The Martian's Daughter

The Martian’s Daughter – A Memoir chronicles events covering the better part of the twentieth century from the perspective of its central figure. It also tells the story of a remarkable woman determined to neither live in her father’s shadow, nor accept society’s prescribed roles. It portrays her effort to navigate a fractured family relationship, as well as rarefied spaces in academia, government, and big business that were slow to welcome women. It is instructive for those navigating contemporary organizational cultures. Though its title suggests a science fiction tale, The Martian’s Daughter – A Memoir is actually a grand tour of twentieth-century history through the eyes of Marina von Neumann Whitman. Whitman is the daughter of John von Neumann, a Hungarian emigre who made key contributions to the Manhattan Project as well as to mathematics and the fledgling efforts in computer science during the formative years of the modern U.S. science establishment. From her unique position, she recounts a series of events from the 1920s to the present, a period of significant scientific, technological, and social change. The Prologue opens with Marina at her father’s bedside, as he lay dying of cancer in 1956. It is a familiarly tragic scene made surreal by the presence of her father’s military minders. They are charged with ensuring that he reveals no national secrets while under the influence of chemotherapy drugs and painkillers. The encounter sets a pattern for Marina’s life experiences as ordinary on one level and simultaneously extraordinary on another. Research Management Review, Volume 20, Number 1 (2014) 2 The early chapters tell the story of her parents’ meeting in pre-World War I Hungary and their later emigration from 1930s Berlin during the Nazi government’s rise. Their ticket out is von Neumann’s 1933 appointment as one of the five founding faculty members (along with Albert Einstein) of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton University. He and his wife settle in Princeton, and Marina is born shortly thereafter. From there, von Neumann and a group of fellow Hungarian ex-patriots, collectively known as ‘the Martians,’ go on to make significant scientific and technological contributions to the coming war effort. The von Neumann marriage is shortlived—Marina’s parents divorce when she is two years old. However, the split is quite amicable, and they take the unusually progressive step of deciding upon joint custody. They agree that Marina will live with her mother until the age of twelve. Thereafter, she will live with her father until ready for college. Thus, she spends her formative years under the tutelage of her mother, a would-be socialite who alternately sets the local social calendar and teaches young Rosie-the-Riveters to assemble radar sets during the War. Marina’s teenage years begin in the late 1940s, during the post-war boom. Her father’s status among the U.S. scientific elite has been cemented following his work on the Manhattan Project and his development of game theory. In his lofty academic circle Marina meets a Who’s Who of prominent scientists and begins to consider life beyond normal options for the mid-century woman. Marina attends Radcliffe College, where she majors in government and meets her future husband, Robert Whitman, a Ph.D. student and English instructor at neighboring Harvard University. Over her father’s objection, she and Robert marry and begin their lives as faculty and wife at Princeton. Soon after, Marina applies to the graduate economics program at Princeton, only to be declined by the institution, which responded that it had no facilities (i.e., bathrooms) for women. Undaunted, she instead enters the program at Columbia University and later graduates with a Ph.D. in economics in 1962. At this point Marina enters truly uncharted territory for the mid-century American woman. She accepts a series of positions that take her to the heights of the Nixon Administration, as well as to the executive suite of General Motors (as the first female executive in the automobile industry) and to the boardrooms of several Fortune 500 corporations. In each instance she faces the challenge of being the first woman. With intelligence, perseverance, and unwavering support from her life partner, she overcomes (nearly) every obstacle. Research Management Review, Volume 20, Number 1 (2014) 3 In a poignant ending, the book closes with Marina contemplating her life following the death of her mother.