by A. J. Baime
In the end, my moral compass took the form of a question: would the people I am writing about find truth in my portrayal of them?
This book gives my name on the cover, but it is the effort of many people. I would like to express my extreme indebtedness to my superb editor, Susan Canavan, and my agent Scott Waxman for believing in this project. Their faith and their many hours of hard work on my behalf have quite frankly changed the trajectory of my future, and for that I am forever grateful. It’s always best to do business with the best and brightest, and I have been blessed in this regard with both of you. I would like to thank everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and at the Waxman Leavell Literary Agency for their efforts as well.
My enduring gratitude goes out to various archivists and librarians at the Benson Ford Research Center in Dearborn, Michigan; the FDR Library in Hyde Park, New York; the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the National Automotive History Collection at the Detroit Public Library; the Lindbergh Papers at the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Chicago Public Library. Special thanks go to Greg Bradsher at the National Archives for his work on my behalf and for his great company during the days I spent in College Park.
My wife Michelle offered her valuable criticisms of this book. If I had not met her on July 19, 2000, I’d still be on page 1—not of this book but of everything in my life. How do you say thank you for something like that?
My mother Denise and my father David read every draft of this manuscript. Both would have made terrific editors. Thank you, Mom and Dad; I hope this book makes up for some of what I put you through when I was a teenager.
I want to thank the following people for sharing their thoughts and memories of World War II and of Willow Run: Carol Lemons, Robert Todd, my wonderful grandfather-in-law Kenneth Wheeldon, Benjamin Napolitano (and his brilliant son Chris), Jack Goetz, Marvin Graham, and Les Hadley. Thank you to Henry Dominguez, author of the book Edsel: The Story of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Son, for helping me to set up some of these interviews. I would like to add a special appreciation for Oak Mackey, Liberator pilot, who shared not only his memories with me but also his technical knowledge of how the airplane functioned.
More special thanks go to Ken Gross—the most universally respected journalist I have ever met. Thank you, Ken, for your close reads of this manuscript.
I wish to express my immeasurable gratitude to Justin Manask, Lucas Foster, and Alex Young in Los Angeles for more than I could possibly put here in the space of a paragraph.
Also, I could not have put together the photo insert for this book without the help of the master of all imagery researchers, Matthew Steigbigel.
I would like to thank my family, whom I can never repay for all their love and support through the years: my sister Abby, my stepmother Susan Baime, my Aunt Karen and Uncle Ken Segal (who have always treated me like I was one of their own), my “outlaws” Connie and the late Bill Burdick, Jack and Margo Ezell, and Ken and Edna Wheeldon, my many cousins and nieces and nephews of the amazing Crystal/Sabel/Segal clan, and Oliver, Peter, and the late Ellen Segal. More special thanks go to Jimmy Jellinek and all the editors at Playboy magazine for their support through the years, and to Sam Walker, Darren Everson, Adam Thompson, and Leslie Yazel at the Wall Street Journal.
The following books proved most valuable in my research: The Fords: An American Epic by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Wheels for the World by Douglas Brinkley, and My Forty Years with Ford by Charles Sorensen. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II and Jon Meacham’s Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship are both must-reads. From an aviation perspective, The Wartime Diaries of Charles Lindbergh, Stephen E. Ambrose’s The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany, 1944–1945, and Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Airpower were most helpful. The following two books proved a great foundation for beginning research on the home front: A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II by William O’Neill and Don’t You Know There’s a War On?: The American Home Front, 1941–1945 by Richard Lingeman.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my family—Michelle, Clayton, Audrey, and yes, even you, Carl Carlson. I remain the luckiest bastard on earth.
Notes
[>] “Every single man, woman”: “A New American Creed,” Detroit News, December 10, 1941, p. 1. See also Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 317.
[>] “I refuse to recognize”: Douglas Brinkley, Wheels of the World (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. xv.
[>] (Cover image) B-24 Liberator bombers in flight: Statistics for the B-24 are from National Museum of the United States Air Force, “Consolidated B-24D Liberator,” February 4, 2011, available at: http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=494 (accessed January 8, 2014).
Introduction
[>] “the biggest wartime boomtown”: Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 176.
[>] “amazing and shocking”: Morgenthau, memo to FDR, May 25, 1943, “Ford Motor Company, Foreign Funds Control,” box 636, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY.
[>] “Here was the power”: Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1948), p. 9.
[>] “city forging thunderbolts”: “A City That Forges Thunderbolts,” New York Times, January 10, 1943, p. SM13.
Prologue
[>] On the night of December 29, 1940: Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), pp. 216–18; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The War President, 1940–1943 (New York: Random House, 2000), pp. 81–82; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 194–96.
[>] “Grace! How many times”: Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, p. 217.
[>] “My friends, this is not”: The text of FDR’s “Great Arsenal of Democracy” speech was published in hundreds of newspapers. See “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The Great Arsenal of Democracy,” American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches, available at: www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html (accessed September 30, 2013).
[>] “The Fuehrer is not just”: William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), p. 97.
[>] “If one makes a toy”: Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin, 1937–1939 (New York: Putnam, 1940), p. 100.
[>] “I am putting on the uniform”: “Nazis Attack Poles by Land and Air,” Detroit News, September 1, 1939, p. 1.
[>] “walls of sand that”: Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 41.
[>] “The London that we knew”: Ibid., p. 151.
[>] “There are no words”: Edward R. Murrow, In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938–1961 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 37.
[>] “like criminals behind”: Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 175.
[>] “The whole industrial strength”: Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1946), pp. 130, 167.
[>] “The Nazi masters”: FDR, the “Great Arsenal of Democracy” speech.
[>] “When I visited the still-burning”: Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, p. 197.
[>] “What can the USA do”: Ibid., p. 240.
1. Henry
[>] “With his Model T”: Norman Beasley, Knudsen: A Biography (Whittlesey House, 1947), p. 34.
[>] “Mr. Bishop had his bicycle”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), pp. 1–2.
[>] “Every clock in the Ford”: Richard Snow, I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford (New York: Scribner’s, 2013), p. 16.
[>] “I’ve been on the wrong”: Collier and Horowitz,
The Fords, p. 17.
[>] “Mrs. Ford didn’t give”: Henry Dominguez, Edsel: The Story of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Son (Detroit: Society of Automotive Engineers, 2002), p. 10.
[>] “You can see he’s smart”: Ibid.
[>] “Here comes that crazy”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 21.
[>] “Crazy like a fox”: Don Mitchell, Driven: A Photobiography of Henry Ford (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2010), p. 16.
[>] “Thrilling Trip on the First”: Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 33.
[>] living with Henry’s: Ford R. Bryan, Clara: Mrs. Henry Ford (Dearborn, MI: Ford Books, 2001), p. 62 (the home is pictured).
[>] “You’ll never make a go”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 25.
[>] he managed to gather: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, pp. 61–62.
[>] “Let’s run it!”: Ibid., p. 70.
2. The Machine Is the New Messiah
[>] “There is in manufacturing”: Vincent Curcio, Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 118.
[>] “Excitement was in the air”: George W. Stark, City of Destiny: The Story of Detroit (Detroit: Arnold-Powers, 1943), p. 501.
[>] “Detroit in those days”: Norman Beasley, Knudsen: A Biography (New York: Whittlesey House, 1947), p. 59.
[>] “Come with me, Charlie”: Charles E. Sorensen, with Samuel T. Williamson, My Forty Years with Ford (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 96.
[>] “I’d like to have a room”: Ibid.
[>] “I will build a motorcar”: Henry Ford, with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), p. 73.
[>] “The man who places a part”: Ibid., p. 83.
[>] “When Henry Ford took me”: Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 137.
[>] “Fancy a jungle of wheels”: Julian Street and Wallace Morgan, Abroad at Home (New York: The Century Company, 1914), p. 93.
[>] “The Ford Motor Company”: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 162.
[>] “He’s crazy, isn’t he?”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 49.
[>] “Biblical principles”: Ibid.
[>] “see to it that he’s”: Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), pp. 222–23.
[>] “Five dollars a day was”: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 171.
[>] “We are going to make it”: Beasley, Knudsen, p. 71.
[>] “the Zeus of American mythology”: Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass Roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 6.
[>] ranked Henry Ford third: Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild Backinprint.com, 2007), p. 154.
[>] “The machine is the new messiah”: Henry Ford, “Machinery, the New Messiah,” The Forum 79, March 1928, pp. 363–64.
[>] “Machinery is accomplishing”: Henry Ford and Ray Leone Faurote, My Philosophy of Industry (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), pp. 18–19.
3. Edsel
[>] “There is not a scrap”: Henry Dominguez, Edsel: The Story of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Son (Detroit: Society of Automotive Engineers, 2002), p. 4.
[>] “I don’t remember”: Ibid., p. 13.
[>] “Snowed all day”: Richard Bak, Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire (New York: Wiley, 2003), p. 40.
[>] “Dear Santa Claus, I haven’t”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), p. 28.
[>] “all the family talked about”: Ibid., p. 44.
[>] “Have you seen Ed?”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 44.
[>] “I told Edsel”: Dominguez, Edsel, p. 28.
[>] “Father put me through”: Ibid.
[>] “the artist in the family”: Irving Bacon, oral history, pp. 7 and 18, Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, MI.
[>] “handsome enough to charm”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 88.
[>] “Bad headache”: Edsel Ford’s diary, reprinted in Ford R. Bryan, Clara: Mrs. Henry Ford (Dearborn, MI: Ford Books, 2001), p. 352.
[>] “sex dancing”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 86.
[>] “Bill, I have a million dollars”: Bak, Henry and Edsel, pp. 76–77.
[>] OMNIUM RERUM VICISSITUDO: IBID., P. 133. Ibid., p. 133.
[>] “I don’t think”: Lacey, Ford, p. 155.
[>] “I don’t envy”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 62.
[>] “Yes, I have a fine son”: Ibid., p. 44.
[>] “You wouldn’t know”: Dominguez, Edsel, p. 56.
[>] “Men sitting around”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 55.
[>] “Tomorrow at ten”: Ibid.
[>] “War is murder”: Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), p. 52.
[>] “The word ‘murderer’”: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 193.
[>] “I will devote”: Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, p. 52.
[>] “God’s fool”: Ibid., p. 63.
[>] “a loon ship”: Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 88.
[>] “Young Ford should”: Bak, Henry and Edsel, p. 98.
[>] “ready to pay”: Owosso Argus-Press, October 28, 1928, p. 6.
[>] “I want no stay-at-home”: “Edsel Ford Dies at 49; Headed Auto Empire 24 Years,” Washington Evening Star, May 26, 1943, p. 1; see also Richard Snow, I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford (New York: Scribner’s, 2013), p. 286.
[>] “All his life he will be”: Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, p. 95.
4. Learning to Fly
[>] “More than electric lights”: Stephen E. Ambrose, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew B-24s over Germany 1944–1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p. 28.
[>] His first move: “$6 Minimum Ford Wage,” Washington Post, January 2, 1919, p. 13.
[>] “Well, if Edsel has bought”: Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 242.
[>] “clapping his hands”: Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), p. 177.
[>] “The fun of playing”: Ibid.
[>] “could lay claim to”: “By Their Works Ye Shall Know Them,” Vanity Fair, February 1928, p. 62.
[>] By 1927, Henry and Edsel’s fortune: William C. Richards, The Last Billionaire (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), p. 352.
[>] “Well, I’m just flabbergasted”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), p. 88.
[>] “A Ford can take you”: Quoted in, among hundreds of other sources, Robert Palestini, Going Back to the Future: A Leadership Journey for Educators (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), p. 85.
[>] “My father is a great man”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 45.
[>] “I have not worked out”: “Edsel Is the Boss,” Hartford Courant, April 16, 1939, p. SM5. Edsel is known to have made this statement, with some variations, on more than one occasion.
[>] “Great Britain is no longer”: Peter FitzSimons, Charles Kingsford and Those Magnificent Men (Sidney: HarperCollins Publishers Australia, 2009), unpaginated.
[>] “The thing did leave”: Henry Dominguez, Edsel: The Story of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Son (Detroit: Society of Automotive Engineers, 2002), p. 155.
[>] “They were pioneering”: William Mayo, oral history, pp. 40–41, Benson Ford Research Center, Dearborn, MI.
[>] “This letter is to wish”: Dominguez, Edsel, p. 163.
[>] “The Highways of the Sky”: Timothy J. O’Callaghan, The Aviation Legacy of Henry and Edsel Ford (Detroit: Proctor Publications, 2000), p. 189.
[>] “There are sound economic”: Dominguez, Edsel, p. 166.
[>] “nearest approach to intensity”: O’Callaghan, The Aviation Legacy of Henry and Edsel Ford, p. 28.
[>] “The
news just saturated”: Ambrose, The Wild Blue, p. 29.
[>] “This was the finest ride”: “Ford’s First Flight Is with Lindbergh,” New York Times, August 12, 1927, p. 1.
[>] “the godlike power man”: A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh (New York: Berkley Books, 1999), p. 81.
[>] “I believe that 1928”: Dominguez, Edsel, p. 166.
5. Father vs. Son
[>] “For all their ambition”: Charles E. Sorensen, with Samuel T. Williamson, My Forty Years with Ford (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), p. 302.
[>] “Father, I believe”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic (San Francisco: Encounter, 2002), p. 98.
[>] “Edsel, you shut up”: Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 400.
[>] “Mr. Ford didn’t go along”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 118.
[>] “What’s going on there?”: Ibid., p. 92; see also Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), p. 264.
[>] “Edsel, if you really need”: Lacey, Ford, p. 264.
[>] “The next big development”: “Edsel Ford: Eager for Rear Engines,” Washington Post, September 8, 1935, p. B2.
[>] “He attained a kind”: Roger Burlingame, Henry Ford: The Greatest Success Story in the History of Industry (New York: Signet, 1956), p. 114.
[>] “put Jesus Christ in my factory”: Samuel S. Marquis, Henry Ford: An Interpretation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), p. 10.
