The Outsider
craig mcnamara2007_1_29One of the haunting images of the 1960s was the figure of Robert McNamara standing in front of a large map of Vietnam, briefing reporters. Waving a pointer, the Secretary of Defense would tick off numbers of troop deployments, air raids, and enemy dead, bringing the war into the living rooms of America in an earnest, cerebral way.
Among the “best and brightest” in John F. Kennedy’s fledgling government, none seemed better or brighter than McNamara. He was a towering figure in American history in the second half of the twentieth century. But following his years at the Pentagon, in which he managed escalation of the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1968, came decades of roiling debate about his wisdom, his character, his morality. It all left the legacy of an earlier career in the shadows.
A half-century ago, Robert Strange McNamara was a dazzling young star, brilliant and voluble in debate, rising through the ranks at the Ford Motor Company. Yet his ignorance when it came to actual automobiles remains the stuff of legend in Detroit. For instance, he planned to economize by bringing out a sluggish two-speed transmission instead of the standard three-speed of the day, an idea that horrified Ford’s engineers.
He once suggested that Ford cars be built in two pieces, then painted and welded together. It was a solution to the problem of how to fit freshly painted bodies into Model T–vintage drying ovens that were too small for the autos of the 1950s. The penny-pinching controller was loath to invest in new ovens. One of Ford’s manufacturing executives bluntly told him that the idea wouldn’t work. A chassis could not be welded together after the body had been painted without severely weakening the structure. When McNamara persisted, the man snapped: “The problem with you is that you don’t know a goddamn thing about how our cars are actually made.” McNamara banned the executive from further meetings on the subject.
Going head to head with McNamara at Ford in the 1950s was like pleading a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The questions flew fast and knifelike. For many Ford executives it was a withering, demoralizing experience. McNamara dominated every meeting he ever took part in at Ford, including those involving his boss, Henry Ford II. The auto industry had never seen anyone like him.
After a meteoric rise, McNamara was named Ford’s president on November 9, 1960, at the age of 44, the first non-Ford family member to hold the title. But just 34 days later he accepted President-elect John F. Kennedy’s offer to run the Pentagon instead. Many at Ford weren’t sorry to see him go. His critics accused him of having no feel for the cars and trucks the company designed, built, and sold. Once he complained that the sporty, V-8-powered 1955 Thunderbird he took home over a weekend got lousy gas mileage, as though fuel economy was to be expected from such a car.
Forty-seven years after leaving Dearborn, he still symbolizes an ancient divide in the auto industry, between the “bean counters” and the “car guys.” In the 1960s Ford men often repeated the story of how McNamara had “designed” a car while sitting in church one Sunday. He showed up for work the next morning with a piece of paper on which he had laid down the contours of a new model. Only he hadn’t done it with a drawing, as a car guy would have. His doodling had been in numbers. He had written down a desired length, weight, cost, investment level, and price, with no word about how the car should look or feel.
He did have a vision for automobiles, but it had nothing to do with chrome or horsepower or tailfins. Instead he was absorbed by such novel concepts as safety, fuel economy, and basic utility. He advocated qualities that 20 years later would make Japanese carmakers big powers in the United States.
“He wanted small cars way back then,” recalls Lee Iacocca, who as a young man worked under McNamara. “He wanted pollution controls. I didn’t know what he meant when he talked about emissions in the 1950s. He said we had to start worrying about pollutants. People didn’t know what the hell the ecology was.”
ford motor company2007_1_31Unlike most Detroit auto executives of the day, McNamara did not grow up a car enthusiast. Born in San Francisco in 1916, he entered the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1933. He was a star student, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, who enjoyed spending his summers climbing mountains. After graduating in 1937, he went off to Harvard Business School, and in 1939 he joined the San Francisco office of Price Waterhouse & Company as an accountant. Bored, he returned to Harvard in 1940 to teach accounting. He was the youngest assistant professor in the business school.
One morning in May of 1942 he and other junior faculty members were summoned to the office of the dean, Wallace Donham. Gen. H. H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, was seeking academics to teach statistical process control to young officers. McNamara headed off to Washington and eventually enlisted in the Army Air Forces himself.
By the autumn of 1945, when he was 29, McNamara, his friend and commanding officer Col. Charles B. “Tex” Thornton, and eight other young officers in the Army Air Forces’ Statistical Control Office were pondering a re-entry into civilian life. They were a team of academic stars Thornton had assembled in 1942 to solve the fledgling Army Air Forces’ massive transport and supply problems. They had done an astonishingly good job, and it had been a crash course in organization and analysis.
Now Thornton, the group’s 32-year-old chief, plotted for them to sell themselves as an elite management force for a large and needy American corporation. In October one of them, Arjay Miller, came across a Life magazine article about troubles at Ford. Sensing an opportunity, Thornton sent Henry Ford II a telegram. “I would like to see you regarding a subject which I believe would be of immense interest,” he wrote. “This concerns a system which has been developed and applied successfully in the management of the Army Air Forces for the past three years. Reference if desired is Robert A. Lovett Asst. Secy. of War for Air.”
The day Thornton sent the telegram he and his team were invited to Dearborn. But McNamara wasn’t convinced Ford was the right place for the group to land. If there was an antiquated American company that seemed unlikely to survive in the postwar world, Ford was it. Furthermore, he had been invited to return to Harvard as a full-time faculty member. However, both he and his wife had contracted polio earlier in 1945 (his was a mild case), and they faced substantial medical bills. When he told Thornton he wasn’t much interested in Ford, Thornton replied, “You’d better get interested. Didn’t you tell me you were broke? You owe it to your wife.”
In early November, McNamara visited Ford with Charles Bosworth, another member of the Stat Control team. A group meeting had been arranged with Henry Ford II. “Hank the Deuce” was a year younger than McNamara and only two months earlier had wrested power from his senile 82-year-old grandfather, Henry Ford, and the founder’s fearsome henchman, Harry Bennett. The younger Ford knew he was out of his depth suddenly running the corporation.
Thornton did the talking, describing how the Stat Control team had coordinated the Allies’ global bombing campaign, which they’d done by compiling and analyzing reams of data on planes, bombs, airfields, fuel depots, pilots, crew members, and targets. McNamara had squeezed 30 percent more flying hours out of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s B-29 bombers simply by getting a handle on the numbers of crews and planes and rescheduling them more efficiently. When Thornton offered to perform similar miracles at Ford, the industrialist was sold. Arjay Miller, who became president of Ford in the 1960s, recalled, “Henry sat on a couch with his top lieutenant, John Bugas. At the end of the meeting, Henry said, ‘I want to hire all 10 of you. How much money do you want to make?’”
In 1946 the Whiz Kids, as they became known, moved into the Ford Motor Company. They drew up organizational charts, created job descriptions, split the company into divisions, put together the first coordinated production schedule, and delivered the first cash-flow forecast.
Ford had never undergone a certified public accounting. An accounting firm was brought in, worked for a year, and gave it up as impossible. Then Fred Secrest joined Ford early in 1948 as part of a second wave from Harvard Business School who would try to bring order from chaos. “The finance department had been old ladies in tennis shoes doing enough work to pay the bills,” Secrest said.
ford motor company2007_1_31aNot long after Secrest arrived, the 32-year-old McNamara was made controller. Over the next few years the Whiz Kids helped turn one of the most loosely governed giants in American industry into a cradle of micromanagement. Initially all 10 Whiz Kids reported directly to Henry Ford II. Thornton became the company’s planning director until he clashed with two older executives Henry II had hired from General Motors in 1946 to serve as top lieutenants, Ernest Breech and Lewis Crusoe. Thornton couldn’t keep his raw ambition in check; in January 1948 Breech fired him.
It was McNamara’s job as controller to mind the bottom line, keeping tabs on the product specialists who would design and develop Ford vehicles under Lewis Crusoe. He brought enormous zeal and self-righteousness to the task and became known as the company’s great naysayer. The car guys thought the bean counters were bloodless and rational to a fault. The finance men had their own term for the car guys: hot dogs .
McNamara “wasn’t a warm person,” said Secrest. “He was never interested in talking about movies or football. He was not a teller of anecdotes, not a man of small talk.” All he did was get down to business.
“In arguments he was so intimidating to people who didn’t have the same intellectual training, not just his brilliance but his training. He would almost always carry the day in a meeting because of the sheer force of his arguing style. He was so fast and so relentless. When he would talk to engineers, he was unrelenting in getting them to stop disagreeing. They tried to find an engineer who was as good at presenting the other side, the other view in a management debate, someone who would be able to say, ‘Just a minute, Bob, you are making an unwarranted inference on line 23 of schedule A.’ But there was no one who could.”
One of the biggest battles grew out of the poor reliability of Ford cars after the war. The factories were small and cramped and couldn’t keep up with booming demand. Starting in 1949, Lewis Crusoe launched a campaign to renovate the outdated facilities and bring Ford’s quality closer to that of Chevrolet. McNamara was the chief obstacle. He used a tactic that became known at Ford as “slow walking,” launching study after study, dragging out the approval process while Crusoe and his men grew increasingly frustrated.
The debate continued for three years, and the showdown that finally occurred in 1953 was a watershed in Ford’s history. Henry Ford II, the final arbiter, decided to spend $500 million—less than half of what Crusoe wanted—to refurbish the factories, even though it would mean going to banks to borrow the funds. It was a comeuppance for McNamara, who pressed for still more deliberation. At one point Ford turned on his young finance man: “Bob, the problem with you is you always want to study things. You never want to do anything.”
Crusoe, Ford’s chief car guy, was responsible for the gorgeous 1955 Thunderbird two-seater, an enthusiast’s dream car. McNamara had little use for it. The very idea of an image car grated on him, violating his deepest principles. A car should be rational, above all, and a two-seater by definition was not.
In January 1955 Crusoe was promoted. McNamara replaced him as head of the Ford Division, which built and sold the Thunderbird. The younger man quickly earned the eternal wrath of T-Bird lovers by making the car a four-seater. When McNamara discovered that a subordinate was looking for a way to keep the two-seat version alive—by getting suppliers to lower parts costs—he scolded the man: “The car is dead! I don’t want to hear about it again.”
The four-passenger T-Bird was launched as a 1958 model and soon turned into a cash machine. In 1960 Ford sold more than 90,000, far more than the two-seater ever achieved. At the same time Chevrolet was moving only a few thousand a year of the Thunderbird’s two-seat rival, the Corvette. The bean counter’s instincts had been right.
McNamara also didn’t think much of Jack Reith’s gaudy 1957 Mercury Turnpike Cruiser, a ungainly, overdesigned sedan meant to move Ford’s Mercury brand upmarket. And by April 1955 Ford had another car in development that he couldn’t stomach. Code-named the E-car, the new model would eventually be called Edsel, Henry Ford II having decided to name it after his late father.
While he was Secretary of Defense, McNamara’s political foes enjoyed labeling him as the man responsible for the most famous new-product debacle in U.S. business history. In fact he did inherit responsibility for the Edsel at about the time it hit the market in 1957, but he had opposed the project from the beginning. It was precisely the kind of overcooked automobile he had always tried to steer the company away from.
The Edsel was Crusoe and Reith’s master plan to match General Motors by introducing a whole new division between the entry-level Ford and more upscale Mercury brands. McNamara hated the idea. He said, “You can’t break into a market dominated by well-established brands unless you provide something those brands don’t. We’re not going to have great price or mechanical advantage, and I have my doubts about styling… .” He also saw no need for an entirely new field of dealers and layer of bureaucracy.
But Henry Ford II was enthusiastic about the project, and McNamara, who after all was running the rival Ford Division, was in no position to block the E-car. Still, he continued to lobby against it. Some historians believe the Edsel might have succeeded had it not been for McNamara’s maneuverings. He created an Edsel challenger at the Ford Division by stretching out the basic Fairlane and piling on the standard equipment—everything from a radio and whitewalls to tinted glass and a two-tone finish—all for just $2,556.
Launched in late 1956, the Fairlane 500 was an immediate hit, not only reducing Chevrolet’s dominance but also undercutting the Edsel, which would debut nine months later. Arjay Miller recalls, “Bob said, ‘Let me build a little bigger Ford.’ In 1957 Buick was getting 10 percent of the market. Two or three years later it was down to half of that because of Bob’s idea.”
Crusoe suffered a heart attack in October 1956. The following May, McNamara succeeded him as group vice president in charge of all of the corporation’s car divisions, including Edsel. The first Edsels were scheduled to go on sale in September 1957. He ordered a $200 hike in the prices of all 1958 models and raised the Edsel’s price too, even though it was a 1957 model. Edsel executives howled, but to no avail.
At an August 1957 Edsel press event, McNamara was asked by Fairfax Cone, head of the ad agency handling the Edsel account, what he thought of the new car. “I’ve got plans for phasing it out,” he is said to have replied.
The Edsel briefly sold well and then tanked, troubled by poor production quality, fuzzy marketing, and a grille design that drew comparisons to everything from a horse collar to a toilet seat. McNamara bore down. C. Gayle Warnock, Edsel’s PR chief, described in his book The Edsel Affair how the boss terrorized the division. One snowy day that winter McNamara called an early-morning meeting of Edsel’s beleaguered marketing executives. Not even stopping to remove his galoshes, he launched into a blistering attack on their sales campaign. One by one he ripped down ad slicks that had been posted in the room as he pointed out the deficiencies in each advertisement. The Edsel men watched in stunned silence.
By November panic had erupted in the Edsel dealer network. The retailers had each invested tens of thousands of dollars in new facilities and many were flat giving up. A few would commit suicide. In a closed-circuit television conference in December, Henry Ford asked the dealers to hang on, but by then McNamara had begun circulating memos recommending that the Edsel be canceled. Sales never did pick up, and in November 1959 Ford pulled the plug.
The Edsel disaster cost the company $350 million and wiped out much of Crusoe’s “car guy” faction at Ford. Incapacitated by his heart attack, Crusoe was out of the picture. Jack Reith, whose Mercury Turnpike Cruiser also bombed, shouldered much of the blame for the Edsel. His downfall eliminated the final obstacle to McNamara’s ascendance.
In August 1957 McNamara removed Reith as head of the Mercury Division. Henry Ford offered Reith a lesser position running Ford of Canada, but he refused the demotion and resigned. He joined the Avco Manufacturing Corporation, a diversified company, but after failing to win the CEO job, he killed himself in 1960.
McNamara had a much different view of automobiles from Reith, an enthusiast who loved racing. His chief concerns were fuel economy and safety. He may have been the first senior executive at an American auto company to care at all about either. Soon after taking over at the Ford Division in 1955, McNamara had gone way out on a limb by adding several safety devices to the 1956 model and then making them the focal point of the marketing campaign. By today’s standards it was a modest effort. The 1956 Ford’s five-part Lifeguard System included two standard features, a deep-dish steering wheel that gave way in a crash and safety latches that kept doors from springing open on impact. Three options also were offered: front seat belts anchored to a steel plate; a padded instrument panel and padded sun visors; and rearview mirrors with backing that reduced glass fallout when shattered. Also, the front and back seat supports were redesigned to reduce the possibility of their coming loose in a crash.
McNamara claimed that the number of injuries resulting from auto accidents could be cut in half. But he ran into a storm of opposition inside the company. When he outfitted the thousand or so cars in the Ford Division corporate fleet with safety belts, hardly any executives used them. Once after flying to Dallas to attend a dealer meeting, he was picked up at the airport by a company driver. When the man saw McNamara fastening his belt, he asked, “What’s the matter, don’t you trust my driving?”
For a short time the ’56 Fords sold well. In fact, there was so much demand for seat belts that the company couldn’t keep up. Then sales hit a rut. Car buyers didn’t know what to make of the safety message, or else they simply didn’t want to be reminded that cars could be unsafe.
ford motor company2007_1_35In 1955 Chevrolet had outsold Ford by 67,000 cars. In 1956 Chevrolet increased the gap to 190,000 units. Henry Ford II grew impatient, finally griping to a reporter, “McNamara is selling safety, but Chevrolet is selling cars.” The experience spawned a new credo that went unchallenged in the auto industry for decades: Safety doesn’t sell. Yet McNamara had caught a glimpse of the future. In 1965 Congress passed the first federal safety standards, including everything the 1956 Fords had and more. Still, safety hadn’t sold in 1956, and it was a blow to McNamara’s career, if not his pride.
For a while his job was on the line. It took an inventive sales promotion to save the model year for Ford. A 31-year-old regional sales director named Lee Iacocca thought up a come-on, “56 for 56,” persuading tens of thousands of customers in the Philadelphia area to buy the 1956 model for a payment of $56 a month when they put 20 percent down.
The regional promotion went national, and McNamara brought Iacocca up from the minors. “He took a liking to me,” said Iacocca, who would become Ford’s president in December 1970. “He was a genius, the ultimate computer mind.” But the younger man was one thing McNamara was not, gregarious, and McNamara relied on Iacocca to help him navigate the backslapping world of dealers, the part of the business in which Iacocca had cut his teeth.
McNamara infused his protégé with a measure of his own discipline, the kind of attention to systems and controls Iacocca would use a quarter-century later to bring Chrysler back from the dead. The older man fascinated the young Iacocca: “He’d say, ‘I’m going to give you five good reasons why you don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about,’ and then he’d tick them off. When I tried that, I couldn’t remember what the hell my fourth point was.”
Although he was Detroit’s fastest-rising star, McNamara still acquitted himself like the academic he had been. He refused to buy one of the big houses in the suburban enclaves of Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills. Instead he settled in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. These days Ann Arbor is a popular address for Detroit executives, but in the 1950s living in the shadow of the college was a rejection of the auto establishment.
Robert Angell, the head of the university’s sociology department, was McNamara’s neighbor and friend, and he once alarmed McNamara by saying he planned to switch from a Pontiac to a Chevy because his Pontiac was getting too big for the garage. McNamara began to wonder if Fords were getting too big. Sales of the undersized Volkswagen Beetle were having an impact in the United States, and McNamara had taken notice. He asked one of his executives, Robert Eggert, to do some research. “Who the hell are buying these cars?” he asked.
Other Detroit executives mocked the odd-looking, rear-engine German car. Nobody would buy a VW if he could afford something better, they said. Eggert came back to McNamara with word that young, affluent professionals were snapping up VWs, not just budget-minded buyers.
The Beetle was McNamara’s kind of car—simple, inexpensive to produce, reliable, profitable. He began asking for studies of the market for foreign economy cars. They projected that sales of these cars would rise to 360,000, roughly 6 percent of the industry total, by 1961. In 1958 VW sold 78,588 cars and trucks in the United States. By 1964 the number had soared to 306,024, and it would eventually approach 600,000.
McNamara believed Ford should counter with a similar-size low-priced model, but once again he ran into opposition inside the company. Crusoe had long argued that Ford couldn’t make money on a small car. But McNamara was relentless, grinding out one study after another, stacking up the evidence until his colleagues gave in. On March 19, 1958, the board of directors approved the economy-car project.
If the Turnpike Cruiser personified Reith’s reckless optimism, Ford’s new small compact was true to McNamara’s cautious, utilitarian nature. With typical economy, he took the design of the car off the shelf. Earle MacPherson, inventor of the MacPherson strut (which forms the basis for a widely used suspension system), had earlier come over from Chevrolet and brought with him a plan for a small Chevy that was to have been called the Cadet. GM management had never approved the project, but McNamara did. He kept repeating one message to his engineers: “Put in value, not cost.”
The car rolled out in the autumn of 1959 as the 1960 Falcon. It was sensible in every way, basic four-cylinder transportation priced at just $1,912. It was the car McNamara left for automotive historians to judge him by, and it reflected his sense of value and utility and austerity. It was successful too, reaching 600,000 in annual sales. He remained forever proud of the Falcon. He bought one soon after moving to Washington and once drove up to an elegant dinner at Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Washington home in his beloved compact. LBJ burst out laughing.
Ford’s car guys hated the Falcon too. “McNamara made a car that looked like him. He had had those granny glasses and he made a granny car,” said Harold Sperlich, of Ford and later Chrysler. “He didn’t seem like a car-company president, if you will,” said Mac Gordon, an automobile journalist, who interviewed McNamara many times at Ford. “Ed Cole, his famous counterpart at Chevrolet, was a real car guy. You’d go into his office and see pictures of race cars and air bags, car stuff. Not in McNamara’s office.” Secrest says: “You would not have found him in an interview talking about being underneath a car as a kid, trying to make himself sound like a great car lover. It didn’t mean anything to him.”
The enthusiasts inside Ford breathed a sigh of relief when McNamara left for Washington. They were now free to design fun cars, cars with emotional appeal and good looks.
Indeed, much of what McNamara had done in the way of product was soon undone by his protégé. When Iacocca took over the Ford Division in late 1960, he tried to jazz up the Falcon. McNamara is said to have cursed when he saw Iacocca’s “European-style” 1963 convertible version of his car.
McNamara had planned to bring Ford of Germany’s Cardinal small car to the United States to do battle with European imports. It had a four-cylinder engine that got excellent fuel economy but was dull as dishwater to look at. Iacocca felt it was wholly unsuited for American tastes. He called it “a little old lady’s car.” McNamara conceded that the Cardinal would not earn outstanding profits, but there would be no tooling costs because German factories were already producing it. The Cardinal would be imported. Give it two or three years to see if it could catch on in America, McNamara thought. If it caught on, they’d build it in the United States. But one of Iacocca’s first actions when he took over as head of the Ford Division in late 1960 was to kill the project. He told Henry Ford II that the Cardinal was “a loser.”
With McNamara off to Washington, Ford’s car guys were ascendant again. They used the McNamara-in-church story to illustrate how out of touch the man had been when it came to automobiles: He had not conceived of a car that Sunday morning but merely a set of specifications. Yet what he had really done when he pulled out a pen in the Ann Arbor First Presbyterian Church was to outline the essential facts of what became the 1962 Ford Fairlane, a car that would fit neatly between the compact Falcon and the larger, standard-size Galaxie. The vision he saw in church was a coming gap in the market, and the car he projected would be called an “intermediate.”
When it went on sale in the fall of 1961 as the 1962 Ford Fairlane (and, with some styling variations, the Mercury Meteor), it changed the industry forever by upsetting GM’s long-serving “step-up” system of retaining customers. With its multiple brands, GM had since the 1920s been moving buyers up and out of basic Chevys to Pontiacs as they grew older and more affluent. Pontiac customers moved up to Buick, Buick to Cadillac, and so on. When Ford brought out the ’62 Fairlane, GM had to respond with its own intermediate, the 1964 Chevelle.
McNamara’s idea was to avoid the expense of setting up a new division for each model, as the company had tried with the Edsel. Instead he aimed to offer more models within the Ford brand. The strategy worked, and it changed the way things were done in Detroit. Soon each GM brand needed a full complement of models, not just one step on the ladder to Cadillac. The costs for the number-one automaker became enormous.
“McNamara fragmented the automaker and destroyed GM’s step-up system,” said Michael W. R. Davis, an automobile historian. “This splintering of market destroyed the GM strategy and is part of the problem that GM finds itself in today.” Henry Ford II also gave McNamara credit for this in a 1980 interview with the historian David Lewis. “I think maybe the whole growth of the automobile industry over the last [20] years is due to some thinking of McNamara’s with respect to the proliferation of car lines… . McNamara was the fellow who started this proliferation in our company.”
Arjay Miller today calls McNamara “the ideal product planner. He doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Bob set up first product-planning department in a car company, something never heard of in the auto industry. Before that, product planning had been part of the engineering department.” He took a rational approach to product divisions, and the result was the Falcon. “American companies were not building small cars, but Bob saw it was the right thing for America. The Falcon was a big success because it was a small car, the mechanics were solid, it was durable, and it got good fuel economy.”
A lot of seconds-in-command to Henry Ford II eventually ran out of luck with the man whose name was on the building. And McNamara was more independent-minded than most. It seemed inevitable that the two eventually would have their day of reckoning. Ford complained to David Lewis: “You couldn’t run it your own way if McNamara was around.” He said, “McNamara’s problem is that he’s mentally so far ahead of everybody else that he can’t get down on the same level with others very easily, and that causes communication problems.”
But Ford was also moved to tears the day McNamara announced he was leaving. “This may be one of the worst days of my life,” the chairman told a visitor to his home. “I can’t believe it happened… . I spent years training him. He’s the first president outside the family. After all those years of training he’s leaving. I can’t believe it. Now what do I do?”
Had McNamara stayed until turning 65 in 1981, a much different Ford Motor Company would have evolved, one braced for the twin oil crises of the 1970s and one that might not have been caught short when the Japanese came along with well-built, low-priced small cars, powered by fuel-efficient engines. And his record suggests that McNamara would have readied the company for the federal safety regulations of the late 1960s that so perplexed and angered Henry Ford II.“McNamara would have been very good at anticipating and finding solutions to those things,” said Secrest, who retired in 1980 after several years as executive vice president in charge of government relations. “He would have got us ready for all of that.”
Still, 47 years after McNamara left Dearborn, Ford has never quite gotten the man out of its system. It remains more button-down than GM and Chrysler. Ford executives look, speak, and even dress a little differently. And there remains a certain intellectual slant at Ford, an academic rigor. The company has been regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as a sort of university for auto executives, a thinking man’s corporation, sometimes to a fault. It bothered McNamara in later years that so few senior executives in the auto industry had been educated in first-class universities. He believed it was one reason American car companies fell behind the rest of the world in the second half of the century. Still, he was unlikely to have remained at Ford. He was too different from everyone else.
He once remarked of his Ford years: “People have often said to me, ‘Well, you sound like a wild hare. How is it that you were able to survive? … My God, how is it that you were able to stay there? You lived in Ann Arbor, a university community; you pushed safety; and you didn’t contribute to the Republicans; how did you handle it?’” His answer: “Well, in a sense, Henry Ford II, the board, the owners, and I had a deal. I could make profits for them, and as long as I could benefit the company, they would allow me to pursue some of these idiosyncrasies.”
