iWoz (10 page)

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was an alleged attack on two American destroyers (the USS
Maddox
and the USS C.
Turner
Joy)
in August of 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnamese gunboats. Later research indicates that most of the attacks did not actually occur. 

According to the Pentagon Papers and various reports, the attacks were pretty much made up by President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration. The U.S.-supported South Vietnamese regime had been attacking oil-processing facilities in North Vietnam, but it was the CIA that helped plan and support it in order to give the administration a good reason to involve the U.S. in the conflict.

me something better. That's what the Pentagon Papers did for me. They pointed out that even the president was subject to the pressures of the military-industrial complex, the major institution of our land. And after reading this, I decided not to vote, that it wouldn't matter either way. I figured that pretty much I'd get the same life no matter who was elected. I thought it was better not even to go into the voting booth.

But I did vote a couple of times. I voted for a guy named George McGovern, who promised he'd find a way to stop the war. I voted for Jimmy Carter, because the words he spoke seemed to come from the same philosophical point of view as my own. He believed, as I did, that war was a last resort and not a first.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000, because I thought it would be nice to have an average Joe kind of person in the White House instead of a smart, well-educated one. Someone who could only speak in very small words. Okay, I'm joking. The fact is I voted for Ralph Nader. But since all the pundits said that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush, I now tell people I voted for Bush just to watch their jaws drop.

Seriously, though, I still think about this whole era with a lot of pain. Being brought up by my dad, who'd taught me that we had the best government in the world and that our government was the best one there ever could be even with its flaws, well, that kind of fell apart. He told me the purpose of the government was to take care of its people and make things better for them.

During the Vietnam War, of course, there was a mandatory draft. When you turned eighteen, you had to register. If you were a college student, you would get what was called a 2S deferment; otherwise you would be classified as 1 A. That meant that any day the military could draft you and send you off to boot camp.

Once you were 1A, the government had a year to draft you. After that, you would be exempt. That's why not everyone who was 1A wound up serving.

I submitted a report card to the San Jose draft board in order to get my 2S deferment, but I didn't submit one of the proper forms the government required to show you were a college student. By mistake I only sent in my report card.

A couple of months later, a big delay, I received notice that the San Jose draft board had voted five to three to make me 1A. What? But I was a student.

This is when I decided that I would go to prison or Canada or, more likely, try to get let off by a judge rather than go to Vietnam. In fact, a judge in San Jose—his name was Judge Peckham—had let a couple of guys off as conscientious objectors despite their lack of membership in a church.

One of those people let off had been one of the brightest math stars at my high school, Allen Stein. Quite a coincidence. So I had good reason to expect the same in my situation.

So since I was 1A anyway, I took a year off from school to program computers and earn money to pay for my third year of college and buy a car.

Then an amazing thing happened. The U.S. Congress created a draft lottery. That meant that those of us who were 1A would know the likelihood of our being called up. This was so it wouldn't be random. That way, you would know your chances— and I thought it was great. It helped me plan my life.

The way the draft lottery worked was your birthday determined what order you got called in. They would assign ever one's birth date to a number from 1 to 366. So January 1 might be 66, January 2 might be 12, it was totally random.

Well, during the week before they announced the results of the lottery, I got a feeling I have never had before or since. A feeling of physical warmth, like I was going to be protected and get a high number in this lottery. I had a stronger level of certainty than I would ever have let myself feel about the unknown. I can't explain it. I'm not a superstitious person in any way. I have

always believed in reality, the truth, and the provable. But this was so certain in my head. I rode my bike around, just smiling and smiling and smiling about it. I couldn't stop. It was a wonderful, positive feeling, and I couldn't ignore it and pretend it wasn't there.

And sure enough, I read in the newspaper the day of the draft lottery that I got number 325. A great number! That meant it was virtually certain I wouldn't be drafted. It's so weird. I got such a great number, but I wasn't even surprised or elated. I felt like I'd known it all along. The feeling I'd had was that strong.

But then something terrible and unexpected happened.

About a week after I got my draft lottery number, I got a letter from the San Jose draft board. It said—in one sentence—that they were granting me a student deferment after all.

This, after taking months to notify me that they'd voted five to three not to grant my student deferment when I deserved it, was bad enough. But worse, it also meant that in a later year they could make me 1A a second time.

I stood there with the letter in my hand, stunned. They were playing tricks with my life. Dirty tricks. They used the application I'd made for a student deferment as an excuse to grant it to me now, knowing that I already had a great 1A number.

• o •

From that point on, I saw that the government would do whatever it could to beat a citizen, that it was just a game. And this was the exact opposite of the way I had thought of government my whole life. That episode taught me an important lesson about government, authority, even the police. You couldn't trust them to do the right tiling.

Now I had to go back to the draft board and request to keep my 1A—which was what I'd had anyway—and keep the same number. Luckily, they agreed.

I can't even describe to you the shock and disgust I felt at our

government: that they would play this kind of game with my life, that they didn't care about people the way my dad had taught me. I'd thought the government was here to protect us, but that turned out to be wrong. I now believed the government was just out to do what was good for the government and would lie about anything they could get away with. They were not there to do sensible things, and they played with my life in the worst possible way.

From then on, my dad and I were at complete odds. I never trusted authority after that. That's too bad, because since founding Apple and all, I've met lots of good people in the government. But still, this hangs over me. I can hardly trust anything I read.

So between the time I was a kid, when my dad taught me extreme ethics, and the time I realized what was going on with the Vietnam War, I changed profoundly, a full 180 degrees. I became skeptical. I stopped believing blindly in things. It was a major turning point. I lost the trust I'd always had in institutions of all kinds and it has never really returned.

I swore to myself I would put up my own life before letting something like the Vietnam War ever happen again to young kids.

• o •

Maybe you've seen pictures of me from the early days and thought I looked like a hippie. I guess I did, a little. But let me tell you, I was never a hippie.

I tried to be a hippie, but I could never be what they were— not in high school or even in college when all that protest stuff was going on. I'd try to hang out with hippies because I stood with them politically, but they'd usually ask me to leave because I wouldn't use drugs. I still wanted to hang around them because I felt my mind was so open—as open as theirs were—and I got what they were saying. I wanted them to be open with me, but their drugs got in the way. They didn't trust me because I wouldn't do drugs with them.

But I believed in almost everything they were trying to do. Everything I was reading about hippies and hippie beliefs in the late 1960s—the free love movement, things like putting flowers in guns—I knew that was me and what I wanted to be. I agreed with every bit of it. I believed, like hippies did, that everybody should be able to get along and help each other out and live out whatever kind of existence they wanted. And I believed it could be an existence without structure and without laws and without organization and without politics.

People should just agree to live together and be good people, I really believed that. I was tremendously influenced by these kinds of hippie thoughts, these kinds of philosophies.

I would wear this little Indian headband, and I wore my hair really long and grew a beard. From the neck up, I looked like Jesus Christ. But from the neck down, I still wore the clothes of a regular kid, a kid engineer. Pants. Collared shirt. I never did have the weird hippie clothes. I was still middle ground; I was still the way I'd grown up. No matter how hard I tried, it was like I couldn't get outside of normal. Hippie is a way of life, not just a matter of clothes and hair, and I didn't lead that kind of life. I didn't live in weird little places with no money with weird curtains hanging in my windows. And I didn't do drugs. I wouldn't.

At the time, not doing drugs or drinking made me real different. I mean, at the time, especially during my second year at De Anza and for years and years after, people would say things like: "Oh, using LSD can really expand your mind." I remember a guy—John was his name—who claimed that all the A's he got were when he was on acid.

But I thought to myself: Well, if drugs are really better for your mind and can make you think better, then wait a minute. When you take a drug, it's you plus the drug that's working, right? It's not just you. And I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone. I knew that I was bright and

that ray brain was going to take me places. I didn't ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else. I wanted to be judged on my own abilities, on what I did and what I thought, and that alone. So that was pretty much my view on drugs, and I never did any of them.

As for drinking, I didn't even get drunk until I was thirty, in 1980. It was on my first flight out of the United States to Sri Lanka. I was extremely scared on the plane so I was drinking. I wasn't sure they'd let you off a plane if you were drunk. I managed to walk off the plane without assistance, and I ended up telling a really awful joke to a customs official:

A lady who'd never seen an elephant before saw an escaped one in her garden. Shrieking, she called the police. "There's a huge animal in my garden!" she said. "Pulling up the vegetables with his tail! And you wouldn't believe where he's putting them!"

I don't remember if he laughed or not. I don't think so. It's not a joke I normally would have told. It's sort of dumb and hard to get.

Anyway, I never liked alcohol. It made people act noisy and out of control. My dad, for instance, he used to drink martinis. I always noticed how he reasoned differently when he was drunk. Especially as he and I got older, I thought it got really out of hand, the way he would get drunk and yell at my mother. That's not the way he was when he wasn't drinking.

So I didn't drink or do drugs, and as I said, that usually made it kind of weird for the hippie people I wanted to be friends with, people who thought like me in every other way. What a sad thing. During that second year at De Anza, I remember driving my first car down to Santa Cruz. This was back when there were hitchhikers all over the place. (The car I was driving was this purple convertible I'd named Hubbs after a weird chemistry professor I had, but it wasn't that funny a joke because neither the car nor the professor was really that weird.)

Anyway, I stopped and picked up a group of people. They were

definitely hippies. And I took them down to Santa Cruz. We're hanging out on the boardwalk and I notice that one of them, a young girl sitting on a bench, was breast-feeding. Breast-feeding! I'd never seen anything like that before in my life! I just turned my head away really quickly, but it made such an impression on me. I started talking to her, and immediately fell in love with her and her baby. It turned out that she and her baby and a bunch of people all lived together in this commune near me in Sunnyvale. Later I would ride my bike out there a lot and stop at a park near their house and read books. I would go over and hang out with them. We'd eat and do the ohm chanting and all of that. And they would take me with them to meet all these Eastern philosophy- type teachers, really getting me exposed to Eastern thoughts of peace and quietness. I listened to these principles of meditation, and I would just sit down and try to get my head into a quiet place by myself.

The sad thing was, eventually even these hippies didn't want to hang around me anymore. It made them uncomfortable that I didn't do drugs.

So this was a hard social time for me. I remember that at one point I was taking some night classes at San Jose State and this pretty girl comes up to my table in the cafeteria and says, "Oh, hi." She just starts talking to me, and I'm so nervous all I can think to ask her is what her major is. She says, "Scientology." I'd never heard of this, but she assured me it was actually a major and I believed it.