So you think automobiles make good transportation? They make pretty good reading, too.
One of the most important books and best pieces of automotive journalism and history is “Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry,” by Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White, Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporters.
It’s all here:
– A gossipy, insider look at the state of the American auto industry, rich in portrayals of the big automotive names in all their foolishness, egotism, arrogance and stupidity.
– A story that will make you feel good about America, especially in its long and often disheartening battle with the Japanese.
– A fresh and contemporary look at how the auto industry functions day-to-day and the pressures on its leaders, from within and out.
The book, published by Simon and Shuster, recounts how the old guard in Detroit, arrogant, complacent and grown soft with success, allowed themselves to be outdone at every turn by the lean and aggressive Japanese.
The brass paid little attention to the threat from Japan until it was almost too late, and then they usually made the wrong responses. The gimmicks that worked in Detroit’s golden age of the ’50s and ’60s didn’t work anymore.
The Japanese approach of quality of product and efficiency in manufacturing stunned the Detroit bureaucracy. It was not just a war of technology and marketing, it was one of culture that forced a sea change in Detroit.
In the end, the American makers swept their management houses clean and replaced them with a new generation of executives who would play the game the same way as the Japanese.
The most fascinating aspect of this very readable book is its portrayal of the men who made up the old guard and the new.
We see good men who were simply wrong for their times. Most tragic was Robert Stempel, a “car guy” and a product of the Detroit system who was universally respected and loved. But he missed the hard and humanly damaging things he had to do, such as make cut jobs, and was humiliated and forced out by the board.
Ford Motor Co. Chairman Donald Petersen was regarded as America’s finest manager, but he made the same mistake that Lee Iacocca had made before him-he ran afoul of the Ford family in largely a family enterprise.
The board sent director Clifton Wharton, a former president of Michigan State University with its message to get out, but Wharton’s approach was too subtle. Then reigning patriarch of the Ford family, William Clay Ford, tried to oust Peterson but also was too gentlemanly. Finally director Drew Lewis, a former Reagan Administration official, told Petersen flatly: “The board wants you out.”
“Comeback” paints Iacocca as the miracle-working savior of Chrysler Corp. when it was sliding down the tube and “self-aggrandizing cheapskate” who nearly ran Chrysler into the ground with ill-advised diversification and skimping on product development.
The reporters tell of Iacocca trying to sell Chrysler Corp. to Ford after his bid to sell to Fiat was spurned by Gianni Agnelli, owner of Fiat. But Ford was trying to digest its 1989 purchase of Jaguar and was wary of further entanglements, particularly any involving Iacocca.
Roger B. Smith, chairman of GM from 1981 to 1989, gets the roughest treatment.
“As retirement neared, it was clear that Smith’s nine years at the top had been a Reign of Error of historic proportion,” Ingrassia and White wrote.
“Three harshly critical books and a wickedly satirical movie called `Roger and Me’ had made Smith the poster boy of American industrial decline.”
The heroes of the book, current chief executives Jack Smith of GM, Alex Trotman of Ford and Robert Eaton of Chrysler, do not emerge as strongly as the villains, Smith and Stempel of GM, and, to some extent, Iacocca.
There are a lot of good stories in “Comeback”: the dramatic ouster of Stempel led by outside director John Smale; Iacocca’s awkward refusal to give up the Chrysler chairmanship to Roger Penske and the recruiting of Robert Eaton from GM through a middle-manager at Chrysler, Fred Hubacker; the clash of egos and ambitions at Chrysler among Richard Dauch, Robert Lutz, Gerald Greenwald and Iacocca; the painstaking and sometimes painful conversion of American middle-managers to Japanese production techniques.
We meet some Japanese executives who led the charge into the U.S. market, such as Kan Higashi, leader of Toyota’s manufacturing joint venture with GM, and Susumu Uchikawa, his lieutenant.
We meet Soichiro Irimajiri, first president of Honda of America Manufacturing, who not only led the way for Japanese makers into U.S. assembly, but virtually made Honda an American company.
But if the story of Detroit automakers rising from the ashes of their arrogance and complacency to become successes isn’t enough, several other books provide insight into America’s automotive machine. Among them:
“Chrome Colossus,” by Ed Cray; McGraw-Hill, New York, 1980; $14.95.
Cray tells how William Crapo Durant, a riverboat gambler of an industrialist from Flint, Mich., put together what became the largest manufacturing enterprise in the world, General Motors Corp., making and losing fortunes and spawning automotive pioneers Charles Nash and Walter P. Chrysler.
It traces the maturing of GM under such automotive legends as Henry Leland, Pierre du Pont, the Fisher brothers and ultimately Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who made GM the model for corporate organization and gave the nation’s business schools food for thought for decades.
“Ford: The Men and the Machine,” by Robert Lacey; Ballantine Books, New York, 1986; $5.95 (paperback).
This book chronicles the fascinating lives of the Ford family and the automotive empire they created and ran. Well written and researched, it reads like a novel rather than nonfiction and was the basis of a television mini-series.
Lacey explores the curious stunting relationship between Henry Ford and his son, Edsel; the remarkable influence of the shadowy Harry Bennett on Henry I and Ford Motor Co.; the assumption of power in World War II of Henry Ford II and the stormy relationship of Henry II and Lee Iacocca, which cost Iacocca his job.
“Irreconcilable Differences,” by Doron Levin; Little, Brown and Co., New York, 1989; $18.95.
Levin, a New York Times reporter who had served in the Wall Street Journal’s Detroit bureau, recounts the battle between H. Ross Perot and Roger B. Smith for the soul of General Motors after Smith acquired Perot’s Electronic Data Systems and made Perot the largest single stockholder in GM. This is a solid piece of journalism, published in 1989 by Little, Brown & Co.
“Rude Awakening: the Rise, Fall and Struggle for Recovery of General Motors,” Maryann Keller; William Morrow, New York, 1989; $18.95.
The 1993 book by automotive stock analyst Keller recounts much of the same story as “Comeback,” but without the upbeat ending and with less development of and sympathy for the leading players. Her story is less journalism, more financial analysis.
“Reuther: A Daughter Strikes,” by Elisabeth Reuther Dickmeyer; Spelman Publishers, Southfield Mich., 1989; $14.95.
Dickmeyer provides a portrait of one of the greatest labor leaders in history, Walter A. Reuther, who guided the United Auto Workers from its beginning in 1936 to an almost unique institution for the bettering of the working man.
Written by Reuther’s younger daughter, this is no “Daddy Dearest,” but rather shows a side of the man not always evident in his public life, a loving and nurturing husband and father, a man driven by the desire to do good.
“Birth of a Giant,” by Richard Crabb; Chilton, Philadelphia, 1969; $9.50.
Crabb tells the story of the first wave of automotive pioneers, men who became legends, and it is written in that way. But if you can get by the “gee-whiz” role model tone, it is filled with fascinating stories about the beginnings of the auto industry.
“On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors,” by J. Patrick Wright; Wright Enterprises, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich., 1979; $12.95.
This started as an authorized biography of John Z. DeLorean. But DeLorean decided after it was written that he did not want the book published because he wanted to start an auto company and did not want to make an enemy of General Motors.
Wright published it anyway and the ensuing argument undoubtedly helped its sales. It is valuable for the view of GM by an intelligent executive and his reflections on life and business. It is particularly interesting in light of DeLorean’s problems with money and drugs.
“The Dream Machine, the Golden Age of American Automobiles 1946-1965,” Jerry Flint; Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., New York, 1976; $12.95.
Flint of Forbes Magazine writes a delightfully nostalgic look at what he calls Detroit’s golden age, the 20 years after World War II.
“It was in those years that we created an entire society around our cars, from freeways to campsites, suburbs to drive-ins,” Flint writes in the foreword. “We built 116 million cars in those 20 years and put the nation on wheels. And it was in those 20 years that automobile engineering peaked. The high-compression engines, the suspension systems, the automatic and power assists were developed and more important, made to work.
“The art of automobile styling reached it height in these two decades, too, in beauty and in the grotesque. It will never be as good looking-or as bad-again.”
Flint dedicated the book, lavishly illustrated, with public relations photos from the auto companies, “to everyone who owned one-and was sorry to see it go.”
“Power Behind the Wheel,” by Walter J. Boyne; Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, 1988; $19.95.
A coffee-table style book with magnificent photos by Lucinda Lewis, that gives the history of the industry through the cars.
“I Gotta Tell You: Speeches of Lee Iacocca,” edited by Matthew W. Seeger, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1994; $15.
Compiled with commentary by Seeger, an academic rhetorician, the name says it all.
