On the High Wire

This is a man’s room. On the carved wooden mantel glistens a gold Nobel Peace medallion awarded to Theodore Roosevelt for stopping war between the Russians and the Japanese. Above hangs a dramatic rendering of the “bully” president reining in a wild-eyed charger. Franklin Roosevelt kept fishing trophies here. JFK once hung a sailfish on the wall.

On this September day, crammed cheek-to-jowl around the table of this “Roosevelt Room” in the White House West Wing sit 20 chief executives of major international American corporations: aging testosterone wrapped in Brooks Brothers chafing about meddlesome U.S. trade sanctions.

That flash of beige in the center with the teal scarf is Laura D’Andrea Tyson, 49, head of the National Economic Council, on-leave Berkeley professor and one of the leading Californians in the White House. She is arguably the highest-ranking female advisor on President Clinton’s staff.

Leaning forward on her elbows, pinched between a pair of dark suits, she’s turning, making eye-contact, gesturing: “I would suggest the following . . . “ is the Tysonian refrain, ever the economics teacher.

After four years of laboring with Clinton’s economic team under the banner “it’s the economy, stupid,” national surveys now show that most people not only applaud the nation’s economic health, but credit the president in significant enough numbers to fuel his double-digit lead over Republican Bob Dole.

So for Tyson, fielding this bit of flack from a room filled with chief executives is a snap.

If only managing the life of a working mother were as easy.

“There’s a way in which these jobs take so much of your time and psychic energy, that it’s very hard to achieve balance,” Tyson says during a quieter moment days later. “You don’t achieve balance. You’re constantly searching for balance and you probably rarely achieve it.”

For now, the balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of success at the office. This woman with the knack for expressing complicated theory in plain language is busy selling the best product Clinton has to offer: an improved economy. Each week, she is thrust before television cameras and audiences reciting a now-familiar mantra:

A budget deficit cut in half and 10 million new jobs; unemployment at 5.2%, the lowest in seven years; mortgage interest rates averaging 4% below Reagan-era numbers; home ownership at a 15-year high; disposable income rising; average hourly earnings in a positive trend; a robust 4.2% growth in the national economy for the second quarter.

Or, as Tyson told the CEOs: “I love to give all the statistics because they’re so wonderful.”

With surveys showing the economy as the No. 1 reason voters want to reelect Clinton, the president’s economic team suddenly feels validated. “All of us, to a large extent, are getting some sense of satisfaction,” says fellow Californian and Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.

This is particularly poignant for Tyson, whose first White House post was chairing the Council of Economic Advisors. The first woman in that post, she entered under a veil of criticism from colleagues who thought her less than adequate for the job.

That, of course, has now changed.

“I don’t have any problem going to my colleagues, and the same colleagues who might have criticized me when I came in, and saying, ‘Look, you know as well as I know that we’ve done the right thing,’ ” she says.

Since her advancement to chief economic advisor in 1995--and the economy’s continued upturn--most critics have long since quieted. Harvard economist Robert Barro, a conservative, wrote three years ago that Tyson brought “scant academic credentials” to the White House, and that Clinton was clearly not wasting her position on “the profession’s best and brightest.” Today he declines comment, saying he doesn’t know enough about Tyson’s role in the White House to assess it.

Economist Robert Lawrence, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, was quoted as saying that Tyson’s nomination “is proof [Clinton] will be his own chief economic advisor.” Today, Lawrence says he was misquoted, never meant harm and believes that with the economy a success story, Tyson has every right to gloat.

“Her performance has been very, very strong,” he says, adding about her critics: “Economists are snobs.”

Suddenly, Tyson is a valued commodity, approached to be dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the School of Business at Georgetown University. A few months ago, Panetta discussed her taking over the Office of Management and Budget.

All she’s declined, opting to “reassess” future plans after the election. There are even murmurings of a secretary post in a second administration--commerce or labor maybe.

“I mean, you know, people speculate . . , “ she concedes, smiling and breaking off bits of a blueberry scone during a breakfast at a Starbucks down the block from the White House.

*

The success, however, has come with a price.

Late last month, dressed in a slender black gown (which she laughingly conceded was not, unlike the glittering formal wear of others present, designer-made), Tyson arrived at a fashion industry gala honoring Princess Diana at the fabulously columned National Building Museum in Washington. She came with White House counsel Jack Quinn, sat between a supermarket magnate and designer Bill Blass, and had a wonderful time.

But official D.C. noticed the absence of husband and screenwriter Erik Tarloff and, three days later, a Washington Post gossip column wagged, “A few concerned eyebrows were raised when the family of Laura D’Andrea Tyson . . . recently decamped back to Berkeley, Calif., and she didn’t.”

In fact, Tyson heads for California every weekend (not at government expense), hoping that an uninterrupted two to three days of quality time with her family will, for now, make up for the quicksand of nonstop Washington. The need to switch coasts, she says, arose from 13-year-old son Elliot’s unhappiness with private Sidwell Friends school in Washington--where Chelsea Clinton attends--and his wish to finish middle school with friends in Berkeley.

And husband Tarloff, who says the phone still rings off the hook on Berkeley weekends, offers a sparing assessment: “Laura has managed to spend enough time back here so it doesn’t feel like kind of an imposed separation. It just feels like she’s doing a lot of traveling.”

She describes her husband and son as understanding and supportive, but the strain of a working mother and wife called to four years of service by a president shows.

It was almost unmanageable at the start, when Tyson was all but consumed by the administration’s birth pains and Tarloff was virtually a single father. “There was just an enormous amount of slack to be picked up,” he recalls. He ran the household. She’s the math wiz, but he balances the checkbooks.

Tarloff helped write funny speeches for Clinton and that was fun. But the screenwriting slacked off since he was so far from Hollywood, and the magic of Washington waned.

“I remember the first time we had a pad of paper on our desk that said, ‘The White House,’ ” Tarloff says. “I was so thrilled, I was sort of hesitant to write on it. I got over it.”

Within that neglected class of Washington spouses, Tarloff became famous for eloquently poking fun at his ego in published essays: “My own parents,” he wrote for Working Women magazine, “now introduce me to their friends as ‘our daughter-in-law’s husband.’ ”

But frayed nerves began to show publicly late last winter, when, in a New Yorker profile on now-U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshevsky--who has become a close friend of Tyson’s--the two women openly discussed how public life strains a marriage.

“By making a choice that was driven by our sense of responsibility,” Tyson told writer Elsa Walsh, “that was being translated either into their thinking that we were making ourselves more important or our spouse was thinking that we were making them less important. We were diminishing them by the choice. . . . I come back from trips and everything’s a lot worse. Elliot’s more unhappy and Erik’s more unhappy and everybody’s angry.”

Over a cafe mocha at the Starbucks breakfast, Tyson reiterates. “He doesn’t demand,” she says of Tarloff, “it’s basically to say, ‘You need to do this [job], but you also need to find a way to pay attention to Elliot’s and my needs in this relationship.’ . . . It’s not about who’s up and who’s down. It’s not about competition or about power. It’s more about caring.”

And there’s an added dimension at work, Tyson says. When she tried to get away from the White House every night at 7:15 p.m. and get home to her family, she knew it was noticed. Everyone else was still working.

“I felt like I was certainly doing the right thing. On the other hand, I always thought, ‘Well, what message am I giving out?’ ” Tyson says. “[It] could be interpreted by some as: She doesn’t care as much, she doesn’t work as hard, she isn’t ambitious.”

*

Back at Holy Trinity High School in her native New Jersey, the nuns had tried to talk Laura D’Andrea into a convent--not to save her from any future tribulations, but because she was well liked, a straight-A student and would be a terrific recruit. But if Tyson turned away their lifestyle, she learned by their example as sisters of charity, mercy and helping others.

At Smith College, she switched from mathematics to economics, where she thought her affinity for numbers could be useful some day in shaping public policy on issues such as poverty and income distribution; a kind of sister of mercy with a calculator and a cost-of-living index.

After obtaining a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she taught at Princeton, where she gave an A to student Michael McCurry, now Clinton’s press secretary. She also shed a first husband (though keeping his last name after publishing under it) and moved to Berkeley. There she met and married Tarloff. They’ve been together 14 years.

With the family now in California, she shares kitchen facilities with two other professional women in a Cleveland Park townhouse in Washington, driving to work every day in her ’92 red Ford Escort.

She’s an “efficient” shopper at Nordstrom, purchasing her signature work wear of pantsuits and scarves. She regularly has her hair done professionally after giving up fretting over it each early morning and is careful to rationalize that decision: unexpected television appearances and it saves time.

When she doesn’t walk off an airplane because of bad weather, she uses the airborne time to read mysteries. She watches “The Larry Sanders Show” with her husband and “Friends” with Elliot, though she admits a need to talk over any explicit scenes or dialogue. Tyson doesn’t think she’s the least bit funny, though she and Tarloff at a dinner party are a riot, according to another Californian in the administration, Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor.

The office mood is relaxed and jovial, and her staffers call her Laura. She evidently tolerates, even manages to thrive in, the largely white / male power structure of the White House. Others, most notably former press secretary Dee Dee Myers, have left complaining of sexism.

“Sometimes in meetings, males can be louder,” Panetta says. “But I have to tell you that it’s the women whose views are listened to. . . . Laura in particular is very effective in that she doesn’t scream or pound the table. She just presents her views. I think for the president, that is the most effective kind of approach.”

Adds Barshevsky: “In meetings that she chairs, there are often conflicts, conflicting positions. There are sometimes personality conflicts. And Laura has this incredible ability to slightly adjust the conversation and readjust the conversation, and readjust it again, and so she basically winds a great thread through everybody and pulls it together.”

But if Tyson’s demeanor is restrained, her tenacity isn’t. By all accounts, she can scrap. Last spring she clashed head on with Clinton’s then-leading political consultant, Dick Morris, over the size of an education tax credit he wanted Clinton to announce. Press reports had Morris telling her to get on board or get out the way. Ultimately Clinton announced a tax credit for tuition costs.

“She has been Ms. No in the White House, constantly opposing every initiative that was helpful to the president’s reelection,” says one source formerly with the Clinton campaign. “She fought like crazy against the tuition tax credit . . . was very negative and went to the mat. And the president just flat out decided against her.”

But Tyson says that with Panetta’s help, she used the economic team’s vetting process to scale back the tax proposal and make sure it was paid for and more targeted.

As head of the National Economic Council, Tyson coordinates and brokers disparate views on economic policy from across the administration--departments such as Commerce, Treasury, Labor, State and Defense, the Council of Economic Advisors and U.S. Trade Representative, perhaps even the CIA.

Then she brings an agreed approach, or perhaps an assemblage of disagreements, to the president in one-on-one morning sessions three times a week in the Oval Office. Clinton sips tea and might chat about Chelsea’s math homework. Tyson politely passes on refreshments, ever mindful of her brief turn in line with the president of the United States and moving the morning’s agenda.

You win some, lose some. In the decision-making ziggurat that shapes White House policy, it pays nothing to be a purist. “You cannot sacrifice the good on the altar of the perfect. You can’t survive that way,” says Tyson’s chief of staff, Tom O’Donnell.

The internal wars over Clinton’s battery of tax-cut proposals are over now and all that’s left is selling them on the campaign trail. For Tyson, a decision on her future looms.

Many, including some of her closest friends, believe she will leave. Tarloff is happy back in California co-writing a sitcom for MTM Television. How long can one maintain a bicoastal family?

Still, friends say Tyson is ambivalent, shopping high schools both in Washington and Berkeley. Others say much depends on what a reelected Clinton offers.

Says Patricia Unterman, a close friend and San Francisco restaurateur: “I think that she’s very curious to see what will happen next in her life.”

Tyson concedes she may listen hardest to the voice of a 13-year-old. “Elliot said: ‘Look Mom, I’m going away to college in five years. You can do whatever you want then. And maybe you can work for the vice president, who then will become the president.’ ”

She says only that her son makes a good point.

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Laura D’Andrea Tyson

Age: 49.

Background: Born in Bayonne, N.J.; lives in Washington, D.C., during the week, Berkeley on the weekends.

Family: married 14 years to Erik Tarloff, her second husband; their son, Elliot, is 13.

Passions: Reading murder mysteries by favorite authors, which include Jonathan and Faye Kellerman and Patricia Cornwell; watching movies and television with her husband and son; not flying in bad weather.

On working in the White House: “You always feel connected to history. There is a sense of being connected to something larger than yourself . . . the sort of ideals of the country, what it stands for and you feel you’re doing service to that ideal. If you walk through the White House any time of day that can come to you.”

On her decision to keep her first husband’s name: “No one seemed happy with that decision. Mr. Tyson or Mr. Tarloff, neither of them were happy.”