Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  Our flight through Siberia took us to the remote town of Yakutsk on the Lena River, where it was minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit when we arrived. I had to admire the Russians for maintaining a real town this far north—even if one of its main industries was a prison. Yakutsk was used as a place to exile people from Moscow, and is one of the coldest spots on earth. Its only communication with the outside world was down the Lena River, which empties into the Laptev Sea in the Arctic. At one point I took off my glove, not thinking, and froze my finger on the propeller controls.

  The following night we took off, hoping to push straight through to Nome, Alaska, two thousand miles to the east. But it was about 40 below and the cold was affecting the way the engines cooled and lubricated themselves. My job as copilot was to manage the engines, and our number-four engine was only delivering about half power. I had to push the three good engines beyond their safe settings to get us into the air. We climbed very well through moonlight and broken clouds for about twenty minutes, and I began to think we might make it. But about half an hour after takeoff, the oil temperature on number four went up and its oil pressure went down. When that happens, something is seriously wrong and you have to act fast because the engine will catch fire once it gets hot enough. I said, “I think we ought to shut down that engine.”

  There was no immediate response. None of us was thinking terribly clearly because the flight-deck heaters were broken and it was so cold. Fiegel didn’t say much and the general, who was standing between us, didn’t either. I said, “I don’t want to be an s.o.b. here, but if we don’t do something about that engine, we may not be able to shut it down. I recommend we shut down the damn engine!”

  The general said, “Yeah, I think you’d better do that, Tom.”

  There was a big red button and I punched it and the engine stopped quite nicely. We didn’t have full power on the other three, because number two was a little sick as well—maybe we had 65 percent power altogether. We were in real trouble—picking up ice, unable to hold our altitude, but still headed for Nome, eighteen hundred miles away. We were making no effort to turn. I sat that out for maybe one minute. Then I said, “Hey, fellas, don’t tell me we’re going to fly to Nome on three engines. We’re getting ice right now, and we’ll get further and further out here where there’s no airport and we’ll have a hell of a time.” Finally Bradley said we should turn back.

  The lights of Yakutsk were one of the grandest sights I have ever seen, because I thought we would never make it back alive. By now it was snowing hard. Our flaps didn’t work and we could barely get the landing gear down. We started to sink at an alarming rate and I pushed the two good engines past their limits to check us. The plane was so heavy with ice that it took all the strength of both Lee and me at the controls to handle it at all. We made our last turn just off the ground and it looked to me as though we were going to crack up, but we finally straightened out for the runway, which was dimly visible through the snow. We were still sinking. I saw trees ahead and yelled at Lee but he couldn’t see them because of the ice on his windshield. So I pulled back on the wheel and blasted the throttles. The boys in the cabin told me that at that point the general covered his eyes. We zoomed over the trees and hit the end of the runway without much of a bump. I think we were all as pleased as if the war were over.

  We were back in town before dawn, very glad to see our warm rooms with their rough-hewn timber walls and coal stoves. Our plane was finished for the winter, and we were stuck in Yakutsk for a week before the Russians could arrange a cargo plane to take us out. Most of the crew were content to sit around their rooms but in spite of the cold I got out every day with Harley Trice, our interpreter, to see the town. Whenever we walked, one or two of the local commissars would join us and a crowd would gather. I’ll warrant that fewer than twenty-five foreigners who weren’t also prisoners had been there in fifty years. The west side of Yakutsk seemed to be one big prison camp, though they never let us get close enough to be sure. The town was full of Poles who were ex-prisoners and still too poor to leave, and many of the people we met spoke French or German.

  The place also had a strong native culture, which I found much more charming than the Communist culture. The natives, called Yakuts, looked like a cross between Eskimos and Chinese, with slanted eyes and fierce mustaches. They wore felt boots and fur garments and drove little Siberian ponies or reindeer. We froze until they supplied us with leggings, gloves, and boots, and I bought a fur coat for my soon-to-be-born baby. At the town museum, which was unheated, we saw a mastodon that had been dug up nearby and the mummy of a native princess dressed in very rich furs and beads. There were implements that indicated a very old civilization. On our third day in Yakutsk we went out to watch ice cutting on the snow-covered river. There one really got a picture of the frozen waste of Siberia. The river plain was flat and snowy and dismal. In the distance I could see the town belching dense clouds of coal smoke in a vain effort to fend off the cold. It was so penetrating that it froze our eyelashes.

  That night the general asked me to come up to his room. We talked about everything under the sun. Eventually he brought up the next mission into Russia, saying that Lee Fiegel didn’t like staff work much and wasn’t interested in going again. He said, “Tom, I am going to make you first pilot. You have worked hard and you’ve learned a lot and I’m very pleased. You can depend on this.” If he had given me a million dollars I couldn’t have felt better.

  That night I went right down to the crew chief’s room, told him I hoped he didn’t feel as bad as he once had about me, and asked if he’d stay on. He said yes. So did the rest of the men. The efforts I’d made with them saved me the great embarrassment of having to tell Bradley that his crew had rejected me as its leader. The funny thing was that once I’d really started thinking about the men, I found it easy to make them reasonably happy. The old angle really worked—a little recognition, a few pats on the back.

  We finally flew out in a Russian cargo plane that took us over the sharp, leaden peaks of eastern Siberia. The fields where we stopped to refuel were already full of brand-new American-built warplanes destined for the Eastern front. Bradley’s Alaska-Siberia ferry route, or Alsib, was a great success—by the end of the war nearly eight thousand planes made their way along it to Russia. Even our own B-24 made a contribution after the Russians got it flying again. In the official records of aircraft turned over to Russia during the war there are a lot of fighters, light bombers, and transport planes, and one heavy bomber. That was ours—a little monument to the Bradley mission.

  I got back to New York in time for the birth of our first son just before Christmas 1942. But two months later this great joy turned to tragedy.

  I was making a practice flight one afternoon in a DC-3 near Washington when a call on the radio said, “Captain Watson, land immediately.” At the field I found an IBM man waiting in his chesterfield and bowler. He said, “Tom, I’ve got bad news. Your baby’s very sick. Your father called and you’ve got to go to New York.” I ran back to the DC-3. Those were pretty informal days. Over the radio the flight sergeant gave me permission to borrow the plane. An hour later I landed at La Guardia field and there, sitting on a wall, was my beautiful Olive with Father standing beside her. When I saw them both I knew the baby was dead. The nurse had taken him to the park in his carriage and somehow he’d died in his sleep. Olive was beside herself with grief, and Father was upset that she had come out, because in his old-fashioned way he thought she should sit with the dead baby for twenty-four hours. But she didn’t want to see the body at all and I didn’t blame her.

  As soon as we got back to our small apartment I went to look at the carriage. I took the sheet out, and then I took the pillowcase off, and there was a little trace of blood right where the baby’s mouth would have been. He had obviously suffocated and thrown out some blood in his struggles. I put the pillowcase in the washing machine and hid away the baby’s other personal things. We decided we’d better ask for an autops
y to see if there was something wrong with us as parents. So they came and took the baby. We never got a written report. The doctors simply said, “You have nothing to worry about. Go right ahead and have more babies.”

  The next day a death notice appeared in the paper and our telephone rang. It was Ben Robertson, one of the correspondents I’d met in Moscow. I said, “Hello, Ben, nice to hear your voice. We’ve got a tragedy here and I just can’t talk now.”

  “I know about the tragedy. I’m here in your building.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to talk to you. Come on down.”

  I went downstairs and he walked me to the park and back and said just enough that I felt a little better. I didn’t know Ben well, and it meant so much to me that he would do that—it was an act of singular kindness. That night he got on a Pan Am flying boat and was killed when it flipped over landing in fog in Lisbon harbor. But he had taught me a crucial lesson: if you can help a man in a period of great grief, you should go out of your way to do it.

  We buried the baby at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County, where my father owned a plot that had been empty up to now. It was awful, piling into a car in the middle of winter and going to see that little coffin lowered into the ground. Then I took Olive away to a resort for military people near Jacksonville, Florida. It was an overnight train ride and I’d bought a bottle of Scotch. I poured Olive a drink and me a drink. Then I said, “I don’t think this is going to help much with this kind of problem.” She said, “I agree with you.” So I poured the Scotch down the basin and we sat together and felt all our sorrow.

  I steered clear of IBM for most of the war. Dad and I saw each other a number of times each year, but never discussed the business. And yet IBM was hard to avoid. The entire military was beginning to move by IBM cards, because warfare had become so big and complicated that book-keeping had to be done right on the battlefield. Toward the end of the war I’d land on some Pacific atoll just taken from the Japanese and find a mobile punch-card unit there, tabulating the payroll. (These were the invention of my brother Dick, who was a major in the army Ordnance Corps by the end of the war; it was his idea to put punch-card machines on army trucks for use in combat zones.) IBM cards kept track of bombing results, casualties, prisoners, displaced persons, and supplies. There was a punch-card record of every man drafted, and it followed him through induction, classification, training, and service, right up to his discharge. There were also IBM machines involved in a lot of top-secret applications. Our equipment was used to break the Japanese code before the Battle of Midway and to help in hunting down German U-boats at sea.

  Making machines for the armed forces and defense suppliers would have been enough to keep IBM’s factories whirring at full capacity. But IBM was also called on to make ordnance—machine guns for fighter planes, infantry carbines, bombsights, gas masks, and more than thirty other war items. To keep up with this, Dad set up a new factory in the town of Poughkeepsie and doubled the size of our Endicott plant. By the middle of the war fully two thirds of IBM’s factory capacity was devoted to ordnance work.

  Dad could have made tens of millions of dollars on this business, but that didn’t interest him. He was very sensitive about making money from war production, both on moral grounds and out of concern for IBM’s image. He didn’t want the company accused of profiteering. So he had a rule that IBM could make no more than one percent profit on munitions, and IBM’s annual profit for each war year stayed the same as it had been in 1940. As far as Dad’s own salary went, he had a proportion of it, representing the extra wartime business, set aside in a fund for widows and orphans of IBM men killed in action.

  All the same, World War II benefited IBM a great deal by pushing us into the ranks of really big businesses. Even though profits didn’t get any higher, sales tripled—from forty-six million dollars in 1940 to one hundred forty million in 1945. The war also showed Dad that IBM could expand fast without losing its character. With just a few experienced men from Endicott he was able to hire two thousand new people at Poughkeepsie, teach them IBM values, and get them to produce in a hurry. He was proud of this work force of “farmers, clerks, artists, and teachers,” as he called them. This success increased Dad’s appetite for growth. By 1944 he was saying that he had no intention of allowing IBM to shrink back down when peace came.

  My father went out of his way to back up the IBM people who had joined the service. He paid each man a quarter of his usual pay while in uniform, and each Christmas, Dad would send a box of food and gifts and every once in a while a sweater or a pair of gloves. He did this partly out of patriotism and partly out of shrewdness, because he wanted those skilled people to come back. I got war pay and food packages from IBM like everyone else, and Business Machines, the company newspaper, seemed to find its way to me every week, no matter where I was. It was filled with news of how IBM was supporting America’s war effort. There would be a picture of Dad surrounded by flags, opening yet another factory, with a band and a diva from the Metropolitan Opera on hand to help the festivities along.

  I always turned down Dad’s invitations to come to Endicott for celebrations. The longer I worked with General Bradley the more I thought about making the Air Force my career. When we left Russia we expected that we’d soon go back to help supervise the Siberian air transport operation. But the Russians abruptly stopped letting in Americans, and meanwhile Bradley’s career took an unexpected turn. I was with him at the Pentagon just after Christmas 1942 when a call came from the White House. The general was asked to see Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s right-hand man.

  Bradley brought me with him, and we reported to the wing of the White House opposite the Oval Office, where Hopkins had a whole suite, including a place to sleep. It was my first visit to the White House, and I thought meeting Hopkins was the next best thing to seeing Roosevelt himself. By then Hopkins had such bad stomach trouble that after shaking our hands he stretched out on a chaise longue and propped his feet up on the wall. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “This is the only way I get comfortable.”

  Bradley sat in front of him and I was off to the side with a notebook. Bradley said, “This is Captain Watson, and I have him along because he takes good notes. If you don’t have any objection he’ll just sit here as we talk.”

  “Not at all. Are you any relation to Tom Watson?”

  “I’m his son.”

  “Isn’t that interesting! I know him. He’s the only business friend Roosevelt has.”

  Then Hopkins turned to Bradley. “You may know that Admiral Standley, who is our ambassador to the Soviet Union, is leaving.…”

  We were there about two hours, and I left with a fistful of notes. They had discussed the Soviets and, while Hopkins hadn’t come right out and said it, it was pretty clear that Bradley was going to be offered the ambassadorship. The last thing Hopkins said to us was: “I’m sure the president will be in touch with you within a few days.” As we drove back to the Pentagon, Bradley said, “If it’s true, would you go back to Russia with me?” I took that as a great compliment and, of course, said yes.

  The first four days we did nothing but wait for the call. Finally, after about two weeks, Bradley said, “What do you think?”

  “I guess it isn’t going to happen.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Roosevelt eventually sent Averell Harriman, after the post had been vacant for five or six months. But I sensed right away what had knocked Bradley out of the running. He had a weak spot where women were concerned, and the U.S. embassy officials in Moscow objected to his appointment. Bradley had lived in Spaso House, the ambassador’s residence, while we were there. More than thirty years later, after I became ambassador, I’d sometimes go into his old room and sit quietly, thinking of my friend—how much he’d done for me and how sad it was that he’d missed out on something he really wanted.

  After Bradley gave up waiting for Roosevelt’s phone call, he went to Hap Arnold, the commander
of the Air Force, for another assignment. Arnold named him to the new post of air inspector, which was later called inspector general. This meant Bradley was chief troubleshooter for an Air Force that now numbered more than a million men around the world. Bradley asked me to stay as his pilot and offered me a place as a technical inspector, which mainly involved going around to air bases to see that planes were safely maintained. I was happy to say yes, even though we’d be based in Washington, far from any action. Olive had been badly depressed since the loss of our baby, and I wanted to spend time with her.

  For about a year and a half I flew a variety of inspection missions around the United States, always returning to Olive after a week or ten days. We rented a little house in the Virginia countryside and were able to live together for the first time. It was great coming home from a trip. I’d get my airplane going like hell and come in low right over our roof. By the time I’d landed at Bolling Field and gotten the airplane buttoned up, Olive would be driving in the gate to meet me. Later on we rented an apartment closer to town, so Olive would have people to talk to when I was away. One couple living near us was Eliot and Molly Noyes. Eliot was an imaginative fellow who ran the Air Force glider program and later became one of the world’s great industrial designers. He wore such thick glasses that I was amazed to learn he flew, but I guess the Air Force overlooked it because glider pilots were hard to come by in those days.

  In many ways, Olive and I were like any ordinary couple starting out, right down to the fact that we fought about money. I had no idea how rich we were, because Dad was still keeping me in the dark about my trust fund. Olive and I had what seemed to me a decent income—I worked my way up to lieutenant colonel and got about $750 a month including flight pay, plus $150 a month from the trust fund, and a little more in IBM war pay. But I have one of our account books for those years, showing what we spent on groceries, the cleaning lady who came once a week, and this and that, and at the end of each month we were always six or eight dollars in the red. I used to dread bringing up the subject with Olive. She was doing her best to run a thrifty house, and when I’d start boring in about our monthly deficit, she didn’t want to talk about it. She would go into what I’d call her Mode Impossible. Nothing really matched it. It occurred to me once or twice to ask Dad for extra cash, but I never did. I knew he expected us to learn financial discipline. Fortunately the money argument came up between Olive and me only when we balanced our books, and overall we grew closer and closer. In March 1944, a little after my thirtieth birthday, our son Tom was born. We both felt very lucky to have another child.