SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Dr. Griffith Harsh, the Stanford University neurosurgeon and husband of Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, stood quietly by his wife's side last week as she vehemently denied knowing the family's housekeeper of nine years was an illegal immigrant.
As the couple was peppered by questions before the glare of dozens of cameras, Harsh never said a word. By the end of the day, however, the media spotlight was trained on the publicly reticent doctor.
He became the target when celebrity attorney Gloria Allred released a 2003 Social Security Administration letter that noted a discrepancy in the housekeeper's employment records. While Whitman said neither she nor her husband had ever seen the letter, it apparently bears Harsh's handwriting: "Nicky Please check this Thanks."
Nicky Diaz Santillan was the family's housekeeper for nine years until Whitman says she learned in June 2009 that Diaz Santillan was illegal. She says she immediately fired her.
Throughout their 30-year marriage, Harsh has quietly followed his own professional and intellectual pursuits as Whitman, the billionaire former chief executive of eBay, took on high-profile corporate roles.
But their experiences did not prepare them for the public scrutiny of a close governor's race, and the heightened focus on their personal lives that burst around them last week.
Until then, Whitman had succeeded in keeping Harsh and the couple's two adult sons, Griff Jr. and Will, out of her race for governor, speaking only generally about them in sound bites and anecdotes that complement her campaign narrative.
She has not issued the standard flier picturing her smiling family. Her sons have not appeared on the campaign trail. Griff Harsh V works for Tagg Romney, the son of the former Republican presidential candidate and Whitman friend Mitt Romney, and Will is a senior at Princeton. Whitman's husband sometimes attends speeches when he is not performing surgeries at Stanford Medical Center, where he is on staff.
"Griff has always had an understated, modest demeanor," Whitman writes in her book, "The Power of Many," which is about corporate success. "He dislikes anything ostentatious or showy, and he is very serious about living an authentic life focused on things that matter — family, faith, friends, health, the stewardship of land, important ideas."
And he does not generally speak with reporters. When approached after the letter was revealed last week, Harsh calmly walked away from two reporters in the Santa Monica hotel where Whitman's press conference was held, relying instead on a statement from Whitman's campaign that said Harsh does not recall receiving the Social Security letter.
From the start, the driven Whitman and Harsh have made career trade-offs with one another, including the decision to move back to California with their young sons from the East Coast in 1998, when Whitman took the job at eBay. Even their early courtship was put on hold because of their busy schedules while she was at Harvard Business School and he at Harvard Medical School after studying as a Rhodes scholar in England, she writes.
Whitman calls them a "type A couple," and at many times the marriage has been long distance. She remained in Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble Cos. for the first six months after they were married and Harsh moved to San Francisco for his residency; Whitman later took a job heading the Michigan-based FTD flower delivery company while the family was in the Boston area.
Harsh's work at Stanford Medical Center includes pioneering a device to target radiation into the brain cavity left by tumor surgery, according to his official Stanford biography. It describes him as a leading expert in certain skull base surgeries.
Both Harsh and his brother, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., followed their father into the neurosurgery profession. Whitman calls him meticulous and detail-oriented, but insists he has a lighter side, too.
"Despite his reserved demeanor, Griff has a wonderful sense of humor and is always game to do something interesting or unconventional — like, say, taking up with a Yankee girl at Harvard Business School," Whitman wrote.
In one oft-told stump speech tale, Whitman jokes about the adventure they set out on when they moved to San Francisco a day after being married in 1980 so Harsh could pursue his neurosurgery residency at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.
The choice of San Francisco over Boston, she says, was made after Harsh joked, "Meg, your mother lives in Boston. We're moving to San Francisco."
She says they "decamped to the Haight-Ashbury" — although she writes in her book that the family bought a home on a hill in the tony area above the famous neighborhood. She uses the move for effect, noting the shock from Harsh's Southern family upon visiting San Francisco.
While Whitman made sacrifices on behalf of his career — she has blamed the distractions of her family and her husband's busy career in part for her poor voting record over nearly 30 years — he and the children also faced trade-offs as Whitman climbed the corporate ladder.
Whitman describes in her book asking the family, who enjoy camping and fishing, to wait a few more hours in 1999 for a "long-promised trip" to Yosemite as she had a hurried meeting at the San Jose airport with a would-be employee she wanted to lure to eBay.
She writes that as the two talked for several hours, "Griff and the boys kept circling the airport and calling every twenty minutes for an update."