by A. J. Baime
The next day Sorensen told Edsel and Henry Ford that he had to get away. He couldn’t take the pressure anymore. He took a brief trip to his vacation home in Miami. The day after he left, Edsel came to work and took a long, slow walk alone through Willow Run. He let the pounding machinery assault his ears and breathed in the myriad of smells—oil, metal dust, antiseptic floor cleaner, paint from the spray guns. He could see the bombers lined along the assembly line, one after another. His two-hundredth Liberator was on that day nearing the end of the assembly line. On the airfield, the bombers taxied for takeoff, test pilots feathering engines and motoring into the ether.
When he got tired, Edsel left Willow Run and returned home, his driver charioting him through the estate’s security gates onto the sprawling property. His wife was waiting for him there. Edsel never left Gaukler Pointe again.
In a makeshift infirmary in his mansion, Edsel lay on his deathbed. His doctors took readings on a thermometer and saw the mercury rising. In addition to his stomach pain—which the physicians believed to be incurable cancer—Edsel was suffering from undulant fever. He had apparently picked up the illness from drinking milk from his father’s farm. When he felt strong enough, he took short doctor-escorted walks along the lakefront in his backyard, so he could see the sunshine and hear the sound of the water lapping against the stones on the shoreline.
“He didn’t complain and he wasn’t morose,” one of his doctors later remembered. “He knew that the end was near and that he couldn’t do anything about it.”
Edsel’s best friend Kanzler called often to cheer him up. But Kanzler talked too much, exhausting Edsel. “Kanzler doesn’t know what a telephone is for,” Edsel said. His soft-spoken wife was a fixture, but other than Eleanor, Edsel was alone much of the time. All his life, his wealth and his position had isolated him, even in the end.
Henry had no idea how sick Edsel was. When he visited Gaukler Pointe and saw his son, he still believed that Edsel could be saved. He wanted to know when Edsel would be back at work. On May 18, in a meeting with the family physician, Dr. McClure, Harry Bennett, and Charlie Sorensen, the doctor informed Henry that Edsel was not coming back to work.
At first, Henry thought rationally. The company’s chief lawyer, I. A. Capizzi, appeared to discuss the handling of Edsel’s estate. But soon after, Henry unleashed his rage. He insisted to his doctors that they restore Edsel’s health. “I expect you to keep my family well,” Henry barked at Dr. McClure. “That’s what you and the others are there for.”
The doctor took the criticism calmly. Henry was old and ill. “We must expect Henry Ford to do unusual things,” Dr. McClure told Sorensen. “He should not be around the plant or having anything to do with the business.”
Facing eternity, Edsel had one last chance to set some plans in motion, one last shot to influence the future. Not long before his final illness, he contacted the FBI’s John Bugas and pleaded with him to continue the Bureau’s investigation of thefts at Ford properties.
Could Bugas bring down Harry Bennett?
Second, Edsel spoke to his best friend Ernie Kanzler about getting Henry II out of the military and back to Dearborn. Kanzler had high-level contacts throughout Washington. Surely he could convince the government that Henry II’s presence in Dearborn was critical. Without Henry II to watch after Edsel’s interests, there was no telling what would happen. It was time for Edsel’s eldest son to return home to fight for his birthright.
In late May, three of Edsel’s children—Henry II, Benson, and Josephine—returned home to be by his side. The youngest, William, was graduating from Hotchkiss, an East Coast boarding school. Edsel didn’t want William to miss the graduation ceremony. Luckily, the date was moved up because so many students were enlisting in the military. William Clay Ford (who would go on to be a longtime owner of the NFL’s Detroit Lions before his death in 2014) made it home to see his father just in time. “I didn’t even know how bad it was until about three days before the graduation when I got a letter from him saying how sorry he was he wouldn’t be there,” William later remembered. “I was disappointed. I was not only getting a diploma but a trophy for being the school tennis champion and I wanted him there.”
By Edsel’s deathbed, William showed his father his trophy. “I think he willed himself alive until the day I got home,” he said. “He was very coherent and we had a fine conversation.”
Edsel’s life was a plot that ended before its climactic moment. He knew that his eldest son, Henry II, sitting then by his side, would be the one to see this plot through to the end. Edsel told young Henry to go see Bob Gregorie in Ford’s Design Department. He would find in Bob Gregorie an ally, a man Edsel trusted, to help him get started.
There was nothing left to do but rally around Edsel and await his last breath. It came at 1:10 AM on May 26, 1943. He was forty-nine years old.
The next morning workers arrived at Willow Run and the Rouge to find flags at half-mast. Ford design chief Bob Gregorie, one of Edsel’s closest confidants, remembered that morning: “As we drove through the gate—we were four in a car, sharing rides in those war days—we saw the flag at half-staff. We knew it was Edsel. We had lost our man. We all started crying.” Sorensen arrived at his office at 9:15 AM, and Henry Ford called an hour later. Sorensen found the old man “very well composed.” As for himself, “I cracked up,” Sorensen recalled.
Condolence letters streamed in from all corners of the globe—England, Egypt, Australia, Finland, South America. The President penned his note to Mrs. Edsel Ford the day Edsel passed. “My dear Mrs. Ford,” Roosevelt wrote, “in the passing of your devoted husband in the full tide of his career, a powerful force has been lost to the war effort. He had devoted his superb abilities wholeheartedly to the defeat of the Axis powers and his passing in this critical time in our history is a grievous loss to his country’s effort and to the cause of the United Nations. My heart goes out to you and to all of the family in deepest sympathy.” The President wired another condolence directly to Henry, expressing his “heartfelt sympathy in which Mrs. Roosevelt joins.”
Edsel’s family arranged for his coffin to lie in state in a funeral home in Detroit so that anyone who wished could pay their respects. They were shocked when they saw the lines form outside. Over a thousand people showed up to say good-bye to Edsel, who had given his life to the city and its defining industry. Laborers, foremen, engineers, executives, politicians. Men arrived in dirty work clothes from assembly-line shifts to wait on line, while next to them stood other Detroiters in fine-tailored suits who had come by chauffeur-driven limousine. The United Auto Workers Local 600 sent a slew of gardenias. Even the union leaders adored Edsel.
The day of his funeral, flags all over Detroit hung at half-mast. At Ford plants in Allied nations all over the world, during Edsel’s funeral service, the machines stopped and the lights went out for five minutes. The clanging presses and jigs of Willow Run and the Rouge fell silent. Workers were left in the dark to stare at their toes.
“When the plant shut down for Edsel’s observance,” remembered one Ford worker, “the motors of the machine tools stopped, the pounding of the massive metal presses quit, and the piercing rhythm ceased. The silence was deafening. As all of us stood there, an Irish tenor began singing the Lord’s Prayer, his tender voice echoing throughout the plant. We all broke down. It was terribly moving.”
At the service at Christ Church in Grosse Pointe, Edsel’s best friend Kanzler fell to pieces and had to be helped from the room. Bennett did not come to the funeral, knowing he would not be wanted there. The church pews filled to capacity with near and distant family members and the auto industry’s most famed engineers, men like Lieutenant General William Knudsen, Chrysler’s K. T. Keller, and General Motors’ Charles Wilson. Henry Ford sat stonelike in a pew with his wife Clara. Nearby, Sorensen held his head low. “That last year he lived was strenuous far beyond his endurance,” Sorensen said of Edsel. “He was responsible for the good name the Company ha
d established all over the world.”
Sorensen could recall a day two years earlier when Henry mysteriously slipped him a card with a prose poem he had written. The poem was about fathers and sons. It struck Sorensen so deeply that he saved it. And it struck him, in that moment at Edsel’s funeral, how much father and son adored each other, and how painful to both their interpersonal struggles became. The poem was called “What Is a Boy?”
What Is a Boy? He is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. He is to sit where you are sitting and attend when you are gone to those things that you think are so important. . . . He will assume control of your cities, states, and nation. All your work is going to be judged and praised, or condemned, by him. Your reputation and your future are in his hands. All your work is for him, and the fate of the nation and of humanity is in his hands.
Sitting next to his mother in a church pew, Henry Ford II’s piercing blue eyes clouded with grief and worry. In his navy uniform, now twenty-five years old, he appeared bewildered. One person present said he looked “totally at sea.” His father was gone. His mother was so distraught that a suicide attempt was not out of the realm of possibility. (In fact, she would talk often about it in the days to come.) All his life, Henry II had traveled a road that led to his father’s corner office, where he expected to assume Edsel’s responsibilities as president of Ford Motor Company. And now? He appeared lost.
Edsel was buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit, the gray marble edifice etched with a simple marking: EDSEL BRYANT FORD, 1893–1943. His wife, who never married again, would join him there thirty-three years later. The remains of one of Detroit’s most misunderstood and tragic figures rests at Woodlawn to this day.
In Washington, meanwhile, Edsel’s name began to come up in secret conversations, for reasons outside his death. On the very day Edsel died, at 5:07 PM, a Secret Service agent arrived at the White House bearing a memo that read “Strictly Confidential” and “For Attention: Miss Tully,” President Roosevelt’s secretary. Grace Tully placed the envelope on Roosevelt’s desk. Inside was a letter from the Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau. It regarded the investigation into the new Ford-Afrique company, and the correspondence between Edsel Ford and the head of his French division, Maurice Dollfus, that a Treasury agent had confiscated from Edsel’s office five months earlier.
“My dear Mr. President,” Morgenthau’s note read, “I am sending you herewith a one page memorandum and a brief summary of amazing and shocking correspondence between Edsel Ford and Mr. Dollfus, Managing Director of the Ford interests in France. As late as July 17, 1942, after the French company had been bombed on June 6, 1942, Mr. Edsel Ford wrote as follows to Mr. Dollfus: ‘I have shown your letter to my father and Mr. Sorensen and they both join me in sending best wishes for you and your staff, and hope that you will continue to carry on with the good work that you are doing.’” The Treasury report explained how Dollfus was protecting Ford property in France by cooperating with the Nazis, delivering Ford trucks to Hitler’s Wehrmacht. The entire investigation seemed to hinge on this one statement from Edsel: “the good work that you are doing.”
Was Edsel applauding Dollfus for profiting by cooperating with the Nazis? Or was he thanking Dollfus for his efforts to protect the Ford empire’s assets inside Nazi Germany—for his efforts to simply survive as a company executive and a human being? Either way, French Ford was thriving, thanks to Nazi investment. “There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by Mr. Edsel Ford” of some culpability for the “receipt of favors from the German Reich,” the lead investigator J. John Lawler wrote in his report.
The Treasury Department’s investigation remained open.
“Probably the loss of no other corporation head in the United States,” noted the Wall Street Journal, “would have the same import and create as many problems as does the passing of Edsel Ford.”
Edsel’s death left the empire adrift. For almost exactly half of his life—twenty-four years—he had served as president of Ford Motor Company. Because of the death tax on Edsel’s 42 percent share of the company, the family had to mobilize its lawyers and accountants. And who would run Ford now? Who could adequately assume control of the nation’s third-largest defense contractor leading up to World War II’s climactic battles?
A believer in reincarnation, Henry said that he and Edsel would soon be together again, working hard, communicating through machines, as they always had. “Well, Harry,” Henry said to Bennett, “you know my belief—Edsel isn’t dead.” Henry would talk about reincarnation, then drop it. “Now, we aren’t going to talk about it anymore.” Then he would bring up Edsel again, unable to stop, as if uttering those two syllables could somehow ease his pain.
“I just can’t get over it,” Henry said. “I’ve got a lump right here in my throat. Clara sits down and cries and gets over it, feels a little better. I just cannot do it. I have a lump here and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“Harry,” Henry said at one point, “do you honestly think I was ever cruel to Edsel?”
“Well,” Bennett answered, “if that had been me you’d treated that way, it wouldn’t have been cruelty.”
“Why don’t you give me an honest answer?”
“Well, cruel, no; but unfair, yes. If it had been me, I’d have got mad.”
“That’s what I wanted him to do. Get mad.”
One night soon after Edsel’s death, the telephone rang in Charlie Sorensen’s home. When he picked up, he heard Henry Ford’s voice on the line. Sorensen nearly dropped the phone when Henry delivered his news: Henry himself intended to assume the responsibilities of president of Ford Motor Company.
By his own admission, Henry was completely out of it. “I never know where I’m going in the morning,” he told one friend around this time. “I just get up and go out in the car and just drive around someplace. . . . I wouldn’t know where I was going next but I would just drive along until I got an idea that I should go to some other office or drop in and see somebody else.”
At times, Henry had asked to see certain Ford executives who hadn’t been working at the company for years. At other times, he would appear childlike, somehow reverting back to the simple Henry who had existed before any cars had ever hurtled down Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. Now he was intent on leading one of the largest corporations in the world.
Impossible, Sorensen thought to himself.
Six days after Edsel’s death, Ford Motor Company’s board of directors met in a Dearborn office. Mrs. Edsel Ford attended in her late husband’s place. With Harry Bennett and Sorensen standing by, Henry announced that he would once again become president of Ford Motor Company, a position he had not held since 1919. Edsel’s wife Eleanor was furious. It was tasteless to hold such a meeting so soon after Edsel’s death, she said.
“You, Mr. Ford,” she is alleged to have said. “You’re the one who killed your son!”
“Most of us,” said Sorensen, “were stunned.”
On the way out of the conference room, Sorensen pulled Henry aside. “You’ve got a job now,” he said bitterly. “Now you run it!”
Henry said, “Charlie, everything is going to be the same with you and me, just as it always has been.”
“You’ve taken a job,” Sorensen said. “I know you don’t realize what that means, but this time you’ve got to. Edsel did. I can work with anyone who understands his responsibilities. But you don’t.” Sorensen pleaded to bring in Edsel’s kids to run the company. They needed Henry II desperately. “As things stand now,” Sorensen said, “we’re slipping. These boys will be some foundation for the future. Better give some thought to that.”
Not long after Edsel’s funeral, Ernie Kanzler ventured to Washington, as Edsel had asked him to do before his death. When military officials heard Kanzler’s plea—to release Henry II from the military—they saw the wisdom in it. Roosevelt was expressing deep concern about Ford Motor Company. How could Henry, at his age, effectively run a company
that vast? With a mission so vital to national security?
Roosevelt discussed plans of placing the company under the stewardship of Studebaker executives. In the end, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox decided to release Henry Ford II from the military so that he could go back to Dearborn and take control—not realizing in Washington just what that would entail.
Within a few short days, at the Great Lakes Naval Station outside Chicago, Henry II received a letter from Secretary Knox himself, regarding his discharge from the service. “My Dear Mr. Ford,” it read, “the services you will render as a private individual will surpass any work you could possibly do in your present situation. I wish you all kinds of good luck. Yours sincerely. . . .”
Young Henry was going home. He had Secretary Knox’s letter framed. It would hang on the wall in his private quarters for the rest of his life.
Henry II packed his bags, gathered his wife and two young children (his third, Edsel II, had not yet been born), and boarded a train headed east to Detroit. The job ahead of him seemed impossible: to wrestle this industrial giant out of the claws of Henry and Bennett, in the name of his father. On the train, Henry II sat in a daze with his family around him, wearing not a military uniform but his civilian clothes. As the train plunged eastward, he ran into an old friend of Edsel’s. They talked about the sad news of Edsel’s death, and young Henry suddenly burst into tears.
“He was a saint, just a saint!” Henry II shouted. “He didn’t have to die. They killed him!”
PART V
D-DAY AND THE BATTLE OF DEARBORN
The whole Ploesti episode began on a high note as far as I was concerned. After six months of combat operations in very cold and hostile winter skies over Europe, we were shifted, without explanation, to low-level formation practice over the green fields of England. We were told that for the time being, at least, there would be no combat—and it was springtime. There were new crews and new B-24s to replace those that had been lost, and losses had been severe for our group. We didn’t understand then that this relatively pleasant interval was preparation for an exceptional mission.
