnny called me and said—I think this PR guy was named Rud Lawrence. I don't know what his right name was but he was called Rud. And Tahnny called me by three o'clock—I mean,

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Lawrence couldn't have gotten back to New York yet—and said, "What did you do to Rud Lawrence?" "I didn't do anything. I insisted on paying for my own lunch." He said, "The word's out all over the street that there's this radical woman who's covering the SEC for the New York Times who's just going to be difficult."

That was a wonderful relationship with Tahnny. We had the greatest time. We scooped the Wall Street Journal right and left because we didn't care who wrote the story or who got the credit. He was covering it as the reform document came out. I've got to get back to that reform document. [Tape interruption.]

Shanahan: I was covering the SEC in Washington and he was covering—not the day-to-day trading thing but it was how they were responding to the SEC's pressure for reform. And each of us would pick up tips or even sometimes be told something that we weren't allowed to use. So we'd tell the other one. And they'd be able to follow it up. And we didn't care who got the byline. And we ran rings around the Wall Street Journal because we cooperated and weren't vain about who got the credit and who got the byline. We had a ball! And the Times financial section had never really run rings around anybody before that. It's much better now.

There's another story about Rud Lawrence that's really worse. When this mega-investigation of how the stocks are traded and how we ought to tighten up regulation of the whole business, how stocks are issued and traded—the whole bit was known as the Special Study of Securities Markets. It came out in three sections, the first of which was in April of '63. It was one of the finest studies on any subject I have ever seen. It was just so capable, run by a workaholic maniac and staff, mostly by young lawyers about five, six years out of law school. All of them were brilliant. It was a magnificent job.

Anyway, the day the first section came out—God, I remember it yet. Somebody knew what they were doing, probably their PR guy, who was fabulous. You need that little, couple-of-word quote for a lead. And the couple-of-word quote in the letter of transmittal—it was technically a report to Congress from the chairman of the SEC, William L. Carey, to whoever the relevant committee chairmen were in Congress—said that they had found "grave abuses," but "no broad pattern of fraud." Well, that lead wrote itself.

Well, this guy Rud Lawrence had some spy in the New York Times financial section who apparently called him up and read him my lead—or he requested that that be done and did so—and got it. And the next thing I know, Rud Lawrence is on the phone to Tom Mullaney who was then the financial editor, saying, "You know, your people in Washington have got to be very clear that this criticism isn't of the New York Stock Exchange, it's of the over-the-counter markets." Well, to be sure, a big chunk of that report was about the over-the-counter markets but this conclusion covered the New York Stock Exchange.

So Mullaney, who was a kind of a gentle spirit, called me up and said, "Well, I gather from Rud Lawrence that this isn't about the New York Stock Exchange and your lead makes it look like it's everybody." And I said, "Yes, it is. You want me to read it to you?" There weren't fax machines in those days or I would have faxed the page to him. But that's an example of the kind of pressure that they tried to exert. And a few people in business still try to do that—not nearly as many as did at that time.

I'll leap ahead to something, the two-word characterization that makes a lead. I suddenly remembered, when I was working for Joe Califano when he was secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, now Health and Human Services, and I was his assistant secretary for public affairs. Very early on, we hadn't been there two or three weeks when some scurrilous person submitted some information—false—to the Senate Finance Committee that alleged that the undersecretary, Hale Champion, had been involved in some chicanery about stopping an investigation. Well, it was outrageous because—yes, Champion had intervened to say, "Get cracking, let's get this done." He was goading the—I think it was the Ways and Means Committee to get this investigation underway. I forget what it was, Medicare or something, maybe.

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So the story gets leaked and printed. And I've been in the office maybe two or three weeks and we all have. And I just was sitting there responsively taking phone calls from reporters who called in to say, you know, "What are you saying about this charge against Undersecretary Champion?" And I was answering it with detail and stuff. But it was unmanageable. It was just a firestorm. I guess it must have been a Friday because I came in the next day—Califano always worked about two-thirds of a day on Saturday so you had to, too. And he called me right away and said, "Come up here."

So I went to his office and he said—he was smarter than I was about PR, and everything else—"We've just got to answer this charge. Just sitting back and being responsive isn't enough. And here, I've written something." Well, he was and is a very good writer. I read what he had written and it was just fine except it lacked that—so I told him that. I said, "Joe, this is wonderful. We just need a two-word characterization or a phrase that characterizes how wrong and outrageous this is that every reporter will use as their 'lead.'" And he said, "Shanahan, I'll give you a two-word characterization: fucking outrage."

Clark: Wow.

Shanahan: Well, I didn't know him at the time, I was a little startled. Not that I had failed to ever utter that word. I certainly had uttered it many times.

Anyway, I sat down. He was eager to get it out and he was right because of early Sunday paper deadlines. And I remember sitting at his secretary's typewriter and thinking, you know, "What can I do here?" And I finally thought of it. It's funny how your mind works. It's one of the few times that I know how I arrived at a decision about a word or a phrase. I was sitting there saying to myself that, you know, they've got it ass-backwards. Now, what's a clean way to say "ass-backwards"? And I came up with "turns the truth on its head." And sure enough, that was the lead in all the stories and it got good play. The Post put it on page one. I forget about the Times but it was a Washington story. The Post was more important. But that two-word characterization, it just came to me.

I had a lot of fun covering the Securities and Exchange Commission. I probably stayed with it longer than I should have because ultimately I asked to be taken off in about '72 or '73 because I came to recognize that mostly it was an argument over which fat cat got fatter, and I didn't care. The real hard-core corruption and fraudulent stock sold to widows and orphans and so on, while it hadn't totally vanished, it was no longer a pervasive problem.

Ralph Nader was one of the people who told me I was wasting my time covering the SEC. Yes, I knew him early on, back in the days when he was struggling to almost literally stay alive. Mr. Sulzberger [publisher of the Times] and I bought him many a lunch. He could pack away a free lunch, too, from soup to nuts. He lives on the press to some degree and I'm pleased to report I was one of the people whose expense account bought him many a lunch back when Unsafe at Any Speed was just coming out. And I really got to understand a lot about the way he saw the world, his insights, some of which were quite different—at least deeper—than the way I had thought about things. Some I rejected, but the ones I accepted became a part of the way I thought about things. I'll give you one example. I asked Nader once—this was in an interview—why, given his dislike for business—it really verged on hatred—why he wasn't a socialist. And he said because a socialist system puts the economic power and the political power in the same hands and thus makes it almost impossible to topple. I wished my father—a socialist all his days—were still alive so I could have taken Nader's answer to him and heard his response.

And that, of course, is one of the things that is most wonderful about being a reporter—various people have said we get to write the first draft of history or we have a front row seat at history, which is a configuration I prefer. It's the people you get to really know and have some sense of "Yes, I do know what this person is really like," and you get to share their thinking and their ideas. And that was true of the people in the women's movement, very much so.

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Gloria Steinem who, I think because she's so pretty, people thought she was some kind of an airhead. I don't know how anybody could spend five minutes with her and think she was an airhead. She's brilliant and she thinks all the time, and she still does. I don't know how many of my ideas, not just about women's role in society and the economy and so on, come from her and others whom I knew in those early days of the movement in the seventies. They're so much a part of me now, I don't know where they came from. But a lot of them came from her. Sometimes I remember that it was her. Like talking about electing women to office, one time she said, "What does it matter if they look like us but when they get in office, they act like them?"

But to know people as human beings, too. I liked Bella Abzug better than a lot of people did. She could be overly harsh, there was no question, with people who worked for her and people who dealt with her. But I didn't mind that. Reporters can be so tough on people, we'd better be tough when somebody's dishing it out to us.

I also remember she apologized to me once. It had to do with a story I wrote around the convention—the first convention of the Women's Political Caucus in Houston, not the much later International Women's Year Convention by which time I was in the government. And there was a fight. There was a big fight. And a lot of the women who were in that fight, including Bella, didn't look too good. And I wrote a piece that displayed the anger and bitterness and unpleasantness of the fight. That's what had happened. And oh, she laid me out in lavender the next day when she had read my story. I mean, she came up and put her face right up next to mine and said, "You're unfair and you're not a good reporter," and so forth. And I managed to keep my cool—which I do better with women than with men, much better—and just said, "Bella, you're mad. It's fresh." I think maybe she'd been on the losing side, I forget. I said, "When you cool off, you re-read the story and you'll find out I wasn't unfair."

Well, some weeks later, I was up in the House press gallery covering some House debate or another and she was down on the floor. And she beckoned me to come down. And I did and went to where reporters meet members. And not a word of introduction, nothing, she just said, "You were right. I've cooled off. It wasn't unfair." And back she went onto the House floor. Well, I give her credit for that.

Yes, the fact that I really don't get as angry with women as with men is an interesting phenomenon having to do with I know not what, maybe because women basically haven't put me down, maybe because I have a sister and no brothers, I'm very much a believer that the first alliance you make in life is the kids against the parents. And therefore if your first ally is—if you're a female and your sole sibling is female, that there's a kind of a lifelong sense of we're in this together. It has interested me greatly—I may have said this before—how many of the women's movement leaders were either only children or one of two sisters. Bella was, Gloria was, Liz Carpenter was—not Jill Ruckelshaus, she had brothers.

But it's interesting that that is the case. But I know that I very rarely really snarl at a woman, no matter what she's done. I'm more forgiving of women. I'm willing to kind of think, "Well, now, why did she do that? And is it my fault or what is it in her life that made her do that?" I'm charitable, basically, toward women and I'm not charitable toward men. I've tried to work hard on that. Men make me mad, to this day and hour. Vicious, backbiting women make me mad. But just kind of a straight-up argument with a woman doesn't upset me at all. I don't feel the need, even if they might be a little harsh toward me. I might have had an easier time and been more successful in my life if I'd had brothers and learned how to deal with the male persona, understood it better.

But John's the only man I've really known intimately, as I had no brothers, no sons—and my father, too.

Clark: How did this—I'm really curious about this—how did this influence your reporting, do you think? I mean, what kind of stories were you able to get with women or what kind of things did you maybe do differently or were able to elicit that you weren't with men?

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Shanahan: Well, except for the women's movement coverage, I had very few women sources because women weren't in the positions where they would be sources. I remember the first very high-ranking woman I dealt with. Now, there were women assistant secretaries. There had even been a couple of women Cabinet members—Frances Perkins, Oveta Culp Hobby in the Department of not-too-much Health, Education and Welfare, as Herblock, the cartoonist, always—every time he attacked her, all the time, he had a picture of a classic Greek building—which HEW didn't have then—and across the architrave was carved "Department of Not-Too-Much Health, Education and Welfare."

But the first woman I ever covered was Marina Whitman, an economist who was on the Council of Economic Advisors in the Nixon administration. I remember interviewing her. She was also married and had children. Her husband was a professor at Pitt where they were from or had landed. We had a nice interview. I don't know what the subject was. And we talked a little bit about ourselves and kind of got a little personally acquainted and I went out of there thinking, "Gosh, she and I are so much alike." And afterwards I realized that we really weren't a bit alike. We were both women, we both had careers, we both had husbands who had honored careers—and had children. But that basically was it. But it seemed that we were so much alike because our situations in life were so similar.

That is not true, really, with any man. Somewhat more so now that men are more involved fathers and just the kind of casual conversations about children that women have always had, you can now have with a man and I have, often, in recent years. One of the things I miss in my present job is that there's nobody there who has children, whereas at Governing magazine there were three different people who had kids around the age of my grandchildren. And that's fun to talk about, you know, when they're six weeks apart and they're doing the same thing at the same time.

So in answer to your professional question, I don't think that—I never dealt with a woman Treasury secretary who was trying to hide something because to this day and hour there hasn't been a woman Treasury secretary. I had a few who were lower down, obviously. And I guess Alice Rivlin, now deputy budget director and who'd been in OMB [Office of Management and Budget] before and of course, was the person who truly created the Congressional Budget Office, a really important institution, was the first woman with whom I really had an ongoing journalistic relationship.

I don't know, there's an element of being more relaxed. Now, there were some—I remember in particular a woman [June O'Neil] who was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Nixon administration who was a real anti-feminist and whom I couldn't stand, because of her views, and I think maybe she was also personally unpleasant but I'm not sure of that. So that going in, it was a little more relaxed, I think, in terms of how you would conduct an interview, how you would pick up on it if they had slid over something or said some things that were inconsistent and so on. It wasn't that different but the comfort level was, I found.

Now, part of that may have been because I was such a freak as a woman covering Treasury and Budget and places like that. So that the men were maybe uncomfortable with me, hadn't really known any women—not just journalists—any women like me—and that wouldn't be the case today. Not all were. I think I mentioned to you before that the men who had taught in co-educational institutions were quite relaxed with a smart woman, and even men who were very conservative, like George Shultz whom I like a lot. He had taught at the University of Chicago, which is co-ed.

I don't really know much about his tenure as Secretary of State because I don't read a lot of foreign policy news. But I covered him as Budget Director and Secretary of Labor and Secretary of the Treasury, and I was quite comfortable with him. And some of the economists who were at the Council of Economic Advisors, some were fine and some were like Walter Heller who whatever you wrote, it was not good enough—I once described him as an equal-opportunity complainer, he complained to the guys on the beat, too.

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I liked him, though. I mean, he was a first-class guy, and I had terrific access to him, even when I was still on the Journal of Commerce, which I was the first year or so of his tenure.

It would be better for women today because there's no real field now of journalism in which anybody is the only woman—in a given city, perhaps, but certainly not in a place like Washington. There are women that cover the Pentagon—at last! And that's a matter of just a very few years standing. And there are women who cover science and medicine. Medicine's almost threatening to become a women's ghetto in journalism, as education already has. And that's too bad because I'm afraid it will downgrade the perceived importance of the beat if it becomes a woman's beat. I think that's one of the problems. There are terrific women covering education and terrific women covering medicine. But if women can do it, it can't be overwhelmingly important. Some of that is still around. And I worry about that.

I was thinking about June O'Neil, the woman in the Nixon Council of Economic Advisers I couldn't stand. There was a year—and it's in my clips—when the annual report of the president's Council of Economic Advisors had a whole chapter on women in the work force. Probably one of the few times when I can point with certainty to: Because I wrote this, something different happened. It doesn't happen very often. People think the press has so much power. We don't have any power. We have influence. But we can't, as Tom Wicker once said, draft anybody, put anybody in jail. But sometimes we do influence events, though less often than people think.

Anyway, this is one of the rare cases where I think I was in a cause-effect situation. June O'Neil was working on this first-ever chapter on the status of women in the economy. And they had called in—I think it was an ad hoc advisory committee of women, including women of great name whom you would know like Bernice Sandler who was with the Association of American Colleges, the great feminist, and a woman named Jacqueline Goodwillig, who was a woman in the Pentagon. It was kind of a Who's Who. I don't remember all the names now, though I've got them. And as an advisory group.

Well, they went right through the ceiling when they saw this draft chapter which still had its head in the theory that women work for pin money. It didn't discuss the need for day care, it discussed the pluses and minuses, was it good for the children to be in day care, without any recognition whatever of the need that working women, especially single working women but all working women, have for day care—all working women with small children. And anyway, I don't think those advisory committee women were out of that meeting more than ten minutes when I got my first call. They were calling me to tell me what terrible things had been said at this meeting.

The year would have been 1974, a recession year, and the draft report said, except for the vast increase in the number of women in the workforce, the unemployment rate would be only four percent, not six and a half. Actually, I remember my friend Carolyn Bell—not a friend, somebody I covered—subsequently did some sharp pencil work to figure out how much lower the GNP would be if those women weren't in the workforce. The same argument, of course, is going on today with respect to immigrants, that they take jobs away from others. The people who think that don't realize that a larger workforce creates more demand for things, whether it's carry-outs in the Mount Pleasant Hispanic area of Washington, where the community is serving the community, but they're jobs, or moving into the wider world. And the same kind of blindness existed as to women in that draft.

In any event, various—I forget how many, at least four, maybe more, of the women on this advisory committee called me. One of them had made notes on the draft copy of the chapter. Either she mentioned this and I asked her for them or whatever. In any event, I got them, she gave them to me. And I wrote the story about this angry meeting and what the report said and how mad they were and so on. And it was changed. Now, how much of that was because the advisory committee was so tough and how much of it was because that story was in the New York Times—

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Clark: That's an interesting question.

Shanahan: It's a very interesting question. The women on that committee, who were always very generous to me, said, "If you hadn't printed it, they wouldn't have changed it that much or maybe not at all." Well, I am inclined to think that's right in this instance. The fact that I wrote that story led to some change.

I'll tell you something about the climate of those times. Watergate was going on like crazy at that time and the Nixon administration was doing all kind of snooping. And we've since learned about the wire-tapping and so on. The woman who gave me the copy of the draft chapter with her handwritten notes on them was inside the government, not at the Council of Economic Advisors, elsewhere inside the government. I won't tell you her name to this day. I ordinarily would have kept that draft, then made line-by-line comparisons. But there was so much we knew that was happening—people's trash was being gone through and so on, I threw it away, because if you ever get a subpoena, of course, it's a felony to throw stuff away that's been subpoenaed.

So then I left the office, I took it with me and threw it in a trash bin not on my regular route from the office to home. That's how frightening it was in Washington at that time. Looking back on it, I think I was being silly. But that's what the climate was then.

Anyway, that was one of the few times that I think I ever actually influenced policy in any immediate way. One of the other ones had to do with banking regulation. There were a huge number of bank failures, not what looks huge today, after the last few years. But at the time in the early sixties, the largest group of bank failures since the Great Depression.

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