Meet My Parents, Especially My Mom - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Meet My Parents, Especially My Mom
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As some of you know, I had a famous father, the economist, wit, and writer, Herbert Stein. I write about him a great deal, especially in these inflationary times, I write about his epigram: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” He would have said that about our inflation, which, he would have said, cannot go on forever and will stop. He, under the appointment of George Shultz, then Secretary of the Treasury, said that about the terrible inflation of Israel in the glorious days of Ronald Reagan. Reagan and Shultz had sent my Pop and a truly brilliant man, Stanley Fischer, to help the Israelis. They did and a miracle was accomplished in Israel that still is remembered there, still known as the Stein Plan.

But I rarely write about my mother, Mildred Fishman Stein. She was born in New York City. When she was a small child, her family moved to a tiny town in the Catskills. It was called Monticello and was very Jewish because so many Jews with lung problems in New York City moved up there for the clean air.

It became a huge Jewish-themed resort town, with famous Jewish resorts like the Concord and Grossinger’s. Patrons ate huge meals and watched famous people come and go, like Michelangelo. (Reference a poem by a genius anti-Semite, T.S. Eliot.) It was especially known for its prize fighters training facilities, where men like Rocky Marciano hit the bags.

My mother’s father was a small businessman. He owned a number of stores and apartment buildings. He was also a “talmud hachim.” That phrase, which I have probably misspelled, means an expert in the Talmud, a book of interpretations of ancient Jewish laws. (Just to show you that things have not changed that much, it includes chapters on when teenage girls are allowed to wear nail polish.)

My maternal grandfather was allowed to sit in the front row of the Orthodox “shul,” while women sat in a whole different portion of the house of worship. Because my mother was just a tiny little girl, though, she could sit with her father and was proud of it.

My mother was deeply attached to her father. She went into a deep shock when she was 8 and he slipped on the ice, fell down, possibly hit his head on a car fender, and soon thereafter died of a stroke or possibly a heart attack. She never recovered from that shock and was permanently embittered and saddened about that loss.

Mom was a great student at Monticello High School. Despite her diminutive size, she was a star basketballer for the team.

She was “salutatorian” of her high school class. That meant she was second in grades. First was a man who became a federal judge.

My mother graduated from high school at 16, in the Great Depression, and went on to Goucher College in Maryland. She found it too “horsey” for her and transferred to Barnard, the sister school to Columbia, at 116th and Broadway in New York City. She studied economics and did well enough at it to be Phi Beta Kappa.

Somehow, possibly from her mother and father, both avid Republicans, possibly because she was well read and extremely aware of history, she was violently anti-Communist. When the leftists, Stalin apologists, spoke from soap boxes at the sidewalks by Barnard, she would heckle them and debate them as best she could (which was pretty damned good). As a conservative at Barnard in 1934 or 1935, she was a lonely girl. That did not slow her down at all. She did not care to be part of the “in crowd.” She loved America, loved capitalism, and hated the savage cruelty of Russian Bolshevism. She saw right through Marxism as a nostrum and saw it for what it was, brutal, utterly dishonest mass murder.

She was so revolted by its pretense to humanitarianism that she would literally vomit when she was around militant leftists.

After Barnard, she went on to get a Master’s Degree in Economics from Bryn Mawr College, where she also excelled in “the dismal science.” She never found it dismal, though, and loved its possibilities.

After Bryn Mawr, she went on to study at the economics department of the University of Chicago. It was then considered the nonpareil econ department in America for those who loved free markets.

AT THE SAME TIME, my father was a teaching assistant at Chicago. In a famously difficult class taught by a genius economist, Jacob Viner, my father was the TA. He noticed my mother, a simply beautiful girl, looking puzzled, sitting in the back of the room. My father fell madly in love with her and asked her, “Is this all Greek to you, too?”

From that moment on, they were inseparable. My father wrote her term papers for her and they both sat and listened to the radio while snuggling.

Despite the true fact that it was the depths of the Great Depression and neither of them had any money to speak of, they got married in 1937. My father went off to teach as an instructor at Iowa State, and to work on a New Deal study of banks. They scraped together enough money to move to Washington, D.C., where they both went to work on government-funded studies of social issues.

My mother found her work, on Railroad Retirement Board issues (railroads were then such an immense part of the U.S. economy that they merited their own Cabinet department). For my mother, the work was too complex. My father was once again pressed into service to help her.

They lived in modest quarters in downtown Washington, D.C. and then in Georgetown. They enjoyed their youth, though, and in 1941, my sister, Rachel, was born. My father was walking her by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when news came over the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. (“The nerve of those Japs,” said my father. My mother was too shocked to speak.)

My father served in the Navy for most of the war, first in training, as a gunner on a 40 mm mount on a carrier, and then, afterwards, in the office of War Production, as head of economic research for a group of super powerful business and labor leaders called “The Committee for Economic Development.” (If there was an American “Establishment” of supra-normal power and influence, it was the CED. It even included large farmers and ranchers from the American Farm Bureau Federation, Democrats and Republicans, although for sure, mostly Republicans.)

My mother, again, although trained at a high level as an economist, was a full-time housewife and mother, especially after I was born in November of 1944. As I recall her saying it, she mostly waited in long lines for such things as bananas.

AS A MOTHER, my mother was a terror at times and sweet at times. This may be the way of mothers. As a wife, she was also a scrapper. I would not have wanted to be married to her. As I mentioned earlier, she carried in her head and in her heart a volcano eruption sized and heated block of rage about the death of her father when she was eight. She never got over it or even close to being over it. Fairly small incidents could set that lava rolling down the mountain.

She never came even close to getting over the loss of her father. She had what we today would call “anger issues” on a thermonuclear scale. She was also extremely competitive about my sister and my school work. My sister was always a far better student than I was. My mother considered me lazy. Her endless refrain was that I was born a genius but did not back it up by studying.

At every “report card” time, she would demand to know the grades of the other top Jewish students in the class. If Carol Brimberg or Jeffrey Burt or Jerry Akman had done better than I, she was hysterically angry.

She also hated the fact that I smoked cigarettes at an early age and yelled at me about that. Of course, she was completely right about the smoking. In those days, though, many teens smoked tobacco. I had picked up the habit from my next-door neighbor, the latterly famous Carl Bernstein. She just generally liked to yell.

She could also be kind and loving and was astonishingly happy that my sister, Rachel, and I could dance “the jitterbug” at dance parties at our house. She would be so moved by it that she would sob with happiness. She was overwhelmed with happiness that we were dancing in our “rec room” rather than being gassed by the Nazis or saber thrusted to death by the Cossacks.

Her finest hour when I was young occurred in 1961. During my Civics Class at Montgomery Blair High, the nation was convulsed by struggles about racial integration. I had made an exhibit on the classroom bulletin board about the “all men are created equal” language of the Founders and contrasted that with photos and articles about the bloody violence surrounding desegregation.

Our teacher, Mrs. F., asked what we thought about that contradiction. I, as a wise guy and a tease, said, “That’s the kind of question a Communist would ask.”

Mrs. F went ballistic. She sent me to the Vice Principal’s office and demanded that I be “suspended.” I was in fact suspended from class for three days and blackballed from the Junior Honor Society despite that fact that I had the among the highest SAT scores in the school (maybe in all of Maryland).

My mother went to the Principal and found out Mrs. F. was in fact a Card Carrying Communist or had recently been one. She had lost her job prior to Blair for that sin, and for lying about it.

My mother demanded retribution, and “reparations,” but I did not want anything. I had already been accepted to college at Columbia in New York, Brown, Stanford, Oberlin, and the University of Chicago. I did not want any change in the situation. I wanted to be in a school where there were Broadway chorus girls nearby. Or so I thought. Mom wanted me to go to Harvard, where my smart, successful brother-in-law had gone. Not for me. No chorus girls at Harvard.

Going to Columbia turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life, and still is.

MY TEACHERS WERE superb. The cultural life of New York City, especially the wide variety of movies, was glorious. I did not have a girlfriend, which bothered me a lot. But my mother wrote me a letter every single day. That was a prodigy of kindness, especially because Mom was a superb writer. Her letters, written from my parents’ endless round the world travels, were paragons of good exposition and humor.

The next year, a kindly, good hearted classmate named Stuart Reynolds got me into his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi. It was an elegant, happy group of young men from an era that seems as long ago as the days of George Washington, now. From being in that frat, I got introduced by a super girl named Susan to a tall, willowy, lovely Barnard girl named Mary. She was Irish/Austrian. Her father had been a famous Botanist. I liked her a lot. She became my girlfriend in short order. She was a smart girl and had a great sense of humor.

We had happy parties at my frat, often black tie, great lunches, endless laughter and joking. It was paradise. To this day, fifty years later, I still think of Alpha Delta Phi as heaven on earth.

Mom was still sending me letters every day. My grades at Columbia were excellent, and we were all happy. I had a best friend named Larry Lissitzyn who was destined for high order medals for courage in the Vietnam War and then great success as a lawyer. My roommates in a fine apartment with a river view at 380 Riverside Drive were an actor/poet whose home town (like mine) was Silver Spring, Maryland, and an astonishing genius named Arthur Best, from Brooklyn, New York. He was as smart as anyone I ever met. And he had a spectacular sense of humor. He became an amazing expert on the law of evidence, which is one of the most important subjects in trial law. Any fan of Perry Mason will agree.

In the summer of 1966, I had a big fight with my gf. At that same time, I met a new girl. A staggeringly beautiful Vassar Sophomore named Alexandra Denman. We started dating and at the same instant, I had the pleasure of being a first year at Yale Law School.

My wife was — and is — a goddess. But in New Haven, life changed radically for the worse. Law school was desperately difficult. My roommate was one of the most unpleasant men I have ever known. (He later very kindly apologized.) I went to the student health service at Yale and was given genuinely harmful “anti-depressants.” They caused a genuine mental breakdown. This led to my dropping out of Yale to work for a year. Psychoactive drugs are super dangerous. I was a basket case.

I went home to my parents’ house in Silver Spring, Maryland. My mother was furious at me for being sick and barely spoke to me for several months. With good reason, she hated me for embarrassing her by dropping out of the most selective graduate school in America to “become a bum” as she saw it.

Her mood improved when I got a fine job as an economist at the Department of Commerce and moved into a rented mansion off Connecticut Avenue, N.W. When I went back to YLS, her mood improved still more. So did mine. I had started five day a week psychoanalysis with an outstanding shrink named Robert N. Butler, M.D. — paid for by the taxpayers. That was in the Fall of 1966 and it worked wonders by the time I went back to YLS. I was incomparably more confident and calm.

BY AN AMAZING stroke of luck, the whole world had changed dramatically from Fall of 1966 to Fall of 1967. It was bliss at YLS. The harsh, mocking tone of the Civ Pro and Contracts teachers was gone. The mood in every class was far more relaxed than when I had entered one year earlier. There were much better anti-anxiety meds. And I was engaged to Alex. I did well in school and I was hooked up with a movie star of a girl. Beautiful, smart, vivacious, a dream come true. My wife for life, Alex.

I became close friends with a rebellious mega genius named Duncan Kennedy and a rebel leader named Dick Balzer. We challenged the professorial nomenklatura at every turn and dared them to fight back. Duncan in particular taught me to answer almost every professor’s questions by saying, “With the greatest possible respect, sir, you are simply restating your previous question.” My teachers sputtered with impotent rage. One of them even walked out of the classroom and resigned to practice anti-trust law on Wall Street. He became one of the most highly paid lawyers in the USA, thus proving one of Duncan’s earliest hypotheses — that judicial opinions go where the money goes.

My classmates loved my antics so much that I was “elected” by a large margin to be graduation speaker in 1970. Yes, I was chosen by election and not by grades. It was a hippie world.

When I finished my speech, asking for a “kinder, gentler Yale…” my classmates stood in applause. My mother walked up to the dean, Henry Pollak, and said to him, “Don’t pay any attention to Benjy. He’s always been a trouble maker.”

Dean Pollak, a brave and wonderful lawyer, said, “He made a lot of sense.”

Once out of the fun and games of law school, practicing law was hell, at least for me. Luckily for me, I learned what law was all about from my super smart, Harvard Law School grad brother-in-law. “Judges just make it up as they go along based on whether they like a lawyer’s looks. It’s like a high school election. At least that’s what they taught you at Yale.”

Thank you, Melvin. I would have missed the whole damned thing. I’m not kidding. I was actually stupid enough to try to make sense of the judges’ opinions based on logic and precedent.

No matter, because by then, my mother and I were getting along incredibly well. I quit legal practice and went out to teach at the University of California at Santa Cruz, by far the most beautiful campus on the planet.

WHEN I CAME BACK to D.C. because of wild anti-Semitism on campus, by another amazing stroke of luck, namely my Pop’s having become Mr. Nixon’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (sic) and introducing me to high powered people, I was made a speechwriter for the President.

That was a great job. My mother was the happiest I had ever seen her. Her hubby and her son were working with her idol, Richard M. Nixon. She had always loved him and the fact that our Bolshevik neighbors hated him only made her love him more. She went to Sunday worship services with the Nixons and her eyes teared up when Mr. Nixon and his family were standing or sitting near him.

She also met Mr. Nixon’s younger daughter, Julie Eisenhower and her husband, the grandson of the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower. She fell madly in love with them both. And stayed in love with them until the end of her days. I would be hard pressed to say if there were any persons on the planet she loved more than David and Julie Eisenhower.

She attended parties with Prominent People, always a gigantic priority for her. She simply loved the men I worked with most closely, John R. Coyne, Jr. (very much alive) and Aram Bakshian, Jr. (RIP), genius speechwriters.

And her husband and son were working with and for one of the greatest anti-Communists of all time. She was as happy as a clam.

When the evil media fraud called “Watergate” took over the news, my mother was grinding out pro-Nixon letters to the editor almost every day.

For my part, my main boss in the speechwriting apparatus, Dave Gergen, latterly a media god, asked me for complex economics data from time to time. Once he came to me for some especially esoteric number. I walked up two huge spiral staircases to my father’s office. It was roughly the size of an airplane hangar.

“If you have nothing more important to do, Pop, could you tell me how much the price of a typical three-bedroom class has gone up since 1945, adjusted for inflation?”

My father looked at me wearily, took such a huge drag of his Kent cigarette that he turned one-third of it to ash and asked, “Benjy, what do you think I have to do that’s as important as helping my only son?”

I am still moved beyond tears (whatever is beyond tears) by the recollection.

Time has passed. The media lynch mob tormented Mr. Nixon to the point where he felt he had to resign, after the biggest landslide in history in 1972. It’s been 51 years and we still don’t know what he did wrong besides infuriate the Beautiful People. The day he resigned my mother and father sat in the front row in the East Room a mere few feet from Mr. Nixon and the First Family.

If I could put a hydrogen bomb inside the word “sobbed,” that might be the right word for their emotions that day.

My parents also, sobbing, sat in the first row at Mr. Nixon’s funeral on April 25, 1994. Four years later my mother joined him and perhaps, for the first time in her life, was at peace.

Image: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Ben Stein
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Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes “Ben Stein’s Diary” for every issue of The American Spectator.
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