Father, Son & Co. by Thomas J. Watson

Author:Thomas J. Watson [Watson, Thomas J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5090-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Even though IBM was supplying a large proportion of the Defense Department’s electronic brains, I was never much of a cold warrior. Like most things conceived in a panic, the air defense system only seemed to make sense. We built it because the Russians had the bomb and we were afraid they might fly over here and destroy New York. It amazes me that nobody ever thought to ask why they’d want to do that. Our State Department probably could have told us that the Russians would never attack because they knew we could retaliate against their cities. And in reality they didn’t have any airplanes that could make the flight. So SAGE was a costly fantasy, the SDI of its day. Before long we found ourselves vastly overarmed, faced with the danger of mutual annihilation.

But at that point the country was in a terrible state of paranoia because of the Red scare. Senator Joe McCarthy was holding hearings and claiming to find Communists in every crack in the wall. There was a moment when I truly thought IBM was going to lose its shot at defense work because of the kind of window blinds I had in my office. Window blinds in those days were almost all horizontal—ordinary Venetian blinds. But vertical blinds had just been developed, and some had been ordered for me. An IBM engineer was in my office one day for a meeting and he was interested in getting the same kind of blinds for his office, so he drew a little diagram of how they were attached on axles to the floor and the ceiling. He put that little piece of paper in his shirt pocket and forgot about it. A few days later the man who did the engineer’s laundry was checking the shirt before putting it in the washer, and he found that little slip of paper—just a diagram with no explanation. McCarthy had so spooked this country that everybody thought everybody else was a Red. So the laundry man sent the paper to McCarthy, and pretty soon Senate investigators came and said to the engineer, “We’ve identified this as the plan for a radar antenna, and we want to hear about it. We want to be perfectly fair. But we know it is a radar antenna and the shirt it was found in belongs to you.”

The guy said, “Oh, for Chrissake, those are the blinds in Watson’s office!”

So they asked to see me. When they came to my office they explained what the engineer had told them and I said, “Well, those blinds are right here.” I showed them how the blinds worked. They looked them over very carefully and then left. I thought that I had contained it, but I wasn’t sure, and I was scared. We were working on SAGE, and it would have been a hell of a way to lose our security clearance.

The McCarthy years were a formative period for me. I was only beginning to run the business and I had no idea how forcefully I ought to speak out.

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