Keeping the Peace

The sky was clear, the sand was warm and the surf was up. Just another day in paradise for the grateful blond from Minnesota.

It was the summer of 1964 and, between waves, the 21-year-old math major was looking for work. So on her way home from the beach, she stopped by the Douglas Aircraft Co. to pick up an application.

“My bathing suit was still damp and I think there was probably sand between my toes, but the company was so desperate that they sat me right down for a test, and before I knew it, I was a computer programmer! Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

Amazing indeed. But then for Jean Jernow, most everything is.

From a peaceful childhood on what was surely one of the Midwest’s most primitive farms to her high-tech post near the apex of the military-industrial complex, Jernow’s life has been a study in spectacular contrast.

Trained as a classical pianist, she prefers the music of Elvis Presley. A scientist working at the outer limits of scientific knowledge, she abhors science fiction. A Eugene McCarthy dove, she programs the missiles of war.

For the last two years, Jernow, 53, has held one of the defense industry’s most imposing titles: Engineering Director of Battle Management Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (BM / C3I) for the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

As chief of more than 140 computer engineers at the Agoura Hills-based Litton Data Systems, Jernow oversees the design of software that may some day guide the U.S. armed forces’ antiballistic missiles to any and all incoming enemy targets.

The inner workings of the THAAD program--the first in the world developed specifically for antiballistic defense--are known only to Jernow and her highly secured colleagues. But it is common knowledge that their creations represent the heart and the brains of the nation’s state-of-the-art weapons system.

While the specifics of the missiles’ range, speed and armament are secret, dramatic full-color brochures put out by “the THAAD Team” boast of the program’s exciting promise against the threat of even nuclear-powered adversaries. With post-Cold War glee, the handouts also describe the antiballistic system’s “hit-to-kill lethality” and “shoot-look-shoot” neutralizing capabilities.

Strong talk for a woman so peaceably reared.

*

Except for the occasional game of cards, Jean Jernow was not raised to play war.

As the second youngest of Martin and Mildred Viste’s seven children, Jean Marie was raised to respect all living things--even the trees in the forest. Because Jean’s father considered chopping down trees a crime against nature, he never got the family a Christmas tree.

Until Jean was 13, the Vistes also lived without electricity or indoor plumbing. On their tiny dairy farm, a team of horses in harness did the heavy work, the kids and parents did the rest.

One of Jean’s favorite memories is of the children and parents, gathered around a big wooden table in the center of their main room, warmed by a potbellied stove, and reading into the night by the light of a kerosene lantern.

Less fond are memories of visiting the outhouse, especially during Minnesota’s bone-numbing winters.

In any weather, all the Viste children had chores, and Jean’s were to help hand-milk the cows every evening after school and to care for any runt babies born around the farm. Caring for piglets the size of her thumb or preemie calves no larger than puppies gave Jernow a respect for life’s insistent spark.

Although poor, the Viste family was remarkably self-sufficient, Jean recalls: “My mother always had a huge garden, and with her baking and my father’s 10 or 12 dairy cows, we never went hungry.”

Nor did they go without entertainment. All the children were taught music, but it soon became clear that Jean and her younger brother David were exceptionally gifted pianists. “She traveled around the area giving little concerts and was in great demand because she played so beautifully,” remembers her eldest brother, Jerry.

Jean was “a bright, sunny girl,” he says, and she shared her father’s love of nature--and of learning. “There was great respect for each child as an individual and there was this streak of intellectual curiosity that ran through all of us, sending us out in the world to learn and discover and, yes, I guess, to succeed.”

Now retired as president of the Nationwide Mutual Insurance subsidiary of Employers of Wausau, Jerry Viste left the farm to attend Harvard on a full scholarship. Years later, Jean won her own scholarship to attend Macalester College, a small Presbyterian school in St. Paul. There, on a work-study program during her senior year, she was introduced to her first computer at the company that would later build the world’s first great computers--UNIVAC.

“I wasn’t there long and programming amounted to code work, stringing together long sequences of 1s and 0s,” she says. “But I discovered a new world and I thought--’Wow! People will pay me to do this.’ It was like solving puzzles--and I loved solving puzzles.”

*

It is three hours before dawn in the New Mexico desert. Jean Jernow and colleague Paul Chandler are in a rented car racing through the darkness to a small cement block building on the White Sands Missile Range.

Although their official role is just to observe, the prospect of this morning’s test launch has both their stomachs in knots. Sleep has been almost impossible for days, but Jernow and Chandler have never felt more awake.

Although the missile will follow a trajectory designed to narrowly miss the target, the very future of the Litton-developed software guiding the interceptor missile could be at stake.

With earphones clamped over their heads and a live-action video rolling on the screen before them, the two engineers listen hard for the communications between computer technicians and soldiers at the launch site. Jernow and Chandler glance out the picture window on one side of the building to see the telltale flame of the rocket’s launch.

As it whistles through the faintly purple sky, the tension in the cinder-block building mounts. The new computer program should dictate the direction, speed and altitude of the trajectory, as well as the moment the “Kill Vehicle” separates from its booster.

If the missile stays on track and performs as it should, it will almost intersect with the target at the black periphery of the Earth’s atmosphere. If it does not perform as promised, it’s back to the drawing board.

This test ends successfully, at least for the software component of the multi-function system. But until each and every function of the prototype is perfect, simulations such as this will continue. And Jernow will continue to hash and rehash the system’s performance, working with her creative engineers to tune and tweak the missile’s inner voice to relay only the messages it should.

Jernow has worked on other defense systems, beginning with the radar programs she learned at Douglas Aircraft three decades before. For the THAAD system, Jernow and Chandler’s team is working with rocket designer Lockheed Martin.

But, as always, their customer is the U.S. armed forces--in this case, the Army. And for Jernow, that has in the past posed a special challenge. Although she speaks the language of computers fluently, she has not always been at ease addressing soldiers.

“I was not very adept at reading those various symbols on the officers’ shoulders and sleeves. I’m afraid when I work with the military, I have to hope that I won’t be asked to call them by their rank or special titles because I always seem to get them wrong,” she says.

“What this generally can mean is that she calls everybody ‘Sergeant,’ ” says her husband of 26 years, Lewis Jernow.

Jean met Lewis when she was working beside one of his friends at System Development Corp., a nonprofit offspring of the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. Both Lew and Jean were working on radar programs for the Air Force.

“Thinking his name was French, I used to affect this very nasal accent whenever Lew called our office--as in ‘Oh, Mister Jerrr-no, just one moment please. . ,’ ” she recalls.

Despite that beginning, the two finally met in person and, in a few years, married and settled into a nature-loving glass and wood home in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Both agree it was a surprising match. “She’s a Norwegian from Minnesota--a Garrison Keillor Lake Woebegone kind of girl,” Lew says. “I’m a nice Jewish boy from back East. We have nothing in common except smoked fish.”

And, he might add, golf. After years of jogging, the two recently began golfing together as well. They recently joined a private club “for no other reason than to get a weekend tee time for Jean,” he says.

Many courses limit women golfers’ access to the links on weekends, saving those precious times for working men. For the Jernows, it is Lew, who runs an executive search firm from his office at home, who has the flexibility to play whenever he wants. Jean, who works 10 to 12 hours a day during most weeks, needs the weekend tee times.

“We’ve always had a fairly unusual division of labor. For example, she’s the handyman and I’m the cook. But then computer people tend to be nothing if not pragmatic. And, no,” volunteers Lew, “the women’s issue has never been a conversation piece or source of consternation for my super-achieving wife. She always feels that if you are good at what you do, you would be rewarded.”

In fact, says Frances Hoskins, a former Litton supervisor whom Jean considers a mentor, times have been hard for women in the computer industry.

“We both were aware that women tended to lag behind men in advancement,” Hoskins says, “and I know there have been cases in all industries and professions where attractive women like Jean would probably have to put up with improper or sexist remarks and not be taken seriously. That would hurt. . . . But, for Jean, her talent is so enormous and her commitment to her work is so unfailing that a good manager cannot help but notice her.”

*

Inside the low-slung silvery building, past the guards and behind the heavy doors with computerized entries, Jean Jernow sits in her beige-on-beige office reviewing and signing memos, reading e-mail (including a message from one of her sisters in Minnesota), listening to voicemail and trying to memorize the rank of the military officer she is due to brief in less than 48 hours.

“I don’t think there is any question that I’m a bit, well maybe more than a bit, hyperactive,” she explains. “It’s good that I have a lot to do because I like the pace. That may be why I like dancing to rock ‘n’ roll so much, it’s the pace.”

She begins every day at dawn, downing a fast breakfast and pausing on her way out the door long enough to feed the wild cats that sleep in the hills around her home. She fills the 45-minute commute to work with audiotaped books (mostly historical) and phone calls to family in other time zones. (Those she doesn’t reach by phone, she e-mails during the week.)

The lean, 5-foot-7-inch executive looks the part of the boss, but she also makes the coffee.

“Since I’m often the first one here in the morning, I don’t mind making the coffee. But once I get to my computer, I’m totally immersed so it’s nice that one of the men generally fills my cup and brings it in to me at my desk,” she says.

“A contradiction? I don’t think so. But then I don’t see a contradiction between my work and my beliefs either. It’s true I am less of a hawk than many who do defense work, but I believe that to avoid war, to ensure the peace, we need a good strong defense. And if that means a strong offense, well, I suppose I want to make sure that’s what we have.

“Still, what interests me is the puzzle. The challenge of getting everything to work together--the ground control that tells the missile what to do, the radar that helps it understand where it is and where it’s going, the soldiers on the ground moving the launchers around--all of this and the exquisite timing of each step, it’s all put together by this little piece of software. Our piece of the puzzle.

“But war games? No, that’s not what we’re playing here. Preventing a war is never a game. This is for keeps.”

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Jean Jernow

Age: 53.

Native?: No. Born in St. Paul, Minn., now lives in Pasadena.

Family: Married 26 years to Lewis Jernow, founder and owner of Jernow & Associates executive search company.

Passions: Golf, dancing, rock ‘n’ roll, turtles.

On being a woman in a mostly male industry: “When I started in the computer programming business, there were more women than you’d expect. Because programmers were so badly needed, employers weren’t that fussy about gender. They had to go by what you could do, not by what you looked like.”

On the challenge of designing an antiballistic system: “The only way we get a target is if there is a missile coming in at us. Creating a defensive system to stop that missile before it gets here is like having one bullet hit another bullet many miles up in the air.”