Dad and I were not at all close during those years. At age sixty he was just beginning to gain international recognition and was busy with social and business commitments. Every few weeks he would write me a long moralizing letter filled with the same slogans he’d post on the walls of IBM sales conventions: “Do right,” for example, or “We are a part of all we have met.” I’d read these things and throw them away.
I had plenty of money for fooling around. My monthly allowance was three hundred dollars—about double the income of the average American family in those years. Out of that all I had to pay for was my college bills and my clothes. Dad never asked for an accounting. When we saw each other he’d say, “You’re probably a little short, son,” and pass me an extra hundred dollars. I spent every nickel. But oddly, I never knew if I was really rich. I had a trust fund consisting, naturally, of IBM stock, but Dad never told me how much was in it. Each year his accountant would come around and have me sign income tax forms that were blank. He’d make an excuse that he hadn’t had time yet to fill them out. This kept up not only through college but ten years beyond, until I was a grown man with children of my own.
My first marks came in after three months, just before Christmas of 1933. I got a phone call asking me to report to Dean Sam Arnold, whom I’d met with my dad. Dean Arnold was fat and had a nice, round, smiling face. “Well now, Mr. Watson,” he said, “these marks are not very good. It doesn’t look promising for you in college. You’ve got to do better.” Serious talk, but with a twinkle in his eye. The dean and I had at least one visit like this each semester. I was a terrible student but he tolerated me. Dad, however, put virtually no pressure on me to perform in school. Later, when I asked him why he let me stay in college with the horrible grades I was producing, he said, “I thought it would be better for you to be unmotivated in an orderly situation than unmotivated and allowed to create your own situation.”
I had barely gotten to Brown when I fulfilled my great dream: finally I learned to fly. In September of my freshman year I soloed after just five and a half hours of instruction, which must be some kind of record. What a feeling! I was good at flying, instantly good. I plowed everything I could, mentally, physically, and financially, into that mad pursuit, and gained a lot of self-confidence. Sometimes I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night, drive to the airport, and fly for an hour. The airport managers were pretty reckless with the students—they didn’t object if we flew in the dark. That first winter my biggest adventure was to join the Red Cross airlift of food to Nantucket Island. New England was having a long siege of cold weather, and the Nantucket harbor froze solid for the first time in more than a decade. For a while the only way to get food to the island was by air. I picked up several loads of supplies in New Bedford and took them across.
Dad never complained when he found out I was flying. I suppose both of us realized subconsciously that airplanes were something we were bound to differ on. He simply passed along some advice from Lindbergh, with whom he was now friends: “ ‘Tell your son never to fly when he’s tired.’ ”
By the time I arrived at Brown, Father and Mother had moved from Short Hills to New York, where they joined the city’s elite. During the social season, from October to May, their lives became a regular round-robin: Monday night at the opera with a few other couples, maybe two dinner parties and a charity banquet during the week, and then, every few weeks, an IBM dinner. Father wanted to know everyone important in New York, and eventually he succeeded. In the early 1930s he became head of the Merchants Association of New York and began socializing with people like John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Henry Luce. He joined the Explorers Club and got to know Lowell Thomas and Admiral Richard Byrd, whose expedition to the South Pole Dad helped underwrite; Byrd named a mountain range in Antarctica the Watson Escarpment. He was around my parents’ house a lot. I was awed by him, and impressed that the first man to fly over the North Pole seemed genuinely to like my father, not just to cultivate him for his money.
Dad loved to collect autographed pictures of important people and kept them on a grand piano in the living room. There was one of Charlie Schwab, the great steel man, that said, “To Tom Watson, master business machine.” There was also a picture of Mussolini, from the days when Mussolini was still well thought of, at least in some quarters—it disappeared as soon as Dad became aware of the viciousness of Italian Fascism.
My father’s most influential friend while I was in college was none other than President Roosevelt. Dad contributed money and advice to Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign, and that earned him access to the White House after Roosevelt beat Hoover in a landslide. Dad later told me that his first visit to the president practically destroyed his welcome. It was the summer of 1933 and the Merchants Association was alarmed at the wage and production controls Roosevelt was trying to impose on business under the National Recovery Act. So Dad volunteered to go to Washington and ask the president to ease up.
He greeted Roosevelt and said, “Mr. President, I’m here to tell you that the people in New York think you’re going too far with regulation. Business should be well regulated, but we also believe it should be well treated. If you go much further, you will decimate what little there is left of business, and we’ll end up with nothing.”
Roosevelt shook his head and said, “Look here, Tom. You go back and tell your banker and businessman friends that I don’t have time to worry about their future. I am trying to save this great nation. I think I am going to be successful. If I am successful, I’ll save them along with everyone else.”
These words turned Dad around completely. He saw the monumental job Roosevelt had on his hands and wanted to help. It was the last time Dad ever spoke for the conservative side. He used to tell me: “The average businessman’s opinion of what is right for the country is almost always wrong.”
Later that year Dad put himself back in Roosevelt’s good graces by taking a public stand in favor of opening diplomatic relations with Russia. Roosevelt was getting criticized for being soft on the Bolsheviks, and Dad was one of the few business leaders to back him up. After that he and the president grew quite friendly. Once or twice a month Dad would send him suggestions—sometimes solicited, sometimes not. At times Roosevelt’s men would even ask for Dad’s appointment schedule, in case the president needed to contact him in a hurry.
I saw many of the letters that President Roosevelt wrote back to Dad. Father was so proud of these that he would keep them in his pocket and show them around. Often Dad and Mother went to Hyde Park for tea, and on a couple of occasions they were invited to spend the night at the White House. That was a big event in our family.
Roosevelt was appreciative enough of Dad’s support that in the mid-1930s he offered to make him secretary of commerce or even ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—the job Joseph P. Kennedy subsequently got. Father said no to both offers because he didn’t want to leave IBM. Instead he served, unofficially, as Roosevelt’s representative in New York. If, for example, Gustaf, the crown prince of Sweden, was due to visit the United States, one of Roosevelt’s aides could call Father and say, “Wouldn’t you like to give a luncheon for Gustaf?”
All Father had to do was press a button. He had a whole department that did nothing but set up company dinners and other functions. They’d produce a guest list, and between one hundred and two hundred people would be splendidly entertained at the Union Club, all at IBM’s expense. Dad saw this as a smart and dignified way to publicize the company, refine our top executives—and help the president. Cardinal Spellman would be on hand to give the blessing. There would be a dais, several tables with magnificent centerpieces, and a menu with crossed American and Swedish flags on the front and a description of the guest of honor. I’m sure the menus alone cost seventy-five cents each. Dad hosted a number of these lunches for visiting dignitaries. Roosevelt once said: “I handle ’em in Washington, and Tom handles ’em in New York.” Dad was very flattered by that.
I w
as a college junior in 1936 when the government released a list of the leading salaries in America and Dad’s name was right at the top. He was making more money than even Will Rogers: $365,000 a year. Newspapers nicknamed him the Thousand-Dollar-A-Day-Man and he was denounced as the Captain Kidd of Industry and the Last of the Robber Barons. Dad got really upset at that. He felt his salary reflected the value he was generating for IBM’s stockholders; in fact, the company was doing so well that every few years Dad made a point of having the board adjust his percentage of the profits downward, so that his pay did not become even more spectacular. Being the son of the Thousand-Dollar-A-Day-Man didn’t bother me at all. I was still trying to get over Isabel, and when the stories about Dad appeared, a lot of girls suddenly found me more interesting than before.
From my vantage point, both Roosevelt and the Depression seemed remote. Except for telling me over and over that Roosevelt was a hero, Dad rarely discussed politics with me. But his liberal principles gradually rubbed off, and I began to develop a sense of social justice. The more I thought about the federal relief programs, the better they struck me. By 1936 I was getting into arguments with members of my fraternity who wanted Alf Landon for President. Then, at the beginning of Roosevelt’s second term, I went to Cuba with some of my fraternity brothers for spring vacation. We took a cruise ship from New York and had a tremendous time. Havana offered every kind of vice, and if you wanted to raise hell, that was the place to do it. But when I got home I began thinking it was awful for the Cubans to have their country turned into an amusement park for rich Americans.
New Deal values weren’t the only thing I picked up from Dad. Somehow, through his moralizing, his example, and his impressive tolerance for my misbehavior, the old gentleman got to me. Sometime around my sophomore year at Brown I started learning how to police myself.
My roommate that year was an interesting fellow from Pittsburgh with a very wealthy father. His name was David Ignatius Bartholomew McCahill III. I called him Iggy. We had an apartment on Waterman Street, a sort of half-cellar, and we were carousing and staying out late with every girl in town. Iggy really didn’t give a damn. Maybe his father didn’t mind if he flunked out. At any rate, Iggy was wild: he had a Great Dane that he didn’t want to bother feeding, so he bought a meal ticket from the greasy-spoon cafeteria at the end of the block and tied it under the dog’s collar. Whenever the dog was hungry it would trot down to the cafeteria and paw the door. Somebody would feed the dog a hamburger and punch the ticket for two bits. That caused quite a stir in the neighborhood. Some people said the meal ticket ought to be taken from the dog and given to a poor student.
Toward the middle of sophomore year, I had another of my visits with Dean Arnold, who said, “This time you’re really headed out the door. I like your father and I like you. I’m sorry to see you go.”
“I’m not a great student,” I said, “but I don’t want to get kicked out.”
He said, “You’d better knuckle down.”
I went to Iggy and told him, “I can’t live here any more, because I’ve got to stay in college.” He understood. He went on to flunk out that January. I took a single room in a dormitory and really tried hard. But exam time was coming and I knew I would flunk. Instead, I developed a pain in my right side that turned out to be appendicitis. Getting operated on gave me a chance to postpone taking the exams by six weeks, so I was able to study and pass.
During that same period I wrestled with the question of alcohol. Drinking was a charged subject in our family, going back to when my parents first met by not touching their wine. Dad never served liquor in the house during Prohibition, and his attitude made drinking seem sinful. He avoided alcohol like he avoided airplanes. Once Mother was trying to give him a dose of castor oil. She had a way of making it less revolting by mixing it with soda, lemon juice, and whiskey. Dad got the stuff right up to his mouth, then put it down on the basin and said, “I’d rather not do that, Jeannette.” He washed the glass out, poured in straight castor oil, and drank it down.
At IBM, drinking was taboo, and the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933 made no difference at all. The official policy was that employees did not drink during the workday and that no liquor was allowed at IBM gatherings or on IBM property. The unofficial policy was that excessive drinking, even done on your own time, could ruin your chances of promotion. In Endicott, our factory town, the saying was that a prudent IBM man would draw his shades before having a cocktail with his wife. Father did nothing to dispel this myth, although I don’t think he ever meant to intrude on people’s private lives. He just wanted IBM to be beyond reproach. But his subordinates concluded he was averse to all merrymaking, and they sometimes got carried away in pressing that view on the employees.
It’s not surprising that I preferred spending the holidays away from home while I was in college. I’d go home for Christmas Day, then the rest of the time I’d visit my fraternity brothers and their families. One night just before New Year’s of 1935, some of us were drinking beer at a country club in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I was twenty years old. One glass led to another and the drinks seemed to improve my dancing, so I had a marvelous evening.
The next day I had a crisis of conscience. On my way back to New York I began agonizing over my gaiety and my father’s feelings about alcohol. I felt so guilty that I decided to confess to Dad. Later that day I took some difficult steps into the library of our apartment where he was sitting. “Dad,” I said, “I want to talk about something.” I outlined the previous evening, which hadn’t really been anything more than a few beers and a lot of fun.
Dad must have found my confession very reassuring. He shook my hand and said, “Thank you very much for telling me, son. Can you sit down for a few minutes?” Then he said, “I tried a few beers when I was young, and a few beers led to stronger stuff, and it never really worked out for me.” Later I heard a story that, to my knowledge, he never told anyone, not even my mother. It came from an old friend of his. When Dad had gone to Buffalo at age nineteen to seek his fortune, his first job had been like the one he’d left behind in Painted Post: selling sewing machines off the back of a wagon, this time for a manufacturer called Wheeler and Wilcox. One day Dad went into a roadside saloon to celebrate a sale and had too much to drink. When the bar closed, he found out that his entire rig—horse, buggy, and samples—had been stolen. Wheeler and Wilcox fired him and dunned him for the lost property. Word of this got around, of course, and it took Dad more than a year to find another steady job. This anecdote never made it into IBM lore, which is too bad, because it would have helped explain Father to the tens of thousands of people who had to follow his rules. At the time he must have felt as though his life was over. I don’t know how much Dad drank up until then, but losing his wagon and his sewing machines was enough to put him off liquor for the rest of his life.
My father began to exercise a profound influence on me, something like the way religion affects some people. I’d go out night after night with pretty girls, dancing and having some drinks. But after about a week of this, I’d start to sense him. Maybe he was four thousand miles away, but I’d feel him like the keel of a boat, pulling me back upright again. I never exactly rushed back to my room to start studying, but I’d take a new tack of trying to live better.
My poor performance at school made it hard for me to see what I was going to amount to. But gradually I reached the conclusion that I might do all right if I worked the whole spectrum of things I was reasonably good at, mainly having to do with people. I knew how to turn down a drink, how to keep myself well turned out, how to show respect toward older people. To some degree I was copying Dad. He wasn’t well educated, but he had assimilated enough knowledge of the world that his lack of formal learning was never a handicap. So I began to work hard at making and keeping friends. I learned to focus on the other person during a conversation and to ask myself constantly, “Am I out of line with this fellow? Am I doing right by him or am I offending in some way?”
The friends I made in college are still my friends today.
When senior year rolled around I flirted with the idea of dropping out of school to fool with airplanes full time. A friend and I had a little aerial photography business. But I was afraid of what might happen to me if I went entirely out on my own, and I said to myself, “I’ve already put in three years—I might as well graduate.” I took all the gut courses I could find and made a mighty effort to pass. In the end, however, I owed my graduation to Dean Arnold. He must have decided, “This guy is improving a bit. Best give him a diploma and wish him well.” Twenty years later I endowed several fellowships at Brown in Arnold’s honor.
During my senior year I also began to have surprisingly prudent thoughts about life after graduation. I still had no idea what I wanted to do, except that I thought I needed the discipline that a job could provide. Only one solution seemed possible. I called up Dad and asked, “How do you go about getting a job at IBM?”
No doubt my father privately rejoiced, although he also may have been wondering what kind of employee he was getting. He quickly arranged for me to start as a sales trainee the following October. The prospect of my working at IBM also inspired Dad to write me even more letters than usual. For my part, I stopped throwing them away and I still have a handful today. One of my favorites is a five-pager from December 1936. He was thinking about moral lessons all the time, and he could not write a letter without giving a lecture. This one was meant to inspire me to pass my remaining courses and graduate:
… always remember life is not as complex as many people would have you think. And the older you grow, the more you will realize that success and happiness depend on a very few things. I list the important assets and liabilities as follows. [Here he drew a line down the middle of the page, and wrote in two columns:]
Father, Son & Co. Page 6
