TYCOON; THE SAGA OF HENRY FORD II; The head of the Ford Motor Company is 60, and talks of retirement. A generation ago, he had to battle his grandfather for control of the family business. Will the struggle of the 40's repeat itself in the 70's, as Henry' (2024)

Today when you fly over Dearborn, Mich., you look down on one of the glories of American industrial capitalism: the Ford Motor Company, the largest industrial complex in the world‐1,200 acres of steel foundries, glassworks, 110 miles of private railroad track, an assembly plant turning out 150,000 Mustangs a year. One man is the absolute master of this industrial universe. If you are in New York, you can walk down 43d Street and see the Ford Foundation Building, all glass and green plants, which houses bureaucrats dispensing millions of dollars a year—once the creature of Dearborn but now, after bitter battles, beyond its control.

Henry Ford 2d is 60 now. He really is a “last tycoon.” Along with the late Howard Hughes and Nelson Rockefeller, he stands in the public imagination as a symbol of American capitalism: His private life—as with Hughes and Rockefeller—is appropriated in the gossip columns as a constantly unwinding adventure: Anne, Cristina, and now Kathy DuRoss. Only recently, newspapers kept their readers informed about Henry's fight with his estranged wife Cristina for the right to auction off the French antiques they collected. The disposition of his company is the subject of interminable speculation: Will the Ford Motor Company finally go the way of General Motors and the others and be run by bankers and

Lally Weymouth is the author of “America in 1876: The Way We Were.” men, or will it descend into the hands of another Ford?

The career of Henry Ford crams into 33 years much of the meaning and the drama of American business and political history. The Ford Motor Company is part of the bedrock of the modern auto‐industrial age. The Ford Foundation financed a substantial part of the civil‐rights drive in the 60's. It was Henry Ford who was one of the businessmen who promoted Jimmy Carter at the start of the election campaign of 1976.

The story of Henry Ford 2d is one—neatly enough—of victory and defeat. When he was 26 he came back from the Navy, fought for the control of a nearly bankrupt company and in 10 years rebuilt it into one of the largest industrial corporations in the world. In 1993 he had to wear a gun to the office, and two years later he owned the town. In 1999 he controlled what was to become the largest foundation in the world. In 1976 he admitted defeat and abandoned the foundation to forces he had come to regard as hostile to everything he believed in.

“Ain't nothing in the world like Dear- born,” Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit said, and then he laughed. He was referring to the Ford Motor Company (F.M.C.), which has its “World Headquarters” in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. F.M.C. is by far the largest publicly held industrial corporation in this country to be still dominated by single family. Under trust agreements, the Fords—Henry and his two brothers and one sister—own about 12 percent of the equity of the company, but their stock carries with it 40 percent of the vote—more than enough to give them control of the vast concern, which had sales of $28,839,600,000 in 1976.

“Although G.M. is way ahead of us in North America, I guess we are No. I you take all the world excluding Japan,” Henry told me. There are Ford operations in 30 countries, ranging from Great Britain to Malaysia.

In this country F.M.C. ranks as the third largest publicly held industrial company in sales—with Exxon first, and General Motors, second. And F.M.C. is one of the largest industrial employers in the nation, with an average of 240,000 workers per year.

For the last 33 years, Henry Ford 2d has been in charge of the Ford Motor Company. Today he holds a pre-eminent position in the industry, which accounts for one‐sixth of all economic activity in this country. Although G.M. is twice as big as F.M.C., Henry is twice as conspicuous and twice as powerful as the chairman of G.M. Whereas G.M. gets a new chairman every five years, Henry has remained in office for more than three decades. While there is no single stockholder who controls G.M., Henry—with the help of his brothers and sister—does control F.M.C.

Unlike many powerful men, Henry has a good press. People find him candid, outspoken, different from the usual titan of industry. Wilbur Mills lost his job for pursuing Fanne Fox. Henry was caught driving while drunk with his girlfriend at his side, but his job was unaffected. In fact, Mayor Young says that one of the things that has impressed him about Henry is that “when the newspapers sensationalized this incident involving him and a young lady, he came forth with what I think is one of the all‐time classics: ‘Don't complain, don't explain.’ Period. That,” says the Mayor, “is class.”

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A few weeks ago I sat and talked with Henry Ford in his office on the 12th floor of the Ford headquarters in Dearborn. The office decor is Corporate Good Taste: abstract paintings and glass tables. One of the tables bears a small needlepoint pillow with the motto “Screw Airbags.” The day I visited him, the chairman was beautifully dressed in a tweed suit with a pink-andwhite‐striped shirt with his initials on it. He wore big gold cuff links, seemed easy and chatty, and puffed away on cigar, exuding smoke, power and confidence.

Henry Ford 2d is not a reflective man. He is vague on his memory of important events in his life, often skirting them or describing them in the blandest clichés. His friends and associates say that his easy‐going facade is misleading, that he is really a very complex man—“generous,” “thoughtful,” “hard‐working” and “charming,” on the one hand, but “capricious and arbitrary” and “tough” on the other. His daughter, Charlotte, says he is shy, “a little standoffish until he's had a couple of drinks,” that he has “flunkies” for friends, and that he “finds it very hard to handle his emotional life.” Henry, she says, always falls for “strong, tough cookies. He has a weak side when women.”

But if he has failed to understand women, he has certainly succeeded in understanding power. “I think he has in a very real sense retained power and been ruthless in retaining and exercising it,” a friend of Henry's told me. “That place [F.M.C.] was a jungle to operate in at times,” a former Ford executive said. “He'd bring up people and then dash them down.”

He leisurely sipped his 11 o'clock tea, and it was plain enough that Henry Ford 2d is very much at ease with his power and wealth, as inheritors often are not. Henry and his present surroundings fit so well that it is difficult for a visitor to remember that he did not arrive in them merely by an accident of birth. Although he is a member of the third generation of one of America's most famous dynasties, succession in the Ford family has never flowed smoothly. Henry did not automatically inherit his present power. In fact, he had to fight his own grandfather to gain the heritage he felt was his by right. This bitter family struggle only began the saga. Thirty‐five years ago, when young Henry Ford 2d went to work at the Ford Motor Company, it was a very different

In the autumn of 1943, 26-year-old Henry Ford 2d went to work for the Ford Motor Company. “He just stepped into a catastrophe,” one Ford executive remembers. Company profits between 1931 and 1941 totaled out to zero, and Ford was then a sad third in the auto industry, with General Motors far out in front and Chrysler in second place. Henry Ford Sr. was supposedly running the company, but by this time he was, as his grandson remembers, “a little over 80 and had had a stroke.” With age had come senility, and Henry Sr. had, in effect, turned over operating control of his company to his crony Harry Bennett. Bennett was a former naval officer, known as a good boxer, who had gone to work for Henry Sr. in 1916. Two years later he had been charged with maintaining discipline at the Rouge plant, where he performed his duties ruthlessly. He managed to please Henry Sr. consistently after that. “Mr. Ford would say, ‘Jump,’ and Bennett would strain every muscle—he'd do anything,” says John Bugas, who was once Bennett's right‐hand man. As he got older, Henry Sr. turned over more and more of his power to his trusted

By the time young Henry arrived at Ford, the satrap Bennett was ruling the place like a tyrant. “Bennett had old Mr. Ford almost literally in the palm of his hand,” Bugas says, and remembers thinking to himself that the Ford Motor Company “could either somehow—maybe by a miracle—go ahead and turn into a great company or else the damned thing was going to go out of existence.”

The troubles at the Ford Motor Company had begun back in the 20's. From 1906, the year that Henry Sr. gained control of the company, until the early 20's, F.M.C. dominated the industry. Henry Sr. invented a car that could be mass‐produced and sold cheaply, and while other auto companies concen-

If Henry has succeeded in understanding power, perhaps he has not done so well with women, Daughter Charlotte says Henry always falls for “strong, tough cookies.- trated on producing a few expensive cars for the rich, F.M.C. captured most of the market. In 1906 Henry Sr. brought out his first light car—the Model N—which sold for $500. The Model T came two years later and was such a big hit that within seven years F.M.C. had become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world. The car proved to be so successful that Henry was reluctant to change it in any way or to bring out any additional models. So, for 19 years, F.M.C. offered itS customers only one car—the Model T. (Henry Sr. finally introduced the Model A, with its more powerful engine, in 1927.)

When Henry Sr. was in Europe on trip in 1912, some of his assistants came up with a few changes which they felt would improve the Model T. Upon Henry Sr.'s return, they discovered their mistake. An eyewitness, George Brown, gave this astonishing account of Henry's fury at the sight of the modified Model T:

“He had his hands in his pockets and he walked around that car three or four times, looking'very closely.... Finally, he got to the left‐hand side of that car and he takes his hands out, gets hold of the door and bang! He ripped the door right off! God! How the man done it, don't know! He jumped in there and bang goes the other door. Bang goes the windshield. He jumps over the back seat and starts pounding on the top. He rips the top with the heel of his shoe. He wrecked the car as much as he could.”

Despite such autocratic behavior, the Ford Motor Company continued to prosper because the Model T was the cheapest and most efficient car available. Moreover, Henry Ford was fortunate to have had a clever business partner, James Couzens. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith describes Couzens as “a man of enormous versatility and intellectual power, where Ford was not.” It was Couzens who helped Ford develop a moving assem-

Henry likes his managers to know that he's the boss, and there have been many dramatic examples of his use of power. “I think he enjoys • being unpredictable,” one Ford executive says. bly line as well as a good dealer organization. But in 1915, Couzens became fed up with Henry Sr. and left. (Later, Couzens became Mayor of Detroit, and later still, a Senator.) After his departure, F.M.C. enjoyed a few more successful years and then went steadily downhill.

As F.M.C. slipped, General Motors began a long period of prosperity under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, who became president of G.M. in 1923. Sloan was the organizational genius who created the modern corporation, which was the antithesis of the autocratic Ford Motor Company. “All policies,” Sloan wrote, “must be appraised and approved by committees before being administered by individuals. In other words, General Motors has been group management comprised of very competent individuals.” There was no such thing as group rule at Ford.

Whereas Henry Sr. concentrated power in his own hands, decentralization was the key to Sloan's organization. He built up one large company out of many smaller ones, but insisted that the small companies be autonomous, competing with one another as well as with the outside world. Each unit or company had its own management as well as its own strict financial controls.

Sloan outwitted Ford by seeing that regular styling innovations would sell cars. And it was Sloan who invented one of the prime features of the auto-industrial age—the annual model change. While Henry was telling the public that it could buy the Model T, and only the Model T, in any color so long as it was black, Sloan was offering a wide variety of cars to his customers—the Cadil-

Union leaders do not exactly adore Henry, but when contrasted with his grandfather, he seems a saint.

“He's liberal in comparison with other industrial leaders,” says one official. lac for the rich, the Oldsmobile for the middle‐rich, and the Chevrolet for the not-so-rich.

Sloan put all his energies into building up G.M., whereas Ford spent a lot of time on projects which interested him but that in no way helped the Ford Motor Company. For instance, in 1915 he subsidized the launching of the socalled Peace Ship—a vessel crammed with pacifists like himself who sailed to Europe hoping that they could talk the Europeans into ending World War I. His attempt failed and Henry was ridiculed in the American press for his naïveté. His grandson says, “I don't think he thought much of the Peace Ship after he got on it. I don't think he ever came out of his cabin, to be honest. ... The idea was to go over there and the war— it was a wild idea.”

After the Peace Ship debacle, Henry Sr. became increasingly bitter and turned his attention to attacking Jews and unions. He bought a newspaper—The Dearborn Independent—which he used during the 20's to launch a violent anti‐Semitic campaign. On May 22, 1920, the lead article in The Dearborn Independent bore the headline: “The International Jew: The World's Problem.” Henry 2d says, “I don't know anything about the Dearborn Independent situation except what I've read. I never discussed it with my grandfather. He never said anything to me. I think his one fear was that he would be taken over by the bankers, whom he considered to be Jewish.” Henry added, “I've never read any of it, to be honest, because I don't believe in reading stuff that can't do much about.”

In the 30's, much of Henry Sr.'s energies went into trying to deny labor the right to organize the Ford Motor Company. Although G.M. recognized the United Auto Workers in February 1937, Ford continued to resist. In fact, three months later he fought all‐out against the union at the “Battle of the Overpass.” Emil Mazey, who is today the secretary‐treasurer of the U.A.W., was thrown into jail on his way to the battle. Sitting behind his desk in the U.A.W.'s headquarters, Solidarity House, Mazey recalled that day: “On May 26 we organized a mass distribution of paper [leaflets and newspapers] in the Ford plant. And [Walter] Reuther, who was a board member of the union, and Dick Frankensteen and about 15 other people were out at Gate 4. Reuther and Frankensteen ... walked up on the overpass which crossed the street right in front of the plant and the Ford thugs came out and gave them a severe beating.

Continued from Page 17 guns and some had brass knuckles and handcuffs. ... But Henry Ford Sr. tolerated that kind of violence. He didn't believe in the right of workers to belong to a union or to organize.”

By the early 40's, F.M.C. was in trouble, while G.M. was prospering. Since Ford was a major supplier of war goods, Government officials were concerned about the poor management of the company. John Kenneth Galbraith, who was then Deputy Director of the Of‐. fice of Price Administration, recalls that Henry Sr. refused to allow “any of his people to come to Washington to do business on price controls. As early as 1941, they had to slip into the O.P.A. clandestinely.” There were talks in Washington about the situation at Willow Run—the plant Ford opened to produce B‐24 bombers. Galbraith says, “The discussions in ‘41 and ‘42 were about whether the Government would have to take over

The situation at F.M.C. took a turn for the worse when, on May 26, 1943, Edsel Ford, president of the company and son of the founder, died of stomach cancer. Roy Chapin, chairman of American Motors, who knew the Fords well, describes Edsel as “an extremely genteel man. ... never heard him raise his voice. Edsel was a very lowkey kind of guy, charming, good sense of humor — almost the kind of person you think might be an art collector or something like that.” In fact, Edsel was a great supporter of

Edsel was always overshadowed by his powerful father. He was made president of F.M.C. in 1919, but Henry Sr. always retained the real power. Henry 2d remembers that although “my father was president and ran the day-today operations, if there was a policy decision, he couldn't make it without talking to my grandfather, without getting his approval.” Edsel was overruled again and again by his father. For instance, Henry remembers that “my father wanted to make certain aircraft engines at the beginning of the war—for the British and also for the Americans—but my grandfather was a pacifist and he was adamant against making any kind of war materials.” So Edsel lost out to

What did Henry 2d think of his grandfather's putting his father in such a weak position? “I didn't have any opinion. ... I wasn't in the middle of it. heard my father say some things but they were sort of general. He didn't like to talk about it.”

Henry says that he thought his father was “a great fellow” and that he also liked his grandfather “very much. We spent an awful lot of time with him when we were children. ... He was very generous with his time with us, and used to do all kinds of things with us—go sleep in the barns at night and let us run the locomotives in the plants. I had a very wonderful relationship with my grandfather outside the Harry Bennett situation.” But an old friend and former colleague of Henry's told me that Henry was polishing up his feelings for the record: “He adored his father and he hated his father; he resented the way old Henry treated Edsel.”

Just three months after Edsel's death, his eldest son, Henry 2d, a naval lieutenant, received a letter from the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, releasing him so that he could go home to the Ford Motor Company. When he arrived in Dearborn in August 1943, the question was: Would Henry 2d, like his father, be crushed by his autocratic grandfather? The signs were not promising. A childhood friend remembers that Henry “never really seemed terribly strongly motivated. ... I thought he might be more like his father, because Henry was always fun to be with but he didn't really give a damn whether he graduated from college or not. I never thought of him as a fellow with a sense of responsibility and an ability to contend with difficult

Henry had not been a particularly distinguished student at either the Hotchkiss School or at Yale University. For that matter, he had not even managed to graduate from Yale because he had been caught paying someone to write a term paper for him. He had subsequently married Anne McDonnell, a New YorkSouthampton socialite, in one of the big society weddings of 1940; then, after a Honolulu honeymoon, Henry did a brief stint at F.M.C. before going into the Navy.

Henry leaned back in his chair and tried to tell me what it was like at the Ford Motor Company 30‐some years ago: “I didn't know anything and was not really given any particular assignments, so just moseyed around and tried to find out what was going on. There wasn't an organizational arrangement of any kind and Harry Bennett had almost full sway.”

Martin Hayden, former editor of The Detroit News, remembers Bennett as “a completely flamboyant roughneck, hired by old Henry to protect the Ford family from kidnappers and that sort of thing. He was stocky, an exboxer, rather nice looking, always wearing a bow tie.”

Bennett operated from a basem*nt office in the old Ford headquarters, not far from the gates of Ford's Rouge plant in Dearborn. Henry remembers that “it was a terrible office— he had a file cabinet, a green metal file cabinet with a little target on it. .. . He always had guns on his desk and he was very well protected outside his office. He had bulletproof glass all around. He was just a roughand‐ready fellow. And I don't think there's any question he had association with gangsters

Bennett's gangland rule of the Ford Motor Company is by now legendary. The former Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams remembers Bennett as “a real tough customer—the kind of fellow that would never sit anywhere in a restaurant unless his back was against the wall. When went into his office he had a little Webley pistol and he had a target at one end of the room and he would sit at his desk and plug that.”

Henry likens the atmosphere in the company under Bennett to a police state: “People were just frightened to death to do something that he might not approve of or that he might report back, so there wasn't any morale within the company. think they were probably stealing the place blind.”

Bennett was not anxious to see the young man have any real control of the company. “Henry would try to do some- thing and he'd get the legs cut out from under him by Bennett,” says John Bugas, who quickly shifted his allegiance from Bennett to Henry. Henry recalls that Bennett's trick was to say, “Well, I've just talked to your grandfather ... ,” but Henry claims that “I knew darned well he hadn't, because I'd ask my grandmother.” It was not long before “an estrangement set in between Henry and Bennett,” according to Bugas. “Henry got pretty discouraged— at least he was finding the way pretty tough.”

One day in the spring of 1945, Henry burst into John Bugas's office. Bugas remembers that Henry “was very disturbed. He said that he had heard from somewhere that there was a document in existence that after his grandfather's death would put the control of the company in [the hands of] a number of people who were in effect Harry Bennett's nominees He said, ‘If this is so, don't want to stay around the Ford Motor Company. I'm going to resign if this is a fact, and if 1 do, I'm going to write a letter to every dealer in the United States and tell him just what kind of a situation he's associated with.’ So I said, ‘Do you want me to find out about it?’ He said, ‘I wish you would.’ “

Bennett. When he asked him about the supposed codicil to old Mr. Ford's will, “Bennett became rather agitated and kind of puffed up behind the ears,” as Bugas remembers it today. “lie didn't answer yes or no but said he'd see me about it later.” The following day, Bugas

says, Bennett called him into his office, “tossed me a manila envelope of legal size, and said, ‘Is this what Henry's worried about?’ ... I opened the envelope, which wasn't sealed, and I pulled out an original, ostensibly executed copy of a codicil to Mr. Ford's will, a two- or three‐page codicil, and an unexecuted copy. I read it over very carefully. I took law in school and was able to recognize it immediately for what it was—a codicil that said that, on Mr. Ford's demise, the votes of his shares— and he held control—would be in either 9 or 10 men whose names were listed, including Harry Bennett's— and all the rest of them were people who were ... beholden to Bennett. And it was signed by Mr. Henry Ford— there was what appeared to be his signature there and it might have been, I don't know. It looked very much like his signature and it was witnessed by two people, Mr. and Mrs. Harry Wismer. ...” Bugas says that just as he was pondering the codicil, Bennett suddenly seized it, “put it down on the linoleum floor by his desk, touched a match to it, and then swept the ashes into the envelope, handed it back to me and said, ‘Here, you can tell Henry now he doesn't have to “

Bugas rushed to Henry's office, told him the story, and showed him the ashes. Bugas says that Henry “just shook his head in almost utter disbelief.”

There has been much speculation about the codicil. Some say it was purely an invention of Bennett's to frighten Henry. Bugas points out that if the codicil had been legitimate, “and it had all the appearances, then nobody could destroy it except old Mr. Ford himself. Or, if it were destroyed by anybody else, it still was in effect....” Therefore, Bugas suspects that it was a fake. He says that the supposed witness, Mr. Wismer, “told me over the phone and his wife did Mr. Ford sign that will, nor did they ever get an acknowledgment from him that that was his signature.” But Bugas rightly adds that “had Mr. Ford died and the codicil still been in existence, there would have been lawsuits probably until the end of time on whether or not that was a good will, and God knows what the court might have said.” Henry merely says, “I never saw it ; don't know what was in it. Everything I know is secondthird‐hand.”

With the codicil disposed of, Henry felt a bit more secure, so in August 1945 he took a vacation. Bugas remained at work, but says that “from that point on, the deep freeze with respect to me set in.” One morning he arrived at his basem*nt office, which was located right across the hall from Bennett's, to find that “everything was moved out. There wasn't even a stick of furniture.” He made some inquiries, and found his new office— “around in back of Harry Bennett's office, right into the same little room as his toilet. ... My two secretaries were in there and all my stuff was there.” Time went by, and Bugas decided he would quit. A few days before Henry was scheduled to return from vacation, Bugas went to work and found that everything had changed once again: “I walked into my outhouse office and nothing was there. They had moved me back into my

When Henry returned, he went down to see Bugas to discuss the dismal state of affairs. “What will we do?” Henry asked. Bugas was ready with an answer: “This is impossible, I suppose, but the thing to do is to somehow get the authority from your grandfather to run the company. Get it in writing. Then delegate the authority to me. promise you I will make some very drastic changes in personnel.” Henry replied, “No, I'll never do that. Everybody would accuse me of delegating a dirty job.” Bugas was impressed: “Here was this 28year‐old guy taking this attitude. You know, I'd been through some pretty rough stuff [as head of the F.B.I. in Detroit] and I knew what was in store and I think he did too. ... But this was total anathema to him, to delegate responsibility.”

One week later Ford came back to see Bugas. He was triumphant. Somehow he had managed to persuade his grandfather to let him run the company. Henry says that when he met with his grandparents, his grandmother said to his grandfather, “Well, think it's about time that you let Henry get in there and do what he thinks he should do, because you're not well enough to do it and he feels pretty strongly about the Bennett situation.” And so, Henry says, he thinks his grandfather decided, “Well, I might as well

Some, like Allan Nevins, say that it was Henry's mother and grandmother who were really responsible for persuading Henry Sr. to turn over the company to his grandson. In his corporate history of the Ford Motor Company, Nevins reports that Clara Ford (Mrs. Henry Ford Sr.) formed an alliance of sorts with her daughter-in-law, Eleanor Ford (Mrs. Edsel Ford), to install Henry 2d as the head of F.M.C.: “The two women were one and they controlled large blocks of voting stock.” The climax to their struggle, Nevins says, came at a stockholders’ meeting where Eleanor Ford said, “If this is not done, I shall sell my stock!” At that, Nevins says, Sr. in.

Others, like John Bugas, be- lieve that the credit really belongs primarily to Henry's grandmother, Clara. Bugas saw Henry shortly after his meeting with his grandparents, and he remembers Henry telling him that “his grandfather was almost totally senile— he had been, in effect, sitting in a rocking chair gazing out over the fields except for an occasional ride.” According to Bugas, Clara Ford was “very unfriendly to what was going on, to the extent that she knew about it. Henry brought it to her attention vividly [so] she arranged for the transfer of power via the of the

Although Henry says that “my grandmother supported me, to the best of my recollection, when I was talking to my grandfather,” he adds that he does not know what part his mother played in helping him get control of the company. He says that he has read the Nevins version and others like it, but that “I just don't believe she [his mother] would have done that. She wasn't a threatening kind of person. She was strong, but not threatening.” If Eleanor Ford did intervene, “she would never admit it to me” Henry says. “She always had a close relationship with my grandfather and grandmother, as far as I know, and if she did say something, she

John Bugas shares Henry's skepticism about his mother's intervention in the company's affairs, but he, like many in Detroit, says that it is almost impossible to underestimate Eleanor Ford's influence on her son. Charlotte Ford says that she does not think her father “ever made a big decision without consulting her [his mother].” And a rival automobile executive remembers that when Henry was struggling to

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Continued From Page 13 take over F.M.C., his mother was behind him in a way that was most reassuring to a 26year‐old boy. She obviously harbored a lot of resentment over the treatment that Edsel had gotten, not only from Edsel's father but also from Bennett.”

Henry's triumph over Bennett was confirmed at a beard meeting on Sept. 21, 1945, at which he was officially named president of the Ford Motor Company. Right after the meeting, Henry says, he asked Harry Bennett to come to his office: “I told him that thought he ought to retire.” Bugas, who says he was present at this conference, remembers that “it was quite a tense meeting and finally Bennett said, ‘Henry, let me drive you around the Rouge. I'd like to show you a number of things that your grandfather has some special interest in that you may want to take care of.’ So we went out and got in the car. Harry Bennett drove ... around the Rouge in a rather helter‐skelter fashion. He pointed out various things, nobody paid much attention to him and we came back and went into Bennett's office. And Henry sat down for a few minutes and I sat down

After a few minutes, Henry went back to his office, leaving Bugas alone with Bennett. Bugas recalls the scene: “I'm sitting over to the right of Bennett and from the desk—the top drawer—he pulls out a gun. He slams it down on the desk and ... jumps up and comes over to where I was sitting. I had a little 'snub nose’ just stuffed in my belt.... Of course, this was quite a traumatic situation for him in any event, plus the fact that he had probably put away a quart or two of whisky the night before. So he came over. I thought he was going to hit me, or that he might hit me, and I was trying to stay prepared and defend myself. But he looked up at me—he was kind of a short guy—and said something to the effect of You son of a hitch. You're the cause of this.’ He cursed me and was very, very threatening. And I figured, ‘Oh, my God, something's gonna happen.’ It didn't. He finally backed over to his chair and sat down, almost completely emotionally exhausted. I remember that his head kind of was thrown to one side. Almost an emotional collapse there, for ct minute or two. I sat down in my chair, pulled it up to his desk and began to talk to him in the most persuasive, convincing manner I could. ... If there was anything I did not want and prayed would not happen, it was bloodshed of any kind. didn't want to get heat up, No. 1. I didn't want to get shot, No.

shoot anybody, No. 3. talked maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes. He calmed down So got up and walked out of that goddamned room, never knowing whether I was going to get something between th6 shoulders or not.”

That was it for Harry Bennett. He came into the office the next day to go through his files. “There was a lot of stuff burned in the incinerator.” Bugas says. Then Bennett left, never to return to the Ford Motor Company.

Firing Bennett and becom- ing president of F.M.C. was for Henry the culmination of a two‐year struggle. Henry says now: “I just thought the company would go right down the drain if it wasn't changed. ... I've got a lot of family pride and I didn't see any reason why the company couldn't be saved.”

Henry's friends say that he was indeed partially motivated by family pride: “I think he's very proud of the family name,” Roy Chapin told me. “It's a family business. Forget the money. God knows how many millions and hundreds of millions were at stake. I think the real motivation was the family business.” But Henry was also the only member of the family who could pull the company out of its woes: “It was obvious there was nobody else,” Chapin says. “He was the oldest in the family. I think it had to be somebody with the name Henry Ford to move in and dislodge all of that.... You could have put some banker in there and Harry Bennett would have chewed him up. I don't believe anyone else could have done

The ouster of Bennett did not, however, entail total victory for Henry. His grandfather had handed Henry enough power to clean out Bennett and his gang, but Henry Sr. did not turn over control to his grandson. Even after he had fired Bennett, Henry says, he “wasn't sure that [Bennett] was going to stay fired by any matter of means....” For two years Henry lived in fear that his grandfather might suddenly say, “Well, Henry, want Bennett back here.” As time went by and the old man became feebler and nothing happened, Henry's fears eased. Nevertheless, he was always careful to tell his grandfather what he was doing because Henry Sr., as his grandson points out, “had the complete power” right up until he died in April 1947.

When Henry 2d was made president of Ford in September 1945, he was faced with a company that was losing $9 million a month. “The company was just rocking along, ready to go under,” one Ford executive says. It was hard to know where to begin to attack the problems, since there were no financial records of any sort. There had never been an audit of the company, dead people were on the payroll, and one supposed employee was actually serving time in the Jackson penitentiary. An official who worked on straightening out the mess remembers that “nobody was running anything, and we had to go down to the Government to get pricing approval—with

The company was as lacking in competent executives as it was in good records. “The upper echelons of the company were woefully inadequate,” one former Ford executive recalls. “Essentially, there were no university graduates in the upper 500 people in the company.”

Henry had to make some radical changes quickly. He says he knew that he could not possibly run the company by himself: “I felt [it] needed somebody who had overall top managerial experience and could sort of take and shake, rattle and roll the place up a little bit and bring in some General Motors systems—some of the methods they used.”

Henry found the man he was looking for in Ernest R. Breech, a G.M. vice president who had become the president of Bendix Aviation, which was partly owned by G.M. Breech says that he was not easily persuaded logo to work for the tailing Ford Motor Company: “Henry came to see me when was president of Bendix and tried to get me to come to the Ford Motor Company, and very gracefully turned it down.” But Henry persisted: “He said, ‘Come out and look it over.’ “ Breech did and he finally agreed to work for Henry.

When he arrived at F.M.C. in July 1946, Breech found things “in a pretty sorry state of affairs: $600-and-some-odd million was the total net worth of the company,” the chief engineer “knew as much about designing cars as a pig did about Christmas,” most of the machines and plants were obsolete, and “they had financial statements like a country grocery store.” All in all, Breech recalls, “for a modern business, it was pitiful.”

Ernie Breech managed to make a profit in his first year at Ford—although it was only $2,000 after taxes. The following year, he rolled up an income after taxes of $66,367,000. In 1948, the company netted $94,346,000. The profit for 1949 was $177,056,000, and in 1950 it was up to $258,515,000. “It was a fantastic turnaround,” a high‐up Ford executive says. “In a big company, you just don't go from nothing to starting to make money.”

How was the turnaround accomplished so quickly, I asked Henry. He explained, “We didn't have the money we needed to bring, out really good products, but ... the damned market had had no vehicles at all for several years so you had a seller's market for a long period of time. You could sell almost anything you could make, regardless of whether it was any good or not. People just wanted to buy transportation and admittedly we didn't make a terribly good product.”

The seller's market was a big help, but by itself it was not enough. “Really,” Henry told me, “the credit for pulling this place together and operating it and making it tick and getting us onto an even keel belongs to Ernie Breech. He really did superb job here and it pulled us through.”

Breech brought some other top G.M. executives to F.M.C. — such as Lewis Crusoe, D.S. Harder and Harold Youngren. And Henry hired 10 young men who not only helped to build up the Ford Motor Company, but later played an important role in national politics and business. The 10 came to be known as the Whiz Kids, and among them were Robert S. McNamara, now president of the World Bank, Charles B. (Tex) Thornton, chairman of Litton Industries, Arjay Miller, dean of the Stanford Business School, and J.E. Lundy, executive vice president of F.M.C.the only Whiz Kid still with the

Henry hired the so‐called Whiz Kids in the fall of 1945: “I got this telegram signed by Tex Thornton saying that there were 10 of these fellows that had been working in stat control in the Air Force during the war and they were looking for a job as a group. So, I wired him back and said, ‘Come on in and we'll talk with you.’ “ Thornton went and met with Henry, who says he was convinced that the Ford Motor Company “certainly needed the kind of experience that these fellows all had, so we

Henry used his new team of managers to try to imitate the corporate structure that Alfred Sloan had created at G.M.: “I wanted to try to use as many of the General Motors systems as we possibly could, particularly their financial controls. And Ernie Breech had been steeped in that—he'd been the general assistant treasurer at General Motors. He'd had all that experience, and then these 10 guys [the Whiz Kids] had had a lot of systems‐analysis work in the Air Force. We didn't have any at all.”

Breech, assisted by Crusoe and the Whiz Kids, succeeded in giving Henry the strict financial controls he needed in order to make F.M.C. prosperous. “To make a profitable company,” a former Whiz Kid remembers, “you had to get the costs under control. There were controls put in on all costs—[both] administrative and manufacturing.”

In areas other than the imposition of financial controls, however, Henry's attempt to copy G.M. was not as successful. “At the beginning, we went pretty far—we went too far and then we had to retrench,” he says. “General Motors was put together by buying up a lot of separate companies. There were all these companies that they put together and then they systematized the whole thing.” To imitate Sloan's corporate system, Henry had to break up F.M.C. into autonomous units. In 1999, a separate Ford Division was created (McNamara was later head of the Ford Division). This division competed successfully against G.M. in the early 50's, but the other F.M.C. car division, the Lincoln‐Mercury Division, was not so successful: G.M. did better than Ford in the middle- and high‐priced fields. Therefore, another unit was set up, the Special Products Division, to produce a car in the $2,400 to $3,100 range‐and, in 1957, it intro-

There are many reasons for the failure of the Edsel. Some say the problem was styling—the car had an unpopular radiator grille. Others say that the failure was caused by the innumerable defects that plagued the early Edsels. Still others, like F.M.C. president Lee Iacocca, say that the “timing was just awful'—the Edsel came out just as the recession of 1958 was hitting the country and people were cutting back. Others, like Allan Nevins, have suggested that decentralization was to blame: “Perhaps the creation of a special Edsel division ... was unfortunate. The new unit had to struggle for recognition and support, sometimes against more powerful and experienced executives than those who could champion its

The Edsel was killed in 1959 after losses that have been estimated as high as $350 million, and its name entered the language as the synonym for “dud.” The Edsel Division died with the car. Soon after, F.M.C. abandoned the idea of splitting the company into separate car lines. Henry explains: “It just wasn't economically feasible for us. We couldn't afford to have these separate divisions with all the overheads. [G.M. has] to do it because they've got twice our volume. ... They have their own engineering department for each car line. We broke it just never worked. We thought we had a Mercury Division but we didn't have a Mercury Division. We called it a Mercury Division and we thought we were smart, but we were stupid.”

While it is true that Ford is a much smaller company than its rival, General Motors, size does not totally account for the failure of decentralization at Ford. Perhaps the real reason is that one man ultimately controls F.M.C. and makes the final decisions. As long as Henry 2d is at the top, there will be no real decentralization of power at F.M.C. Galbraith praises Henry for his initial understanding that “the Ford Motor Company could only survive with a deep management structure—so he brought over the Whiz Kids and built a structure of competence. He said he hoped to bring F.M.C. to the point G.M. had reached, where it had an ongoing competence that was wholly independent of any one man.” But Galbraith says that when Henry saw his vision approaching fulfillment, he also saw that consequently he would become just one member of a management team, and he did not like it. “If 1 interpret this correctly,” Galbraith says, “as Henry got older, he began to have some of the same reactions as his grandfather about the devolution of power which left him without power. My impression is that in the last 10 years there have been traces of his grandfather's reactions—a feeling that the process has rendered him redundant, and he has resented it. There's a definite tension between Henry Ford 2d and the organization, and this is very interesting in terms of the psychological parallels of what caused the departure of James Couzens

In the late 50's, Henry, according to his executives, began to assert himself more and more, Finally, in 1960, he turned to Breech and said, “I've graduated, Ernie.” Breech politely moved over (and soon, out) and Henry took the reins of power firmly into his own hands, where they have rested since that time. “He's in command, let's not kid around,” one top F.M,C. executive said to me. “lie's been in command for years. Even when Mr. Breech was here, toward the end Henry had taken over and was in

There have been many dramatic examples of Henry's use of power. Probably the most notorious episode was the firing of Arjay Miller as president of Ford in 1968. The most recent is the shunting aside of Lee Iacocca in favor of the new vice chairman, Philip Caldwell.

Arjay Miller started out at Ford in 1946 as one of the Whiz Kids. By 1963 he had become president of the company. Everything seemed to he going along quite well until one evening in February 1968, when Miller returned to Detroit from a trip to Latin America. He was surprised to find a message waiting for him at the airport instructing him to go to the chairman's office at once. He did, and found Henry waiting to tell him that he was going to be replaced by Semon E. (Bunkie) Knudsen, an executive vice president of General Motors. The blow was somewhat softened; Miller would not be ousted but “elevated” to vice chairman. But, as editor Martin Hayden puts it: “There isn't any doubt that

“I was absolutely shocked,” one Ford official remembers. “Arjay was one of Henry's great favorites.” Miller says that he was determined that “I was not going to get mad and didn't. Henry was the boss.” He does admit, however, that the hiring of Knudsen was the cause of his subsequent departure from Ford: “I thought was a better man than Knudsen. I am a proud man. I would never have left if he hadn't brought Knudsen in.”

What was behind the re- placement of Miller? Bunkie Knudsen was a big name in the automobile industry. His father had been president of G.M. and, at the time Henry hired him, Bunkie himself was a well‐known executive vice president of G.M. A former Ford executive says that the hiring of Knudsen was yet another part of Henry's continuous effort to copy G.M.: “At that point, Henry wanted to imitate G.M. by bringing in Bunkie Knudsen who was thought to be a red‐hot merchandiser. So he fired Arjay and brought in Bunkie. That was a ruthless exercise of power.” Henry says, “I think Arjay would tell you that he wasn't the type of fellow from the background standpoint, or anything else, to he an operating fellow. He's much more at ease, and also more capable, in the staff areas. I would have kept him here forever if he'd wanted to stay as vice chairman. But I guess he wasn't very happy as vice chair-

Henry, in fact, refuses to admit that he moved Miller upstairs in favor of Knudsen. He merely says, “Maybe I did wrong. I think [Arjay] felt that it was a sideways move. thought, and maybe I didn't tell it properly to him, that it was a strengthening move in the overall management of the company. But he didn't see it that way, and that's the important part.”

Only 19 months after the installation of Knudsen as president of F.M.C., Henry called a press conference to announce yet another surprise. This time, he told the astonished reporters that Knudsen was through, and that he would be replaced by a triumvirate consisting of Lee Iacocca, Robert Stevenson and Robert J. Hampson. “Things just did not work out with Bunkie,” was the only explanation that Henry offered for the shakeup. Knudsen, who says that he had “no inkling” that Henry was displeased with him—“I didn't know I had any problems”—also says that Henry did not elaborate privately on what had gone wrong: “He just came in and told me—I think it was on a Monday.” Knudsen adds with an air of resignation: “After all, he owns the business and can do

At the time, however, Knudsen did not accept Henry's action so gracefully. He even called his own press conference to make it clear to the world that Ford had fired him‐and for no good reason.

Henry is still reticent about the Knudsen debacle: “The people that were here and had been here for a long time just didn't accept Knudsen. And we sort of had a—not a mutiny, but just sort of an uprising, and it just wasn't working. It was impeding progress and we just had to do something about it. I was very keen on bringing him here. I mean, God, it was my idea. I just made a mistake.”

Henry admits that firing Knudsen was one of his worst moments: “It was very hard, but God almighty, you just have to do it. You just have to step up to it and ....”

Some say the Knudsen episode was just an aberration; others, that the abrupt hiring and even more abrupt firing of Knudsen exemplify Henry's temperament. “He's very unpredictable,” a Ford execu- live told me. “That adjective has to be used. You cannot predict his actions at all, and if you try, you're out of your mind. I think he enjoys being unpredictable.” Would you be surprised if Henry threw you out tomorrow? I asked. “No,” was the answer.

The latest big management. shake‐up at Ford occurred last April when Henry called a press conference to announce the formation of yet another triumvirate to rule his company—this one consisting of Henry, Lee Iacocca and Philip Caldwell. The big news was that Henry said that when he was not available to make decisions, Caldwell would make them. This was a slap in the face for Iacocca, who had been president of the company since 19711 and thus, for the better part of a decade, No. 2 to Henry. Iacocca, who invented the Mustang, is a big star in the industry, but Henry's announcement was a blow to both his career and his pride. A friend of Iacocca's tells me that he wanted to quit, but his friend advised him to “think of your stock and of your salary” — which, with bonuses, amounts to a tidy million dollars per year. For the moment, Iacocca has complied and stayed at Ford, although there are rumors that he will

Such changes have left Henry with a reputation for falling in and out of love with managers. This seems to he his one major flaw as a man- ager — “the one business objection,” as one top man at F.M.C. puts it. So, Ford executives are left with a certain anxiety about their futures. One told me that Henry feels threatened by strong men and that “if somebody as strong as Bob McNamara had stayed, think there would have been a problem, too.” Henry sloughs off the charge and says, “1 didn't fall out with anyone in particular. It's much easier for people to analyze from the outside, sometimes.”

If it is clear that Henry's management techniques have veered toward the autocratic, the end result seems to be that, despite such behavior, he has managed to make a company that was once losing $9 million a month into one of the largest industrial companies in the world. Some argue that Henry could have done better—that he will go down in the books for throwing out Bennett and installing Breech, not for his performance after that time. “Since then,” one financial analyst told me, “I regard his activities as those of a semiserious dabbler. Henry wants the ultimate power, but running the company day by day doesn't interest him, The Ford Motor Company will operate most of the time like G.M., but it's always subject to the capricious person that he is. He can reverse anything. He has a position of extraordinary strength in a major corporation, but he hasn't produced anything major since the over-

Others give him high marks as a manager. David Lewis of the University of Michigan Business School says that he thinks Henry has “done a good job. I've never had the feeling that the company would be better off with somebody else in charge.”

Wall Street analyst Ron Glantz, a specialist in the auto industry, points out that Ford stock is selling at only three times earnings, but he says that in the last 10 years Ford stock has outperformed Gent eral Motors. Glantz qualifies his praise by explaining that “in the mid‐60's, G.M. was selling for a considerably higher multiple than Ford, and therefore had further to decline—but even so, Ford's earnings performance is somewhat better than G.M.'s.”

When Henry looks back over his 33‐year career at the Ford Motor Company, he feels satisfaction. What was the greatest challenge he faced? “Getting the company turned around in the beginning.” Would he do it differently if he had it to do all over again? “1 suppose there are a lot of things if 1 sat down and went over all the details. Well, I guess you only learn by your mistakes, so 1 don't suppose you can do it differently. You'd just make different mis-

This is altogether too comfortable a verbal formula. There are ways to measure Henry Ford's success other than by the price of his stock. He has been a public man, for many years a potent force in the largest foundation in the world, and the object, along with the other moguls of the auto industry, of the execrations of the consumer movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader. Nader recently told me that Henry has been more harmful to the cause of auto safety than the chiefs of other automobile corporations, because “he's more visible and because he's more in control of his corporation, and he's always thought that he could have direct telephone access

The exciting high point of Henry Ford 2d's business life was an adventure in the traditional Western genre: Son returns to claim inheritance and routs the outlaws, But that was 30 years ago. To appreciate the moral of Ford's career as an archetypal American capitalist, there is still many a tale to tell. ■