Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Instead he had to wait his turn and keep hoping. He was in the company because of blood, and because of a singular passion for cars as well. He knew and loved cars as his father did not. In the late seventies, Henry Ford once dropped by his son’s house in Grosse Pointe, looked in the garage at a particularly powerful piece of automotive machinery, and asked Edsel, “What the hell is that?” The answer was that it was an exact replica of one of the Ford GTOs that Henry Ford had taken to France in 1966 and with which the Ford Motor Company triumphed at Le Mans—a car that the son loved and the father no longer even recognized. His son’s taste for high-performance cars was something of an irritant to the senior Ford, and on occasion he complained to Edsel that he spent too much time at auto races and with racers. “Well,” answered Edsel, “you were the one who introduced me to it all.” As a teenager he had been schooled by Carroll Shelby, the famed race car driver, at Shelby’s operation in California, where Shelby customized sports cars; Edsel had loved that. It was a total automotive experience—everything was about cars and performance. Edsel Ford eventually won that cherished Detroit accolade, the highest that a man like Shelby could bestow: “Edsel’s a damn good car guy.” Race car drivers were among his closest friends; as an impressionable teenager he toured Europe and hung around their world, and to him they seemed truly heroic figures. They were, he said, the last gladiators. Jackie Stewart, the famous British driver, became his close friend and was an usher at his wedding. Most of his friends in Detroit, too, tended to be auto buffs, lovers of the machines rather than of the business generated by those machines. He was intrigued by the fact that most of the city’s auto journalists were true car nuts, while the companies themselves were increasingly governed by passionless businessmen. No wonder, then, he thought, that the journalists were often so frustrated when they wrote about the companies; it was as if, by some cruel trick of fate, those who should have been on the inside were on the outside, and those who should have been out were in.

  Edsel Ford always knew he wanted to be in the company. It was, he once said, a proud heritage, and he wanted to be part of it. Even as a child his toys were large, powerful cars. At eleven years old he drove cars up and down the family’s driveway—no small piece of track on a gigantic estate. On his sixteenth birthday he was given his first car, a Mustang with a governor rigged to it to keep the speed down. “The attitude,” he said years later, “seemed to be, ‘We’d better protect the crown prince some way.’” He managed to disconnect the governor.

  He was raised in Grosse Pointe, a Ford, aware of his responsibilities but spoiled nonetheless. He was the youngest of three children, the first boy, and his sisters were much older. His parents were distant figures. In those days, he once recalled, high-level executives worked very hard and their wives did charity work, and servants raised the children according to intricate, demanding rules laid down by the parents. He did not mind being a Ford, but he hated being Edsel Ford. As a boy he longed for a nice regular name like those the other kids had. The name Henry would have been just fine, he thought. The name Edsel was not only different, it had an opprobrium to it. Other children taunted him about it, connecting it to the failure of that car. He was a lemon. “I wish,” he once told his father, “that I had a different name. Anything but Edsel.” Overweight, unsure, indulged, he was in his own words a wimp before his time.

  At the age of fourteen, hardly thrilled by the idea of leaving home, he was sent off to his first prep school, Eaglebrook, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he was moderately happy. Then, after graduation at sixteen, he was, like Fords before him, dispatched to an exclusive Connecticut school called Hotchkiss. The first thing he saw as he approached his dorm was the Edsel B. Ford Library; with that he knew he hated Hotchkiss. He pleaded with his parents to let him come home. The answer was always that he must stay, that Hotchkiss was good for him. (“If you think Hotchkiss was bad for a family member in my generation with the Edsel Ford Library,” he said years later, “imagine it now with the William Clay Ford Tennis Courts.”) Finally the headmaster of Hotchkiss came to share Edsel’s opinion that this was not the right school for him. He ended up at another Connecticut school, Gunnery, where he was less burdened by the family tradition. There a kindly faculty couple named Norman and Nancy Lemcke, sensing his misery, reached out to him. He was seventeen years old, lonely, loved a bit too remotely, a little unsure of who he was, trying to find his place amid the pressures of name, wealth, and privilege. The Lemckes’ attention made all the difference.

  He graduated from Gunnery and went on to Babson. None of the great colleges of the Ivy League had solicited his attendance, and Babson had the reputation of being a pleasant, acceptable college to which very successful men could send their not entirely successful sons. The possibility of failure for academic reasons seemed remote. He displayed no signs of academic brilliance at Babson; Edsel, said his close friend Billy Chapin, grandson of Hudson founder Roy Chapin, was a typical underachiever. In his own, blunter words, he was a typical screw-up. Edsel eventually graduated from Babson, and though it took him five and a half years, he became the first member of his direct line, going back to his great-grandfather, to finish college.

  He discovered something about himself in college. He was not brilliant in class, but he was a good manager. People seemed to like him apart from the fact he was a Ford, and he was skilled at using his connections with influential people when necessary. Every year Babson honored Roger Babson with a founder’s day ceremony, and normally these ceremonies were rather boring church services. Then Edsel Ford took over: he started holding symposia. One year the topic was movies, and Billy Friedkin, the director, Judith Crist, the critic, and Jack Valenti, the motion-picture industry’s lobbyist, came. The next year it was professional sports, and Jack Kemp, the former quarterback, William Clay Ford, the owner of the Detroit Lions, and Howard Cosell, the sportscaster, took part. For the symposium on automobiles he was able to get Henry Ford II as a keynote speaker. He did not know how to study, but he knew about the real world and how to organize things concerning it. He could not wait to get out of college and get into the auto business.

  He graduated in 1974, at precisely the moment when the auto business was about to go under siege. After graduation his father took him out to dinner.

  “What do you want to do now?” Henry Ford asked his son.

  “I thought I’d take three months off and then go to work for the company,” Edsel Ford answered.

  “Are you sure you want that?” the father continued. “It’s a public company now, and you’ll have to earn your own way. It’s all much harder now.”

  Edsel Ford assured his father that it was the only thing he wanted to do. It was where he felt he belonged. He had never thought of doing anything else. He was a Ford, and he was part of a special heritage. (Once, meeting a man named Tom DuPont who published a magazine devoted to the buying and selling of antique cars, he asked a friend, “Is he a du Pont du Pont the way I’m a Ford Ford?”) He knew the lineage in terms of character: His greatgrandfather had been a raw, hard, brilliant man; his grandfather Edsel Ford had been sensitive and creative, a good family man; his own father was stubborn, with a damn-everyone-else-I’ll-do-it-my-way attitude. Edsel Ford II saw himself linked to his grandfather, the first Edsel Ford, because they were both passionate about cars. His father and great-grandfather, he thought, were also linked, both tough leaders with fierce drive who would have been successful in any business.

  The young man who emerged into the middle level of Ford management in his mid-thirties was an agreeable person of considerable social grace. He seemed more at harmony with himself than his father had been, less weighted with ego. He could make fun of himself, a quality few detected in Henry Ford II. His interest was in product, and the company to him seemed burdened by too many layers of management, too many men who in the end had little affinity for cars. During the seventies he and his father had on occasion argued seriously, because Edsel Ford thought the company wa
s not putting enough resource back into product. Henry Ford’s answer was, in effect, if you knew what I know, you’d take my position, too. That was an argument that Edsel, along with all the others before him, lost. But he respected what his father had done with the company—Henry Ford, in his opinion, had been shrewd and strong, and he generally had measured people well. His attitude had been that he did not have to be brilliant because he could always buy brilliance. Most important, as far as Edsel Ford was concerned, Henry Ford thought constantly of the broad responsibilities of the Ford company. His stewardship had been a steady effort to do right by as many of the company’s constituencies as he could. If there was one thing he felt bad about, it was that his father had not really had fun while running the company, that because he did not love cars, the job had always been business, a family obligation to fulfill. Edsel had seen the job wear his father out. When Henry Ford announced he was going to retire, Edsel asked him why. “I’m just tired,” the chairman answered.

  Edsel knew he was perpetually being watched, yet the first decade of his career had been a good one, and there was a general feeling that he had done well in his various posts. A number of executives believed that it would be a good thing if a Ford eventually ran the company, particularly this Ford, who loved cars. It made the company special in the great impersonal corporate world, gave it a quality that most other companies lacked.

  Certainly his father was interested in his career. Though retired, he still played an important role in critical personnel decisions, but whether Henry Ford and the rest of the family would still be able to dominate the decision-making in another ten years was an interesting question. Besides, he was not the only potential family representative of his generation working in the company. Although he was nine years younger than Edsel, Billy Ford, the son of William Clay Ford (who owned more stock than Henry), was also working his way up through the ranks, and he was also admired by his peers. As for Edsel Ford, the clock was ticking against him; in 1986 he was thirty-eight and probably ten to fifteen years from the time when he might be promoted to the highest jobs, and every year the power of the family to control those promotions slightly diminished. He was racing, ever so slowly, against time. In that race he had certain large advantages as the boss’s son, but there was the corresponding drawback: If he was promoted, people would always assume that it was because his name was Ford. Therefore when he achieved something, he would get less than the normal credit; in some people’s eyes his only real possibility was failure. The other drawback was that his associates sometimes deferred to him because he was a Ford, bending their own instincts to what he wanted, or they thought he wanted.

  He had always regarded the auto business as glamorous, and he had reported for duty precisely at the moment when the glamour was disappearing. Times were harder, the margins of pleasure and profit were slimmer. He observed the young men who were his contemporaries working longer and longer hours for less and less reward. He loved the business and found it very difficult on its people. It was, he thought, wildly destructive to marriages. Men went to work early in the morning and came home late at night, and then they worked on the weekends. Someone, he said, should write a book about the auto business and divorce. There were fewer perks, too, fewer frills in what had once been a world with lush conveniences. Recently his mother had phoned from New York to say that she had to come back to Detroit for the funeral of a friend and would like to stay with him. He said that of course she could, and then asked her flight number, saying he would pick her up at the airport.

  “Oh, Edsel,” said Anne Ford, “there’s no need for you to come and pick me up. Just send your driver.”

  “Mother,” he answered, “these days, I’m the driver.”

  He himself was staying in the company, he liked to emphasize, because he liked cars; he certainly did not need to work. On the day that he was married in 1975 the Detroit Free Press estimated the value of his portfolio at $54 million. He had gone into the marketing side, which he thought was an underdeveloped area, a reflection of the feeling among auto men that the cars could damn well sell themselves. (“Can you believe an ad campaign saying ‘GM Sweats the Difference’?” he said. “Imagine a campaign saying ‘Procter and Gamble Sweats the Difference.’”) The work, because of the ongoing crisis in the industry, had turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. If he had not been a Ford, or perhaps if he had known when he graduated from Babson what he knew now, he said, he might have gone instead into a somewhat more contemporary business, like Federal Express. That was an exciting operation, he thought. The people there were always ahead of their competition; just about the time the competition caught up in one area, then Federal Express would come up with something new. Unlike many of his colleagues in Detroit, he believed that the modern service industries were the real future of the American economy. Their world was expanding, while the auto people were fighting harder and harder for smaller and smaller pieces of territory.

  Still the auto business was his family’s past, and it would be his future and, he hoped, the future of his children. He was, in fact, preparing yet another generation of Fords for it. He made it a point to bring new cars home and show them to his kids, and when he took his five-year-old son driving, they played a game of naming cars.

  “What’s that one?” he would ask.

  “A GMC,” his son would say.

  “Who makes it?” Edsel Ford II would ask.

  “General Motors,” would answer Henry Ford III.

  46. THE NEW AMERICAN HERO

  LEE IACOCCA SEEMED TO burn with the fire of vengeance against Henry Ford. That as much as anything else was his driving motivation during the worst of times at Chrysler. His friends in the company were unnerved by the degree to which it dominated his psyche. When Iacocca was writing his book, he would begin sessions with his ghostwriter and his editor with the casual remark that he would not discuss Henry Ford that day, there was already too much about him in the book. Then, sooner or later, it would come pouring out, the rage over the injustice of his being fired by Henry Ford.

  Sometimes he would talk about Henry Ford’s son Edsel. Iacocca believed absolutely that he had been destroyed at Ford because he had been too strong, and that Henry Ford had sacrificed him in order to preserve the family ownership for Edsel. “It’s all a damn shame,” he would say. “There isn’t a person in the whole goddam place who cares about Edsel. Those bastards over there kissing Henry’s ass aren’t going to take care of Edsel—all they can do is take care of themselves. If Henry had wanted Edsel to run the company, all he had to do was come to me and say, ‘Look, Lee, I’m putting Edsel under your tutelage. I want you to teach him everything you know.’ I would have done it. I could have taught him and protected him and set him up for the future. Now there’s no way in the world he’s going to be able to make it, because there’s no one over there who gives a damn about him. They don’t know anything about loyalty. The only one who could have done it and would have done it is me.” That was a judgment that neither Henry Ford II nor Edsel Ford concurred in.

  In Detroit, as Iacocca became the city’s dominant celebrity, if there was a business or journalistic event at which his presence was desired, he would turn it down if someone else who was involved was, in his phrase, “too close to the Fords.” When Bill Curran, a longtime Detroit advertising representative for Time-Life, was turning eighty, his associates decided to invite both Ford and Iacocca to a birthday celebration, a party of twenty-five old friends. Iacocca let it be known that he would not go if there was a possibility that Henry Ford was going to attend. Ford rather gracefully declined, to spare Curran embarrassment. When on the occasion of Chrysler’s first good year the Chrysler board voted Iacocca a handsome bonus, Najeeb Halaby turned to his fellow board member Doug Fraser and said, “Wouldn’t you like to see Henry’s face tomorrow when he reads about the bonus for Lee?” Fraser, whose concerns at the moment were somewhat different, more about the future employment of hundreds of thousands of
the members of his union, was slightly surprised, then thought to himself: Is that all it’s about, ego?

  The problem was that Henry Ford did not reciprocate. That made the war somewhat less satisfactory for Iacocca, for it was a struggle in which the enemy did not fight back. He did not fight back because he did not need to; he was Henry Ford. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing unusual about the decision to replace Iacocca. After all, he had done it to several others before him—Breech, Miller, Knudsen—and they had had the good sense, indeed the propriety, to understand what had happened, that it was time to go, and then had gone away quietly, or at least fairly quietly, handsomely rewarded in no small part for the decorum of their departures. With Breech it had been unusually simple. Breech had saved the company, but he had outlived his usefulness. “Ernie, I’ve graduated,” Henry Ford had said, and Breech had known immediately what it meant. To the list of Lee Iacocca’s other failings, then, was added one more: He had failed in his comportment as a firee. Henry Ford most certainly did not feel guilty about those firings. He had taken care of the men, paid them off well, helped them get new jobs if need be.

  The more Iacocca attacked, the less Henry Ford responded. Lee, said Bunkie Knudsen, an authority on this topic, was wasting his time feuding with Henry Ford. He was just burning his guts out. It was a waste of energy, anyway. He’s Henry Ford and you’re not, Bunkie said, and you accept it and get on with your life. There was, of course, a line among the top company people around Henry: Lee’s book, they noted, was a perfect example of the kind of thing for which Mr. Ford had fired Iacocca; the book revealed a man who let his ego get in the way of his job. Ford himself said nothing. Not only did he not respond to Iacocca’s assaults, but there was a family policy on it. His son Edsel Ford, more comfortable and candid with the press than his father, nevertheless refused to talk about Lee. Within the family, the private position was that there were some families that had had power and money for a long time and whose members had learned the responsibility that went with such power and privilege, and there were other families, new to wealth and power, whose members did not know how to behave. Some of the Ford people hinted, however, that if Iacocca ever decided to run for high office, Henry Ford might go public and write his side of the affair. As those stories gained currency in Detroit, there was no doubt that a small shot had been fired, however discreetly, across Iacocca’s bow. When others asked him about Iacocca’s success at Chrysler, Ford became absolutely jovial. That was Chrysler, he said, things never changed over there, it was always a boom-or-bust place. Things were going well there now—a sure sign they’d head toward bust pretty soon.