A look at the Bill Gates autobiography Source Code: My Beginnings
Bill Gates is one of the world’s most important political figures – not because he’s a great thinker, writer, orator, or officeholder, but because he’s rich.
That’s OK. As long as they do it honestly and openly, rich people should be able to promote the causes they believe in. It’s a basic human right, one that, for Americans, is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
Like anyone else, Gates is and should be subject to criticism when he exercises that right. But efforts to criticize Gates are complicated by the fact that his views are often unclear.
He has stated that, while he was building Microsoft, until he mostly left the company in 2000 to pursue activism and philanthropy, he focused – “hyperfocused” – on business, on fulfilling the vision of Gates and co-founder Paul Allen: “a computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software.”
So the Bill Gates of national and world politics is a babe, only 25 years old.
In human years, Gates is approaching 70. It’s been 49 years since he became a public figure, when he stirred controversy with an open letter, sent to the country’s computer publications, decrying software piracy. It’s been nearly 41 years since “Microsoft Boss Bill Gates” made the cover of Time magazine, and almost 30 since he made Time’s cover again as “Master of the Universe.” Today he is the world’s most famous billionaire activist – yes, more famous than Elon Musk. World leaders and major media figures treat his opinion on any given subject as of great importance.
Now comes Gates’s autobiography – part one of a trilogy – entitled Source Code: My Beginnings. This book covers his life up through the early days of Microsoft. Future volumes will cover the rise of Microsoft to world prominence and Gates’s activities as a philanthropist.
If you’re looking for a rags-to-riches story, look elsewhere. It’s more a story of riches-to-unimaginable-riches, and of family connections that provided Bill a charmed life and initiated him into the elite.
Gates’s great-grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, founded Seattle’s National City Bank, served as school board member, state legislator, and mayor, and was director of the Seattle branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
J.W. Maxwell’s son was likewise a millionaire, and the granddaughter, Mary, Gates’s mother, became a prominent figure in society. During Bill’s childhood, Mary was a board member for numerous charities and businesses – First Interstate Bank, Planned Parenthood, a TV station, an insurance company, the phone company, and, appointed by the governor, the University of Washington.
Importantly, she was a board member (and future chairman) of the United Way, which at the time was the largest nonprofit organization in the country in terms of public contributions. (It didn’t hurt that employers sometimes pressured employees to make automatic donations.) The United Way connection paid off bigtime when Mary Gates mentioned her son’s software business to a fellow board member, IBM president John Opel.
IBM was getting into the personal computer business and needed an operating system, that is, software to run the machines. When a deal with another company fell through, Opel remembered the company run by “Mary Gates’s son.” Microsoft made the deal with IBM, though it didn’t actually have an operating system; it bought one from another company for $50,000 and turned that into Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). Microsoft kept the rights to MS-DOS, licensing it to 50 hardware manufacturers in the first year. It became the principal operating system for personal computers around the world, and proved far more valuable than IBM’s PC business.
Gates’s father likewise played a critical role. Bill Gates “Sr.” (actually the second or third, depending on who’s counting) had a relatively humble background; his father worked in a furniture store. But Bill Sr. was lucky in the connections he made, becoming a very successful lawyer and advisor to businesses and charities while James d’Orma Braman, his best friend’s father whom he considered his own surrogate father, became a Seattle city council member and mayor, later assistant secretary of transportation in the Nixon administration.
Gates Sr. turned down a federal judgeship during the administration of liberal Republican President Gerald Ford, and served as president of the Seattle/King County and Washington State bar associations. He later served on the boards of Planned Parenthood and of the left-leaning corporation Costco, and was prominent in campaigns for raising property, income, and death taxes, co-authoring a pro-tax book, Wealth and Our Commonwealth.
Mary Gates worked hard to maintain the family’s standing, modeling the Gateses on the Kennedys, putting condiments in little dishes with little spoons – no ketchup bottles at the dinner table! – and socializing with the elite. Mary and Bill Sr., raised in the Christian Science faith, rejected their parents’ beliefs. They were member of Seattle’s popular University Congregational Church, where the pastor was an outspoken liberal (although some of the beliefs he espoused, such as support for racial equality and opposition to war, would today be seen more as conservative views).
Mary and her female friends had gone to college at a time when women were one-sixth as likely to go as they are today. “That her kids would all go to college was a given,” Gates wrote. But first, his parents sent Bill to Lakeside, a boys’ school where everyone wore jackets and attended chapel. It was the school for Seattle’s most privileged. Gates told the Washington Post that “my dad made a very good salary, but other kids had Porsches that they drove to school. I always envied that a little bit. So it was kind of funny when, even though it was used, I could buy one.”
At Lakeside, the mothers conducted a yard sale to fund a computer lab. Thus, Gates had access to a computer in 1968 when he was 13, at a time when even most businesses didn’t have access to computers. Eventually, as the novelty wore off and other students lost interest, the computer was used exclusively by four boys, Gates and his friends who laid the foundation for Microsoft.
Back to politics: Most people form a political orientation based not on careful reasoning and serious thought, but on the views and attitudes of people around them.
As he grew up, Gates’s associations were with his family and other members of the elite in Seattle and thereabouts.
His parents’ partner at the card game bridge was Daniel Evans, the governor of Washington and future U.S. Senator. Evans was a Republican who considered conservative ideology a nuisance if not a threat. He was a supporter of the presidential campaign of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and refused to campaign in 1968 for Richard Nixon because the moderate Nixon was too conservative for him. When Gates was 15, his connection to Evans got him a job as a page at the state Capitol. While in Olympia, Gates lived at the governor’s mansion.
At the University of Washington in 1948, Gates’s mother was the student body secretary. She was introduced to her future husband by Brock Adams, the student body president, who would go on to become a Democratic member of Congress, chairman of the House Budget Committee, transportation secretary under President Jimmy Carter, and U.S. Senator. Adams was also a sexual predator. During his time in the Senate, female staffers were often warned to avoid him. After multiple allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted women, he withdrew from his campaign for a second term.
When Gates was 16, his connection to Adams got him a job as a page at the U.S. Capitol. “Many of the other pages were selected on merit, but I was selected because my parents were good friends with Brock Adams, and I guess I did a good job licking stamps,” Gates told The Washington Post.
That was the year when George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president, was so far to the left that he carried only one state. “Even amongst the Democratic pages, I was one of the few who was for McGovern,” said Gates.
Why was Gates a McGovern supporter when even the other Democratic pages weren’t? One factor, perhaps, was the influence of Kent Evans. Early in his teen years, Evans was Gates’s best friend, one of the four Lakeside computer kids. He was the one with whom Gates planned to go into business someday. Evans’s father had retired, after an inheritance, to become a Unitarian minister, and young Kent became a liberal Democratic activist, supporting Eugene McCarthy’s primary challenge to President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and closely following the cases of the ACLU. He was so much a Democrat that he marked wrong answers on a French test with the initials of Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon and correct answers with those of Nixon’s opponent, Hubert Humphrey. (Evans died in a climbing accident, the only tragedy of Gates’s young life.)
When the Gates family supported Republicans, the Republicans were liberals. In 1966, the Gates family supported the successful state senate race of a protégé of Governor Evans named Joel Pritchard. Pritchard would go on to sponsor a ballot measure that made Washington, in 1970, the first state to legalize abortion by popular referendum. He would also serve in Congress – the fourth-most liberal Republican in the House in 1984, by one analysis – and was elected lieutenant governor.
In the period covered by Source Code, up through 1978, Gates gained advantage from his family’s political connections but he was mainly interested in what he called his “hyperfocus” – logic, math, programming, and building the Microsoft business. His political orientation was based on the views of his family, friends, and the elites of Seattle. In that world, there were Republicans, but those Republicans were liberals like Dan Evans, and it seemed that Democrats and the Left represented the wave of the future (an accurate prediction, to this point, for Seattle and Washington State).
In this volume of Gates’s autobiography, there’s no moment of political conversion, as when Hillary Clinton, a Republican “Goldwater Girl,” fell under the influence of a liberal youth pastor, or when Elon Musk, a liberal-leaning libertarian, realized that the Democratic Party had gone hard left, censoring and fraudulently prosecuting its opponents. We’re left to wonder what turned Gates into a political activist.
We may learn more in future volumes. Perhaps Gates’s turn toward political activism was largely a practical one, inspired by what happened to Microsoft during the Clinton era.
Gates boasted for many years that Washington, DC wasn’t “on our radar screen.” But Microsoft was on Washington’s. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration went after the company, seeking to break it up. This was supposedly to enforce the antitrust laws. The real reason, many suspected, was that DC operates as a protection racket, and Microsoft hadn’t paid its pizzo (as the Mafia calls it). A message needed to be sent, that the exponentially growing information-technology sector had to play by the same rules as every other business. Nice company you have there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.
Message received. In 1995, for the first time, Microsoft hired a fulltime DC lobbyist. At first, the lobbyist had a small office in the suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, with no secretary and a political action committee budget of $16,000. Four years later, the Washington Post reported that “Today, as it fights a government antitrust lawsuit that could threaten its corporate existence, Microsoft is scrambling to recover from its years of languor in the nation’s capital. The company, a flagship of the New Economy, has embarked on an all-out crusade to win friends in Washington that draws from every page of the traditional political influence playbook.” By 2016, Gates was sufficiently political, and sufficiently on good terms with the Clintons, that he appeared on a list of prospective running mates put together by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta.
As he built Microsoft, Gates spent many years largely avoiding politics, but there were clues in his youth that pointed to the sort of political activist he would one day become. Whether or not Gates intended it, Source Code provides those clues.
Dr. Steven J. Allen is an NLPC Senior Fellow.
