Not Having It All in Washington

For years in Washington, it was a well-known code phrase. When someone left a high-powered job “for family reasons,” it usually meant “fired,” “going into rehab” or “trying to patch up the marriage.”

But leaving the pinnacle of American political power to accommodate a spouse or children no longer seems so unthinkable. For example, Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich recently announced he was giving up his powerful and prestigious position--”the best job I’ve ever had and probably ever will”--in the interest of his family, who preceded him in returning home to Cambridge, Mass., more than a year ago.

Reich’s family-centered resignation notice was swiftly followed by at least two other high-ranking members of the Clinton administration, who also pleaded family reasons for their departures.

Erik and Elliot Tarloff, the husband and son, respectively, of National Economic Council chief Laura D’Andrea Tyson, had already moved home to California when Tyson said last week that she would reluctantly leave the administration to join them. Assistant Atty. Gen. Deval Patrick, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, also cited family concerns for his decision soon to jump ship and head home to Boston.

None of the three presidential appointees appeared to have been pressured to leave jobs that all three said they adored. Two of the three--Reich and Patrick--traded important government jobs in areas they felt passionate about for at least interim unemployment. Tyson returned to a comfortable professorship at UC Berkeley that nonetheless lacks the flash of serving as one of President Clinton’s top economic advisors.

In the worlds of business or finance, where more and more executives who hit 40 or 50 decide that earning millions of dollars is not nearly as satisfying as building Brio trains with their toddlers, this might not seem so strange. Society no longer blinks twice at investment bankers who announce they would rather write poetry. But the capital has made an art form out of basking in its own cachet. Until recently, official Washington was fairly successful in marketing the myth that governing the world’s oldest democracy is a heady endeavor justifying all manners of personal sacrifice, such as a spouse’s career or anything resembling domestic tranquillity.

No longer. “Unless you’re prepared to say government service trumps all other work, and I’m not,” Erik Tarloff said, “there really is a statute of limitations in terms of how long a job can disrupt family life.”

What a concept: Family, said Arlene Johnson, vice president of the Families and Work Institute in New York, has become “an important value even compared to being at the center of power in the most powerful country in the world.” Placing the family on an equal pedestal with work, agreed Brad Googins, director of Boston University’s Center for Work and Family, has become “politically correct, with all the good and bad things that brings with it.”

It was Reich who pulled the federal fig leaf off the family with a New York Times op-ed piece decrying the struggle to establish balance between work and family. He loved his job, Reich wrote, he loved his family, and no matter how hard he tried, he always felt he was shortchanging one or the other--or both. “You’re never able to do enough of what you truly value,” he lamented.

That admission unleashed furious replies from mortals, who said, essentially, no kidding. “You can’t have it all, Mr. Reich,” one reader responded, adding: “The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted over long years in poor light by a crotchety old man on dangerous scaffolding for an impossible patron. No one would argue that the man had balance in his life.”

Still, the mere fact that these high-ranking Washingtonians would even think to play the family card did help to pull personal considerations out of the professional closet. In the corporate world, said Caroline Nahas, managing director of Korn / Ferry International, a large executive search firm in Los Angeles, it wasn’t so very long ago that working women, in particular, shied from talking about family issues for fear that they would be perceived as weak--and specifically, unable to compete with men.

But in the very recent past, Nahas said, confidence levels have grown among many top professionals. No one is quite ready to write down “my family comes first” on an executive resume, but “I think what you’re seeing is a sense that ‘I know who I am and who I want to be, and I’ve achieved something in the work world that very few have ever achieved--but at the same time, there are other things that are equally important to me.’ ” In short, “It’s not the job at all costs.”

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The complexities of adapting to the needs of two-career families are well-known in private industry, Nahas said. But even as its politicians routinely espoused “family values,” the executive branch of government operated on rules that made hamburger meat out of home lives. It wasn’t so long ago that Hollywood television and screenwriter Erik Tarloff would have been guilty of heresy for declaring, “One member of the team doesn’t have exclusive rights to define what work is, or where it will be. You both have to make sacrifices in juggling work and family.”

Even before Tyson announced plans to resign, Tarloff and his son decamped to California, leaving the head of the National Economic Council to commute across country if she wished to spend time with her family. Elliot wanted to return to his old school in Berkeley, Tarloff explained, and maintaining a career as a Hollywood writer in Washington “wasn’t easy. I worked, but I worked less. And it was very difficult.”

Meanwhile, Tarloff said, his wife was working 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week. When snow stranded her in wintertime, the White House sent a four-wheel-drive vehicle to pick her up.

Much the same scenario was transpiring in the Reich household. The Clinton White House may have been singing a family-friendly tune, passing the Family and Medical Leave Act as its first piece of legislation in 1993 and holding “family reunion” executive getaways, but “at the rank of a Cabinet-level official, it doesn’t matter what the avowed management philosophy is,” Reich said in an interview. “These jobs are hell. They’re 14-hour-a-day jobs. The president can say whatever he wants, but there’s just no way these can be family-friendly jobs.”

Tarloff, at work on a book called “I’m With Her,” about the husbands of powerful women, concurred. “No administration, regardless of its policy, is family-friendly in its operation,” he said. “It just can’t be.”

And while leaving a job “for family reasons” may now be more socially acceptable in Washington and elsewhere than it once was, “It still raises eyebrows,” Tarloff observed. “In a town like Washington, a one-industry town, it’s still kind of striking and a little anomalous to walk away voluntarily. It still raises questions about one’s seriousness, quite unfortunately.”

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The matter-of-fact tone of such pronouncements troubled Johnson of the Families and Work Institute, a consulting and research organization. “I’m distraught by that conclusion,” she said. “It seems that all these folks are coming to the conclusion that you can’t operate at the center of power, the pinnacle of a very important job, and still be connected to your family. It sounds a signal--so who is left to do these important jobs? Are we going to have people who don’t care about their families do these jobs?”

At Boston University, Googins urged that the executive branch adopt some of its own family-friendly philosophy. “Why not look back at your organization, why not make the organization more responsive?” he asked.

Besides, he said, high-level executive branch appointees occupy rarefied positions even in departure. “It’s nice that there are people at that level who have the luxury to say they’re leaving so they can go to their kids’ soccer games,” Googins said. “But what about the poor guy who is traveling five days a week in some lower-level, way-lower-salary job? He would love to have the luxury to even think about going to his kids’ soccer games.”

Googins added that he was skeptical about some top-ranking professionals who quit “for family reasons.” Five years later, “Where are these people?” he said. “Have they changed their lifestyles? Are they actually going to the soccer games? I don’t think so.”