Father, Son & Co.

by Thomas J. Watson

  I thought our first report to Carter ought to be unanimous, but there was such a range of opinions on the committee that this was no easy feat. Most members were in favor of reversing the arms race through treaties. Lane Kirkland, on the other hand, was always puffing out black smoke. “Treaties with those bastards aren’t worth a damn,” he’d say. He was pretty close to Scoop Jackson, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and thought the U.S. should simply arm up and stand firm. Harold Agnew, the director of the Los Alamos lab, was a kind of gadfly—full of criticism but impossible to pin down. He’d sit quietly through a meeting, suddenly make a caustic remark about an idea we were working on, and then go back in his shell. Scowcroft was hard to read too, although he was brilliant and the clearest-minded military man I ever met.

  There were plenty of issues on which we all disagreed, but we finally found a common cause when the Air Force showed up to present its proposal for the new MX missile, which amounted to yet another escalation of the arms race. They wanted to dig thousands of silos in the desert and move the rockets around so they’d be hard for the Russians to attack. Out of every twenty silos only one would have a real missile, and the rest would be decoys. The cost of this giant shell game was going to be something like fifty billion dollars, to cover three hundred new MXes with ten warheads each, hundreds of giant tractors to haul them around, fifty-seven hundred dummy rockets, and six thousand silos. We heard briefings on the MX throughout the summer of 1978. The State Department was against it and the CIA sent a man to tell us how ridiculous the proposed basing schemes were. “We know a little bit about deception,” he said, “and those decoys aren’t going to fool anybody.”

  For every criticism that was made, the Air Force would come back with some new improvisation. I would never have tolerated such half-baked thinking at IBM, and the rest of the GAC felt the same way. At the end of September we reported to the president that the MX scheme was impractical and should not be pursued. I think Carter had already reached the same conclusion. He kept the plan around as a bargaining chip, but as long as he was in the White House the new missiles were never built.

  Carter seemed to find our work useful, and late in 1978 he asked us to come up with ideas for new reductions of nuclear arms. Even though SALT II hadn’t yet been signed and was also going to face a tough battle for approval in the Senate, he was looking forward to SALT III. Critics of the administration would have dismissed this as typical Carter idealism, but to me he seemed to be acting from a realistic sense of how dangerous the nuclear arsenals are and how technological advances make agreements obsolete. We gave him a long list of proposals, such as the phasing out of rockets with multiple warheads. But our most important point was that the treaty-making process was too slow. It had taken three administrations six years to work out SALT II; meanwhile, weapons laboratories had given the world new generations of missiles, bombers, and the neutron bomb. We told Carter that the only answer was for the heads of both countries to streamline arms negotiations by taking an active, continuous, and direct role themselves.

  By the spring of 1979 the GAC had branched out into many other projects. Panofsky wrote a highly classified study for the White House on the future of ICBMs, and Arthur Krim began agitating among prominent Democrats for a treaty banning all new weapons. Our meetings became an important arms-control forum, and we heard from prominent people all across the ideological spectrum—hawks like Fred Iklé and advocates of détente like Averell Harriman and the State Department’s Marshall Shulman. All of this was done without a single leak to the press, which was one reason so many people were willing to talk to us. Another reason was that we were known to have Carter’s ear. When Stansfield Turner, the director of the CIA, wanted to alert the president that the United States was down to only one spare spy satellite, he came to the GAC to make his case. Even the Russians noticed that we were around: in March I got an invitation, which I declined, to visit Moscow and discuss the future of arms control at a Soviet foreign-policy institute.

  Carter seemed to share our faith in personal leadership. When he went to the Vienna summit conference to sign SALT II the following June, he made a set of dramatic proposals to Leonid Brezhnev on speeding up SALT III. He gave the premier a handwritten list of major arms cuts both countries might pursue, and told Brezhnev that the United States would be willing to put into effect each element of the next treaty as it was agreed on, instead of waiting for the entire package. This must have given the Russians a lot to think about, but we never had a chance to learn their response. Instead, increasing tensions between our countries and Senate objections to SALT caused the whole treaty-making process to collapse.

  I liked running the GAC and would gladly have stayed with it for the rest of the Carter administration. Olive was pleased with the effect the job had on me; she said it made me happier and easier to live with than anything I’d done since leaving IBM. But in May 1979 a report appeared in the New York Times that Malcolm Toon, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, was about to retire, and that Averell Harriman was advocating me as his replacement. Olive spotted it first and got very upset. “What’s this about us going to Russia?” she said. The thought of having to move to a foreign country and being separated from our children and grandchildren was really alarming to her. “Let me see that!” I said. “That’s ridiculous! We’re not going to Moscow. Nobody’s mentioned it to me.”

  A couple of days later Vance called and said I was indeed going to be Carter’s choice. It turned out that the administration had the idea that I could make things go more smoothly in Moscow. Toon, the current ambassador, was a holdover from the Ford administration and an advocate of toughness toward the Soviets. I’d met him when I was getting ready to run the GAC and thought he had an odd, abrasive style. When he talked about Russia he usually had reasonable ideas, but he’d lead off with a hostile aside like, “Well, of course, I hate the sons of bitches.” He was critical of SALT II and skeptical about the future of détente. The Russians didn’t like him and Carter wanted me to take his place.

  As flattering as the offer was, I had no diplomatic experience and knew I’d again be going in over my head. Furthermore, I didn’t disagree with Toon that much on the basic issues, although I was less inclined to be polemical. There was another factor as well: I wasn’t sure I was being fair to Olive. She was really downcast—the more she heard about Moscow, the less she liked the idea, although she perked up a bit when Gay Vance called and told all about Spaso House, the magnificent ambassador’s residence, saying how easy it would be for us to have friends and grandchildren come visit. Olive and I discussed the matter a great deal, and I finally said I wanted to go ahead. I really was hoping to advance U.S.-Soviet relations and arms control, and I told Olive that would be the best thing for the grandchildren—ours and everybody else’s.

  Long before my appointment was made official, I found myself the object of a big controversy. A lot of foreign policy experts thought that I was the wrong choice, that the Moscow job called for a veteran, Russian-speaking diplomat like Toon, instead of an amateur with good intentions. Moscow is generally seen as one of the most demanding diplomatic posts, and for thirty years it had been filled by professionals. There were reports that powerful members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were going to challenge my appointment if Carter went through with it. Some critics didn’t know I had experience in arms control; they thought Carter had suddenly gone soft on Russia and was sending the chairman of IBM to throw open the gates of trade between our two countries. My proponents tried to counteract all this with a lobbying campaign. They publicized my work on the GAC and my various trips to Moscow, and suggested that I belonged in the great tradition of business statesmen like Harriman, who had been our Moscow ambassador during the war.

  Things were looking very promising, although while all this was going on I made an embarrassing mistake. In July, just before my appointment was to be officially announced, I attended the Vienna summit conference as ch
airman of the GAC with Carter. I got a call in my hotel from a newspaper reporter I knew slightly. He said, “I’m down in the lobby with a colleague of mine, and we want to talk to you about your nomination for the ambassadorship.”

  “I haven’t heard that I’ve been officially appointed,” I said, “so I don’t think I am in a position to say anything.”

  “Well, how about letting us come up and talk to you for background?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind that,” I said. I wanted to be friendly but wasn’t thinking very clearly; the GAC had avoided publicity completely, and for years at IBM we’d been very careful in our dealings with the press. The interview lasted fifteen minutes, went very well, and the reporters agreed to put it down only as background. Then just as they were getting ready to leave one of them said, “What’s that on your thumb?”

  As it happened, I was going to the opera that night, and I wanted to remind myself to look for Ambassador Toon there. So I had written on my thumb, in small letters, t-o-o-n.

  “Oh, that!” I said. “My youngest daughter does the same thing. She calls it scratch memory. I’m going to the opera tonight and I want to make sure I look for Ambassador Toon.”

  I could never find out which of the two reporters spread the story around. But pretty soon an article came out that I was an old man with a lousy memory. I didn’t think the story was devastating, just annoying. But when I got back to Washington, Marshall Shulman called me in. He was the top State Department authority on U.S.-Soviet relations and one of the people drumming up Senate support for my appointment. He said, “That article is really going to hurt your chances.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “I could have a smudge on my nose someday and someone could write about that. If that’s going to make or break me as ambassador, I’m in the wrong game.” I came on strong because I didn’t want to admit how naive I’d been to talk to those two reporters. Shulman didn’t back down an inch. He told me off, and I was quite relieved when my appointment finally went through.

  When I left the GAC, Arthur Krim and his wife Mathilde gave me a party in their magnificent townhouse in New York. Mac Bundy made the send-off speech and presented me with a set of colonial pewter spoons on behalf of the group. I’ll never forget the funny thing he said: “When you look at these spoons, Tom, you’ll notice that they are too long to use at a banquet with friends—and too short to sup with the Devil. So perhaps they’ll be just the right length for you to use in Moscow, and be reminded of the great affection in which everyone in this room holds you.” It was the nicest send-off I could have had.

  There were already signs of the coming winter when we arrived in Moscow in October. The city’s dingy buildings and grim skies reminded me of the four months I’d spent in Russia as a young pilot and aide to General Follett Bradley during the war. While I had no affection whatsoever for the Communist system, the experience of Russia in wartime had left a deep impression on me. On the Bradley mission we’d worked in the old U.S. chancellery on Mokhavaya Street, right across from the Kremlin, with the German armies less than thirty miles away. We’d flown across the vast outer provinces and gotten stuck for a week in the middle of Siberia. Turning back Hitler’s invasion was one of the great triumphs of Soviet history, and I was proud to have witnessed it and to a small degree participated. But I didn’t fool myself into thinking that nostalgia was going to make me an effective ambassador. Even though I felt connected to Russia because of the war, I was quite aware of the reality of U.S.-Soviet affairs. In 1979, détente was working poorly, and the signing of SALT II had been the only positive development in a long time.

  My mission from Carter and Vance was clear-cut: they wanted me to right the tremendous imbalance that had developed between the treatment of the American ambassador in Moscow and the treatment of Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington. Dobrynin had been the Soviet envoy in America for twenty years and was so well established that he could get to see the president just by picking up the phone. He was even allowed to park in the State Department garage. Our ambassadors, by contrast, had had little access to the Kremlin for more than ten years. During the SALT negotiations the Carter administration had done the expedient thing and used Dobrynin to convey its thinking to Moscow, shunting Malcolm Toon aside. But now that the treaty was signed, Carter wanted the prestige of the American embassy restored.

  I had yet to learn the nuts and bolts of my new job, but I already knew what sort of ambassador I wanted to be. My ambition was to model myself after my good friend Llewellyn Thompson, the ambassador to Moscow under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. I’d met Thompson in Moscow in 1942, when he was a junior diplomat. Most of the embassy staff had been sent to the town of Kuybyshev five hundred miles to the rear, but Tommy, as he was called, had been assigned to keep an eye on our Moscow facilities. One of my first tasks had been to fly him all the way to Teheran to pick up provisions for the staff, because all over Russia food was scarce. We loaded the bomb bay with two tons of supplies—not fancy food like you’d expect for an embassy but wartime staples such as KLIM, a kind of condensed milk, and beans in cans. I came to know Tommy well and looked up to him the way a young man admires someone ten years older. He was a tall, slim fellow, fluent in Russian, naturally a bit shy and reserved, but he didn’t let that stop him. As ambassador he traveled all over Russia and rubbed elbows socially with high-ranking Soviets almost every day. He and his wife knew how to create a warm ambiance and made Spaso House, his official residence, a magnet for hundreds of important Soviets from Politburo members to ballerinas—it was one of the few “decadent” places where high-ranking Soviets could openly go. Nikita Khrushchev liked Tommy so much that they used to talk together for hours on end.

  Thompson wasn’t a brilliant theorist like George Kennan, but he understood Soviet motivations and in 1962 that knowledge may have helped save everybody’s life. At the peak of the Cuban missile crisis Khrushchev sent Kennedy two conflicting messages. The first was conciliatory and made it clear that the premier wanted to avoid nuclear war; the second was belligerent and almost dared Kennedy to take the confrontation another step. Kennedy and his men were baffled until Thompson advised that the first message was probably closer to what Khrushchev felt, and that the Russians were worried not so much about putting missiles in Cuba as about obtaining a bargaining position on other matters. On that basis Bobby Kennedy came up with an astonishingly simple idea: ignore the second message and answer only the first, with an offer to try to build détente between East and West if the missiles were removed. That’s what the president did, and Khrushchev ordered the missiles taken out the following day.

  My life had come full circle to Spaso House. I’d first set foot there as a kid just out of college, seeing the world before I had to start work at IBM. During the war I’d shaken hands with Winston Churchill at a Spaso House reception. I’d visited Thompson there as head of IBM. Now, at age sixty-five, I was coming back as ambassador myself, eager to see what I could make my long acquaintance with Russia add up to.

  The house was grander by far than any place Olive and I had ever lived. It is an extraordinary stucco mansion, about two miles from the Kremlin, built by a Czarist sugar magnate just before the World War II. By the time the house was finished, there were signs of revolution, and the sugar magnate was too afraid to move in, although he gave parties there. Under Lenin the building was broken up into apartments for bureaucrats, and that’s the way it stayed until 1933, when Roosevelt opened relations with the Soviets. His ambassador, William Bullitt, picked Spaso House from among a half dozen buildings the Russians proposed, probably because it has capitalist prosperity written all over it. The place is organized around a huge, elegant room, with ornate pillars, archways, balconies, and a massive crystal chandelier hanging from a domed ceiling three stories high. Alcoves lead from this hall to a state dining room, living quarters for the ambassador and his family, libraries, sitting rooms, and numerous bedrooms for guests. Beyond the dining ro
om is a ballroom, added by the Americans, where two hundred people can be seated for movies or lectures. The house stands on a broad lawn behind wrought-iron gates, and with all its windows lit on a frosty Moscow night, it seems elegant and totally inviting.

  An ambassador’s first task when he arrives in the country where he is to serve is to present his credentials. This involves a formal meeting with the chief of state or his deputy, and the Soviets know how to carry off such ceremonial occasions with utmost grandeur. I was escorted in a motorcade from Spaso House to the Kremlin on Monday, October 29. Every bit of traffic along the route stopped, and policemen saluted me at every corner. Then I walked in a procession through tremendous halls with gifts given to the Czars and artifacts from the Russian Revolution laid out in glass cases along both sides. We reached a great room, where I’d been told to walk up to the point of a diamond on a rug. From the opposite end of the hall came a little gentleman, the Soviet vice president V. V. Kuznetsov, saying things in Russian. Then the chief of protocol whispered to me, “Now read your speech,” which I did, and there was clapping and handshaking and champagne was passed around. I felt a tremendous thrill. After the ceremony, Vice President Kuznetsov took me into his office and said in American English, “What would you like—coffee or Scotch?”

  “What are you going to have, Mr. Vice President?” I said.

  “Coffee.”

  “I’ll join you. Sir, you speak amazingly good English.”

  “I went to Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh and then worked for the Ford Motor Company for three years. In the early days just after Lenin took over, he wanted some of us young technocrats to learn American ways and I was one of the lucky ones to be sent to your country. I remember it extremely well.”