Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  I hadn’t had much to do with Jane since she’d sold her IBM stock, but her illness made hurt pride irrelevant, and I got in the habit of visiting her several times each week. She was a solid, thoughtful, tough gal, and she really fought the cancer, staying active socially and giving dinner parties even though she was almost bedridden. When Nixon appointed her husband undersecretary of state, Jane was too sick to move to Washington, but she knew how much the job meant to Jack and urged him to grab it. She was happy that I came to see her, and in those final months we developed a warm relationship. Being there day after day was the best way I had to tell her that in spite of our past differences, I admired her and loved her and felt sorrow that she was dying.

  All these problems piled up on me and there was no escape. If I had been a drinker in those days, I’d have quickly killed myself. Vacations didn’t help. I threw myself into skiing—we must have gone on a dozen ski trips in 1969 alone—and when the weather was warm I raced my sailboat. But afterward I’d go back to IBM with my nerves just as taut as before. By fall 1970 my discouragement showed. People who worked around me say that I became more and more volatile, flying into rages over petty details like the way snow was plowed in the parking lot. Late on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-November, I was in my office and Jane Cahill, my executive assistant, started to come in the door. Then she stopped cold, because I had my head down on the desk. “Are you all right?” she said.

  “I’m fine. I’m tired,” I said. Jane offered to drive me home, but I told her I’d drive myself. My sister’s condition was much worse, and the day before I’d learned of the death of my best friend from college, Nick Lunken. He’d been ill for years but I remembered him as a merry guy who loved to play practical jokes and always got me to laugh. I was supposed to go to his funeral the following morning.

  That night I woke up with a pain in my chest. It wasn’t very intense but it wouldn’t go away. Olive was in the Caribbean with friends, so I drove myself to the emergency room at Greenwich Hospital, where they put me on a monitor. By morning I’d convinced myself I was fine, and told the internist who came to examine me that I wanted to leave. He said, “You’re not going anywhere. You’re having a heart attack.”

  “Impossible!” I thought. “Dad never had a heart attack.” But they wheeled me into intensive care and put me into an oxygen tent. Next the doctor tried to stick an IV into my arm, the needle broke, and he yelled at the nurse to get another one. I thought he was acting awfully tense. More doctors trooped in. There was a speaker inside the oxygen tent and I said, “Why are all you fellows gathering around here?” My voice was weak because I was slowly losing consciousness. Then I said, “Oh, I know—so each of you can render my estate a bill. Ha ha …” and I was out.

  If my father had ever been struck down in this way, IBM would have been paralyzed because it was a one-man show. But when I got sick, business went on pretty smoothly. Vin Learson came to the intensive care unit and I put IBM in his hands until I could get healthy again; I didn’t want to make decisions from a hospital bed. Then I called Al Williams, who was the senior member of the board, and told him we had it all arranged.

  Dr. Newberg, the internist, was an energetic, attractive man. Over the next three weeks he had long talks with me about what a heart attack is, how serious mine had been, how long I’d need to recuperate, and so forth. Finally he said, “You know more about heart attacks than any patient I ever had.”

  “I’m trying to avoid having another one,” I said.

  “Well, as long as we’re on the subject, what are you planning to do when you get out of here?”

  I said, “I don’t know—go back, and maybe retire in a few years.”

  Newberg looked me right in the eye and said, “Why don’t you get out right now?”

  I was so stunned by this suggestion that I couldn’t think about anything else for the rest of the day. I realized that the strain of running IBM had taken a huge toll. Now I was being offered a way to step down with honor.

  The next morning I saw the sun coming up outside my window and felt better than I had in decades. I decided that as long as I was in the hospital I’d stop worrying about IBM. I sent for the secret list of adventures that had been in my desk drawer for years. Most of the items on the list were too arduous for a recovering heart-attack victim to consider, but I thought I could sail. Before long I was happily immersed in plans for a new sailboat designed for voyaging rather than speed. I got Olin Stephens, the yacht designer, to come to the hospital with Paul Wolter, Palawan’s professional captain, and we spread sketches out on the bed. I started rereading the journals of Captain Cook, which I’d loved as a boy, and I was amused to find a comment I could almost have written myself. It was from Cook’s letter to a friend upon being retired to a desk job in Greenwich, England after a decade of roaming the seas:

  My fate drives me from one extreme to another; a few months ago the whole Southern hemisphere was hardly big enough for me, and now I am going to be confined within the limits of Greenwich, which are far too small for an active mind like mine. I must however confess it is a fine retreat and a pretty income, but whether I can bring myself to like ease and retirement, time will shew.

  Less than a year after Cook wrote this complaint, he managed to obtain the command of two ships and was off on his third and last great voyage. If Cook could fight his way out of the doldrums of retirement and take to the sea, so could I, I thought. Knowing of my ambitions, my brother sent me a very large oil painting of a 19th-century English sailing ship entering Portsmouth harbor after a long voyage. The note said, “I hope this is the biggest get-well card you’ll receive.” IBM seemed very far away indeed.

  I came home thirty days after the heart attack, and the first thing I had to do was go to my sister’s funeral. She died on the last day of the year. She was only fifty-five, but I guess everyone in our family felt reconciled to her death because it had been expected and we’d all been able to say good-bye. After that I had to face the slow ordeal of recuperating physically and emotionally from my illness. When you have a heart attack, you realize how fragile your body is. I felt that mine had let me down, damn near entirely, and for several months I had very volatile reactions to insignificant things. Olive bore the brunt of my anger and bitterness. She had fixed up a very comfortable room for me on the ground floor of our house because I wasn’t supposed to climb stairs. She put books in there that she knew I’d like, paintings, and so on. When I first walked in I saw she even had a miniature air horn on the nightstand, a small version of the kind of horn they use to call time-out at basketball games. “What’s that for?” I said.

  “That’s in case you feel bad. You blow that and we’ll come.”

  I tried it and the valve must have been clogged because it just went boop. I don’t know why I got so mad, but I said, “Goddammit, Olive, you’d never hear this!” I made a big stink about it, which was awful of me. She’d obviously put a lot of time and thought into preparing that room, and I should have been grateful instead of acting like an angry fool.

  I kept to myself during the weeks that followed, working on my plans for the new boat. In the barn behind our house Paul Wolter built full-size mockups of sections of the hull. I wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but I’d sneak out there and look at the mock-ups for hours, imagining what the boat would be like, and debating with Paul about the changes we ought to make.

  Finally, after a couple of months had passed, I went back to IBM and told people I was thinking of getting out. The board of directors did everything in the world to keep me in the company. They came to me individually and as a group. “You’re so valuable to the business,” they said. “Can’t you just arrange your schedule so you’re under less stress?” IBM has one of the best boards in the world, but all boards have a common failing. If the chief executive has done well, they won’t push for a successor to be designated until something goes wrong—and then they often end up hiring a new man pell-mell from outside. All the same
, I tried it their way for a little while. The doctor had told me to do a lot of walking to build up my heart. So I’d leave my office and pace endlessly around the grounds of our headquarters. The doctor also ordered me to lie down for an hour or two after lunch. So each day I’d eat and then lie down. But you can’t run a big company like that. I’d get up from my couch and look into the outer office and I’d see people with important problems sitting there cooling their heels. That wasn’t the example I wanted to set. After two months I finally went to the board and told them it wasn’t going to work. I knew I was doing the right thing. I wanted to live more than I wanted to run IBM. It was a choice my father never would have made, but I think he would have respected it.

  I wrestled with the question of who was to run the company after me. A year earlier, when Dick left for Paris, I’d decided on Frank Cary as my successor. Frank was really everybody’s choice. He was head of IBM’s computer divisions in the U.S., and had emerged as a natural leader even though his management style was utterly different from mine. Frank was a brilliant business analyst, cool, impartial, and totally self-confident. He rarely spoke up at meetings, and it wasn’t his style to step in and save the day the way Learson and I did. He didn’t make heroic moves and he didn’t make glaring mistakes; when he ran into a problem he simply figured out how to fix it. A lot of people attributed Frank’s muted style to the fact that he came from California—he was one of the talented young managers Al Williams had turned up in 1955 when he scoured the company for MBAs. At one point Frank was a district manager in Chicago, and I’d flown out to look him over. He seemed unprepossessing at first sight, but talking to me didn’t appear to intimidate him in the least. When I bored in with questions his answers were straightforward and calm. I called Williams and said, “We’ve got to bring this guy East.” As soon as Frank got to New York he began to shine, and that was without Al or me championing him. He started at about the fourth echelon of management, and passed muster with a lot of other bosses before he got to us.

  The heart attack threw my Frank Cary plan into disarray, because it hinged on the assumption that I’d be around three more years until I turned sixty, the retirement age all the senior executives had agreed upon. If I’d made it that far, Vin, who was older, would have retired first, and Frank would have had a clear path to the top. But when I decided to step down, Vin was only fifty-eight, with a year and a half to go before his retirement. Even though Cary was the man we’d picked to run the company long-term, Vin was ending a long and dramatic career and clearly had a claim on the top job. I resolved the question by naming him chairman and chief executive for that eighteen-month span.

  I gave the board my letter of resignation at the end of June, agreeing to stay on as head of the board’s executive committee, just as Al Williams had in the first stage of his retirement. Bill Moore, the chairman of Bankers Trust and head of the compensation committee, asked, “What do you want to be paid?” and I laughed because it was so much easier to negotiate my salary now than it had been after Dad’s death. I told him I’d finish the current year at full salary, that the next year I’d take half pay, and that in the final year I’d work but take no pay at all. I fully intended to let my responsibilities taper off, and I didn’t want to feel any obligation to show up at the office.

  Finally I went sailing, as I’d been longing to do. I don’t think I understood at the time why I felt so compelled to sail, or the depth of the emotional turmoil I was in. So much of what was important to me had suddenly been taken away—my IBM career was over, my license to fly airplanes suspended because of the heart attack—and lurking underneath was my terror at realizing my life, instead of being long like Dad’s, might be short like Jane’s. Only in retrospect can I see how panicked I was. But at the time I knew instinctively that sailing would rescue me. Dr. Newberg had said, “You’re either going to be a heart-attack invalid, always trying to be near a hospital so you can check in for the next one; or you can try to forget about hospitals altogether.” I wanted to forget, and my solution was to head for a remote place where no hospitals were. I got Paul Wolter and we took the Palawan up around the island of Newfoundland.

  We brought a crew of young men to do the heavy work, and an old friend named Ed Thorne who was a great companion and excellent seaman. Ed knew he was going sailing with a captain who might drop dead at any minute, but he was game. Before we left he went to see Dr. Newberg, who took an orange and taught him how to give an emergency injection of morphine. I carried morphine along because I knew heart pain could be excruciating. When we put out to sea I worried each night when I went to bed that I might wake up dying and have no doctor around. As it happened one day we anchored in front of the Grenfell Mission Hospital on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula, and it crossed my mind that this might be my last chance to get off the Palawan alive. But then I put the fear behind me and I’m glad I did, because it would have been awful to live with that kind of dependency. The weather was rough, but we kept pounding along for a month, and the trip worked out better than I had a right to expect. In reality I was still pretty frail.

  Olive was waiting for me when we got back to North Haven, but the way I’d behaved since my heart attack had taken a terrible toll on our marriage. I must have thought that I had to get better all by myself, because I’d done everything I could to push her away. I’d been self-absorbed, unappreciative, and rude—a fairly common reaction among heart-attack victims, I’ve been told. Olive was constantly trying to keep me amused, but if something wasn’t to my liking I’d snap, “Don’t you know I can’t do that with my heart condition?” When I came back from the Newfoundland voyage our marriage was hanging by a thread. Nine months of frustration came boiling out in a bitter fight, and Olive finally said, “I can’t stand this anymore!”

  “Fine,” I said. “I can’t either.” I left and went out West with some friends.

  As far as Olive was concerned, that was the last straw. We’d been married almost thirty years, she had made tremendous efforts to cope with my temper, and it had all come to naught. It looked like retirement was only going to make my disposition worse. She was ready for a divorce.

  It took me a couple of weeks to realize that I was making the worst mistake of my life. By the time I raced back East to ask her to change her mind, she had moved out of our Greenwich house and gotten an apartment in Manhattan. The friends I confided in were pessimistic. “She’ll never come back, so don’t waste any effort,” one told me. Another one saw how sick I was about losing her and said, “She’s a great girl. Give it everything you’ve got.”

  I couldn’t reach her. She wouldn’t answer the letters I wrote, or pick up the telephone when I tried to call. Soon the news of our separation appeared in the gossip columns, which made it pretty official, and Olive hired a woman divorce lawyer who was one of the best in the business. I knew I had to do something drastic. So I went to the lawyer and asked for her help. “Olive can’t be sure about this thing, and I want her back,” I said. “Could you be our intermediary?”

  The lawyer was down-to-earth. “I feel as though I owe you a favor, and I’ll tell you why,” she said. “I met your father once. When I was a young associate just starting out, I was sent to deliver some papers to him at home in New York. It was snowing that night. After he signed the papers, he walked me to the front door, called his limousine, and put me in it. Then he arranged a blanket on my knees and told the driver to take me home. So for your father’s sake, I’ll talk to your wife.” Olive was madder than hell when she found all this out, but the lawyer did serve as a go-between.

  I was as desperate as a teenager to have Olive back. More weeks went by, the matter still wasn’t resolved, and I went with my sister Helen to visit England. One night we took a walk on the Strand and suddenly I felt faint. It was totally psychosomatic but I thought I was going to die. I checked out of the hotel and came straight back to the United States and to Greenwich Hospital, where I actually told the doctor that I had a bro
ken heart. “I guess you really miss your wife,” he said.

  I sent my secretary to tell Olive I was sick. She was skeptical. “Will he live?” she said.

  “I think he’ll live all right, Mrs. Watson, but he’s seriously ill.” So she came straight to my bedside and that was the beginning of our reconciliation. Within two days we were on our way to Europe and I sent a cable to the IBM board that said, “Reports of our divorce are greatly exaggerated. We are leaving for Sweden on a second honeymoon. Olive and Tom.”

  We had a tough time putting our marriage back together. There were blow-ups, mainly caused by me. At one point when it looked like we might separate again, I decided I had to try a psychiatrist, the only time in my life I’ve ever gone. “We need help,” I told him, “but there’s no point in bringing Olive in here because she doesn’t like to analyze emotional matters.”

  He said, “Tell me about you and what your problems are.” So I gave him a short rundown of my life. Then I talked about our marriage and occasionally he’d throw in a question such as, “Did you ever have an argument at breakfast?” or “Did you ever have arguments over the children?” We’d had terrible arguments over the children, so I concentrated on that. Around the middle of the third session I said, “I guess what you’re trying to tell me is that the woman is doing her damnedest to get things right, and I never give her any credit. I keep trying to win every fight. I guess I’ve got to lose some.”