Martian's Daughter: A Memoir Read Free

being denied to him.
     
    My father had been shaped by, and then played a central role in, the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century. His youth was punctuated by global upheavals. Hungary had been on the defeated side in World War I and had been punished by the loss of two-thirds of its territoryin the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. His family had fled in fear of their lives from a revolutionary communist government that seized power in Hungary and held it for 133 days in 1919. And he had made a prescient shift across the Atlantic, as a precocious young professor of mathematics, to Princeton from the University of Berlin just as the collapse of the impoverished and embittered German nation's democratic government paved the way for Hitler's rise.
     
    Once settled in the United States, he became a key player in the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb and put an end to World War II, as well as in the development of the hydrogen bomb, whose shadow dominated the Cold War. His invention of game theory enabled innovative approaches to military strategy and gave birth to entirely new ways of analyzing and making predictions about such disparate phenomena as business competition, diplomatic negotiations, gambling strategies, and the evolution of cancer cells. And his description of the logical architecture that underpins the modern electronic computer provided an essential base for the development of successively smaller, cheaper, and more powerful machines, up to and including the infinite variety of smart electronics that, together with the Internet, have revolutionized every aspect of modern life and human interaction.
     
    John von Neumann is often referred to as one of the “Martians,” five Hungarian Jewish physicists born in turn-of-the-century Budapest, all of whom spent most of their scientific lives in the United States and made fundamental contributions to the Allied victory in World War II. Four of them—Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, von Neumann, and Edward Teller—were at the forefront of developing the atomic bomb; the fifth and oldest, Theodore von Karman, was a pioneer in supersonic flight. The story goes that some of the participants in the Manhattan Project, speculating on how there came to be so many brilliant Hungarians in their midst, concluded that these colleagues were really creatures from Mars who disguised their nonhuman origins by speaking Hungarian.
     
    As this remarkable man's life was ending, I was just becoming an adult, starting out on a life path that would involve me closely in some of the defining events in the second half of the twentieth century. I was a pioneer in and early beneficiary of the feminist wave that swept the nation in the 1960s and 1970s, opening up new opportunities for womenwho dared to think that they could have it all. I ventured into economics, a field dominated by men, and climbed the academic ladder by focusing my teaching and research on the economic interdependence among nations long before globalization had become part of our everyday vocabulary.
     
    I became the first woman on the President's Council of Economic Advisers when I was appointed by Richard Nixon, only to resign when I could no longer resist the mounting evidence that the president was implicated in covering up the Watergate scandal. I was elected as the first female member of the board of directors of some of the nation's most powerful companies just as they were starting to feel pressure to invite women into their boardrooms. And I was a senior executive of General Motors during the years 1979–92, struggling to awaken its top management to the threats that confronted it, as the Big Three's dominance of the US auto industry was being relentlessly overtaken by nimbler Japanese competitors and their inexorable decline toward disaster was under way.
     
    To some extent, my involvement in all of these events was possible because I was in the right place at the right time. But my