Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  “But Bob,” said Kaplan, “that’s just not true.” He was well aware that Crusoe was extremely bitter over lost sales and production on the ’52 Ford and blamed McNamara and his resistance to the study for the loss.

  “I want you to do it,” McNamara said, pressing on. “I think it would be very helpful.” Suddenly Kaplan realized that a loyalty test of sorts was being administered and that his career hinged on what he did. Kaplan thought about that a long time, and he thought of his wife and two children, and he wrote a report which with some hedging and softening seemed to make McNamara’s point. As he wrote it he was sure for the first time that he would one day leave the Ford Motor Company.

  Observers who watched what happened next thought that it was not that Bob McNamara deliberately set out to break the once mighty and unquestioned power of the manufacturing and assembly division. But it offended him; he was modern and rational, and it, as it stood, was old-fashioned, often corrupt, and run by its own secret systems which to him were irrational. If nothing else, it was in his way. He was contemptuous of the plant managers and their backgrounds and what they represented, and he believed that they were wasteful, either deliberately so, out of avarice, or unintentionally, out of incompetence. Even the best of them had little chance with him; none of them could ever explain to his satisfaction or in his language why they did certain things. He set out instead to convert them, but to the men in the plants his idea of conversion was their idea of destruction. What in fact took place was a political act that would have an immense effect on the future of the company. At the time, of course, no one had any idea that something of such magnitude was taking place.

  In the beginning he rolled over Max Wiesmyer, the head of manufacturing. Wiesmyer was the central figure: He was the plant managers’ man in Detroit. When they really needed something, they called Max, and he would break through the red tape and get it for them. On one occasion, when one of his plant managers sent in an appropriations request, Wiesmyer gave it to one of his assistants, who examined it and told Wiesmyer that it was as phony as a three-dollar bill. “Max, we have to send this one back,” the assistant said. “It just isn’t any good.”

  “Listen,” Wiesmyer answered, “when one of my plant managers requests an appropriation, it’s not your job to examine it and find out what’s wrong—it’s your job to take it and fix it up so McNamara won’t bounce it.”

  No one else in this new age reflected the old era so faithfully as Wiesmyer. He knew all the sins of the past, and had managed, by governing his ambition, to avoid getting caught up in the endless power struggles under the original Henry Ford. Once when one of the bright young finance men assigned to him was asking a lot of questions, Wiesmyer said, “Young man, this is a company where you do not always want to know all the answers. What you don’t know may be better for you than what you do know.” He was born in Whitemore Lake, Michigan, in 1899, the son of a carpenter and small-time contractor. When he was eighteen, he thought about being a carpenter too, but the work those days was erratic, so Wiesmyer told his father he was going to try to land a position at Ford’s. He was worried that the anti-German feeling of the time might keep him from being hired, but he quickly got a job working in the machine-tool shop at 47 cents an hour. To him that was astonishing, making almost $5 a day for indoor work. He kept boasting to his friends that he had this miraculous job which kept him out of the cold. Over the next thirty years he worked at almost every job there was at Ford. In that career he had seen it all. He had laid out plants throughout America, and Europe as well. He had been in Holland when the first Henry Ford arrived to dedicate a new plant at Rotterdam.

  “Mr. Ford, here is our new plant,” Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly.

  “Where is the water?” the old man asked.

  “There isn’t any water,” Lord Perry replied.

  “Well, let’s get out of here,” Ford said. “I don’t even want to look at it.” That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.

  Wiesmyer stayed as far as he could from the power struggles between Sorensen and Bennett that marked the thirties at Ford. A Whiz Kid once asked him how he had survived the Sorensen-Bennett era, and Wiesmyer replied: “I was very good at being no one’s enemy and no one’s favorite.” Sorensen once bawled out Wiesmyer for the way he had laid out a plant in Richmond, California. “Why did you do it this badly?” Sorensen had screamed at him.

  “Mr. Sorensen, I thought...” Wiesmyer began.

  A dark look came over Sorensen’s face. “Who in the hell ever told you that you were supposed to think?” he said. And Sorensen, in Wiesmyer’s view, was better than Bennett. At least Sorensen was a good factory man. Bennett was just a bully. All he knew was how to beat up people.

  That someone so essentially decent as Wiesmyer had survived in so difficult an environment was no small badge of honor. That alone won him respect, for Max had kept his integrity when integrity had not been fashionable. His strength was that he was good with the men under him, and they, in turn, working under difficult conditions, would do things for him that they would not do for another boss. As long as Crusoe was the head of the Ford division, Wiesmyer was protected, for Crusoe understood this and knew his value. Wiesmyer had been offered the job of head of the Ford division before Crusoe had, but he had turned it down, thinking himself not properly prepared. Though they were very different men—Crusoe fastidious and college-educated, Wiesmyer rough-hewn—they became friends, taking vacations together in Palm Springs, and speaking, it seemed, their own private language as they puzzled out how to sustain a company so shaky that had needs so huge. Above all, Crusoe thoroughly understood and appreciated that Wiesmyer was holding together a once great but now ramshackle operation, and that he was doing it by virtue of the personal loyalties he generated. The assembly plants, Crusoe knew, were critical. In his words, they were the court of last resort, where things either were done the right way or they would be irretrievably wrong. Wiesmyer was the representative of the men who ran those assembly plants. He knew that there was waste built into the system, that all kinds of games were being played, but he had decided long ago that they were his men, they were running their factories under terrible conditions, and if they were playing games, these were merely games of survival, not games of greed. Thus his job was to protect them from finance and McNamara.

  With Crusoe elevated and McNamara at the head of the Ford division, Wiesmyer never had a chance. What he did best, his greatest skill, the handling of people, McNamara never gave him credit for; in fact, he distrusted him for it—to him it smacked of cronyism. Wiesmyer’s greatest weakness, the quantifying of what was happening in his factories, the turning of this clumsy, haphazard mechanical process into one yielding constant numerical truths, was McNamara’s strength—and his weapon. Wiesmyer hated McNamara’s numbers; he knew that each represented a loss of autonomy, and he could not cope with them. He was old-fashioned, he relied on personal trust, but McNamara seemed to brush all that aside. He pushed Wiesmyer relentlessly with numbers: Quantify this, meet these figures. He even demanded, for a time, that quality be quantified—points subtracted for things that were wrong. The effort came apart when it became clear that the men in the plants had learned to rig the system by having a few high-quality cars on hand for inspection and by taking the inspectors from Detroit out for drinks on the night they arrived. Don Bastian, one of the top manufacturing people, finally pleaded with Detroit to change the system. “You’re turning all my plant guys into drunks,” he said.

  Wiesmyer knew what was happening, that McNamara was moving on him, centralizing power, taking things that had once been under the jurisdiction of the plants and turning them over to Detroit, where the finance people could dominate them. The realities of manufacturing meant less and less; what those realities should be, according to Detroit’s numbers, meant more and more. McNamara wanted not only budgets, which was legitimate
; he wanted more and more control over the plant managers. For example, he ordered a salary freeze, so that no one new could be hired at the plants without Detroit’s approval. Every month there were more rules, more controls, all of them alien. From a world of instinct, the plants became a world of authorizations. Now there were constant directives coming from this alien capital, usually about production numbers, seldom about quality. Wiesmyer was furious. “If he wants to run the goddam factories,” Wiesmyer once said of McNamara, “why doesn’t he go out there and take one over and run it for a year? But not do it on paper.”

  Nothing reflected the new split personality of the Ford Motor Company, the clash between modern efficiency and old-time flawed reality, more than the battle of the paint ovens. Because the plants were in bad shape, inadequate to produce cars for the hungry postwar customers, there was soon a violent collision between McNamara and the manufacturing men over these facilities. The plant men wanted newer and better factories. McNamara wanted greater speed from the existing plants. The bottleneck, it quickly became clear, was the paint ovens. They were old, technologically outdated, and too small for contemporary cars. A manufacturing man, Neil Waud, told McNamara at one meeting of senior officials that there was no way that the painting could be expedited. Waud was stunned when McNamara then suggested that the chassis be built in two main parts, painted, and then welded together into one piece. Waud quickly explained why it was impractical, that the welding could not come after the painting and that even if it could, the car thus produced would be significantly weakened and vulnerable to all kinds of stress. But McNamara was insistent; there had to be a way to do this to speed up production. The more insistent he was, the blunter Waud became. “The problem with you,” Waud shouted, “is you don’t known a goddam thing about how our cars are actually made.” After the meeting broke up, McNamara turned to Sanford Kaplan, one of Waud’s superiors, and said, “I don’t want that man at any more meetings.”

  Wiesmyer, hearing the story, was both comforted and discomforted. It assured him that he himself was not crazy; it also made clear that there was no relief in sight.

  For McNamara was like a drill, relentlessly boring in on the assembly plants. No one worked as hard as he did, no one was as single-minded. Every day there was some new regulation, some new instrument of control. “I can’t deal with him,” Wiesmyer would tell friends. “This guy is crazy. It’s not about cars—I can deal with cars. It’s about numbers. Do you know what this guy does for a vacation? He climbs mountains. How can you deal with a guy who on his time off flies to some God-forsaken place and then climbs a mountain? You know, he pays good money to do that.”

  Wiesmyer began to change. He came to hate McNamara, and he would talk about him as “the son of a bitch.” “I know what he’s up to,” he would say. “He wants to get me, and he wants to get my people. They’ll be nothing left of us when he’s done.” First he fought actively, and when that failed, he fought McNamara with a kind of passive resistance. Once ebullient and extroverted, he began to retreat within himself. He became sullen and morose. Even McNamara was aware that something was happening. “What’s wrong with Max?” he would ask, and Wiesmyer’s friends would explain that Max was terrified of McNamara, that he could no longer defend himself, that he was sure that each meeting was going to expose some failure on his part. McNamara seemed to listen, but his approach never changed. Wiesmyer’s hands began to tremble. His speech sometimes became incoherent. At the end he became almost catatonic. After a little more than a year without Crusoe’s protection he had a complete breakdown. He was given shock treatment and had somewhat of a recovery, and in March 1956 he was given a job as a consultant, which demanded far less of him. In 1962 he retired, still shaken by his experience.

  With the elimination of Max Wiesmyer, the power of Ford manufacturing was effectively destroyed. The decisions on production—decisions the plants had to live with each day—were made in Detroit now, and made by men who had never worked in the plants. The old-timers and the men who could not keep up with the new style just faded away. They were not fired, except in rare circumstances. Many left the company of their own accord. Others, men in their late forties and their fifties, stayed but melted into the background, assigned to meaningless jobs. They were sinking and everyone knew it, and no one wanted to look at them. They existed but they did not exist. No wonder then that, with exceptions like Don Lennox, the bright young men at Ford did not want to go into the factories. The factories were a no-man’s-land, a limbo at best.

  So manufacturing, weakened, continued to weaken for lack of new blood. Politically, its power began to contract. There was one brief period, between 1961 and 1963, when John Dykstra, one of the GM people who had been brought over by Ernie Breech, served as president. But that was almost a fluke, and not a very happy one; it helped convince Henry Ford that he needed the new breed rather than the old at the top. Their decline accelerated from then on. The younger men were on a slower track. The senior manufacturing men rarely served on the board or reached the inner circle of Glass House power. Falling short of real power themselves, they could not reward their protégés. The company’s new elite, coming as it did from the nation’s best schools, looked down on these men who had usually been to middling state schools and whose clothes and way of speaking reflected it. The finance people begot strength; the manufacturing men’s weakness begot weakness. There was not only a diminished respect for them personally but also a corresponding disdain for what they did. They were no longer in the company’s most important division. They were now in its backwater.

  The Big Three in the auto industry stood virtually alone, possessors of what was in effect a shared monopoly, for the price of entry was too great for any start-up company. In an environment like that, power moved steadily from the product men, who took risks but were normally the creators of market share, to finance, whose agents knew how to maximize the profits of an existing share in a static industry. Since competition within the auto industry was mild, there was no impulse to innovate; to the finance people, innovation not only was expensive but seemed unnecessary. When engineers, especially foreigners, made breakthroughs like disk brakes and radial tires and fuel injection, it would be years, sometimes many years, before Detroit finally went ahead and added them either as standard equipment or as options. Why bother, after all? In America’s rush to become a middle-class society, there was an almost insatiable demand for cars. It was impossible not to make money, and there was a conviction that no matter what the sales were this year, they would be even greater the next. So there was little stress on improving the cars. From 1949, when the automatic transmission was introduced, to the late seventies, the cars remained remarkably the same. What innovation there was came almost reluctantly.

  Indeed, change, in the later part of that era, was contrived not to improve but in the most subtle way to weaken each car model, year by year. The company, in its drive for greater profit, would take the essential auto structure of the year before and figure out ways to increase the profits by reducing the cost of some of the parts. Not a lot was subtracted. From the outside the car might seem much the same as its forerunner, but Detroit had saved $1 million here and $2 million there by cutting tiny corners.

  The Ford Motor Company was becoming a stagnant place at which to work. The impulse of product, to make the best and most modern cars possible, was giving way to the impulse of profit, to maximize the margins and drive both the profit and the stock up. It did not happen overnight. It had begun with McNamara and his systems. Those systems, brought in originally because the company was in such desperate shape and needed discipline, became a force unto themselves. Men like Charley Beacham—the old-time boomer and salesman, Lee Iacocca’s great tutor—began to complain that men like Arjay Miller and Ed Lundy, both of them original Whiz Kids, both of them rising stars, didn’t really like cars, didn’t like dealers, and didn’t really like the business. Beacham was constantly urging Miller and Lundy to go to the dealers
’ conventions, which were the real communal rites of the auto business; you had to attend if you wanted to find out what was happening out there in America, for the dealers were the people who actually sold the cars. More often than not they refused. On the rare occasions that they did go, Beacham was struck by how uncomfortable they were, how difficult it was for them to talk to people whose passion in life was not so much even cars as the selling of cars. They could only, he claimed, talk to people just like themselves. When they did go to a convention, he would observe them ruefully. “Watch, now,” he would tell Iacocca. “Watch Arjay and Ed. They’ve been here as long as they can stand it. Now watch them start moving for the back door so they can get the hell out.” And sure enough, soon they would disappear.

  But it was as if the lack of feel for cars was beside the point. The finance people were rising to power because the company needed them and their skills. The decisions facing these huge postwar companies were novel and complicated, and no one with the average manufacturing man’s background could hope to run such a company or even play an important role. The government was now more involved in business, there were more lawyers and more pressure groups, the cost of doing everything was greater. It was, in short, becoming a far more difficult time in which to do business, and that helped the finance people, because they were trained to deal with the difficulties. They understood the complex new business world, and how to survive in it, as the old-timers did not.