WASHINGTON -- Elisse Walter landed the job of her dreams last year when President George W. Bush appointed her to the Securities and Exchange Commission, capping a career devoted to securities law and investor protection.
Weeks later, she got a nightmare diagnosis: ovarian cancer.
What followed was months of juggling the demands of surgery, chemotherapy and a new post that put her at the center of the nation's economic meltdown. Now back at work full time, she talks about the lessons she learned and strategies she employed to handle a high-powered job while dealing with a personal crisis -- a situation that others also face in their lives.
"People talk a lot about work-family life balance, and when you have a health crisis, a part of you cries out, 'I really need to devote myself to this,' " Walter says. "But because I had this new position -- it was something I was so excited about, it was something I was so geared up to do -- I was really motivated to do everything I could" to manage the job while she also managed her illness.
That enabled her to participate in emergency deliberations on how to steady markets, deal with the collapse of Lehman Bros. and respond to criticism about SEC oversight in the Bernard Madoff case and others. With the agency under fire and the five-member panel divided, her voice often mattered.
She believes her determination to keep working boosted her mental attitude and facilitated her physical recovery. It was the second time she had faced such a challenge: The first came nearly 15 years ago, when she battled breast cancer while general counsel at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission -- though the prognosis was more dire and the treatment more debilitating this time.
It is increasingly common to see government officials and corporate executives coping with serious illnesses on the job, says Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.
"What we are seeing is people not hiding it as much," he says. "There was a sense, I think, in the previous generation that you didn't want to acknowledge that you had these sorts of problems." The stigma of cancer and other diseases has eased, he says.
What's more, medical advances mean patients are more likely to undergo treatments over an extended period of time while they are still able and eager to continue their careers.
Walter focused intensely on how to get her job done, says Christopher Cox, then SEC chairman. "She tackled this challenge as though this was another tough enforcement case or another new wrinkle in the mortgage meltdown," he says.
Over the past year, the pace at the SEC has been "blistering," Walter says. It still is: During the 90-minute interview, the arrest of billionaire hedge-fund adviser Raj Rajaratnam, charged by the SEC with a massive inside-trading scheme, was announced in New York. Minutes later, Walter was called out of the office to formally sign off on an enforcement action she said would soon be in the headlines.
On Jan. 20, she had watched Barack Obama's inauguration on TV as she was getting her final chemotherapy treatment. Later that day, he signed an order -- printed on a blank sheet of paper and now framed in her office -- appointing her acting head of the SEC until Mary Schapiro could be confirmed by the Senate.
"That was a big day," Walter recalls with a wide smile.
'Driving Miss Elisse'
So how did she manage?
The first three weeks after extensive surgery on Sept. 3 were "hell," she says, as she struggled with pain and depression. "I was coping with the things right in front of my nose," she says.
In short order, however, she was looking ahead with the aid of her husband of 35 years, attorney Ronald Stern. A friend circulated a schedule titled "Driving Miss Elisse" of volunteers to take her to six rounds of chemotherapy. The younger of her two sons, Evan, then a student at Georgetown Law School, would drop over in the afternoons to keep her company as he studied.
Her previous stint on the SEC staff helped her figure out how to make her new job work. She stayed in constant contact by e-mail and joined commission meetings by phone. She set priorities, dealing with the essential while delaying or delegating other tasks, and she set limits when things seemed exhausting.
She also decided to be open about her battle with cancer and her absences from the office within the agency and with outsiders. That was "liberating," she says, although she acknowledges that might not be the right choice for everyone in her situation.
And what about drawing up a "bucket list"?
In 1995, when Walter survived breast cancer, she had written a wish list of things to do before she died: Learn to play the piano, for one, and revive the Russian she had taken in college. She bought a keyboard and sheaves of music but never did any of the items on her "bucket list."
"I don't think I have one any more," she says. "I learned the first time more to kind of live -- not live in the moment, but live for the now."
Wearing a white hat
Fifty-nine years old and 5 feet tall, Walter has a fast patter, a no-nonsense manner and an open, friendly face. Her sense of humor is apparent in her office decor: A disembodied pair of women's legs in red striped stockings and sparkly shoes sticks out from the side of one bookcase.
She had planned to be a mathematician but decided to go to law school almost on a whim, she says. The firm she joined after graduating from Harvard Law School had an opening in the securities department, and with that she found her calling.
Three years later, she joined the SEC staff with a plan to work there for three or four years; she stayed for 17. She continued to work in financial regulation, first as general counsel at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and then at the National Association of Securities Dealers. The NASD merged in 2007 with the New York Stock Exchange's regulatory arm to become the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, where she served as senior executive vice president.
"I really do like wearing a white hat and riding the white horse," she says, regulating stock markets with an eye to protecting investors. Devising the best enforcement strategy for the long term is often like working a puzzle, she says.
By the 1980s, while on staff at the SEC, she knew she wanted to become a commissioner. In late 2007, there was an opening and Schapiro, then the head of FINRA, suggested Walter's name. She got the job.
The economy in turmoil
When she was sworn in last July, it was clear that the economy was in turmoil. The SEC was being blasted for having failed to sufficiently oversee prominent investment banks that were in trouble. The arrest of Bernard Madoff in December brought new fire for the SEC's failure to uncover his long-running Ponzi scheme years earlier.
"I was more pro-regulatory than all of my colleagues" when she started at the Cox-led commission, she says, "so my views were really going against the flow of where the place was at that time -- which I think made it all the more important to speak up."
Harvey Goldschmid, a professor at Columbia University Law School and a former SEC commissioner, says Walter "brought a new breadth, high intelligence and integrity that everyone admired ... at just that right moment." Her role has grown with the appointment of Schapiro, a friend and former colleague, as chairman.
"To my mind, she's the go-to person here for the staff and for other commissioners on a wide range of issues," including accounting and corporate governance, Schapiro says. "She has a phenomenal ability to cut through lots of information, lots of complexity, understand the situation and then be creative in coming up with a good way forward."
Walter sees serendipity in the timing of her diagnosis. At her annual checkup in April 2008, she had complained of pressure on her side. If doctors had figured out what was wrong before Bush announced her name in June, she would have felt obliged to withdraw from consideration.
Instead, she had moved into her new office and gone to work before cancer was diagnosed in August. Weeks later, at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, gynecologic oncologist Robert Bristow removed her uterus, part of her colon, the back wall of her vagina and her appendix. She was left with a colostomy, a temporary measure that she plans to have reversed.
She has surprised herself.
"I have a tendency to dwell on my weaknesses rather than my strengths, and I did not think of myself as a strong person until I had breast cancer," she says. "I remember standing outside myself, looking at this woman, thinking, 'Hmm, who's that? How could she be doing this?' "
Now she is back at work full time, feeling better though still often tired. Her doctor's prognosis is sobering, telling her that 65% of those with her diagnosis survive five years. She expects good news: "I've never been in the bottom third of a class."
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