The Reckoning
By David Halberstam
Morrow, 752 pages, $19.95
The American auto industry`s fall from pre-war grace while Japan`s automakers were rising from the ashes of war is the epic story David Halberstam tells in ”The Reckoning.” It is a story suffused not only with a melancholy drama, but also, Halberstam believes, a way of understanding America`s decline as an industrial power.
The narrative is divided into alternating sections covering the Ford Motor Co. and Nissan (chosen, Halberstam tells us, because they are the number-two companies in their respective countries). As in his other books, he builds this work on a series of portraits. He takes us into the life of a young Ford tool and die maker who winds up sadder but wiser after a long bout of unemployment caused by the company`s malaise; he also tells about the life of a Japanese engineer who ends his career covered in glory. But Halberstam is like a latter-day Carlyle in his belief that history is the sum of the acts of great men, and his emphasis in this book is on the titans of the American and Japanese industry.
The Ford Motor Co., which in effect was born as an industrial cult of personality, is perfect for him. He has telling portraits of the first Henry, genius and humbug; his grandson and namesake, Henry II; the imperious Robert McNamara and the secretive Ed Lundy, two of the Whiz Kids who allowed Henry II to resurrect the company when he took over in 1943 at the age of 26; and, of course, Lee Iacocca, the superman who came to the automotive supermarket with the Mustang in 1964 and worked with the tireless ingenuity and menace of an Italian courtier to make the company his own.
Although individual flamboyance is supposedly discouraged in Japanese culture, in Halberstam`s hands the men of Nissan yield even more dramatic characterizations than their American counterparts. There is Katsuji Kawamata, an ambitious banker who steered the tiny Nissan company through the perils of post-war Japan and made it an industrial giant; Ichiro Shioji, a powerful union leader and one of the architects of the distinctive cooperative arrangement between labor and management which has allowed Japan Inc. to become a world economic power; and Yutaka Katayama, the pioneering excutive who overcame the xenophobia and caution of others at Nissan to make Datsun a household word in America.
The 1950s is the turning point in this drama of a symbiotic fall and rise in two auto cultures. At Ford it was the era of the chrome boat, the great gas guzzler that had penetrated the dreamscape of the American driver. (”Better than psychotherapy,” the advertisement of one auto maker claimed.) It was also the era that saw the triumph of the financial men over the manufacturing men, the men who cared only for the bottom line over those who loved cars and, in the old industry phrase, had gasoline in their veins. McNamara and the other men of finance–”bean counters” in the jargon of Detroit–would have been just as happy selling widgets or ladies` corsets. Their rise to power coincided with the advent of a pernicious conservatism, tranquilized imagination and lack of concern about the increasing shoddiness of American goods.
At the same time the American auto industry was wallowing in arrogance and narcissism, the Japanese were studying the auguries that would make small cars, fuel efficiency, quality, and technological innovation the watchwords of the future. Beginning with an inelegant and unpredictable car–a car for which Americans had to be begged to take dealerships that would eventually be worth millions–Nissan almost fanatically improved its product over the next few years, making it ready when the succession of shocks, beginning with the Yom Kippur War and culminating in the fall of the Shah, changed the economics of oil and hence the economics of autos forever.
Dismissing the current uptick in American auto sales as an industrial Indian summer, Halberstam tells us that this story has reached a turning point but not a conclusion. A time can now be foreseen when Japan will have an undreamt of 50 percent of the American market. A time can also be foreseen when Korea, with its low wages and obdurate sense of national mission, will play the role to Japan that Japan is now playing to the United States.
The Japanese part of this story is exotic and wonderful. The Ford part is less successful, although still much better than Robert Lacey`s gossipy and derivative ”Ford: The Man and the Machine.” Some of the errors Halberstam makes are minor. He has gotten the year of the first Henry Ford`s death wrong; he mistakenly has Ford meeting his idol Thomas Edison in Detroit when the introduction (which Ford considered one of the high points of his life)
actually took place on Long Island; he dismisses the Ford Sociology Department simply as a snooping organization, when in fact it also played a valuable socializing role for the company`s immigrant workers.
Some errors are more serious. Halberstam says Henry Ford II came home from the Navy only with reluctance to take over the company after his father Edsel`s death when, in fact, young Ford had avidly sought a leadership role in Dearborn from the moment of his enlistment three years earlier. The mistake is an important one, for it makes Halberstam more sympathetic to Iacocca`s vision of Henry II as a spoiled rich kid who was an inheritor rather than a creator at Ford than he should be. Halberstam also barely mentions the catastrophe of the Edsel, which is arguably as significant a reason for the Ford Motor Co.`s caution and attention to the bottom line than the cramped mentality of Robert McNamara and his followers in the company`s finance division.
A non-fiction novelist at heart, Halberstam is somewhat cavalier about documentation. He includes a list of the people he interviewed for the book, but doesn`t use footnotes. This is not a pedantic quibble: In a place like Detroit, where everyone has a private agenda and speaks with a sharpened tongue, it is valuable to know who is saying what about whom. Drama is the priority in this book and Halberstam relentlessly sweeps everything aside to achieve it. His chief vehicle is portraiture. Whenever a character is introduced, the reader can be sure there will immediately follow a digression about his background. In a book of this length–some 750 pages–this technique not only slows the narrative at times, but finally comes to seem mannered and formulaic.
All this having been said, it must be added that David Halberstam has done something unique and valuable in ”The Reckoning.” He has penetrated two cultures, one in Tokyo and the other, scarcely less foreign, in Detroit. Out of the conflict between two nations he has fashioned a cautionary tale that makes us understand why we weep for America at the same time that we buy Japanese.
