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Churchill & the Desk. When World War II came, Salesman Tom Watson Jr. enlisted and spent the next 5½ years as a transport pilot in the Army Air Forces. Right after Pearl Harbor he married Olive Field Cawley, then started shuttling between Russia and the Middle East on staff missions. In his B-24 he once flew escort for Britain's Prime Minister Churchill on a long flight from Moscow to Teheran. When he got out in 1946, he was a lieutenant colonel with 2,000 hours of flight time, the Air Medal, and senior pilot's wings.
IBM's executives hardly recognized him when he got back. Tom Watson Jr. had grown up in the Army. His first job was as assistant to Charles Kirk, IBM's vice president in charge of sales. "He had a large desk," says Tom Watson Jr., "and I simply had a chair pulled up at the edge of the desk, alongside him, and saw 90% of what he did." When Kirk was away, Tom Watson Jr. had to make the decisions. He made them so well that when Kirk died suddenly in the summer of 1947, Tom Jr. took over the job, moved up to executive vice president in 1949.
Three years later, his father called him into his 17th floor office at IBM's Manhattan World Headquarters, told him that he was IBM's new president. Says Tom: "It was the most moving experience of my life. I was completely disarmed."
Today, after three years as president, there is little doubt who is running the company, though his father is still active in IBM and outside as well,* likes to be informed of everything, and takes part in most high policy decisions. Tom Watson Jr. makes no bones about the fact that his father was able to put him in the president's chair largely because of his position in the company and the fact that the Watson family holds 6% of IBM's 4,098,471 shares. But Tom Watson Jr. is proving that the choice was a good one.
Phones & Time Clocks. Tall and rangy (6 ft. 3 in., 190 Ibs.), prematurely grey at 41, Tom Watson Jr. is much like his father at IBM. He does not smoke, except for a few weeks at Christmastime, never drinks. He used to do both, but when he took over the president's chair, he gave them up in deference to his father. He usually wears the traditional IBM uniform —dark suit, quiet tie, white shirt with stiff, detachable paper collar—punches a time clock along with the lowliest employee. But he is a more relaxed executive than his father. He likes to be called Tom, delegates responsibility. Nine times out of ten, he answers his own phone in his office atop IBM's Manhattan World Headquarters. He gives orders in a quiet, assured voice, never expects to be told that they have been accomplished. Much of the time he is off on inspection trips in a company plane (often doing the piloting himself), and, like all IBM executives, is a good public speaker.
He lives in a big colonial brick house in Greenwich, Conn., with his pretty wife and their five children—Tom III, 11 , Jeannette, 9, Olive, 7, Lucinda, 5, Susan, 2—and tries to lead the happy, solid life of a normal, 9-to-5 commuter. He is as hard-muscled as a 25-year-old, loves to ski and sail. Whenever he can, he sails his 47-ft. racing yawl Palawan on Long Island Sound, has taken it on two Newport-to-Bermuda races.