Thomas Watson

Thomas Watson Jr. was born on January 14, 1914, just before his father, Thomas J. Watson, was dismissed from his job at cash register company NCR – an act which subsequently drove Watson Sr., to founding the largest and most profitable digital computer manufacturer in the world, IBM Corporation. Two sisters followed Thomas Jr., Jane and Helen, before a final child, Arthur Kittredge Watson, was born.

Watson Jr. was raised in the Short Hills section of Millburn, New Jersey.

Both sons were immersed in IBM from a very early age. He was taken on plant inspections – his first memory of such a visit (to the Dayton, Ohio factory) was at the age of five – and business tours to Europe and made appearances at annual gatherings for the company's elite sales representatives, the IBM Hundred Per Cent Club, even before he was old enough to attend school.

At home his father's discipline was erratic and often harsh. Around the time he was thirteen, Watson suffered from clinical depression.

Talking to a reporter in 1974, Watson described his relationship with his father; "My father and I had terrible fights... He seemed like a blanket that covered everything. I really wanted to beat him but also make him proud of me." But this relationship was not all negative: "I really enjoyed the ten years (working) with him". In his book he says; "I was so intimately entwined with my father. I had a compelling desire, maybe out of honor for the old gentleman, maybe out of sheer cussedness, to prove to the world that I could excel in the same way that he did."

Watson attended the Hun School of Princeton in Princeton, New Jersey. He claimed in his autobiography that as a child he had a "strange defect in his vision" that made written words appear to fall off the page when he tried to read them. As a result, Watson struggled in school, and he acknowledged that Brown University reluctantly admitted him as a favor to his father. He graduated with a business degree in 1937.

After graduating, Watson became a salesman for IBM but had little interest in the job. The turning point was his service as a pilot in the Army Air Forces during World War II. His brother "Dick" (Arthur) Watson had dropped out of Yale. Watson became a lieutenant colonel, tasked with flying military commanders. Tom Jr. later admitted to journalists that the one career he would have liked to follow was an airline pilot. Piloting came easily to him and for the first time, he had confidence in his abilities. Toward the end of his service, Watson worked for Major General Follett Bradley, who suggested that he should try to follow his father at IBM. Watson regularly flew Bradley, the director of lend-lease programs to the Soviet Union, to Moscow during the war. On these trips, he learned Russian, which would later serve him well as the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union. Watson and Bradley were instrumental in establishing the ALSIB-Northwest Staging Route to send military aircraft from the United States to the Soviet Union.

Watson returned to IBM at the beginning of 1946. He was promoted to be a vice president just six months later and was promoted to the board just four months after that. He became Executive Vice-president in 1949.

Watson married Olive Cawley (1918–2004) in 1941. They had six children.

He had homes in Greenwich, Connecticut; North Haven, Maine; Stowe, Vermont; Vail, Colorado; New York City; and Antigua. He died in Greenwich on December 31, 1993, of complications following a stroke. He was 79.

Watson was the principal benefactor of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (which supports students to study a topic of personal interest for a year) and other charitable gifts.

Watson contributed to the Watson Pavilion at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, which named the Olive and Thomas J. Watson Jr. Pavilion (a wing) after him and his wife. He was also the principal benefactor of Owls Head Transportation Museum in Owls Head, Maine. He was on the board of directors of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and helped bring a factory employing over 300 people to the community that made cables, including ones for the US space program.