Thomas Watson Sr. gathered his corporate flock to build an empire centered on him. But at home he struggled to shape his young family to his will. Tommy in particular felt overwhelmed to the point of suffocating beneath the force of his father’s paternal love, grandiosity, and authority. Thomas Sr., his son recalled, “seemed like a blanket that covered everything.” The young Tommy responded to his domineering, business-prophet father with teenage rebellion, outlandish and sometimes dangerous pranks, then dark periods of gloominess and finally frightening, recurring bouts of major depression. “I really wanted to beat him but also make him proud of me,” he said. But he owned up: “Everything he did left me feeling inconsequential by comparison.”1 It would take him decades to overcome the insecurities his father engendered in him, step out of his shadow, and deal with his fear of being unable to live up to his father’s image and heavy demands upon him. While born into great privilege and the namesake of a business leader who was increasingly recognized around the world, Tom Watson Jr. would have to fight to prove his worth to the only person who mattered: his emotionally distant, often harshly demanding, and frequently absent father.
For the first decade of his life, Tommy saw his father sporadically except while on vacation or on extended business trips with the family to Europe. When not out of town, the senior Watson was frequently meeting with visiting sales teams and managers, bankers, Flint and his fellow board members, and other company executives. Evenings, he expected Jeannette to join him for business dinners or to attend social events where he began cultivating a place within New York’s business establishment. At home in Tommy’s early years, although always dressed in an impeccable suit and tie, his father was, his son thought, “the liveliest father imaginable.” He recalled his playacting, even dressing up in his wife’s clothing, singing and dancing with the children and other family members. But, Tom Watson Jr. wrote, “his playfulness gradually diminished, and by the time I was ten or eleven Dad acted quite formal and aloof.”2 Tommy blamed his father’s age, much older than other children’s fathers. But his father’s constant work demands, ballooning sense of self-importance, and tyrannical dominion over his corporate kingdom also fed his need for distance from the messy chaos of a household full of rambunctious, growing children.
Three siblings had followed Tommy in quick succession, first daughters Jane and Helen, and, in 1919, a final child, another son, Arthur, who was known to all as Dick for reasons that are not clear. The family was often on the go. Thomas Sr. brought the young Tom and his infant sisters to visit his mother, Jane, in Rochester, where he supported her after his father’s death until she died suddenly of pneumonia in 1917.3 In 1918, the Watsons moved into a gabled Tudor mansion perched on a five-acre hilltop in Short Hills, New Jersey. Many among the Wall Street elite made their homes amid the town’s rolling hills and lakes. Although some neighbors from more established families turned up their noses at the nouveau riche Watsons, T.J. and Jeannette made their way into town society by joining the town Episcopal church, despite his strict Methodist upbringing, and the tennis club, though neither played. When they sent Tommy and his siblings to the nearby day school, T.J. joined the school board.
One of Tommy’s earliest memories came from a winter’s night in 1919. He saw lights flickering outside his window and began to cry, bringing his father storming angrily into his room. It turned out that the roof was burning, sparked by an untended fire his father had left in the hearth. Watson and a family servant got Jeannette, the children, and their nanny out. They watched their new home burn to the ground. But Tommy’s father built an even grander twenty-room house while the family rented a neighboring place. Fire would plague the Watsons again when their summer house in the Poconos burned up in July 1921.
With T.J. often out of the house, Jeannette “had her hands full,” Tom recalled many years later.4 Short, slender, never ostentatious, she was a practical, capable, and loving head of the family home and also was often called to attend company events or to throw together an impromptu meal for visiting executives. Although Tom felt only loose oversight from her, she worked with him on his schoolwork and scouting projects. “She was,” he reminisced, “much more accessible than Father, and always made us feel protected and loved.” He appreciated her warmth, steadiness, and midwestern stalwartness—enough to put her on the IBM board of directors decades later, after his father’s death.
He also felt sympathy for her, having witnessed numerous instances of his imperious father’s mistreatment of her. When home from work, Thomas Sr. demanded that she jump at his orders much like his assistants at the office (a pattern that Tom Jr. would repeat in his marriage). Having married relatively late in life and coming from better circumstances than her husband, she too rebelled in the early years of their marriage. Tom remembered “incessant arguments between them,” which recurred later in his home.5 Many of those arguments revolved around money. Although she was raised in comfort, Jeannette’s ingrained frugality left her tortured by her husband’s ostentatiously high-living ways that kept them in deep, persistent debt, lasting until Watson’s income finally hit headline-making heights. By day, her husband would sponsor large dinners for business organizations; buy nice cars, summer places, grand yachts, and finely tailored clothes; and donate large sums to various causes, while at night she would make the children go back to their rooms to turn out lights they left on rather than waste electricity. As an adult, Tom Jr. would do the same thing with his children, while also spending millions to purchase aircraft, several houses, paintings, collectibles, and sailing yachts.
But the son would be able to afford those lavish purchases. According to Tom, his father remained some $100,000 in debt—about $1.5 million today—until the mid-1930s. Twice he supposedly flirted with bankruptcy—to Jeannette’s horror.6 He needed to borrow embarrassingly large amounts of money from the company to pay for luxuries. Thanks to IBM’s rising stock share price, Flint and his fellow enriched investors had no problem with Watson’s spendthrift ways.7
But for Jeannette, the combination of running the big household, meeting her husband’s many demands, arguing, and their lavish lifestyle proved too much. Sometime in the 1920s, tension between the couple boiled over. After another bad fight, Jeannette said that she wanted a divorce. Her husband reacted as if he had been struck. His pained look and sincere expressions of love for Jeannette seemed to reset the marriage. She confided to her son in later years that she came to accept her husband’s demanding ways and overbearing personality. They patched their difficulties over and settled into a lasting union.8 In the ensuing decades, she grew to admire and even adore her husband, though she lived in fear of his scalding temper boiling over. Although always at his side, she rarely spoke at public events, where attention never wavered from her husband. Again, her son Tom would follow a similar marital framework with his wife. But the “mother of IBM” did what she could to keep T.J.’s self-absorption and hucksterism in check, especially at IBM events where he could talk on and on for hours, convinced that his audience’s rapt attention was genuine when they feared turning away from their mercurial boss. She would sometimes pass him notes at the dais letting him know it was time to “shut up.” He would.9
He in turn recognized his debt to her. Perhaps as a way to remind himself from time to time, his wallet held a scrap of folded paper upon which he had written:
Dearest Jeannette:
Always know I have always loved and adored you, as the best wife, mother, friend, and humanitarian, and possessing qualities not found in any other woman of the world.
[Signed] Tom10
At home and on vacations, life in the Watson household revolved around the four children. Tom felt closest to Helen, and he loved his younger brother, Dick, despite their sibling rivalry that continued long into adulthood. He and Helen were close, but he and Jane grew up distanced and were eventually even estranged for a period as adults. He would often lure his siblings into his escapades. But in an incident he recounted to his own children that would color his feelings toward her for their entire lives, Tommy and she were playing together when Jane was the culprit in breaking one of their mother’s rules—though which one exactly he never mentioned. Their mother demanded that the child responsible own up to the infraction. Jane pointed her finger at her older brother. His mother whipped him. He never forgave Jane. And then, in his fight for his father’s approval, Tommy could not miss that his father favored her among the siblings. Their father-daughter relationship remained special for life and that caused strains with Tommy, who resented seeing their father so loving and at ease with her. As adults, he suspected her of seeding his rivalry at IBM with his brother, Dick, for their father’s approval in their business dealings. Decades later, when Tom became CEO of IBM, Jane’s sale of her stock in the company felt like a slap and deepened their rift.11
But young Tommy was not surprised that his father favored another child. As an adult, Tom Jr. said of himself, “From very early in my life, I was convinced that I had something missing.”12 His unhappy interactions with the adult world seemed to confirm that self-assessment. He bristled at his mother’s and teachers’ attempts to rein him in and openly rebelled against his father’s demands that he live up to his strict code of conduct and project an image of probity beyond his years. Instead, he caused mischief. He tore and muddied his fine clothes, including suits tailored to look like the outfits his father wore; he played with fire, shot animals in the nearby swamps, and pilfered things from neighbors’ houses. And worse. Before long, other Short Hills families took to calling the boy Terrible Tommy Watson.
He went from trouble to trouble. At age ten, he and a friend entered an empty house under renovation. They took cans of paint and brushes they found inside and painted the street. His mother had already warned him about his pilfering. This time she marched him to the Short Hills police station where, at his mother’s urging, the chief showed the boy the lockup. The officer admonished, “Once you’re in jail, it’s a terrible place to be. Most people turn into repeat offenders, and then there goes your life.”13 Tommy was left wide-eyed with fear, but the lesson did not take. His father paid for a trip out of the country for Tommy and his Boy Scout troop, but after he failed to meet a badge requirement, his father commanded Tommy to stay home while his friends left.14 Nor did he reform after his father, driving home early from work, spied Tommy and a friend, both around fourteen years old, racing along the street in a Model T they had bought off a classmate. When the boys saw T.J. driving up, they sped off across a field in hope of escaping his notice, but he chased them down. Tommy was surprised when his exasperated father did not explode in anger as he most often did. He seemed flustered and at a loss for what to do about his wayward son. Instead, he simply told him to sell it. “That car will get you in trouble.”15
Trouble followed Tommy wherever he went. At school, his mischief-making may have been his way of dealing with repeated failures. He could not learn to read. “Words on a page,” he said, “seemed to swim around whenever I tried to read.”16 He didn’t learn the cause or how to compensate for his undiagnosed reading problems until later in life and continued to struggle with reading all his life, even when he needed to absorb massive amounts of materials for work. Unable to learn except, he recalled, “by doing instead of reading,” he bounced from school to school, bringing home report cards filled, he recalled, with “a jumble of Ds and Fs with an occasional A or B.” Tommy also failed at most other school-sponsored activities. Gangly, awkward, and self-conscious, much like his father in his youth, he found no relief in athletics or other extracurricular activities. Close to his full six-foot, two-inch adult height by age thirteen, he stood a head taller than his classmates. He tried to play baseball and football, but his poor hand-eye coordination relegated him to the sidelines.
Bored and loathing school, Tommy counted the minutes down until class ended, to his chagrin, on IBM clocks on the school walls. He would do almost anything to get out of class. When he met a boy who killed skunks and extracted the juice from their stink glands, Tommy bought a bottle of skunk oil and brought it to school. When teachers and students went to an assembly, he snuck down to the basement where he poured the oil into the main furnace vent. The foul smell spread throughout the building, causing the students and teachers to gag and cough. The students were sent home for the day, but not before Tommy admitted to his smelly deed. When his father learned of the prank, he chased his fleeing son, yelling after him, “I don’t need to discipline you! The world will discipline you, you little skunk!”17
Despite his father’s membership on the school’s board, it became the first of several to throw or flunk him out. He would take six years and three high schools to graduate at age nineteen.
When his father learned about Tommy’s latest escapade, the boy was terrified of his father’s “uncontrollable temper that might feed on itself.” Even when others were around, he would not hold back in venting his anger and disappointment at his miscreant son—or his younger brother, Dick, who sometimes tailed along with Tommy when he was off on his mischief. His face would grow livid, his voice terrifyingly loud, his language caustic and undercutting. Benjamin Wood, a Columbia University researcher whose work on educational testing and statistical calculations relied on Watson’s largesse, recalled hearing him “scold his boys in ways that made me weep. When he got mad, his reason and everything else vanished.” Something of a mentor to Tommy and his brother, Dick, Wood watched the boys, after their father’s tongue-lashing, “shrivel up and wish they were somewhere else.” Wallace Eckert, an early computer scientist whom Watson recruited first to head up a laboratory he funded at Columbia and then to head up IBM’s own industrial research, endured Watson’s temper often. “He saw you as one of his family,” Eckert said, “and he could be abusive to that family.”18
And within his real family, Tommy and his many failings gave his father frequent cause for letting his temper and the abuse fly. The rebel Tommy tried to argue back. “My father and I had terrible fights,” he recalled. Their troubled mixture of deep love and veneration combined with a bitter father-son rivalry led at times to unrestrained shouting matches. These would recur right up to the last years of his elderly father’s life. Most often when Tommy got caught for infractions, his mother meted out the corporal punishment, a switching to his backside while his father glowered alongside. His father never raised a hand to him, but his voice alone rattled the boy. Repeated whippings and scoldings did little to curb Tommy’s misbehavior. “For some reason,” the boy could not fully comprehend, “being punished only drove me to greater mischief.”19
Stepping into his father’s IBM world brought all of Tommy’s insecurities and rebelliousness to the surface. For him, IBM was like being born into a large and clannish extended family with an all-powerful, unsatisfiable patriarch, like being heir to the throne in a royal court. He found it suffocating and limiting. Born just months before Flint hired his father to head up CTR, Tom Watson Jr. literally grew up with the business. He never knew his father other than as chief of the company, a company with a uniquely paternalistic culture. Tom’s earliest memory of IBM dated to age five when he accompanied his father on a tour of the company’s scale factory in Dayton. Four years later, T.J. brought him on his first tour of IBM’s European subsidiaries. After that, Tommy went with him often to IBM meetings and sales events. A few years later he began to bring Tommy’s younger brother, Dick, as well. When Tommy came in tow, T.J. made him dress in tailored business attire—photographs show father and teen son identically outfitted: dark suit, white shirt and stiff collar, long wool overcoat, bowler hat, and cane, a discomfiting lesson in gentlemanly business attire and comportment. But Tommy found, “I was sloppy and could never get my clothes straight.”20 The chauffeur frequently drove the young Tommy to visit the company offices in Manhattan. T.J.’s son found the place gloomy and oppressive. He felt uneasy seeing his father’s glowering face in photographs looking down upon him in every room.
At age twelve, his father brought him to a sales convention of hundreds of IBM employees. Onstage, Watson introduced his son, “Tom… [whose] mind is centered on the IBM,” as both he and later his son often called their company. T.J. told the reverential men, “There is nothing in the world that would please me so much, in connection with my son’s future, as to have him join the business and stay with it.” Tommy was horrified by every word his father spoke. But he succeeded in delivering a short, prepared speech on salesmanship.21 Wherever he went, grown men applauded T.J.’s son, leaving him feeling confused, unworthy, and burdened.
None of this grooming for future success sat right with the self-conscious and awkward boy. He found much about his father’s lofty stature “embarrassing” and said he “developed an internal streak of skepticism about my father’s world” as a form of “self-defense.” Above all, he felt “inconsequential by comparison” with the man who dominated every room he entered and before whom all were “bowing and scraping and trying to ingratiate themselves with him.”22 As the senior Watson rose higher in the business world and public’s esteem, the junior Watson found he could not, he remarked, “match myself with him man-to-man,” and that feeling of inadequacy endured.23
But he would have to measure up to his father. He realized even before he was a teenager that T.J. wanted his son to work for him at IBM and one day take over leadership of the company, his father’s company. “The very idea made me miserable,” Tom reflected. One afternoon after school, at age twelve, he sat down on a curb where he thought about his father, which of course meant IBM. By the time he got home, he was in tears. His mother asked what was wrong. The crying boy said, “I can’t do it. I can’t go to work at IBM.”
“But nobody asked you to,” reasoned his mother.
“Yeah, but I know Dad wants me to. And I just can’t do it.”24 That sense of inadequacy for the job his father expected him to fill would last a lifetime and drive him to achieve greatness.
His increasing sense of being unable to measure up to his father, learning inability, continuing troubles with authorities in and out of school, gawky teenage insecurities, and the dawning apprehension that he was being groomed as the future successor to his father’s IBM kingdom that he did not want to inherit, all proved a toxic mixture. He started toppling into what he described as “emotional lows that lasted weeks at a time.” Finally, at age thirteen, those lows would, for the first time, crash, sending him into a far graver state; he experienced his first instance of what would today have been diagnosed as major depression. At the onset, he remembered, “All my willpower [would] evaporate. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I had to be urged to eat; I had to be urged to take a bath.”25 Years later he recalled vividly “thinking I was going crazy” and losing connection to “what was going on around me. I couldn’t read a book and couldn’t talk to anybody.” He could only muster one-word replies to the questions the many doctors sent to see him posed. Irrational fears, distorted thinking, lethargy, detachment from reality—classic symptoms of major depression—plagued him and left him debilitated for weeks. Long before the illness began to be better understood, his physicians were perplexed and offered no useful remedies for his frightened parents. The teenaged Tom Watson Jr. was terrified, he later recalled, that “I’d never feel right again.”
The illness would plague him generally twice a year after that, seemingly tied to midwinter and summer seasons, abating only when he left for college. After college, the devastating bouts of depression recurred sporadically, striking especially at Christmastime and also during times of family strife.
While he was at summer camp in Nova Scotia in 1929 with his nine-year-old younger brother, depression again struck the fifteen-year-old. “Suddenly helpless,” he recalled, and unable to leave his bunk, Tom tried to explain his grim mental state to the confused Dick, who looked up to his beloved big brother. Tom pleaded with his little brother, “Stick around, help me.” In his desperation, Tom probably terrified Dick when he said to him, “If I die, be sure to tell Mother and Dad that it’s not their fault.”26
Despite his crashing lows, amid his depressed, excessively self-conscious, and rebellious childhood, Tommy was already demonstrating a singular trait that would one day make him one of the greatest business leaders; he enjoyed taking risks, pushing limits, bucking expectations, and sometimes gambling with his life.
Although his risky behaviors often landed him in hot water, in the midst of all his difficulties, he discovered a very risky means of escape from his troubled state—and the start of what became a lifelong passion. For as long as he could remember, even before he learned to ride a bicycle, he was obsessed with airplanes and everything about the dawning age of flight. Born just a bit over a decade after the Wright brothers’ first flight, he speculated that perhaps he owed his passion to his mother having been taught in her Dayton high school by Katharine Wright, the brothers’ younger sister.27 Certainly, Dayton helped launch his obsession with aviation. When he visited his mother’s family in the home city of the Army Air Corps and the Wright Company, airplanes were “almost,” he recollected, “as common a sight as cars.”28 After sitting in the cockpit of an airplane on the ground for the first time, he spent hours at the kitchen table using a broom handle for the flight stick and a board for the rudder controls. Despite knowing the Wrights, his father would never fly, not even with his later highly accomplished pilot son. The first and only time he considered going up came when a pilot offered airplane rides at a county fair in the early 1920s. He bought a ticket, but quit the line to buy his squirrelly children ice-cream cones. Before they returned, the airplane had crashed, killing three people. He refused to fly after that, taking car, train, or ship wherever he went, despite traveling several months every year on business across the land and throughout Europe.
Tommy from the first felt no fear of flying. In fact, he craved the emotional and physical thrills that flight gave him. As a ten-year-old in 1924, he accompanied his parents on one of their long European trips. The family attended an air show at Le Bourget, an airport outside Paris. When the couple they were traveling with bought tickets to go up in an airplane offering rides, Tommy pleaded until his parents let him go along. Seeing the ground drop away was life-changing. “I was overwhelmed,” he recalled, “the sensation of freedom, the noise, the unseen bumps that pushed the airplane up and down, the ability to choose one’s own angle of bank and make one’s own decision to climb or descend—all these combined to give me a powerful desire to learn to fly.”29 It doesn’t take a great leap to see that in flight the child felt released from the strictures and troubled state of his earthbound life, including his discontent with his powerful father’s expectations for him. Little in life would equal the freedom he felt in flight. In later years, he would find in piloting airplanes romance, thrills, practical transport, and adventure, an escape from the trials of work and family life that plagued him with his feet on the ground.
He did not take flying lessons as a teen, but at age fifteen, a friend who was just a year older, Mahlon Kemmerer, managed to learn to fly and bought a surplus World War I two-seater Curtiss Jenny (JN-4). Kemmerer did not bother telling his parents about his airplane purchase. Tommy happily joined him flying in the Jenny numerous times over the New Jersey countryside. Watson recalled that the fabric covering the barely airworthy biplane was so deteriorated “that my mother’s medicine kit was raided on numerous occasions to provide adhesive to patch over worn spots in the Jenny’s tail.” But “all of this clandestine activity was brought to a grinding halt one day,” Watson recorded. An airplane salesman had called Kemmerer’s mother to sell her a more airworthy plane “in view of the fact that he was flying around New Jersey with the Watson boy in antiquated junk.” Kemmerer’s parents quickly put a halt to their flying escapades, though he did not say how his own parents may have reacted when they heard.30 But for Tom Watson Jr., a love affair with flying had just begun.
Around this same time, Watson found another enduring passion that released him from land, sailing. He took his first sailing lessons during a family vacation on Cape Cod in the summer of 1925. Three years after that, the family spent their first summer in Camden, Maine, a posh coastal village. Many stately captain’s houses lined Camden’s rocky harbor crowded with yachts of every description. The family returned there in the following years and finally purchased a summer residence. Tom spent his teen summers there when not at camp.
In 1931, T.J. bought his son a first sailboat, a seventeen-footer for racing around the harbor. The senior Watson also chartered a forty-two-foot yacht and crew for family excursions that summer. The following year, he bought a sixty-five-foot yacht and hired a captain to sail the family along the Maine coast. Watson also purchased thirteen thirty-two-foot racing sloops for the use of the Camden Yacht Club, where his son and other club members raced. Ever in competition for status, just three years later T.J. Watson took possession of a ninety-four-foot yacht, which was able to mount eight sails and looked like a magnificently colorful palace moving before the wind. He would loan the yacht to the Coast Guard for its use as a sub patrol boat during the first year of the Second World War. Although Tom’s father spent relatively little time on the water, his children and their friends enjoyed cruising aboard the family boats. Once Tom Jr. reached college, he began to bring friends along on extended cruises north into Canadian waters.31
Those yachts were just one sign of T.J. Watson’s growing success. While many among the nation’s business executives failed to maintain their livelihoods in the Great Depression, T.J. simply denied its effects would last, even as IBM slid perilously close to insolvency and its stock price fell by half after the 1929 market crash and soon dropped to 1921 prices. Despite the demand for office equipment having fallen 50 percent by the end of 1930, he refused to accept that the crash would last. In a talk to IBM sales agents in early 1931, reported on in the New York Times, he repeated a “prophecy that I have already made to our directors, namely—that not only our company but every office and business appliance company in the United States will have a better year in 1931 than they had in 1930.”32 As businesses cut spending and existing customers paid but did not expand contracts, he, nonetheless, continued to turn out products and parts that filled warehouses. He refused to lay off any employees—and, with unemployment running close to 25 percent nationally and businesses closing left and right, actually added salesmen and factory capacity. Perhaps he was reflecting on this seemingly irrational strategy when, on October 29, 1930—a year to the day after the Black Tuesday crash—he told a gathering of new employees, “Think before you act, and then if you make a mistake you will be [his emphasis] forgiven.”33
He certainly acted as if the good times would never end. Drawing his $100,000 salary and 5 percent bonus on declining profits, he took home his salary and spent every cent. In 1933, the family moved into an epically grand Manhattan mansion. The four-story, twenty-thousand-square-foot-plus town house stood between Madison and Fifth Avenues, at 4 East Seventy-Fifth Street. At fifty feet wide, it was twice the width of its neighbors. The street-front, bronze-gated doorway opened into an austerely elegant interior of white marble walls and black-and-white marble floors with a grand white marble staircase rising to the upper floors. Formal French Empire furnishings filled the rooms.34 A large-as-life portrait of a seated Watson, looking distinguished and at ease in his trademark bright white linen summer suit, dominated the dining room, scene of many dinners with IBM executives and fellow captains of industry. The multitude of uniformed staff, the lack of light, and footfalls echoing on stone-tile floors lent the house a stiffness and formality that the children returning home from their boarding schools could not enliven in their third-floor bedrooms.35
Moving into that ostentatiously palatial house marked T.J. Watson’s entry into New York City high society. He was indefatigable in his pursuit of social prestige and business standing. When he and Jeannette were not at IBM events, they went out almost every evening, to the opera, charity banquets, and private dinner parties with the city’s elite. “Father,” said Tom, “wanted to know everyone important in New York, and eventually he succeeded.”36 To that end, he became president of the Merchants’ Association of New York, a director on the New York Federal Reserve Bank board, chair of the American delegation to the International Chamber of Commerce and later president of the global ICC, and an officer on a plethora of other corporate, nonprofit, civic, and charitable boards.37 Watson came to know virtually all the Wall Street and political grandees of his times and courted leaders in many other fields. Among his associates were John D. Rockefeller Jr., Henry Luce, Charles Lindbergh, polar explorer Richard Byrd, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler, and President Herbert Hoover.38
Despite his small “d” democratic touch when it came to his employees, T.J. Watson coveted the company of the highborn and the mighty. His house became a stop for European royalty in town. On October 24, 1941, the New York Times reported that the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, “last night dined with the Duchess at the home of Thomas J. Watson.”39 The following year, King George II of Greece was the guest of honor at a reception in the house. In 1949, the Watsons gave a reception for President Eurico Gaspar Dutra of Brazil; and a year later they entertained President González Videla of Chile. In 1953, Queen Frederika and King Paul of Greece were the guests of honor in the Watson mansion.40 For T.J., these royal visits reconfirmed his rise in the world.
But any optimistic forecasts for his teen son’s future looked unlikely. Throughout Tom Jr.’s youth, his insecurities and misbehavior only increased, and so did his failures in school. Other adults besides his parents noted his academic failings. He spent two years commuting to Carteret Academy, which he recalled as “an old, dingy place” leaving him with “an odd and lonely existence.”41 Along with secretly keeping and driving the Model T and flying about the New Jersey countryside with friends while there, other misbehavior that came to his worried parents’ attention included a mud fight that turned into a brawl with classmates. Hoping for better results away from home, his parents sent him to board for a year at Morristown Academy, where he flunked out. His parents next enrolled him in the Hun School of Princeton, which since its founding in 1914 had served as a preparatory school for students bound for college at nearby Princeton University. With annual fees totaling $3,000, far above the average income at the time, Hun attracted a moneyed crowd. Hun was “filled with playboys,” Tom recalled of his two years there. “I’d see them with the hip flask, the raccoon coat, the babe on their arm, driving the Stutz Bearcat roadster like hell down the street.” He dryly remarked that it was the kind of “life for which I felt to some degree qualified.” Joining this set meant “that studies were not particularly important, that you had a little more money than the average fellow, that you were always out with the girls and that you owned a car.”42
He fit in at Hun. He was the namesake of a high-profile executive and had a big allowance; he was out to enjoy all the fun Hun had to offer. For his seventeenth birthday, his parents gave him a snazzy red-and-black Chevy. Although he followed his father’s lead and did not drink, he did something far racier, risking expulsion by smoking marijuana. He and a classmate bought a marijuana joint, a drug identified with jazz clubs and Blacks. Having shared it, the two thought it was having no effect on them until they broke out in uncontrollable laughter. But they grew so paranoid about getting caught that they retreated to their rooms and slept it off. In later years when Tom, by then a famous corporate executive, bumped into the classmate, who had long since become “a pretty staid fellow around New York,” he enjoyed twisting his old classmate’s nose by greeting him each time, “Remember the time we smoked marijuana cigarettes?”43 Tom would smoke marijuana again while in college.44
His academic and mental health problems dogged him into his Hun years. In October 1931, his father wrote that Tom would be delayed returning to school due to “a bad case of asthma.” With his eighteen-year-old son still at home in early January, Watson blamed a bad flu and assured, “Tom… will return… as soon as possible.”45 But Tom was in bed, nearly catatonic with depression. Tom took some solace in finding that, for the first time, his father showed sympathy for his plight. “The difficulties I was having seemed to bring out a warmth and gentleness in my father that were not otherwise obvious,” he recalled. “He knew I was drifting but never gave up.”46
Amid his son’s many failures and his inexplicable depressions, the senior Watson recalled his own youthful awkwardness and shyness. He shared with Tom that for him “childhood wasn’t the happiest stage of life.” Although Tom had trouble believing him at the time, he asserted “that I had much to look forward to. No matter what happens, it is a time of great change and nobody coasts through it without a lot of problems.” His father assured him: “At some point, something will catch hold and you are going to be a great man.”
Tom thought, “That’s impossible.”
As he would for the rest of his life, Tom hid his many insecurities and bouts of depression from schoolmates. He even found a sport he enjoyed and, for once, was good at: rowing for the crew team. It was a sport, he quipped in a 1954 speech, “where all one needs is a strong back and a weak mind.” But he grew, he said, “mad for the sport.” From it, he claimed to have learned about teamwork, how “a breakdown on the part of any one individual can cause the team to fail,” and the importance of “work[ing] for the team instead of… for one’s self.” His experience on the crew team was his first exposure to “interdependence” among teammates, something that he said later proved lifesaving in wartime and essential for his success at IBM.47 He also credited his passion for the sport in those years for helping to spark his lifelong love of being on the water and for whetting his appetite for competitive sail racing. In his final year at Hun, he traveled with the Hun crew team to race in the vaunted Henley Regatta in England.48
Tom arrived at Hun with high hopes of going to college at Princeton. Next to a pensive-looking yearbook photograph of a handsome teen with thick, dark hair and a melancholy look in his eyes, his 1931–1932 junior-year biographical entry noted that Watson enjoyed crew and that “brain-weather permitting, he will make Princeton his Alma Mater” after his senior year. But he continued to flounder academically and to find ways to stir up trouble. Even his thirty classmates saw little worth in him. In his first year, the class members voted for their top three choices among their classmates in various categories, including best athlete, best scholar, most generous, most gentlemanly, and most likely to succeed. Watson was on none of those lists. But there were also several gag races, and that is where Tom shined. He won for the noisiest and biggest baby and came in third for biggest chiseler.49 In his final year at Hun, he remained the top vote-getter for biggest baby and third for noisiest. The latter was due to his having rebuilt an old outboard boat motor, which he tested by mounting it on a chair in his dorm room. “It made a terrible racket,” he remembered years later.50 The caption beside his final year’s photograph asserts that Tom “will long be remembered in the annals of the school.” The reasons for that prediction, though, outside his rowing, seem dubious or worse: “He has most notably succeeded in being a fine crew man, a wizard for getting other people in trouble, and a great addition to the fun” in his school residence. The entry concludes: “If all goes well, Watty will enter Princeton next fall where he plans to continue his career as a brilliant socialite.”51 Princeton had other thoughts about Watty’s plans.
His classmates in later years looked back on Watson, said one, as a “pretty normal student.” In an interview for a fall 1989 alumni publication naming Watson “Alumnus of the Year,” classmate Alan Poole described him as “friendly and unspoiled. He was unimpressed by his father’s prominence at IBM and never traded on the Watson name. In fact, people who didn’t know the connection would never have guessed.”52
Between his boisterous evenings and weekends and hours rowing each day, Tom found little time to squeeze in study and what studying he did brought scant reward. His grades remained worse than mediocre but his emotional life stabilized to a degree, helped greatly by his discovery of rowing. Hun barely awarded him his diploma in 1933. He, nonetheless, thought his chances for getting into Princeton were strong. The school was then known for welcoming the sons of the well-to-do, virtually without consideration of their high school grades. But his overall marks and test scores at Hun stood so low that Princeton rejected him. After his rejection, his headstrong and wealthy father drove to Princeton to make Tom’s case with Radcliffe Heermance, director of admission. Sitting in his office, Heermance held up the young Watson’s dismal school records. “Mr. Watson,” he said, “I am looking at your son’s record and he is a predetermined failure.” His father would not share that bleak assessment with his son until many years later.53
Tom was crushed. He then hoped for better marks in his last semester, perhaps opening college admission to him at another school of his choice, but his final grades improved little. At that point, his chances for entry into any college’s freshman class for that fall were, he considered, “pretty slim.” But his father, mustering his usual optimism, rejected his son’s dire outlook: “There must be some college we can find that will accept you with your marks,” he said. He and his son loaded into the family Packard and Tom’s father told him, “We will keep driving south until we get you a place at a university.”
Tom knew where he wanted to try. That summer in Camden, he had fallen hard for Isabel Henry, the beautiful daughter of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her mother did not think much of Tom and considered his upstart family unworthy of her beautiful daughter, but the pair became inseparable. The nineteen-year-old scion was intent on marrying the equally well-to-do Isabel. Although Tom was not particularly faithful to her by his own description, they remained together. But, two years later in 1935, when she suggested that they elope and start on a monied life of leisure and travel together, he balked at the prospect: “Your family would be forever annoyed. My mother would be upset.” Within two weeks, she ended the relationship.54
But in 1933, he was determined to stay close to her. Tom suggested to his father that they try for Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, which would place him near enough to continue seeing her.55 Upon arriving at the campus, Tom and his father went to the admissions office. The senior Watson promptly announced, “I’m Thomas Watson, I run the IBM company, and my son would like to consider coming to Brown.” Always one to make connections, T.J. asked, “By the way, who is the president of Brown?” By pure luck, Clarence Barbour, his former church pastor from Rochester, was the president. A school with little cachet outside Rhode Island in the midst of the Great Depression, Brown was happy to welcome the industrialist’s son. Barbour made some calls on Tom’s behalf. When the Watsons returned to the admissions office, the dean remarked dryly, “He’s not very good, but we’ll take him.”56