Today’s Times obituary of Juanita Kreps was a masterpiece – an entire world in one life story. I’m re-reading “Barbarians at the Gate” and Dr. Kreps makes a fine series of appearances there, telling Ross Johnson straight out, with great emphasis, that he’s just not treating the RJR/Nabisco board right.
Dr. Kreps had a rich life and a difficult post as Secreatry of the Department of Commerce. Never forget this description:
Commerce was perhaps the most unglamorous, thankless job in the cabinet: managing 38,000 employees and an oracular mandate to promote economic growth while taking the census, forecasting the weather, recording patents and trademarks, standardizing weights and measures, charting seas, collecting statistics on the nation’s output of goods and services, and managing $6 billion in public works projects.
Have you been to Commerce? It’s enormous. The hallways stretch on for miles. And it’s true that it’s a place of a gajillion lightly-connected functions. Dr. Kreps clearly made the best of it, forging bravely onward, all alone in Washington while her husband went on teaching at UNC. She wasn’t able to stay on as long as President Carter wanted, but she did a great job.
[By the way, Commerce is no longer "unglamorous." It's got broadband grants - more coming! - and internet policy. NTIA has a major set of proceedings going on led by its Internet Policy Task Force. Privacy, copyright, free flow of information, cybersecurity - that - that is glamor.]
Here’s to Dr. Juanita Kreps, “genteel and low-key,” holding her own in the halls of government and the boardrooms of America.