Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  One day in the early sixties one of his sons came to see Michio Hatada, Masuda’s oldest friend. The son seemed quite desperate; he wanted to quit college and go to work in an auto company, but even more, he needed advice about his father. Masuda, the son reported, did not live at home, but was not yet divorced from his mother. On occasion he came over to visit his family. If no one was home, he always took something—a radio, a lamp, an heirloom, a kimono—and went to the pawnshop for money. Hatada went by the house, talked with Mrs. Masuda, heard the story, and urged her to divorce her husband. It was her only protection, he said.

  Masuda dropped even further out of sight. No one heard from him until in 1964 an employee of a small manufacturing company in Tokyo called Masuda’s family and said he had died of a heart attack. He had worked for the company as some sort of manager. One day while he was handing out the summer bonuses he keeled over. He was fifty years old. In his wallet someone found a photograph of his family and his old address. The family arranged the funeral. The only one of his old friends who was contacted was Hatada. He got a postcard notifying him of the funeral on the day it was taking place, and he went. It turned out to be just him, the ex-wife, her mother, and Masuda’s three sons. The family wanted no one from the union. Hatada found the day almost unbearable. He kept remembering the young man with so much promise and ambition, and then the glory years of the strike and his passion for the new Japan. Hatada found it hard to understand how a life so promising could end in such loneliness and failure. He was the Japanese Don Quixote, Hatada thought, a dreamer in a nation not much given to dreams.

  Thirty years later Katsuji Kawamata was asked by a journalist about Masuda. “Masuda?” he said. “I don’t really remember him. Besides, he is dead, so why even talk about him?” Kawamata was the big winner of the strike. He now had a union that was sympathetic to management. His labor troubles were over. He had increased his prestige greatly in the world of Japanese finance and industry, for he was the man who had broken the toughest union of all. He was seen, and he now saw himself, not just as the banker who had gone to Nissan but as an industrialist, the man who went into the pit with formidable labor leaders and held his own. He was a tough man now, a man to be reckoned with.

  Until the strike he had been a somewhat solitary figure at Nissan, the outsider sent over by the bank, never entirely trusted by the old hands. The contempt of the Asahara people for him, because he knew nothing about cars, was as great as his contempt for them, for being afraid of the union. But Kawamata, as it turned out, had both crushed a union and at the same time performed something of a coup: He had taken over the whole company. His power base was the Miyake union. For union leaders they might be, but their loyalties were much more complicated. In America being a union leader meant one thing, a responsibility to the working men and to the union itself; the company, it was assumed, could take care of itself. But in Japan there was another meaning. Yes, they were union leaders, but they were white-collar men of middle management, and their ambitions were managerial. They were an extension of management.

  In terms of loyalties, they were very much Kawamata’s men. Some had been encouraged to go into the union by him, others had turned to him as the only man capable of standing up to Masuda. Now Kawamata began to place them in important jobs throughout the company. They formed a cadre loyal first and foremost to him. They could, for example, pressure Asahara and his men if, as seemed inevitable, there was a conflict between Kawamata and Asahara. The Miyake union virtually took over the personnel department of the company. Anybody who got ahead, not just at the lower levels but in middle management, now had to have the union’s approval. Middle managers who belonged to neither union and had breathed a sigh of relief when the strike was over were now stunned by the power of the new union and the personalization of the company. Executives found themselves on the outside, judged on political rather than professional grounds, often by men who knew nothing about cars. They began to find out about significant personnel shifts not from their superiors but from the union; the union always seemed to know about these changes first. The implication was clear, that Miyake and Shioji had played a key role in effecting them. The ancillary message was equally clear: Play ball with Miyake and Shioji and Kawamata, and you will get ahead. Stay outside the reach of this powerful new network, and your future is uncertain at best. Anyone who challenged this new team was going to be squeezed and squeezed hard.

  Twenty years later, when Japan was becoming an industrial giant, Leonard Woodcock, then the head of the UAW, went to the founding convention of the Japan Auto Workers. He went at the special invitation of Ichiro Shioji. By then the head of the Nissan union, Shioji was something of a protégé of the UAW leaders. The union had sponsored his tour at Harvard Business School, and he had often visited its offices at Solidarity House in Detroit. Indeed, at this convention Woodcock was struck by the degree to which Shioji’s union imitated the UAW: It was the JAW, the Japan Auto Workers; the pin that its members wore was similar to the UAW’s; the banner behind the rostrum seemed a very close imitation of the UAW banner. The difference, of course, and it was critical to the way the two industries had developed, was that Shioji’s own union, like the unions at Toyota and Mazda, was a company-wide union and the UAW was an industry-wide union.

  Woodcock was an honored guest at the JAW convention. The translations of the speeches into English, though imperfect, began to fascinate him. Speaker after speaker was getting up and talking about something terrible which had happened in 1953 and pledging that it must never happen again.

  “What are they all talking about?” he asked Shioji.

  “A strike we had here in 1953,” Shioji said, “a long and difficult one.”

  Woodcock had never heard of this event, one that had and was to continue to have the most profound impact on his own union and industry. “What happened?” he said.

  “It was very bitter,” Shioji replied. “It went on four months, and in the end the Communists were crushed, and our union came into being.”

  “Why did you never tell me this before?”

  “You never asked me,” said Shioji.

  PART FOUR

  10. TOUGH LITTLE RICH BOY

  HENRY FORD II WAS a man trying to perpetuate privilege in an age unsympathetic to it. That was not easily done, for it demanded that he comport himself as the modern egalitarian industrial leader while at the same time living the kingly private and corporate life in which he was always served. This split in his role produced contradictions in behavior. Single-minded in his desire to preserve the family industry, a man of intelligence and toughness and social grace, he sometimes seemed determined to conceal his abilities and play the boisterous sophomore. As such, he was an easy man to underestimate.

  He had always been an industrial prince. With the possible exception of Nelson and David Rockefeller and Averell Harriman, no public figure was raised in such splendor. In 1920, when he was almost three years old, he held the torch that lit the blast furnace for the mighty Rouge, the greatest factory ever created. He grew up in a sixty-room house in Grosse Pointe, son of a refined mother and a father who was a passionate art lover. As a little boy he rode on his own child-sized railroad, authentic in all but dimensions, with a coal-burning locomotive. Each December he took friends by sleigh to a place on his grandfather’s property known as Santa’s Workshop; there the children would be given toys by Santa and could pet his specially imported live reindeer. Before he was ten he had a small British sports car and could drive it around the ninety-acre estate. He spent the summers at his parents’ stone house in Seal Harbor, Maine, surrounded by security men, and in the winter he sailed out of Hobe Sound in Florida on his father’s 125-foot yacht, the Onika, with its Chippendale living room. There were always servants, ready to do for him what was not done for very many of his fellow countrymen. Even as a child, his future was omnipresent. The boys who played with him, all of them from Grosse Pointe, their parents friends of his parents, were always
aware that he was little Henry and that he would inherit a huge industrial firm. One of them, Philip Stearns, said years later that in that magical house, on the largest piece of property any of them had ever seen, filled with things to play with, they always did what Henry wanted to do.

  The Grosse Pointe that he was raised in was an isolated place of provincial splendor. It is unlikely that in pre-World War II America there was another community quite so sheltered and quite so rich. There was neither economic nor social diversity. Catholics were viewed with suspicion and, on occasion, hatred. (When Henry as a young man married a Catholic and converted, it sent shivers throughout the community; his oldest friends regarded it as at least partly a declaration of independence from his past.) Jews too were unwelcome, and there was a great deal of dinner-party discussion as to whether Walter Chrysler was actually, despite what he claimed, Jewish. Neither World War II nor the coming of modern communications and transportation, which so changed and expanded people’s lives, had yet occurred. It was a secure, comfortable, insular place, largely untouched by the modern world. If Grosse Pointers traveled to New York, they traveled by train, on The Detroiter, where they knew the porter and he knew them; if they traveled to Europe they traveled with each other. The assumption was that Grosse Pointe was the center of the universe; once, announcing the engagement of a Grosse Pointe girl to a young man from Cincinnati, the Detroit Free Press used the headline “Local Girl to Marry Eastern Man.”

  The social life was built around the country club and home entertaining. The entertaining was serious. The same families tended to be at the main dinner parties—the Fords, the Chapins, the Stearnses, the Bonbrights, the Andersons. At the parties the ladies quietly competed in showing off their new dresses and wore the maximum amount of jewels. The men wore black tie and drank in earnest, starting early and ending late. Mostly it was hard liquor, not wine. A favorite was called a gin toddy, which was gin on ice. (It was also called the throwaway martini, because you took the vermouth and threw it away.) A New Yorker cartoon of that era shows a hostess greeting an outsider while, behind her, everyone at the party seems to be falling-down drunk. “I bet you didn’t know we were so sophisticated here in Grosse Pointe,” she says. Many of the local fortunes had been made directly or indirectly through the auto industry, and the men talked business all the time. “The problem with all these people,” said Frederick Stearns, the father of Philip, whose money came from a pharmaceutical company and who was the resident skeptic, “is that if you opened the tops of their heads, instead of brains you’d find carburetors.” When the men weren’t talking business, they were cursing Roosevelt and labor. The women did not so much talk as, in the words of one visitor, palaver. They did not say how they really felt or what they really thought. They said how nice, how sad, how attractive, how unfortunate. No one disagreed because there was nothing to disagree about. It was a world dominated by servants. The parents, in most of the families, were distant, formal figures who showed up long enough to explain the rules and obligations. If there was any intimacy, any nurturing in the homes, it likely came from a servant who had taken pity on a lonely youngster and bestowed kindness along with service. It was a society governed by rituals. Coming-out parties were big events, for they marked both the coming of age of a young person and the status of the parents, and couples decorously competed to give the grandest party. (That tradition continued through the next generation. In 1959 when Henry Ford’s daughter Charlotte had her coming-out party, it was recognized as the fanciest one of the year, not just in Detroit but in the country; some $150,000 was spent, a figure exceeded a year and a half later when her sister, Anne, had her coming-out party, at a cost estimated at $250,000.)

  The people who lived in Grosse Pointe were not bored with it, for they knew of nothing else and wanted nothing else. They could not conceive of life being different or better. Billy Chapin—grandson of Roy, the first sales manager of the pioneer Old Motor Company, and son of Roy, president of American Motors—said that the trouble with the awful creamed spinach at the Grosse Pointe’s club was that just about the moment you became influential enough to have it taken off the menu, you found that you liked it. In that world everyone was rich, and each child was privileged, but Edsel and Ellie Ford were by far the richest, and young Henry was the most privileged because everyone always knew he was going to run the Ford Motor Company.

  That someone who came from this kind of background would grow up strong defied the assumptions of American life. By all rights he should have been ruined by the affluence and succumbed to self-indulgence. Instead he turned out to be a shrewd, industrious executive capable of the coldest scrutiny of those around him. He was an odd combination, a man both spoiled and hard. Within the company he was almost impossible to con. It was almost genetic with him; he had grown up assuming, that most of the people he met on a given day wanted something from him, and he had therefore developed, as the most basic of his reflexes, the ability to judge motives.

  Part of the reason for his toughness stemmed from the special circumstances of his childhood. For Henry Ford might have been raised in one of the two or three grandest homes in America, but a dark shadow hung over it nevertheless. He had been just a boy during the years in which his grandfather systematically crushed his father, destroying first Edsel’s emotional and then his physical health, and he was shielded from as much of the tragedy as possible. But the residual impact was always there, a father ruined by a grandfather, a mother determined never to let this happen to her own children. For what had happened in his home was evidently evil; it was very close to filicide.

  From his boyhood, when it was clear that his father’s health was failing, Henry Ford became the heir apparent; he would assume the family obligations. His mother, whose elegance hid much of her fortitude, raised him that way. He would have to be strong enough to resist the forces that had overwhelmed her husband. Edsel Ford had been too gentle. That would not be true of her son. As her husband had been destroyed, so now would her son triumph. She was for many years the secret force and strength of the Ford Motor Company. Women did not hold jobs in industrial companies like Ford then (nor later—Henry Ford II completely shielded his two daughters from his business; even though he praised the business acumen of the elder, Charlotte, neither she nor Anne was ever put on the Ford board). Still, Eleanor Clay Ford held the power. She had played a crucial role in forcing the old man, reluctant though he was, to turn control over to his grandson, and she had pushed her son to make the right moves. Very much the elegant, genteel Grosse Pointe lady, she never appeared in the offices, yet she knew the company inside and out. No one was promoted to a high office without her approval.

  One Saturday morning in 1961, Gene Bordinat, a talented young man in the design shop, had gone shopping at the downtown Hudson’s with his wife. As they came out of the store a handsomely tailored chauffeur walked up, asked them if they were Mr. and Mrs. Bordinat, and, when they said yes, said, “Mrs. Edsel Ford would like to talk to you.” He took them to a wonderful old touring car, in the backseat of which sat a patrician lady. For twenty minutes (later Bordinat said it seemed more like two hours) she deftly and gracefully passed the time with small talk. It was obviously an inspection, however deftly done. A few days later Bordinat was named vice-president of design at Ford. How, he always wondered, had Mrs. Ford known that he would be shopping at Hudson’s that morning?

  On the outside, few knew of her power; within the family, no one questioned it. Every Sunday after young Henry became head of the company, the Fords gathered for a family meeting at Eleanor Ford’s house. There was a ritual to it. For two hours or so before dinner they did nothing but talk business in the most elemental way. When dinner was served, all business talk ceased for that day; they were a family, not a business. The symbolism of where the meetings were held was unmistakable. They were not at young Henry’s house, they were at his mother’s. He might be the head of the company, but she was still the head of the family. Her particular g
ift to her oldest son was to free him from all family responsibilities so that he could concentrate his energies on the company. She was zestful and positive, and she tried to pass those qualities on to others. In 1975, when she was seventy-nine years old, she spent a day with her oldest son because Lord Snowdon was taking family pictures. The session was being shot at her house, and as it was ending she turned to Henry and said that she wanted him to come to dinner that night. “I want to talk about these paintings,” she said, gesturing at the treasures on the walls, “who gets what, because I’m getting old and I want to be ready.”

  “Oh, Mother,” said the chairman of the Ford Motor Company, “why are you always talking about death?”

  “I’m not, Henry,” she said, “but I think death is going to be a wonderful experience, and I’m really looking forward to it, and I want to be ready.”

  Henry was, of course, the favored son. If there was always some distance between him and his two brothers, Benson and William Clay, it was because it had been made so clear so early that the company would be his; he was the oldest and they would have to be satisfied with ancillary roles. For a time this was hard on Bill Ford, who had a genuine love of cars and probably a more natural affinity for the product side than his older brother. He spent much of a lifetime in jobs that had titles but rarely had power, and on more than one occasion he saw his pet projects dismantled. Finally he bought the Detroit Lions professional football team to give himself an interest outside the Ford Motor Company.

  If in later years Henry could go so suddenly from the workaholic at the office to the buffoonish, almost crude playboy, his closest friends thought they understood why. It was, they believed, his one way of escaping the responsibility that had been imposed upon him so early in life and having some fun. In the role of Henry Ford II, he was awesomely burdened and severely constrained. Only in the role of carouser could he let go, become another person. He could be the head of the Ford Motor Company during the day and a roisterer at night. He became somewhat famous for going off on ferocious late-night drinking bouts and, the next day, boasting to the poor men who had suffered through those long hours with him that he had never had a hangover in his life. Often when he was younger there were dives fully clothed into swimming pools. That became something of a rite, and there was a time when he was younger that a party was not deemed a success, be it at Southampton, Grosse Pointe, or Palm Beach, until Henry Ford II went into the swimming pool in his suit.