Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  “What was wrong with the party last night?” Charlotte Ford once asked at breakfast.

  “Why?” asked Anne Ford.

  “Well,” she said, “Daddy didn’t end up in the pool.”

  During one particularly joyous party in the late forties, he found occasion to apply lipstick to the portrait of Newell Tilton, the president of the Southampton Beach Club, behavior which Mr. Tilton did not find amusing. “I made the fatal mistake,” said Kay Meehan, wife of his friend Joe Meehan, who was dancing with him at the time, “of saying, ‘Henry, don’t.’ If I had said, ‘Oh, Henry, go ahead,’ the entire incident might have been avoided.”

  The contrast between his exceptional diligence inside the office and his erratic behavior outside it diminished his reputation in some circles and puzzled many.

  “Tell me about Henry Ford,” the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban once asked his friend Richard Clurman, the New York journalist.

  “Well, he’s like Jekyll and Hyde,” Clurman answered.

  “Yes,” Eban said, “but I understand that the Jekyll is just as bad as the Hyde.”

  A succession of high executives at the Ford Motor Company, men who believed that they had been anointed by Ford and that he truly liked them, found to their surprise one day that they had gotten too close or taken too much for granted. Either they had presumed on what they thought was their relationship, or, worst of all, they had begun to bore him, and he, as arbitrarily as his grandfather, had decided he was no longer interested in them. Often they were soon gone. He had no doubts about whose company it really was. When the Glass House was being completed, there was some discussion about the fact that it was to be called World Headquarters. “Ford World Headquarters,” Henry Ford told his aides, “is where I am on any given day.” He did not like to be crowded and he did not like to be bored. He was particularly sensitive to anyone who pushed too hard or seemed to want to take too much. When his close friend Joseph Meehan died of a heart attack, Henry Ford was offended by the demanding way Meehan’s lawyer seemed to be handling Kay in the days right after the death. Ford approved one document drafted by the lawyer, but as he did, he peered over his little half-glasses and said, his voice uncommonly frosty, “Do not make the mistake of thinking this means you will be the lawyer for the estate.”

  He was terribly spoiled, not only by power but by an extraordinary standard of living and by people whose sole purpose in life was to please him. (“You were smart, Henry,” Walter Reuther once told him. “You chose the right grandfather.”) He always indulged himself freely in whatever his taste demanded. David E. Davis, the Detroit auto writer, was once buying a new suit at Anderson & Sheppard, the Savile Row tailor, when he heard the tailor talk about Henry Ford’s particular affection for smoking jackets.

  “He likes velvet smoking jackets,” the tailor said. Davis shrugged.

  “Yes,” continued the man, “I once did seventeen velvet smoking jackets for Mr. Ford. He’s a very good customer.”

  “Can you imagine that?” Davis said to his wife as they left the shop. “Seventeen copies of the same jacket.”

  “I’m sure it’s because he has so many residences in so many different parts of the world,” Jeannie Davis explained to him, “and he likes to travel light.”

  By chance not long after that, when the Davises were on their way back to Detroit, Henry Ford was on the same plane. Davis waited at the baggage area in order to learn how much luggage Henry Ford traveled with. “There,” he said triumphantly to his wife. “Traveling light—thirty-five suitcases.”

  Henry Ford’s life had always been like that. On the day he was married, Edsel Ford had given him (in addition to a house in Grosse Pointe) twenty-five thousand shares of Ford Motor Company stock, then valued at $135 a share—a wedding present worth well over $3 million. When he was a boy, there had always been servants; as a grown man he had houses full of servants, and he raised his family through the proxy of his servants. At Christmas, when it was time to decorate his family tree, employees from the Ford Motor Company art department dutifully arrived and did the tree and the wreath, just as they also on occasion handled the decorations for the Ford parties. The children of Henry Ford did not answer the phone in their house; servants did. Nor did they make their own beds.

  They were, however, under severe pressure to keep their rooms tidy, for Henry Ford II was meticulous. That was a legacy from his mother. Ellie Ford, concerned about the privileges enjoyed by her children, tried hard to inculcate in each a sense of responsibility for his or her personal behavior. Neatness was very important. When the young Fords went off to school each fall, they had to go to the cellar, get their trunks, and pack them properly, and when they returned home for the summer, they had to unpack them, put things away, and return the trunks to their place. In later years, if someone moved Henry’s notebook or datebook, he immediately noticed it, and he did not like it. “Who has moved my things?” he would ask. He was accustomed to having his own way. He had, said one longtime aide unhappily, a brilliant eye for picking out what did not please him. His whim was always served. If it was not, the offender was likely to be dismissed. He once told Calvin Beauregard, the man in charge of the New York office and whose specialty was taking care of VIP requests, “Cal, if the answer to one of my requests is no, then I don’t need you.” In his mind, after the President he was the nation’s leading VIP. Among the perks that he offered Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson when Johnson was President was the use of the Ford company limo when Lady Bird came to New York (license plate FM-9), an amenity she readily accepted. Once when Henry Ford came to the city and attended a benefit at the Metropolitan Opera, he noticed the car ahead of him had the license plate GM-1. Out stepped Mrs. Johnson.

  “How come she’s not in this car?” he asked his chauffeur.

  “Because you’re using it, Mr. Ford,” the chauffeur said.

  “That’s the right answer,” he said.

  If he was in a car, then it was black. It was never red. He hated red cars. It never had snow tires. He hated snow tires. Once at a board meeting in Philadelphia it began to snow heavily. “Are there snow tires on the car, or do I have to take the train back?” he asked an aide. The aide, who had made sure that the despised snow tires were not on the car, looked at him and said, “Your car is ready, Mr. Ford.” Again, it was the right answer.

  One of his favorite foods was hamburger, and it was typical of him that he constantly complained, when he ate hamburger on the road, that it was never as good as it was at his dining room in the Ford building, which was not a surprise for those who knew the Ford kitchen well; few restaurants, no matter how fine their kitchens, ground up filet mignon to make their hamburger. As he had come to expect the rights of the seigneur, so too did his children. The Ford limousines based in New York were for company use and for VIPs, but for a long time they were used by the children for daily errands—picking up the grandchildren, shuttling nannies back and forth, and having servants pick up packages at stores.

  In the modern world of the self-made man, Henry Ford was easy to underestimate. The beginnings of his career were hardly impressive. At Yale he had been a somewhat unhappy, overweight young man, nicknamed Lard Ass. He had been expelled for having someone else write a paper for him. That he had departed Yale before graduation was first seen by his peers as tangible proof that he was not very smart; later, as evidence of his shrewdness and ability mounted, it was seen differently, particularly by serious students of upper-class behavior—it was a sign that the mandatory tests of ability that the American establishment inflicts upon most young men as part of their rites of passage did not apply to him. Yale soon confirmed that interpretation; the Yale Political Union invited him back to speak. He confirmed it himself by standing before the assembled Yalies on that day, holding up his speech, and saying somewhat proudly, “And I didn’t write this one either.”

  When he first took over the company, he handled himself with skill. He had been duly modest in the beginning. “I
’m all alone here,” he told John Bugas, his first ally as he wrested power away from Harry Bennett. “It’s supposed to be my company, but I’m the outsider. No one in the company wants to be seen with me.” Anyone interested in how tough he was likely to be when the family interest was at issue had only to remember the time when he finally had to confront Harry Bennett and tell him he was finished at the company. Since Bennett was considered a dangerous figure—he always carried a gun—the question of who was going to face him down was a serious one. Bugas, the former FBI agent, asked if he could handle Bennett. But young Henry Ford turned him down. This was a family matter. Confronting Bennett was necessary, he pointed out, if the company was to be returned to family hands, from which it had slipped because of the senility of his grandfather. Therefore, it was his obligation. Besides, he sensed that historians would judge this act. “If I don’t do it,” he told Bugas, “people will always know that at a critical moment when it was my responsibility, I let someone do my dirty work for me.”

  To understand him it was important to understand that sense of duty. He had not just taken a job at Ford; it was as if he had taken an oath of office, had sworn his allegiance to strengthen and protect the Ford Motor Company from all outside forces and to perpetuate it as a family trust. He never lost sight of that mission. Ford was not just a company, it was a family company. He had not even wanted to come back to it during the war, when his father died; he wanted to serve overseas in the navy. He wanted to be like all the other young men of his generation, but, of course, he could never be that. He did not want to fight the battle of Detroit, a battle that had just helped kill his father; he wanted to live his own life and make his own mistakes. Not for the first time was he to find that his was, on anything important, a life without choice. But he had come back dutifully—it was what his mother and his grandmother wanted, and they were the family.

  When learning the business, he was quite content to defer. He knew he needed help. In 1946 he knew he was lucky to get Ernest Breech and his team to come over from Bendix and GM to run the company. (The manner in which he sweetened the pot for Breech and his colleagues was quite ingenious. Ford was not yet a public company, so Ford stock was not the answer, since no value had as yet been set on the stock; and taxes on executive salaries were extremely high in those days. So Henry Ford gave Breech and the others sizable amounts of shares in Dearborn Tractor, a company owned by Ford. Breech got 20 percent of Dearborn’s stock, the others 10 percent. The company, until then a low-priority Ford satellite, suddenly began getting first-rate employees and much more attention in general. Ten years later, Breech’s share was said to be worth $6 million.) He was modest with Breech and genuinely acquiescent for more than a decade. It might be Henry Ford’s company, but there was no doubt in those first postwar years that Ernie Breech was in control.

  Then, slowly, Henry Ford began to gain in confidence. Very subtly the balance began to change in meetings where both men were present, Henry Ford asserting himself more. Others noticed it before Breech did, the quiet self-assertion of the founder’s grandson. Henry knew it would never really be his company as long as Breech was there. Soon he was looking for a way to get rid of him. What had once been a valued participation had become an intrusion into Henry Ford’s domain, without Breech’s realizing it until, of course, it was too late. Finally Breech picked up on it. “Henry doesn’t need me anymore,” he told friends. Breech had hoped to retire in 1962 when he was sixty-five; instead he left in 1961. It was another sign that the young heir was capable of being as callous as his grandfather.

  Soon, because his personnel policies were so arbitrary, because some people would be favored and then just as quickly unfavored, the company was, as it had been in his grandfather’s day, faction-ridden. It made Ford a more interesting and more exciting place to work than GM, for there was far greater chance of quick advancement, and also far greater chance of quick decapitation. It was a very political company. “You had to be careful not to be hit by one of those giant steel balls coming down the corridor at you at Ford,” said Donald Frey, one of Ford’s senior executives in the sixties. “You never knew who aimed it, all you knew was you’d better take cover fast.” Of Henry Ford II, it was soon said that he had not so much a hiring policy as a firing policy. The most trusted of old friends could be forced out if it suited him. There was nothing sentimental, he once told John Bugas, about running an industrial company, and he later proved it to Bugas by ousting him. The young man who had ascended to the Ford throne was surprisingly obdurate, veteran Ford executives decided, more like his grandfather than his father. He trusted almost no one and confided in almost no one. If he had deferred at first, in due course he developed an imperial style. Those who were smart understood how to read it, knew when not to crowd him. They learned that his self-deprecating manner was just that, a manner. They learned that the true code on any critical issue—never spoken but as real as it could be—was Don’t cross me on this.

  Henry Ford II was an anomaly in the modern industrial era. He was of the blood. Even after the company went public, his control never wavered, and he liked to demonstrate this by the audacity of his personal behavior. In the modern era of management, that made him stand apart. For so many companies had been sold or gone public that a new, professional managerial class had emerged, composed of careful, serious men who ran these old companies as antiseptically as they could for five or six years, usually leaving little trace of themselves, going on eventually to other things, retirements that were described as well deserved but that they did not really want, or directorships of large philanthropic institutions or memberships on the boards of other companies. These modern men generally led upright, prescribed lives. Within the accepted boundaries of executive competition they might be savage combatants, but their personal lives were supposed to be above reproach and more often than not were. There were to be few displays—on the way up the ladder, at least—of weakness of the flesh. It was advisable—well into the 1960s, at least—to remain married to the first wife, if at all possible, and it was advisable that the wife be a good sport, that is, good with other wives, knowing her place at all times, which wives were above her and which below her, never confusing the two. If the corporate balance sheet was sufficiently above reproach, then on occasion personal behavior could be marginally below reproach and a second wife was permissible. The chief executive was beholden to the board, and the board was always careful.

  At the Ford Motor Company, where blood still worked, the reverse was true. There was a board of directors, including outsider directors, but the board did not lightly interfere with actions Henry Ford wanted to take. If anything, it was beholden to him. The Ford finance staff would prepare brilliant briefings for the board, the best son et lumière shows a company could offer, but in the end his real attitude toward the board, oft expressed, was “Wine ’em, dine ’em, and screw ’em.” When there was an important issue before the board, Henry Ford would smile and say, “Well, of course, I have only one vote on this, but my answer to it is no.” That was his way of giving the board its marching orders; the vote of the board was, of course, no.

  In any company save his own, Henry Ford’s personal, conduct—the instinct at certain moments in his life, when his marriages were not going well, to womanize; his drinking (he was often surprisingly sloppy about it for so public a figure) and ensuing vulgarity—might have worked against him. But his behavior was never a problem at the Ford Motor Company. He was perceived as a throwback to another era, when men were men and ran their own companies the way they wanted, did what they damn well pleased in their own hours, and said whatever crossed their minds. That freedom, in so gray a corporate world, humanized him and made him a popular figure. Other major corporate leaders were careful and used management-speak, a deliberately neutered language devoid of feeling, humanity, and viewpoint, a language that left as little record as possible. Beyond constraint, with no board looking over his shoulder, Ford took pleasure in saying what
he felt. That became part of his style, and he gloried in it. Told at a meeting that one of his executives had put Michelin tires on a Mustang, he said, “I don’t like frog tires.” Told that he could use foreign steel more cheaply than domestic, he said simply, “I don’t want any goddam foreign steel in my cars.” Asked at a shareholders’ meeting about a particular policy which had turned out badly, he did not say he had made a mistake but said, “I screwed up.” Caught by a California state trooper drunk-driving with a lady most definitely not his wife, he said only, “Never explain, never complain.” (In fact, he was not loath to complain; whenever a newspaper or a magazine printed something about him that he did not like, he and his people were capable of raising a great deal of fuss.)

  Other men might have fallen, if not from their jobs then at least from grace, on that last one, but not Henry Ford II. A few days later he walked into a meeting of the Detroit Economic Club, a center for the Detroit establishment, and received a standing ovation. Nor was it just other executives who took pleasure in his style. His blunt, pseudo-candid style, Henry Ford as the common man, appealed to workers on the line as well. To them he was independent and free, a man who could tell the other big guys off and sometimes did. At the height of tensions between labor and management, he could walk down a Ford line and still be hailed, worker after worker rushing over to shake his hand. He said the things they would have liked to say, and even more important, lived the life they would have liked to lead.