The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

  In Detroit he was the odd man in. The auto world is a very special segment of America, with the normal American exaggerations blown even larger. Like a mini-Texas. It is a world closed in, auto men talk to other auto men, auto traditions passed on in generations of families. Ford people living among Ford people, General Motors among GM people. A Ford country club. A General Motors country club. Cocktail conversations about cars and the company. Dinner conversations about cars and the company. There is a self-belief that what they are doing is not only good for America, it is America. In this atmosphere McNamara was the last puritan. He came to it, met it on his terms, never really changing, conquered it by sheer mathematical and tactical ability, rose to the highest position, a penultimate corporate victory, forcing the head of the company to adjust an entire system to his style. McNamara was never of Detroit and never really of the auto industry. They were backslappers, good fellows, and he was never one for slapped backs, his or theirs. While they frolicked, he plowed through the unabridged Toynbee. Even his public relations man was different; other PR men specialized in expense-account lunches, plush trips, the usual lures to wine and dine and con journalists; McNamara by contrast paid a very handsome salary to a man named Holmes Brown because Brown was very good, knew a lot about the auto industry and was well informed. Brown’s treatment of reporters was considered unusually Spartan by Detroit standards. McNamara preferred to live in Ann Arbor among the eggheads, many of them liberals and Democrats (at Ford executive meetings Henry Ford would occasionally mention contributions to the Republican party and then note with a certain distaste that “Bob here will probably give to the Democrats”), reading books, buying paintings. When the dealers and their wives showed up every year, the head of Ford would traditionally show them around while the wife would take care of the ladies for a day. Normally it meant fashion shows with mink coats. Under Marg McNamara they went for a tour of the University of Michigan cyclotron. Indeed it was said that the McNamaras deliberately managed to be elsewhere when Henry and Ann Ford gave great gala parties for their daughters.

  But it was more than just a stylistic difference with Detroit, it was something far deeper. In business philosophy as well as personal life McNamara was a puritan, and the auto business is not the place for a puritan, nor is it necessarily the place for someone who has an abiding faith in man as a rational being committing rational acts. The buying of a car is not necessarily a rational act; it takes more than the transportation aspect to sell a car. Detroit is and always has been happiest when it can foist on a potential customer more than he needs, adding chrome, hard tops, soft tops, air conditioners, speakers, extra horsepower. McNamara was different; he thought the customer should be rational, and worse, in the eyes of some colleagues, he thought he was rational. The auto industry essentially believes the buying of a car is an impulse; McNamara insisted it was a rational decision. It pained him to approve a convertible, the idea that a customer would pay $200 more for a dangerous car that would deteriorate more rapidly offended him (after he left Ford and they made a convertible version out of his beloved Falcon he wrote a rare message to a friend at Ford: “You must be crazier than hell”). He believed deeply in the simple utilitarian car, that it was a raw, functional thing, that man seeks the highest form of efficiency without grace, and without psychological feelings at all. His opponents in the auto industry argued that this is not the way the world is, and in particular, it is not the way the auto industry is; man will opt for comfort and status every time, and has since men flaunted better-looking horses and carriages at one another.

  But it was as if McNamara felt that there were certain things which were good for people and other things which were bad, and he would be the arbiter, he knew better than they. It was, said one friend, a quiet kind of arrogance. One of his colleagues thought he should have been the head of production at the Moskva works in the Soviet Union, the utilitarian man producing the utilitarian car for the utilitarian society, no worry about frills there. If he hadn’t gone to work at Ford, thought another, he’d still be teaching at the Harvard Business School, probably happier, driving a VW to work and laughing like hell at all the fools around him with their big cars and automatic transmissions. He not only believed in rationality, thought a friend, he loved it. It was his only passion. “If you offended it at a meeting, you were not just wrong, you had violated something far greater, you had violated his sense of the rational order. Like offending a man’s religion.” If you did show a flash of irrationality or support the wrong position, he would change, speaking faster, the voice like a machine gun, cutting into you: chop chop chop. You miscalculated here. Chop. You left this out. Chop. You neglected this. Chop. Therefore you’re wrong. Chop. Chop. Chop.

  He was a powerhouse at those meetings, driving things through, always in great command, doing his own homework, never respecting those who did not (later when he was at the Pentagon a general would turn at a meeting and ask a colonel for the answer to a question, and it would be the general’s last appearance around McNamara). His power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was based, yes, on a false assumption). He was, if anything, too strong a personality; he so dominated meetings that other men felt submerged and suppressed. Sometimes his meetings seemed to less friendly eyes to have a sham quality. There would be a meeting, say, to plan a car, its style, content and prospective price. McNamara would arrive at the meeting with his own homework done, his own decisions made, so that he came with a fixed position. He would seemingly defer to the others, ask what they thought, yet there was an overpowering personality and ego there. He perhaps did not mean it to be that way, but despite the appearance of give-and-take, the whole thing would become something of a sham, the classic Harvard Business School approach with loaded dice.

  Those who attended the meetings learned to play the game; the McNamara requests to speak freely were not to be taken too seriously. He would telegraph his own viewpoint, more often than not unconsciously, in the way he expressed the problem, and in particular he would summarize in an intimidating way, outlining point by point, using the letters of the alphabet, A through J, if necessary, and his position always seemed to win out in the summation. If you dissented or deviated, he listened, but you could almost hear the fingers wanting to drum on the table; if you agreed and gave pro evidence, he would respond warmly, his voice approving in tone. Gradually those who disagreed learned their lesson, and just as gradually he would reach out to men who were like him until he was surrounded by men in his own image. Those who knew him well could tell when he was angry, when he was going to explode. He would become tense, and if you looked under the table you could see him begin to hitch up his pants, a nervous habit, done because he knew he could not control his hands if they were on the table. The more restless he became, the more his antagonist assaulted his senses, the higher the pants would get, showing thick hairy legs. On bad days the pants might reach to the knees, and then suddenly he would talk, bang bang bang. You’re wrong for these reasons. Flicking his fingers out. One. Two. Three . . . He always ran out of fingers.

  Though he was often blamed for the Edsel (particularly by Barry Goldwater in 1964), he had remarkably little to do with it; the car was essentially antithetical to his position. The old GM people at Ford had long wanted to emulate the GM pattern, a different car in each of several different markets, different stalls in the market place (Ford-Mercury-Lincoln dealers were together, whereas the GM lines were sold separately). Finally they saw their chance: upgrade Mercury and slip the Edsel in between. The decision was made in 1955, a prime year, but the car came to fruition in 1958, which was a bad auto year, post-Sputnik, the worst year, for instance, Buick had. When the Edsel went bad, Lewis Crusoe had a heart attack, and McNamara was put in charge of all the car divisions. He consolidated some of the other divisions and put a st
op to the Edsel.

  Instead of playing games with consumer tastes, he spent those years fighting the battle to keep the prices down and the cars simple, fighting with the other people at Ford, fighting with the dealers. Always trading and swapping to hold the line. The dealers wanted more frills. The dealers wanted a crank on the front-window vents. And McNamara would say, all right, you can have that, but we’ll have to take all the chrome off the car. Some of the men fought about the width of the car, wanting it wider so it could be a hard-top, which entailed a wider frame. McNamara would listen and tell them (words which would be remembered long after), “If you persist in demanding this, I’ll have to take the car away from you.” The men around him began to shade things in talking to him, not really lies, just a certain hedging of the truth to please him. For instance, McNamara wanted a two-speed automatic transmission, so he promoted a design which would perform as well as a three-speed but cost less. There were considerable doubts that the two-speed would work as well, but he was finally given assurances that it would; the engineers wanted it to work because he wanted it to work, because there would be bonuses and smiles of approval, but sadly it never did; it performed durably but sluggishly, just as his critics had predicted.

  Yet he was good at Ford, no mistake about that. He brought his system to that declining empire at just the right time; they held the line, they did not decay and collapse as they might have, and they finally grew back, in part owing to his enormous drive and pressure, his utilitarian view, probably perfectly suited to what Ford needed and could afford at the time. His greatest triumph was the Falcon, the vindication of his years at Ford, the definitive utilitarian car, the direct descendant of the Model T, his ultimate contribution to cost effectiveness, a car low enough in price to compete with foreign imports but large enough to transport an American family around. He did not want a revolutionary car, just a classic, simple car. It was a great success, though not as great as McNamara had hoped; he envisioned a million in the first year, and it went instead to 600,000. Its success was to come just before he left Ford; it enabled him to gain the presidency, and he left on a note of triumph. But after he left, Lee Iacocca, who would eventually succeed him, said that Bob McNamara had damn near ruined Ford by pushing that Falcon, too simple a car, with too small a profit for the company. Iacocca symbolized exactly the opposite of McNamara in the auto world. For instance, he brought racing to Ford, and Henry liked that, Henry pictured with his pretty new wife in Europe after having virtually bought Le Mans, an invasion of American power and industry somewhat short of that flashed on D-Day. McNamara hated all that, hated racing, and now here was Henry and the Ford name advertising for it. Lee brought in the Mustang, a car designed for the American consumer in just the way McNamara’s cars were not. They had looked at the design and thought, we have a doll of a car and people will buy it, and now let’s figure out how to build it. Lee liked bigger, plusher, flashier cars, and to him the Falcon was a reminder that Ford might be growing customers for GM, bringing them into auto consumption, and then as they grew wealthier, turning them over to GM, which was stronger in the middle range of cars. So Lee was critical of McNamara, and so occasionally was Henry Ford, now more confident, now more his own man, and sometimes given to making statements which indicated a measure of disenchantment with McNamara, that perhaps the good old-style auto people were better than the new intellectuals.

  It is not easy being a puritan in Babylon, living the private life of a puritan but competing with the other Babylonians in the daytime pursuit of profit and growth, and the Ford McNamara was an immensely complicated man. He would have been a simple man had he stayed on in a university, taught there, lived there, sent his students out in the world a little better for their experience with him, but essentially one man, no difference between the theory and practice of McNamara. But this was different. He who had little material drive of his own was committed to making it in the world of profit and excess and, indeed, greed (to hold power he had to be, above all, a successful businessman, and his power stemmed from his ability to do the job, to cut corners, to make profits).

  So the ferocious businessman of Detroit was the humane citizen of Ann Arbor: he read the right books, went to local art openings in Ann Arbor, and supported the local cultural affairs, which always needed supporting. Marg belonged, of course, to the local UN group, and Bob and Marg were both members of a book club, which met once a month. Each person picked a book for a meeting, then all of them read and discussed it (with no more than two drinks at the meetings). Bob’s book was Camus’ The Rebel. His intellectualism was even then a little self-conscious; it wasn’t so much that he was philosophical as he liked to be philosophical, he liked to improve himself (he was the final self-improvement man; he read an essay because it was an essay to be read), the man with the five-foot shelf of Great Books. Later, when he arrived in Washington, all that intelligence and force made some of the capital’s more skeptical residents feel that there was a gee-whiz quality to his intellectual pursuits, McNamara a little self-conscious about intellectual pursuits, a part of the Great Book crowd . . . Bob and Marg to be improved . . . he had just talked to Barbara Ward and she said this and that. At the Robert Kennedy’s Hickory Hill seminars, which were a symbolic feature of the vastly overrated New Frontier culture, more chic than substance, the women had to be either very pretty, or Mrs. Longworth, McNamara was a constant and deadly earnest student. He took the seminars more seriously than anyone else, always doing his homework, always asking a serious question.

  As there was later in Washington, there was something of a split in the personality during the Detroit years, a switchover after 6:30 p.m. There was the driving, relentless, cost-effective executive of Ford during the day and the resident philosopher of Ann Arbor in the evening, one cold and efficient, the other warm, almost gregarious. It was as if he compartmentalized his mind; the deep philosophic thoughts were important, but they were not to be part of the broader outlook; if perhaps he were to stand for some of the good things in business he would do it after he took control of Ford. Subvert them first and then announce who you are. If later the immensity of the contradictions between his liberal instincts and the war in Vietnam would cause him grief, similarly the difference between his sense of social conscience and the enormous needs of great industry caused him problems earlier. It was as if the contradictions of our age were all within him. At Ford he could be an advocate of consumer rights, hating the way the parts system worked, with dealers forcing spare parts on customers (the dealers, of course, loved this because they could charge high labor rates for repairs). Although McNamara despised this system, he was also very much a part of it, because it was, yes, cost-effective, very lucrative, and the dealers in those years did not get the choice items from Detroit unless they sold the requisite number of parts to their customers. (Years later at the Pentagon he would be a symbol of an attempt to control the arms race and at the same time one of the world’s great arms salesmen to other countries because it cut Pentagon costs, was good for the budget, looked good on the Hill, made the President smile.)

  McNamara believed in car safety and thought it was important, yet he never really pushed it until 1956 when Ford was flat beaten by Chevy; Ford was in the last year of a three-year cycle and Chevy had a hot new car, a sharp new style, a V-8 engine, and Ford was dead and they all knew it. Since the Ford people realized that there was little in the way of options, they decided to sell safety; it was not often, one of them said, that you got to be on the side of both God and profits. It was McNamara’s idea and decision. He had long been concerned about safety and wanted to bring it in; yet it was also a last-minute decision and a desperate one. They added some safety latches, a deep-dish steering wheel, crash padding in front, and called in J. Walter Thompson to do the campaign. The theme was that Ford was safe and safety was good for you, something that sounds mild to the uninitiated but which was revolutionary at the time. When the cars came out, Chevy was, predictably, a great succes
s; the Ford was a bust and McNamara’s job even seemed to be on the line.

  Then he caught the flu and went to Florida for a rest. While he was gone some of the General Motors executives and some of their old friends at Ford tried a coup against McNamara. Apparently high GM officials called Henry and said—look, this is serious, you’re ruining the auto industry, you’re selling death, the image you’re projecting is violent and ugly (cars, after all, were for pleasure and brought happiness. On the television commercials, handsome young men drove new cars and they met good-looking young women). With Henry’s sanction a group of the old GM people took over some of McNamara’s functions. It was, in effect, a takeover; he was, in fact, close to being out. But he rose from the ashes, saved not so much by the generosity of Henry Ford, or the Ford power structure, as by the 1957 Ford and by the much despised dealers, who knew they had a hot car (this was one of the two years while he was at Ford that Ford beat Chevrolet) and were willing to stay with the ’56 in order to get the ’57. So Ford decided to cut back on the ’56 and minimize its losses. The new advertising was changed to style, performance, and yes—you could barely hear it—safety. It was not untypical of McNamara at Ford, and later at Defense, that he started with good intentions, touched with a certain expediency and a little dissembling, and ended up not with a success, but with something even worse, for it became part of the auto mythology that safety does not sell, safety is bad and hurts business. It would take another decade and an outsider named Ralph Nader who did not worry about hiding his intentions or making it in the business world, to put the full moral pressure on the auto industry to bring some safety and consumer reforms.