Distaff Talent Search

Just as the search for a woman to serve on the Supreme Court has thus far proved futile, so President Nixon has long been frustrated in finding a woman to work in top Government economic councils. Last week his talent search produced results. To occupy one of the three inner-sanctum seats on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Nixon named Dr. Marina von Neumann Whitman, 36, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh.

The daughter of Mathematician John von Neumann, co-developer of the theory of games, the comely Mrs. Whitman graduated from Radcliffe with the top scholastic average in her class ('56), earned a Ph.D. at Columbia, and later settled in Pittsburgh. She worked for the council as a senior staff economist in 1970-71 and last October was named to the Price Commission. There she has proved a tough and highly capable overseer of Phase II prices; she argued strongly against allowing coal companies to pass along, through higher prices, all of the exorbitant wage hike for miners approved by the Pay Board. Mrs. Whitman plans to move back to Washington with her husband, an English professor who will work on a research project, and their two children. Women's Lib disapproves of the professional use of a married name, but Mrs. Whitman's has had an unexpected benefit for her. As an offspring following in the footsteps of a famous father, she says, "I probably would have had more difficulty if I had been John von Neumann's son."

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