The girl I wanted to get back to in Maine was Isabel Henry. I wanted to marry her, even though I was only nineteen and had yet to start college. Loving this girl was the only deep attachment I had until five years later, when I met the woman who would be my wife. Isabel was socially prominent, two years older than I, and already going out with a wealthy guy who had just graduated from Harvard, the very handsome John Ames. I met her with the help of an impetuous blond-headed fellow named Conway Pendleton, a friend from the Hun School whom I’d invited to Camden that summer.

Conway and I were at a dance at the golf club one night when Isabel and Ames turned up. Everybody stopped and looked at them when they came in. She was the loveliest girl I’d ever seen. She had blond hair, dark eyebrows, a square face, and wonderful carriage—she walked with her shoulders back. Ames looked pretty impressive in a black dinner coat, a white shirt, a black tie, and white flannel pants. To me they were high society, way up out of reach. But my friend Pendleton cut right in on them. I couldn’t wait to get him off the dance floor and debrief him. “What was she like, Conway? What was she like?” I said.

“Oh hell, Tom, she’s just another girl! She’s great, a lot of fun.”

Isabel’s family was a power unto itself in that summer community. They were from Philadelphia and lived in a different way from what I had ever seen. Isabel’s grandfather had bought a small peninsula jutting out into Penobscot Bay and had turned it into a private compound for all the cousins. Isabel’s mother was a Biddle. Their house was modest looking outside but very cosmopolitan inside. I noticed lots of foreign magazines around. They played backgammon, which I’d never heard of before.

I got Conway to introduce me to Isabel and waited impatiently until John Ames left town. Then I began to court her. We saw each other on and off for four or five weeks, and finally I put my arms around her, kissed her, and said, “Isabel, I love you.”

She said, “I love you too, Tommy. God knows I’ve tried not to, but I do.”

I should have started worrying right then. Instead I went home with my heart singing and couldn’t get to sleep. I began to see her all the time. Isabel’s father was a nice guy, very intelligent, but subdued. Mrs. Henry ran the roost. They’d invite me out overnight on their yacht or to dinner at their house. At the table, Mrs. Henry would start cutting me down. She’d be describing some garden party and say, “The Lionel Smiths were there …” and then, turning to me, “Of course you wouldn’t know them.” I’d leave those dinners with my tail between my legs.

Father was delighted with Isabel: he thought she was a queenly woman and that the Biddies were a great family. But if Isabel and I had gotten married, it would have been a disaster. Mrs. Henry would never have let up on me. In fact, I don’t think Isabel saw much ability in me either. We were out riding one day when she said, “I have money and you do too. I don’t think you ought to work. We ought to just pool our funds and travel.”

For two years we were very close. She lived with her parents and we dated while I went to Brown. The crisis finally came when I was twenty-one, in the summer of 1935. I picked up Isabel in Boston, intending to drive to Maine. When we got as far as Rockport, we came over a hill and there was a fork in the road. She said, “Tommy, let’s not stop at Camden. Let’s drive right to Montreal and get married.” It was very tempting. But then I thought about who I’d be alienating—her family and my family. I said, “I don’t think we should do that. Your family would be forever annoyed. My mother would be upset.”

So we drove on into Camden. A few weeks later, Isabel told me it was all over. I was terribly hurt. I went back to Brown and stayed away from eligible girls for more than a year. Mrs. Henry succeeded in getting her daughters married to appropriate men and lived to be about ninety-five. She was always wealthy and spent a month each fall at the Ritz in Paris, buying her gowns. Many years later I ran into her there. I walked down the hall and said, “Mrs. Henry, how are you?”

She said, “Tommy Watson, you’ve become terribly important. You must come to Philadelphia. I’ll give you a dinner.”

If you’d visited Brown University in 1933, the effects of the Depression would have been obvious. The campus looked rundown and a good number of students seemed undernourished. Many of them commuted by bus from places like Pawtucket, because they couldn’t afford to live at school.

However, I fell in with the minority of students who had the money to behave as if the 1920s had never stopped roaring. I belonged to the Psi Upsilon fraternity, which was known for its fun-loving ways. Every night of the week our crowd would head downtown to drink and dance at the Biltmore Hotel. We had apartments, cars, and a pretty fast life. On weekends we drove off to ski resorts in Vermont or to Smith or Vassar for girls.

Living this way, I was even more at odds with myself than most aimless undergraduates. I was behaving like a playboy, but I could see that the country was in an economic mess. I felt anxious to make something of myself, yet unable to lift a finger to try. I was a rich kid among other rich kids, but my friends’ fathers were Republicans while mine was an outspoken New Dealer.

Dad and I were not at all close during those years. At age sixty he was just beginning to gain international recognition and was busy with social and business commitments. Every few weeks he would write me a long moralizing letter filled with the same slogans he’d post on the walls of IBM sales conventions: “Do right,” for example, or “We are a part of all we have met.” I’d read these things and throw them away.

I had plenty of money for fooling around. My monthly allowance was three hundred dollars—about double the income of the average American family in those years. Out of that all I had to pay for was my college bills and my clothes. Dad never asked for an accounting. When we saw each other he’d say, “You’re probably a little short, son,” and pass me an extra hundred dollars. I spent every nickel. But oddly, I never knew if I was really rich. I had a trust fund consisting, naturally, of IBM stock, but Dad never told me how much was in it. Each year his accountant would come around and have me sign income tax forms that were blank. He’d make an excuse that he hadn’t had time yet to fill them out. This kept up not only through college but ten years beyond, until I was a grown man with children of my own.

My first marks came in after three months, just before Christmas of 1933. I got a phone call asking me to report to Dean Sam Arnold, whom I’d met with my dad. Dean Arnold was fat and had a nice, round, smiling face. “Well now, Mr. Watson,” he said, “these marks are not very good. It doesn’t look promising for you in college. You’ve got to do better.” Serious talk, but with a twinkle in his eye. The dean and I had at least one visit like this each semester. I was a terrible student but he tolerated me. Dad, however, put virtually no pressure on me to perform in school. Later, when I asked him why he let me stay in college with the horrible grades I was producing, he said, “I thought it would be better for you to be unmotivated in an orderly situation than unmotivated and allowed to create your own situation.”

I had barely gotten to Brown when I fulfilled my great dream: finally I learned to fly. In September of my freshman year I soloed after just five and a half hours of instruction, which must be some kind of record. What a feeling! I was good at flying, instantly good. I plowed everything I could, mentally, physically, and financially, into that mad pursuit, and gained a lot of self-confidence. Sometimes I’d get out of bed in the middle of the night, drive to the airport, and fly for an hour. The airport managers were pretty reckless with the students—they didn’t object if we flew in the dark. That first winter my biggest adventure was to join the Red Cross airlift of food to Nantucket Island. New England was having a long siege of cold weather, and the Nantucket harbor froze solid for the first time in more than a decade. For a while the only way to get food to the island was by air. I picked up several loads of supplies in New Bedford and took them across.

Dad never complained when he found out I was flying. I suppose both of us realized subconsciously that airplanes were something we were bound to differ on. He simply passed along some advice from Lindbergh, with whom he was now friends: “ ‘Tell your son never to fly when he’s tired.’ ”

By the time I arrived at Brown, Father and Mother had moved from Short Hills to New York, where they joined the city’s elite. During the social season, from October to May, their lives became a regular round-robin: Monday night at the opera with a few other couples, maybe two dinner parties and a charity banquet during the week, and then, every few weeks, an IBM dinner. Father wanted to know everyone important in New York, and eventually he succeeded. In the early 1930s he became head of the Merchants Association of New York and began socializing with people like John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Henry Luce. He joined the Explorers Club and got to know Lowell Thomas and Admiral Richard Byrd, whose expedition to the South Pole Dad helped underwrite; Byrd named a mountain range in Antarctica the Watson Escarpment. He was around my parents’ house a lot. I was awed by him, and impressed that the first man to fly over the North Pole seemed genuinely to like my father, not just to cultivate him for his money.

Dad loved to collect autographed pictures of important people and kept them on a grand piano in the living room. There was one of Charlie Schwab, the great steel man, that said, “To Tom Watson, master business machine.” There was also a picture of Mussolini, from the days when Mussolini was still well thought of, at least in some quarters—it disappeared as soon as Dad became aware of the viciousness of Italian Fascism.

My father’s most influential friend while I was in college was none other than President Roosevelt. Dad contributed money and advice to Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign, and that earned him access to the White House after Roosevelt beat Hoover in a landslide. Dad later told me that his first visit to the president practically destroyed his welcome. It was the summer of 1933 and the Merchants Association was alarmed at the wage and production controls Roosevelt was trying to impose on business under the National Recovery Act. So Dad volunteered to go to Washington and ask the president to ease up.

He greeted Roosevelt and said, “Mr. President, I’m here to tell you that the people in New York think you’re going too far with regulation. Business should be well regulated, but we also believe it should be well treated. If you go much further, you will decimate what little there is left of business, and we’ll end up with nothing.”

Roosevelt shook his head and said, “Look here, Tom. You go back and tell your banker and businessman friends that I don’t have time to worry about their future. I am trying to save this great nation. I think I am going to be successful. If I am successful, I’ll save them along with everyone else.”

These words turned Dad around completely. He saw the monumental job Roosevelt had on his hands and wanted to help. It was the last time Dad ever spoke for the conservative side. He used to tell me: “The average businessman’s opinion of what is right for the country is almost always wrong.”

Later that year Dad put himself back in Roosevelt’s good graces by taking a public stand in favor of opening diplomatic relations with Russia. Roosevelt was getting criticized for being soft on the Bolsheviks, and Dad was one of the few business leaders to back him up. After that he and the president grew quite friendly. Once or twice a month Dad would send him suggestions—sometimes solicited, sometimes not. At times Roosevelt’s men would even ask for Dad’s appointment schedule, in case the president needed to contact him in a hurry.

I saw many of the letters that President Roosevelt wrote back to Dad. Father was so proud of these that he would keep them in his pocket and show them around. Often Dad and Mother went to Hyde Park for tea, and on a couple of occasions they were invited to spend the night at the White House. That was a big event in our family.

Roosevelt was appreciative enough of Dad’s support that in the mid-1930s he offered to make him secretary of commerce or even ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—the job Joseph P. Kennedy subsequently got. Father said no to both offers because he didn’t want to leave IBM. Instead he served, unofficially, as Roosevelt’s representative in New York. If, for example, Gustaf, the crown prince of Sweden, was due to visit the United States, one of Roosevelt’s aides could call Father and say, “Wouldn’t you like to give a luncheon for Gustaf?”

All Father had to do was press a button. He had a whole department that did nothing but set up company dinners and other functions. They’d produce a guest list, and between one hundred and two hundred people would be splendidly entertained at the Union Club, all at IBM’s expense. Dad saw this as a smart and dignified way to publicize the company, refine our top executives—and help the president. Cardinal Spellman would be on hand to give the blessing. There would be a dais, several tables with magnificent centerpieces, and a menu with crossed American and Swedish flags on the front and a description of the guest of honor. I’m sure the menus alone cost seventy-five cents each. Dad hosted a number of these lunches for visiting dignitaries. Roosevelt once said: “I handle ’em in Washington, and Tom handles ’em in New York.” Dad was very flattered by that.