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<\/dt>\n- Steven Braun<\/dd>\n
- Alice Williams (center) with current CEA chair Christina Romer (left) and former chair Joseph Stiglitz (right) at her retirement party.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n
Williams was hired during the Eisenhower administration by a precursor of the U.S. Agency for International Development. She signed on to the CEA staff in 1970 in the Nixon years when Paul McCracken was the chairman.<\/p>\n
A retirement party earlier this month drew five CEA chairs -\u0096 the current one, Christina Romer, and predecessors Charles Schultz (Carter), Joseph Stiglitz (Clinton), Martin Baily (Clinton) and Edward Lazear (George W. Bush) \u0096- as well as one-time CEA wanna-be Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and now Obama economic adviser.<\/p>\n
\u0093I remember when I got there and thinking, ‘I know nothing, she knows everything — and thank goodness that she does!’ She was the matriarch of the institution,\u0094 said Lazear, now back at Stanford. \u0093Always professional, she served presidents and chairs from both parties without the slightest hint of partisanship. Alice was a constant. A truly remarkable woman, she was our voice, our institutional memory, and she taught all of us how to do our jobs. \u0093<\/p>\n
Baily, now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, echoed that: \u0093She was the glue that held CEA together through administrations with very different political persuasions and through chairs with very different personalities, most of whom were extremely demanding. Even after many, many years at CEA she worked incredibly hard and maintained a real enthusiasm for the life and role of the institution, getting us into meetings and helping us be part of the important economic decisions.\u0094<\/p>\n
Williams, a competitive ball room dancer, plans to keep dancing and to travel in retirement.<\/p>\n
\u00a0UPDATE:<\/strong> Joseph Stiglitz, another former CEA chair, adds: “We were academics, and for most of us, this was our first experience with government or bureacracy.\u00a0 She really made the CEA work.\u00a0 Got us into meetings.\u00a0 (You have to be in meetings to have your voice heard!)\u00a0 Had her ear to the ground–always knowing what was going on.\u00a0 She also had a big effect on the ‘culture”–the good spiritedness that market the CEA across administrations.\u00a0 She was one of the reasons that it was always fun and enjoyable to come to work every day–in spite of the “battles” that were to be fought (and somtimes lost).\u00a0 For those of us who believe that government can play an important role in our society, she provides proof that government can work:\u00a0 a dedicated civil servant, someone who worked tirelessly and selflessly for decades, across Administrations–including long hours into the night. On a more personal note, the particular challenge of managing my office–an inflow of papers vastly greater than an outflow meant that finding\u00a0the papers I needed for a particular meeting on short notice was not always easy.\u00a0 Somehow, she managed it all.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nUPDATE: <\/strong>Ray Squitieri, now at the Office of the Comptroller of the Current and a former CEA staffer, writes: “Alice certainly was the glue that kept the natural centrifugal forces of the CEA in check. With a staff of freewheeling academics who came and went every year or two, CEA would not have worked at all without Alice’s steady hand in the front office. Another key to CEA’s longevity and influence was Kitty Furlong, head of CEA’s superb statistical office, who retired a couple of years ago. Kitty had been at the Council since the 1947–no, that’s not a typo either–with a few years off for child raising.”<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After 51 years \u0096- that\u0092s not a typo — Alice Williams, executive assistant to the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, is retiring from the federal government this week. Williams has been something of a permanent fixture at the CEA as members of the three-member council came and went as the presidency […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Alice Williams (center) with current CEA chair Christina Romer (left) and former chair Joseph Stiglitz (right) at her retirement party.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n