When it came time for me to leave Moscow, the Russians got sentimental. I think they were reluctant to see me go at such a low point in U.S.–Soviet relations because they have such great reverence for old soldiers. Korniyenko, Gromyko’s deputy, said, “Can we do something for you? Is there a gesture we can make?”
I said the first thing that came into my head. “The best gesture would be for you to let me go out on my airplane with the Pentecostals. How about that?”
Korniyenko looked shocked. “Well, I’ll talk to the foreign minister about it. But to tell the truth, I don’t think we should do that. And I don’t think you would really want us to do that, either.”
I had to admit he was right. It would cause a horde of people to descend on our embassy hoping to get to the United States. The Foreign Ministry gave a small lunch in my honor instead. On the afternoon of January 15, 1981, Olive and I stepped onto a U.S. Air Force jet at Sheremetyevo airport, and my short, unhappy tour as a diplomat came to an end.
When I came back from Moscow that January it was the tenth anniversary of my decision to step down at IBM. I’d been disappointed in my dream of being the ambassador to help end the cold war, but taking stock of those ten years I felt extraordinarily lucky. I’d succeeded in regaining my health, weaning myself from business, gratifying my urge for adventure, and adding honor to the family name with the sort of public service my father never had time for.
It was astonishing the degree to which my life and his had diverged. When I was young I wasn’t sure there would ever be any comparison between us: he was a giant and I didn’t think I was cut out for business at all. It took me a long time to commit myself to an IBM career, but then I became a success and for twenty years the company consumed my life and my family’s. When I was forced to retire much younger than most men, it was traumatic to have to walk away. Yet if I’d stayed on the job until normal retirement age—not to mention as long as Dad, who was still putting on his business suit every morning at age eighty—I’d have missed the chance to go beyond IBM in any significant way.
I knew it was now time to come to grips with the fact that I was old. My great fear was that there wouldn’t be enough to do—that my brain would atrophy and life would lose its shape. While I didn’t want to take on anything as hard anymore as running the General Advisory Committee, I’d already made elaborate preparations before leaving Moscow for keeping myself sharp. I intended to stay up-to-date in the field of U.S.-Soviet affairs, and at Brown University I helped found a new Center for Foreign Policy Development specializing in the subject. To my delight, Mark Garrison, my deputy at the Moscow embassy, elected to leave the Foreign Service and head the center. I couldn’t have found a better man. But, in spite of this, I felt low when Olive and I moved back to Greenwich. She said, “Why not just take it easy? See your grandchildren, go to the Caribbean!” That’s pretty much what I did for a couple of months, worrying all the while that I might be losing my relevance.
I still missed the power that went with being head of IBM, although I was glad to see the company growing under Frank Cary. By 1980 it had almost quadrupled in size from the time I ran it, to twenty-six billion dollars in sales. The business was now so huge that I found it hard to imagine how any chief executive could ever manage. But Cary had done fine in his quiet, competent way, and he was scheduled to hand the company over to John Opel that spring. Opel urged me to rejoin the IBM board. I’d resigned when I became ambassador, and I told him I thought it made more sense to stay away, but he said, “You are too much a part of the history of this business not to come back,” and pointed out that I was only sixty-seven. So back I went, with the proviso that I would be called chairman emeritus. (A few years later, when I turned seventy, I insisted on retiring from the board like any other IBM director. I’d made that rule myself and felt very strongly about it.)
The thing that got me moving again, oddly enough, was giving the commencement speech at Harvard in June, 1981. Harvard has a tradition of picking speakers who are in the news, not necessarily highbrows, and I was immensely pleased and flattered that out of all the people on the national scene they picked me. I got the invitation at the end of February and went right to work. My father and brother were natural public speakers but to this day I find it hard to face an audience. I compensate by scrupulous preparation—I’ll rewrite a speech over and over, run it past two or three experts, practice it with a tape recorder in the cellar, and finally try it out on Olive, who is always a patient listener. By late March I was in a fever of anxiety—never mind that graduation was still ten weeks away. Then came a telephone call from my friend Andrew Heiskell, the retired chairman of Time Inc., who was a member of the Harvard Corporation, one of Harvard’s two governing boards. “Your speech is off,” he said. “We’ve asked President Reagan and he has accepted.”
I suppose I should have been insulted, but actually I was grateful for the reprieve. Besides, it’s hard to complain when you’re being upstaged by the president of the United States. “Just think of it, Olive,” I said. “Isn’t it wonderful? I was having fits trying to get this speech into my head, and now I don’t have to do it!” But then, about three weeks before graduation, Heiskell called again. “You’re back on,” he said. There had been a big misunderstanding with the White House. Reagan had apparently accepted the invitation because he thought he was going to get an honorary degree, but Harvard rarely gives honorary degrees to American public officials who are in office. After Reagan’s staff found that out, they told Harvard he wasn’t going to do it. It didn’t make any difference to me—not only was I not in office, but, as it happened, I already had an honorary degree from Harvard.
So on June 4, 1981, I found myself sitting on the speaker’s platform in Harvard Yard with other personages like Cy Vance, Ansel Adams, and Jorge Luis Borges. Derek Bok, the university president, gave the first address, and while he spoke I looked around, letting my mind wander. I thought about how old Harvard Yard is—how it had already been there for over a hundred years when undergraduates walked out the gate to join the minutemen at Concord. Finally I heard Bok get around to introducing me. But as I stepped up next to him at the lectern there was a roll of thunder and a horrific cloudburst. The speakers’ platform was covered, but the podium was not, and the poor graduating class was sitting out on the grass on folding chairs. Some of the seniors got up and filed away into the surrounding dormitories, where there were TV monitors set up to carry the ceremony. But Derek kept everything on hold for a few minutes, hoping the rain would let up. Finally I said to him, “This rain looks like it’s going to last awhile.”
“Do you mean you just want to belt it out now?” he said.
“Yes!” I said. So I talked, and meanwhile more seniors trickled away into the dorms. I suppose the thunder and downpour were appropriate, because my subject was nuclear war. What I tried to do was get across to the young people the most important lesson I’d learned in my jobs in Washington and Moscow. It was very different from what they would have heard from President Reagan:
The result of any use of nuclear weapons would not be victory. It would be all-out war and total destruction. We have to confront the illusion of softheadedness—that anyone who favors an end to the arms race must be soft on U.S. defense or even soft on Communism. The illusion of softheadedness is thermonuclear McCarthyism. Because the search for a way out of this morass—the search for an avenue of negotiation and survival instead of confrontation and weaponry—has a long and honorable heritage. Our imperative is to change our course and to take the only road which offers a viable hope for the future: not a road to unilateral action of any kind, but a road to a long series of mutually verifiable treaties.
The rain let up, and the students came back to their seats, clapping with great enthusiasm. My speech was very well received. The Harvard Crimson ran a flattering story entitled “A Capitalist for Disarmament.” Time magazine and the Boston newspapers also quoted things I’d said. Soon more speaking invitations came
in, and I found myself transformed into a voice for arms control. I hadn’t paid much attention to the nuclear-freeze movement before that, but my skepticism about nuclear weapons dovetailed nicely, so to speak, with the interests of antinuclear groups that were popping up all over.
At places like Harvard and Brown, it was easy to get people enthusiastic because they were students. Convincing anybody with real power was another matter. My first chance to win the hearts and minds of influential people came in 1982, when I was asked to give a speech at the Bohemian Grove. This is a private summer retreat for two thousand of the country’s richest and most powerful men. People like Richard Nixon, George Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Leonard K. Firestone all belong, as well as scientists, artists, and entertainers who help keep things lively. It’s not the kind of scene I like, because it requires lots of meeting and talking with strangers. But when I was young my father had told me that the Grove was a gorgeous place and that I should go if I had the opportunity, because I would never find that kind of atmosphere anywhere else.
Someone put me up for membership in 1957, the year after my father died. But unless you had a special in, it took about twenty years to get to the head of the waiting list, so I ended up going as the guest of Dad’s old friend Lowell Thomas. The Grove is on the Russian River about seventy miles north of San Francisco, and is only open for sixteen days each July. It is organized into more than a hundred “camps,” with offbeat names like Tunerville, Aviary, and Poison Oak. Thomas belonged to Cave Man, which was one of the largest and whose members included Eddie Rickenbacker and old Herbert Hoover.
Coming into the Grove was impressive. You drive past “private property” signs to an area where there are long platforms posted with the names of the camps. You never find out where all the camps are, because they’re tucked away in twenty-seven hundred acres of steep hills and stupendous trees, some of which date back to the time of Christ. Each camp has its own kitchen and a campfire area where the men can sit and talk. The entire Grove is crisscrossed with catwalks and bridges, and as you walk around you bump into a lot of well-known people. Most members go there to get away from business; in fact, the Bohemian Grove motto is a line out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Weaving spiders come not here.”
I went to the Grove as a guest seven or eight times while I ran IBM, but I didn’t actually join until I came back from Moscow in 1981. The following summer came the invitation to give a speech. The Grove has a tradition of so-called lakeside talks—they set up a microphone after lunch and members sit all the way around the lake, with comfortable chairs reserved for the very old fellows. When I got up to speak I could see before me in the audience such dignitaries as Henry Kissinger.
It was my big chance to pitch bilateral reduction of nuclear arms, and I gave it everything I had. Like any good salesman I was really sure that I could win them over. My thinking had developed during the year since my Harvard speech, and I felt confident that my ideas on national security were comprehensive and realistic enough to make sense even to veteran policymakers. Not only could I demonstrate why we had to reduce our blind dependence on atomic weapons, but I was able to paint a picture of how the United States might defend its interests without them. I took the position that, given the strength of the Soviet military, we couldn’t cut back our nuclear arsenal without beefing up conventional forces—even if this meant reinstating the draft and raising taxes. Then I suggested that antinuclear protesters had a point—they were ordinary Americans applying common sense to the fact that we had more nuclear weapons than we needed. I told the Bohemians what I’d learned as head of the General Advisory Committee—that nuclear strategy, like any national issue, benefits from open public debate:
Everything necessary to make decisions on nuclear weapons and our relations with the Soviet Union is in the public domain. There are no secrets, and every one of us can and must participate in deciding our country’s fate. Never believe this subject is so complex and so secret that we laymen must leave it to others. It’s vital that all of us add our American common sense to the inputs of military strategists and technicians.
There was plenty of applause when I finished, but I was looking for something more—maybe people jumping up and sending cables to Reagan, or turning to the senators in the audience and saying, “Watson’s right! What are we going to do about it?” Of course that didn’t happen. Later that afternoon I overheard a conversation between two Bohemians. “Did you listen to Watson?” said the first.
“No,” said the second. “How was it?”
“It was terrific, absolutely terrific.”
I was just starting to swell with pride when the second Bohemian asked, “Well, did you learn anything you didn’t already know?” And there was no reply. I felt as though I’d been dropping pebbles down a well.
I talked to other tough audiences after that—the midshipmen at Annapolis, the students at the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island—and they were just as unmoved. Eventually I realized how the conservatives viewed me: as an elder statesman who’d been to Russia and knew his stuff, but was a bit kooked on nuclear weapons. I had the consolation that many other prominent people were also advocating arms cuts and that within a few years there was a massive mobilization of public opinion against the arms race. In the year Reagan took office, 70 percent of the population favored an increase in the defense budget, but by his second term that percentage was reversed—only a small minority wanted more arms and 77 percent were in favor of an immediate, bilateral nuclear freeze.
Once the word was out about nuclear arms I let my speaking taper off; I thought going further wouldn’t accomplish anything except to make me sour. I shifted my energies back to airplanes and boats, starting with a single-handed voyage across the Caribbean. It was only a thousand miles, but enough to acquaint me with the tedium and fear of sailing alone, neither of which I liked. So I went back to organizing voyages with amateur crews. Late in 1985 I finally made my long-postponed trip around Cape Horn, and the following summer I took the Palawan north again, along the Labrador coast and into the far reaches of Hudson Bay. I was proud to be able to pull off such adventures, but the glow of accomplishment never lasted long. I’d no sooner be back from one voyage than I felt compelled to start planning the next.
Occasionally I’d interrupt these projects to give a speech or write an op-ed piece on arms control or the state of U.S.-Soviet affairs. But I was sure no one in the Reagan administration would be asking my advice on the Soviet Union. Oddly, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who made it possible for me to continue my involvement in relations between our two countries. Many years earlier I’d asked the Soviets for permission to retrace the flight I made across Siberia with General Bradley during the war. This request was so unusual that Georgi Arbatov, the senior Soviet official I first discussed it with, had a hard time understanding what I meant. He thought I simply wanted to fly a private plane along the commercial air route that goes from Moscow to Tokyo. Lufthansa and Air France use that corridor all the time and Arbatov said it would be simple to work out. When I finally took out a map and showed him the old Lend-Lease ferry route across Siberia, Arbatov got a long face. “This will not be easy,” he said. That was back in 1979; my request disappeared into the Russian bureaucracy until Gorbachev came into power and started looking for ways to warm up relations with the West. I ran into Arbatov in the spring of 1987 at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. “Tom, you can do it,” he said. “You can fly your airplane along the old ferry route. Just get in touch with Aeroflot to arrange for jet fuel.”
They gave me only six weeks to put the trip together. Several years earlier I’d bought a Learjet that could comfortably accommodate a half dozen passengers and two pilots on a long flight. My copilot was Bob Philpott, who had been one of IBM’s top pilots for many years. I wanted Olive to come but she was forced to stay home because of a family illness. I brought my sixteen-year-old grandson Willy, who is my son’s only son, Mark Garrison and his wife, and S
trobe Talbott, Time magazine’s top correspondent on arms control. We took off from the Westchester County airport on July 5, 1987, and two days later, after spending nights in Reykjavik and Helsinki, we crossed into the Soviet Union heading for Moscow.
Arbatov had sent a cable asking me not to arrive until 5:30 in the afternoon, and I worked things out so that I put the Lear down at precisely that time at the Moscow airport. As we taxied in from the runway, we were met by a small car that led us to a special parking spot. Then out stepped Arbatov and General Ilya Mazuruk, a legendary pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union who had been the commander of the Alaska-Siberia ferry route during the war. He was grizzled and bent and more than eighty years old. The Lend-Lease operation had been one of the high points of his life, and as he walked toward my airplane tears poured down his face. He put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Until that moment I hadn’t felt nostalgic at all, but I got teary-eyed too. We drank champagne and that night there was a dinner where several people stood up and overstated my wartime accomplishments.
We stayed in Moscow a week, making sure all the necessary arrangements for the trip were in place, and I had a chance to meet with Andrei Gromyko. By this time Gorbachev had elevated him to the presidency of the Soviet Union, which was a largely honorary post. He was much more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. We had a long, amiable talk, and finally he dispensed with his interpreter and spoke to me in English. “Do you know,” he said, “I felt sorry that you had a difficult time as ambassador. We had looked forward to your being here. You were here in the war, we see you as a fellow soldier, and there are many things we could have accomplished. It is a pity that you came at the time you did.” It was kind of him to say this, because it made me feel as though my ambassadorship had not been an entire waste.
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