The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived by Ralph Watson McElvenny

Author:Ralph Watson McElvenny [Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Watson advocated for improved social welfare programs and public and private investment in impoverished inner cities. As an example of what he called “corporate social responsibility,” after discussions with New York senator Robert Kennedy, he built an IBM plant in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, then predominantly poor and Black. Watson was a member of the board for a program Kennedy helped set up to boost opportunities for local residents. The computer-cable factory employed about four hundred people, among them a large percentage who were previously unemployed. Watson wrote that the rare big-business manufacturing plant in the inner city “worked better than we’d hoped,” and proved a success as both a business investment and as an employment opportunity for the impoverished area.45 It also bought IBM front-page coverage.46

With antiwar protests on campuses and in Washington, he fretted over the war in Vietnam and the costs to the economy and the fabric of a bitterly divided society. But IBM built bombsights for B-52 bombers, and, in a letter to the student newspaper at Brown University, reported on by the New York Times, he rebuked student protesters for calling upon the school to end investment from its endowment in the Dow Chemical Company as a show of opposition to its production of napalm for US forces. He claimed that nearly all major US corporations were “contributing in some way to the Vietnam War regardless of the points of view of [their] executives.”47

In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was running for president and for a period looked like the probable Democratic candidate, floated Watson’s name as a possible choice for his secretary of the Treasury. But summers and winters, Robert Kennedy came often to the Watson vacation houses in North Haven and Stowe. Watson loaned him Palawan for a week each summer. They discussed Kennedy’s thoughts on running for president that year, and when he entered the race, Watson came out strongly for him.48 When his friend was assassinated in June, he flew Jackie Kennedy to Los Angeles to join the other family members, copiloting the IBM corporate jet and paying for the flight himself.49 After Robert Kennedy’s death, Kennedy family members urged him to enter the race. But having briefly considered it, Watson declined, recalling, “I’d already gotten over my vague aspirations to elective office.”

Watson and Nixon were also quiet allies at first, until Watson spoke out publicly in June 1970 against the continued war in Vietnam.50 He made front-page national news when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US must withdraw “as soon as possible… we must end this tragedy before it overwhelms us.”51 He warned that the war was harming the economy and, more importantly, causing “disaffection” and “demoralization” among the nation’s youth. “The damage we have seen will take decades to repair,” he testified, “and, if we continue, I believe we will soon reach a point where much of the damage will be irreparable.”

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