Blue Sky Dream (23 page)

In this, Woz is different from his own father, because Jerry Wozniak never seemed to wish for his son’s life. My father remembers that even after Woz became famous, Jerry said very little about him to colleagues at Lockheed, except to roll his eyes at the rock concert fiascos, saying his son had fallen in with the “wrong element” and paid the price for it.

Jerry’s element was Lockheed and always would be. The grueling project in 1977 that forced him to work Christmas day did not dull his appetite, nor did the heart attack that ended that project for him. Even when the Cold War was over, even when
layoffs were once again souring morale in the halls of Lockheed, Jerry Wozniak was eager to go into work. After he reached retirement age, he found a way back inside through consulting. And after his last consulting job was through, he quietly hung on to his badge. No one had thought to ask him for it. Until someone did, Jerry Wozniak would put on his badge and walk into Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. He would seek out his old colleagues and work on their projects for no pay. He would, at lunchtime, take his usual place in a bridge game that had been going on for fifteen years.

Jerry described for me his last day within Lockheed, a day not long before our conversation. He had spent the morning working on Missiles and Space projects for nothing, whiling away the lunch hour playing bridge with his friends. But a corporate vice president had caught sight of him in the hall, had done a double-take, and announced to all around, “What’s
he
doing here?”

Someone took Jerry’s badge from him. Then “they invited me to leave the complex.” Jerry said he wasn’t angry about it. “My guess is it was a liability problem or something like that. If I fall down the stairs, I guess it’s not good if I’m not an employee.”

I
t was several mornings after I spoke with Jerry Wozniak that I sat quietly reading the newspaper across from my father, waiting for the coffee to brew. I was thinking about how Jerry had defined to me his relationship with Woz. “Everyone in this family,” he had said, “is fiercely independent.” The son’s skills and accomplishments had flowed from the father, but the father had not wanted to take credit. “I just pointed him to the right literature, answered a question here or there.” The son had then, by luck and obsession and invention, constructed a life completely different from the father’s, had made choices that made the father roll his eyes with disapproval. And yet Jerry had preferred to say of Woz, “I just feel kind of akin to him.”

I was thinking that the son seemed to be triumphing over the father in the newspaper stories that morning, stories of aerospace decline in a Silicon Valley that was nevertheless prospering, stories praising aggressive young entrepreneurs and stories about the trimming of middle-aged, middle-manager workforces. I was thinking this as I turned to page 6b, which happened to be the obituaries.

The black headline at the top said: “Jerry Wozniak, Electrical Engineer.”

Underneath, a smaller headline read:
“Father set example for Apple co-founder.”

Jerry Wozniak had been at home in front of his personal computer when a heart attack killed him. The story said that Jerry was to have hosted a bridge game with “Lockheed pals” the next night. There was a quote from the famous son. “He was meticulous. I can remember him at home working and working, hours and hours on drawings trying to get a solution. I knew that feeling later when I spent hours and hours to save the tiniest bit of circuit.” When his father was found dead, Woz reported, “Everything was neat, even his glasses were lined up straight.”

I said to my father, “Jerry Wozniak died. Two days after I spoke with him. Can you believe it?”

“Jerry?” my father said, taking the page from me and reading the Lockheed life that had been compressed into eighteen column inches of some journalist’s words, a blue sky life written about only because the son was the mythical Woz. My father shook his head as he read. I looked on, seeing across the table from me a face with rosy splotches and lines and stray white hairs, a face that seemed to have been made soft by history, including the history between the two of us.

Anyone who knew some but not enough about my father and me might well have concluded that our history was one of an example offered and rejected, opposites pulling apart, changing times opening a gulf between, so that now I was the son who (likely in some spirit of vendetta) made a living attacking the very basis of my father’s own livelihood. But that is not really the way
it had come to be with us. I knew that my father always had felt kind of akin to me and I to him and that this was something we understood in silent moments together like these. As I watched him reading the obituary of a fellow Organization Man that morning, I thought my father looked uncharacteristically fragile. And yet I could not imagine his face gone from my life, his face which would be my face, no doubt, in twenty-five years.

EIGHT
 OUR PRESIDENT
 

R
onald Reagan made my family’s tract house into a dream home. Just about the time of his landslide re-election in 1984, Ronald Reagan knocked out the north and west facing walls of our house. He tore out the linoleum floor and the flocked ceiling of the family room. He ripped out the frumpy cabinets and yellow tile and harvest-colored appliances in the kitchen. He moved the washer and dryer in from the garage, adding a laundry station next to the refurbished bathroom off the master bedroom. He cut a larger window in the living room. Then Ronald Reagan went to work on the new, pushed-out north and west walls and the additions they would enclose, the expanded family room with its high ceiling and free-standing fireplace and billiard table, the octagonal dining room that would be cozy yet plenty big enough for the family gatherings my parents expected to grow in size in the years ahead. Ronald Reagan gave my mother a kitchen twice the area of the old one, with solid oak cabinets and an extra sink and yards of counter space. He gave my father a shop of his
own just off the garage. He got rid of every scrap of shag carpet in the house, sanding and lacquering the floorboards beneath until they gleamed golden. In the family room Ronald Reagan laid tongue-and-groove hardwood from Sweden, and in the kitchen and dining room, rich brown squares of Mexican terra-cotta. Everything shined with the light that poured in from many new windows, picture windows with wood casings instead of the original aluminum frames, a touch that elevated the final effect above the cost-conscious functionality the house once announced. Now the light poured in through picture windows that seemed almost ornate with their many panes (or, more precisely, the illusion of many panes, since the whole checkerboard of stained wood snapped out to reveal a single plate of glass, the easier to wash).

Ronald Reagan never actually laid eyes on my family’s home, no. Most of the renovation was done by an independent contractor named Dick who probably voted for Ronald Reagan and who probably bid too low on my parents’ project. Whenever my father was niggling with him over some detail in the work, Dick liked to flash his smile, white against tanned leather, and say, “Hal, building is an art, not a science.” So it was Dick and his small crew who did most of the work, and it was my father who added many finishing touches of charm, including the Swedish hardwood and the Mexican tile and an inlaid redwood ceiling over the dining room.

But it was Ronald Reagan who wanted my family to have all this, Ronald Reagan who arranged to have it paid for. In fact, no president of the United States ever did more for my family. And so it may seem strange if I say that my family accepted Ronald Reagan’s every blandishment, yes, but did so the way a child takes a Christmas gift from a detested old uncle, with eyes averted and confused feelings—feelings of covetousness and resentment and entitlement—swirling inside. To my father and mother, liberal-minded people, Ronald Reagan was a sham whose politics were mean-spirited. To me, a young man who wished to imagine his soul cleaner than most, scrubbed by indignation and good works, Ronald Reagan was something more. He was the
devil himself, denying me my self-satisfaction, reminding me always of my complicity in his schemes, the complicity of a child so fortunate as to have been born into the blue sky tribe, the tribe Ronald Reagan loved and favored like no other.

S
urely no president ever professed more belief in the powers of aerospace invention, a vow of faith that Ronald Reagan, over and over again, invited all of America to renew. He did this by returning the mythology of holy crusade to the Cold War, a crusade that was to be won, inevitably, in the skies and in space. Years of “detente” as official policy had drained the drama out of the Cold War story, had made the Cold War, under President Carter, a matter of keeping our Olympic athletes home and off TV if the enemy should happen to invade Afghanistan. It took Ronald Reagan to undo what President Ford had done when he called whipping inflation the moral equivalent of war, to undo what President Carter had done by trying to make driving fifty-five the moral equivalent of war. It took a President Reagan to restore the
Cold War
to the moral equivalent of war, to brand the Soviet Union an Evil Empire, to joke darkly about bombing Moscow, to prophesy that Armageddon was nigh, that a Christian nation must therefore prepare itself to engage and vanquish the pagan enemy.

Ronald Reagan came into office the first president to speak openly of waging and winning a protracted nuclear war. “Winning,” by some White House estimates, meant obliterating the Soviet Union while suffering twenty million civilian casualties at home. In making this his test of victory, Ronald Reagan broke with the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the assumption that neither superpower would start, much less win, a nuclear war, because once the thousands of missiles on each side started flying, holocaust would devour both sides. There were several ways to read the Reagan shift. Perhaps the man
did
so hate and distrust Soviet Communism that he spoiled for a
showdown no matter the cost. Or perhaps Ronald Reagan was more canny than that, meaning only to prevent the Soviets from assuming they could render us helpless with a first strike, in which case he merely aimed to shore up the logic of MAD. Or, more canny still, the missile rattling could have been bluff intended to drive the Soviets into economic ruin as they strove to keep pace. No matter. Whatever intent lay behind all this Cold War mongering, my family was sure to benefit, for as Ronald Reagan set about mounting the largest peacetime military buildup in American history, he was commanding into being some wondrous, and wondrously expensive, inventions of aerospace. There would have to be computers faster than any before, capable of selecting targets well after their human masters had been incinerated. There would have to be communications satellites unlike any before, capable of withstanding the barrage of circuit-frying radiation that nuclear explosions send thousands of miles through space. There would have to be B-1 and Stealth bombers and Trident and Pershing and MX and cruise missiles, and there would have to be 16,000 new nuclear warheads added to all these various new and improved “delivery systems.”

The problem with Ronald Reagan’s reinvigorated version of the Cold War story, of course, was the implied dark ending for the victors, twenty million dead or maimed and the rest of us cowering as blue sky weaponry performed wondrously above. The aftermath “would be a terrible mess but it wouldn’t be unmanageable,” Ronald Reagan’s director of civil defense, trying to put the best face on it, assured the writer Robert Scheer. But nothing is harder to summon than faith without hope. And so …

“Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.”

On the evening of March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan once again invited a renewal of faith in the powers of aerospace. This time he defined hope in terms of meeting the ultimate systems engineering challenge. A shield in space, he asked us to imagine, impervious to nuclear attack, hammered from the stuff of blue
sky dreams. “Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.”

The famed “Star Wars” speech never mentioned Star Wars or even the official term for Ronald Reagan’s vision of hope, the Strategic Defense Initiative. Ronald Reagan simply let it be known that he had been mired in nuclear gloom of late and that “my advisors, particularly the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have underscored the bleakness of the future before us.” Fortunately, those same advisors and Joint Chiefs of Staff were in agreement with Ronald Reagan that the future need not be bleak at all. Not if “the scientific community who gave us nuclear weapons” could be commanded to work on “the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

True, this space shield would take “probably decades” to construct. “But what if free people could live secure in the knowledge that … we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies’?” asked Ronald Reagan.