Eileen Shanahan: Interview #3

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[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 differentlyónot 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 doóand did it and some others followed. But I think for a decade or more, she was really the only person on the paper in Washingtonóthere 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 kindóI 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 notócould 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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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 realizeóI know at the time I sort of kept mental trackósome 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 knowsóand maybe it's not worth thinking about, reallyó 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 itówomen in the economyóearly in the

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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 timeónever, 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 afterógetting 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 seenóthis 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 weekóthey ran a weekówhich 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 arrivedó

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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 hadóI don't know how many women economists were there that I knew but a large percentage of themónot 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 maybeóI give the guy credit, I always liked himóthat 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 justóhe 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 usedóhe 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 accomplishóand 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 storyóunexpected 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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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 involvementópreparing 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 correspondentówell, 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 kneesóthis 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 middleóor near the end, as it turned outóof 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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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 organizationóthat 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 papersóI regret to say including the Washington Postóon 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 guyóa 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 televisionónot super-early because after all, I hadn't come there until the sixties, though not the very beginning, '63óten 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 bullpenóthat's the person who was the top decision-maker on the premises at 11:30 at night or whenever Gould's copy came inólooked 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 questionóis 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 nameóI forget what it wasófor 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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And it didn't take him too long to get rid of all of themóall 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 aboutó

Shanahan: I recall right after I first went with the Times and one of my first assignmentsówhich I had for ten years, it probably took up maybe a third of my time, on the average for ten yearsówas 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 exchangeóI 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 drinkóI 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 tipóno 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 myóoh, twelve dollars or something, in those daysóthat's a long time ago, 1963 probablyóand 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 fromóI 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 saidóI 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'clockóI mean,

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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 dayóCalifano 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 saidóhe was smarter than I was about PR, and everything elseó"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 thatóso 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 differentóat least deeperóthan 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 onceóthis was in an interviewówhy, given his dislike for businessóit really verged on hatredówhy 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 fatheróa socialist all his daysówere 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 reporteróvarious 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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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 membersóFrances Perkins, Oveta Culp Hobby in the Department of not-too-much Health, Education and Welfare, as Herblock, the cartoonist, alwaysóevery time he attacked her, all the time, he had a picture of a classic Greek buildingówhich HEW didn't have thenóand 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 careersóand 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 thatóI 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 someóI 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 womenónot just journalistsóany women like meóand 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 enoughóI once described him as an equal-opportunity complainer, he complained to the guys on the beat, too.

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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 happeningópeople'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.