Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  I probably would have become deeply depressed if IBM had been the only outlet for my energy. Fortunately, I knew not only how to sail, but how to fly. Aviation was my earliest passion, and while IBM had replaced it at the center of my life, my desire to be airborne had never disappeared. When the Federal Aviation Administration restored my unrestricted pilot’s license two years after my heart attack, my first present to myself was helicopter lessons. I wasn’t sure that life outside of IBM was going to be worthwhile, but the idea of mastering a new form of flying excited me. So in the spring of 1974 I enrolled at a helicopter training center near Boston. Each day I’d fly an hour in the morning, spend a couple of hours in bed, and fly another hour in the afternoon. I fancied myself a talented pilot, but keeping a helicopter steady is like trying to stand at attention on top of a medicine ball. After about thirty-five hours in the air, I despaired of ever learning how. I told the instructor, “I think it’s about time I gave this whole thing up.”

  “Not at all! You can solo anytime you want.”

  His confidence surprised me, and without giving myself a chance to think I said, “Well, let’s do it right now.” I closed the door and off I went. The practice area was a forest where a lumber company had cut large swathes. For forty-five minutes I flew up and down those cuts, which were at least fifty yards wide but seemed much narrower to me, until I felt the beginnings of mastery, and a couple of weeks later I proudly qualified for my license. A lot of veteran fliers shy away from helicopters because of the gruesome way the early ones used to crash. Typically, one rotor blade would fly off, then the other, and the pilot would find himself in a fragile little capsule plunging to earth. That prospect terrified me too, so after careful research I bought a Bell Jet Ranger, the helicopter with the longest and best safety record, better than most small planes.

  I picked up my flying career where I’d left off at the end of the war. While I’d flown several thousand hours during my years at IBM, it was always for business and I never felt that I was getting enough solo time or variety. As a young man I’d flown every airplane I could get my hands on: fifteen different types during college and thirty more during the war, including bombers, fighters, transport planes, and even the big O-38 biplanes that were still part of the army’s inventory. Aviation in those days was very informal: I’d go up to a sergeant on the flight line and say, “I’ve read the tech order on the C-47, and if you’d just stand behind me and show me where the switches are, I’d like to fly it.” And he’s say, “Sure, Major.” It always satisfied me just to get the new airplane up and down; I had a reputation for knowing what I was doing because I never tried crazy stunts and never had a crack-up. Flying after the war became increasingly technical, with more and more FAA rules, but unlike many pilots of my generation I didn’t mind—following procedures became part of the challenge. I love piloting jets, which is the most technical flying of all, and after I got my helicopter license I bought a Learjet and became certified to fly that as well.

  I’ve experimented with just about every form of aviation except space flight. I wanted to try a hang glider at one point, after a friend’s son demonstrated one in Stowe. There seemed to be no reason why a sixty-year-old couldn’t learn, so I asked the young man for the name of the best instructor in the United States. I called, and the secretary at the hang gliding school said he wasn’t in. I called again and again for a couple of weeks, but could never get hold of the guy. Finally I said to the secretary, “Is he dead?”

  She said, “Yes.”

  “Was he killed by a hang glider?”

  “Yes.” That was the end of hang gliding for me.

  It’s quite a challenge, to be able to shift from one type of flying machine to another, and not necessarily the safest thing in the world. In spite of my best efforts I occasionally had a close call. A lot of people who knew me must have been saying, “That old bird is going to kill himself in an airplane.” But flying is vital to me, and in the first five years of my retirement I logged two thousand hours, not much less than the average corporate pilot. I found that it sharpened me to take new challenges, and I was constantly trying to program my time so I stayed a little overcommitted. That was how I’d lived at IBM, and my worst fear in retirement was of being dead in the water.

  In the summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter’s first year as president, I was sitting in my study at North Haven making plans for a voyage around Cape Horn when the phone rang. It was Harold Brown, the new secretary of defense. “Cy and I think you ought to come to Washington and get busy,” he said, referring to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Brown and Vance had both been directors of IBM when I retired and knew me well.

  “Harold,” I said, “I’m sitting in a comfortable chair looking out a picture window at beautiful spruce trees and Penobscot Bay. Why would I want to come to Washington?”

  “President Carter wants you to be chairman of the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament.”

  I’d never heard of this group before, but Harold explained that it was a blue-ribbon commission whose purpose is to give the president independent advice on nuclear strategy. It was established when Kennedy was in the White House, reports directly to the president, and is a way for prominent citizens to get behind the curtain of military secrecy and understand what is really going on in the arms race. Brown and Vance thought I was an obvious choice to lead the GAC, as it is called. I was a liberal whose whole professional life involved high technology. And I’d spent enough time in Russia, first as a military man and later as a businessman, that the Soviet way of thinking was not a total mystery to me. I saw the Soviets as responsible people, as interested as we are in preventing World War III, so that negotiating arms reduction treaties with them made sense.

  Surprising myself a little, I jumped at the opportunity. Before my heart attack I’d always turned down offers from Washington. It never seemed right to leave IBM, and I wasn’t willing to risk making a fool of myself in some new area where I didn’t know the ropes. But now I was retired and I’d been having adventures for several years. Here was a Democratic administration—the first in a long time—giving me a chance to do something important. Like many Americans I hadn’t given much thought to World War III since the early 1960s. I remembered those terrifying days when everybody huddled by their radios and TV sets waiting for news about the Cuban missile crisis. I’d built a fallout shelter for my own family during that period, and had started a Family Shelter Loan Program at IBM, so that any employee who wanted a shelter could afford one. But as more and more people built shelters, the less and less sense it seemed to make. You would stay in your shelter for thirty days, but when you came out, what would you meet? A savage world with a lot of predatory people to threaten your family. We all equipped our shelters with pistols and rifles, but the whole thing began to seem insane. Soon people seemed to decide that if nuclear war ever happened, there would be no point in trying to survive.

  When Harold Brown called, I hadn’t been downstairs to replenish the supplies in my shelter for many years. Psychologically it had been easier to push out of my mind the danger of the arms race—even while I knew it was still going on and IBM was supplying computers for weapons labs. The race had gone through several rounds of escalation. The U.S. had built a whole new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles called Minutemen; we’d surrounded the Soviet Union with Polaris submarines; we’d added multiple warheads to all our missiles; and of course the Russians had matched every move. The arms-control effort, which lagged far behind, now seemed to be nearing a crisis. The first SALT treaty limiting nuclear missiles had lapsed, SALT II was still on the negotiating table, and meanwhile the U.S. and Russia were on the verge of another escalation of the arms race.

  I put away my charts of Patagonia. For the next six months, leading up to the first meeting of the GAC, I shuttled back and forth to Washington and learned everything I could about treaties, politics, and nuclear weapons. I was briefed by the Arms Control and Disarma
ment Agency, the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department’s internal security agency, and the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I spent hours listening to military analysts talk in hypothetical terms about attacks, counterattacks, and tens and hundreds of millions of casualties. It was staggering. These people used a form of jargon that made it possible to discuss nuclear holocaust for hours without ever mentioning a human death. I thought their whole way of looking at things was perverse. I felt intimidated by the sheer volume of information that I had to master. But at the same time that I struggled to assimilate the technical content of what I was hearing, I was determined not to let the true meaning escape me. It seemed to me that we ought not to be making preparations to destroy civilization. I guess the military would argue that if we are always prepared, it will never happen. But that concept was driving the arms race. I was sure the experts who spent their lives immersed in the intricacies of strategic planning would consider my point of view simplistic, so I tried to keep it to myself. But using plain common sense was the whole premise for an advisory board like the GAC. In any technology field, especially one as dangerous as this, you need to counterbalance the narrow focus of the experts.

  The White House didn’t ask my advice on whom to appoint to the GAC—the members had been chosen before I arrived in Washington—but it was an interesting and competent group. Carter had named Republicans and Democrats, scientists and businessmen, lawyers, a churchman, and a labor leader—a dozen people in all. Half were prominent citizens who knew almost nothing about nuclear weapons; the other half were defense and foreign-policy experts; but almost all the members made the GAC a top priority. We had McGeorge Bundy, who’d been national security adviser for Kennedy and Johnson; Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to Gerald Ford; and Harold Agnew, the current head of the Los Alamos lab. Wolfgang Panofsky and Paul Doty were prominent scientists who had been in and out of government for years. The “civilians” included Owen Cooper of the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference; Margaret Wilson of the NAACP; Bert Combs, a federal judge and former governor of Kentucky; and Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists and a tremendous power in the Democratic Party. Lane Kirkland, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, was our biggest hawk.

  During the first few months I must have called on forty senators, building the network we were going to need if the committee were to have any effect. I had a lot of help from Bill Jackson, the GAC’s executive director, who had been Senator Alan Cranston’s chief legislative assistant in the areas of foreign policy and defense, and really knew how to get things done on Capitol Hill. Jackson was a short peppery guy about forty years old with a huge briefcase, and so energetic that he often failed to organize his ideas or express them succinctly—not exactly the IBM style. But he had brass and great political instincts, so I turned off my IBM approach and did things his way. Jackson had me making courtesy calls on everybody from liberals like Frank Church to hard-liners like Scoop Jackson. I also made a point of seeking advice from veterans of U.S.-Soviet relations, such as Averell Harriman and John J. McCloy, who had been the founding chairman of my committee in 1961.

  I didn’t know how to politick, but I began to realize that in some ways it isn’t much different from being a salesman. Rules of thumb that I’d learned selling punch-card machines also worked here, such as never wasting a customer’s time and always making friends with the secretaries.

  The committee had so much ground to cover that Bill Jackson and I decided it should meet each month for a full two days. That is a lot of time to ask of volunteers, and I measured my success by the number of people who showed up at each meeting. I’d send out teasers, saying for example that four physicists who’d helped design the first atom bomb were coming to talk to us. We always got ten or eleven attendees out of a possible thirteen, which indicated that people were interested. Each meeting was a challenge for me because I’d been on the sidelines for seven years, and there were enough experts on the committee that I felt I could ruin my credibility by making two or three really stupid remarks. Before each meeting Jackson and I would meet in a hotel and he’d spend a whole day throwing questions at me. When the meeting began I’d have detailed notes to keep me going and keep the pace fast. I never concentrated so hard in my life.

  Running the GAC was not at all like running IBM. Toward the end of my career I had a well-deserved reputation for swarming all over people at meetings, but this was an advisory panel, not a team of IBM executives, and my job was to develop a consensus. So I was constantly holding myself back. I’d sit in those briefings and write notes to myself that said, “Don’t talk too much. Make sure everybody has a chance to speak. Ask for ideas from those who haven’t said anything yet.”

  My goal was to take that diverse group and somehow weld it into a team. I knew it was hard for laymen not to feel intimidated by someone as brilliant and experienced as McGeorge Bundy, who was at Kennedy’s side during the Cuban missile crisis. So I made it clear to the professionals that they’d have to let other committee members catch up. In the meantime I thought it would be worthwhile to confront the professionals with a radically different viewpoint on the bomb. So I set up a private screening for the committee of Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant satire Dr. Strangelove. When Brent Scowcroft, one of the top military strategists in the country, heard that the film might be shown to the committee, he said, “How can you show such an unrealistic picture to people who are seriously trying to understand nuclear weapons!” I admitted that the scene of the pilot riding the H-bomb and wearing his cowboy hat was a little farfetched. But I thought there was a ring of truth to the rest of the movie—all those safeguards going wrong. It makes the point that the people with their fingers on the triggers are human, and that accidents can happen.

  The GAC usually met at the State Department, in a secure conference room with a big oval table, brown paneling, green carpet, and fluorescent lights. When the high-level briefings on weapons began, the first reactions of people like Arthur Krim and Bert Combs and Margaret Wilson were emotional. There would be a coffee break in the middle of a Defense Department presentation on cruise missiles or the neutron bomb, and committee members would come up to me glassy-eyed and say, “Can you imagine the position these people have worked us into? We’re paying taxes, and they’ve got us in a scenario where everybody dies!” Nobody on the committee was for unilateral or total disarmament, however. Most of us simply wanted to find ways to make the standoff with the Russians a lot less tense and cut down the arsenals on both sides.

  Before long the real thinkers in the group began to emerge. Wolfgang Panofsky pointed out a frightening paradox in arms control: technology moves faster than the treaty-making process, so that we are perpetually making treaties about obsolete weapons while racing to build modern ones. Arthur Krim, one of the most farsighted men I’ve ever met, suggested that it was fallacy to think that we could invent weapons that the Russians couldn’t somehow match. Again and again the U.S. had escalated the arms race, thinking we were pulling decisively ahead, only to have the Russians catch up a few years later. This made sense to me because the computer industry is also a game of technological leapfrog, only nonlethal.

  I didn’t think the committee could function intelligently unless we saw the weapons for ourselves. So Jackson and I took the group to New Mexico, where we visited Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb, and the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, which are run by AT&T and are where bomb components are developed today. We saw a Department of Energy historical exhibit that included full-size replicas of Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man, the one dropped on Nagasaki. Then we went to a sort of warehouse at Sandia, where we sat as a variety of nuclear weapons were rolled out on silent, rubber-tired dollies for us to see. The technicians pushing these dollies were clothed like IBMers, in dark gray suits, white shirts, and dark shoes. The bombs themselves were little modern things, cylinders maybe six feet long, but some of them were tens or hundr
eds of times more powerful than the Fat Man upstairs. I’ll never forget one weapon called the Dial-a-Yield. Why you would want to adjust the explosion of a nuclear weapon I don’t know, nor how you would find the time or inclination to do it in the middle of a nuclear war. But some engineer, in an effort to be logical, had probably said, “Well, we don’t just want to blow everything to kingdom come. Let’s design a Dial-a-Yield. If we dial it down, it will only do so much, and if we dial it up, it’ll do so much more.” The whole committee was brought up short by seeing such things, even Lane Kirkland and the other hard-liners. When you sit across a room from a nuclear weapon you can’t help but feel afraid of the future.

  After hearing dozens of presentations by high-ranking officers, many of us came to the conclusion that military men aren’t capable of imagining nuclear war as a rational civilian might. They talk about it, they make plans for it, and yet they avoid thinking about what would really happen in nuclear war. The people on our committee would ask, “What do you think the survival rate of the United States might be?” Some estimates were as low as 10 percent and some as high as 50 percent. When we questioned whether there would be an America left that resembled the one we live in now, the answer would be, “Well, we could breed the race back from there.”