The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (102 page)

By the 1940s, Henry's mental disintegration was producing outbursts that made the situation unbearable. His criticisms of Edsel became obsessions, and increasingly bizarre directives reflected clouded judgments. In the spring of 1941, he decreed that Edsel's two eldest sons, Henry II and Benson, who had come to work for the company a few months earlier, should be banished as far away from Dearborn as possible. There appeared neither rhyme nor reason to the order. Sorensen and Edsel decided to visit Henry together, and the production chief threatened to quit if the Ford grandsons were sent away. Henry backed down, but Sorensen never forgot his countenance as Sorensen walked into his office with Edsel. “A look of hatred came over his face. I had never seen that expression before.”
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In this highly charged atmosphere of family tension, an additional strain appeared. Edsel began to experience recurrent stomach pain and vomiting that proved resistant to treatment. “On one of our trips to Washington, he was suddenly taken ill after a seafood dinner,” Sorensen reported. “I got him back to our hotel rooms and called a doctor. Edsel was in such agony that I sat up with him all night.” When the ailment was diagnosed as ulcers brought on by stress, the doctors advised him to cut back on work in
order to ease his worries. Edsel attempted to do so, but with limited success. Henry, of course, was quick to blame his son's health problems on Grosse Pointe parties, alcohol consumption, and smoking. “If there is anything the matter with Edsel's health he can correct it himself,” he told associates. “First, he will have to change his way of living. Then I'll get my chiropractor to work on him.” Henry developed a standard prescription to remedy his son's health: “Edsel must mend his ways.”
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Edsel's condition deteriorated. In January 1942, he underwent an operation for ulcers and surgeons removed part of his stomach. After the surgery, he improved slightly, but within months he began to lose weight and appeared increasingly wan and weak. To complicate matters, he also suffered undulant fever, an infectious, debilitating malady that is contracted from bacteria in unpasteurized dairy products. It is characterized by high fevers, chills, diarrhea, and weight loss, and at that time it was incurable. Ironically, it is likely that Edsel caught the fever by drinking milk from his father's farms. For years Henry had rejected the advice of medical and nutritional experts, insisting that pasteurizing milk was unnecessary. After Edsel was struck down, Henry stopped serving this milk in Greenfield Village and ordered Ray Dahlinger to get rid of all the cows on his farms. Nonetheless, he stubbornly insisted that his son's living habits were the source of his sickness. In November, Edsel returned to the hospital after a relapse and underwent another stomach surgery.
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It was becoming obvious to everyone but his father that Edsel was gravely ill. In the middle of this health crisis, Henry indulged in a shameful display that threatened to open a total breach with his only son. In a phone call on April 15, 1943, he ordered Sorensen to confront Edsel the next morning and demand a reform in his attitude and behavior. He reiterated his faith in Harry Bennett, declared he would support Bennett against every obstacle, and demanded that Edsel fully acquiesce in Bennett's authority over labor issues. To drive the point home, Henry ordered Sorensen to fire A. M. Wibel—the capable head of purchasing, who had worked at the company since 1912—because he had tangled recently with Bennett. Henry took an even harsher stand on personal issues. He insisted that Edsel end his long friendship with Ernest Kanzler and change his diet, drinking, and lifestyle. Sorensen was flabbergasted at this irrational tirade. “What a brutal thing to do to one's son!” he told himself. “To send me to tell him this!” The next morning, Sorensen visited Edsel and conveyed Henry's sentiments along with his own commiseration and support. The younger Ford, physically and emotionally exhausted, threw in the towel. “The best thing for me to do is to resign. My health won't let me go on,” he said to Sorensen wearily. Henry backed away when Sorensen told the old man that he would
follow Edsel out of the company, but this episode marked the breaking point for the son, who decided he could take his father's abuse no longer. Sadly, he would not have to.
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In late April, Edsel collapsed and was taken to his home at Gaukler Pointe. Eleanor then told the family, including Henry and Clara, what she had known since the operation in November: her husband had been diagnosed with incurable stomach cancer. When Henry heard that his son was dying, he refused to believe it. He frantically contacted the doctors at the Ford Hospital and demanded that they restore Edsel's health. He told associates, “You know, Edsel's not going to die.” Henry's physician, Dr. Roy McClure, explained these irrational outbursts: “Henry Ford is a sick man, too. We must expect him to say and do unusual things.” Throughout the month of May, Edsel remained bedridden at Gaukler Pointe as Eleanor and a team of doctors and nurses administered to his needs as best they could. But he steadily slipped away, occasionally mustering the energy to take a brief walk along the lakeshore. Finally, Edsel fell into a coma and at 1:00 a.m. on May 26,1943, he died at age forty-nine.
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Henry Ford was shattered by his son's death. He went through Edsel's funeral “like a piece of stone,” according to one observer, and was overheard muttering to himself, “Well, nothing to do, just work harder, work harder.” Over the next few weeks, he went about in a daze. John McIntyre, the powerhouse engineer at Fair Lane, met the old man coming toward him on the path from the house and prepared to offer his condolences. But Ford “walked right past me and looked down at the cement. He didn't even see me,” McIntyre said. “When the boy left, it just seemed to take something out of him.” Ford tried to comfort himself with talk of reincarnation, telling Bennett, “Well, Harry, you know my belief—Edsel isn't dead.” But Bennett knew better and described the death as “the greatest single catastrophe he ever suffered.”
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In his pain, Henry lashed out at others and himself. He blamed the doctors for killing his son and denounced the medical profession. When it was suggested that he donate money to the cancer fund for medical research in his son's memory, he exploded in rage. He blamed everyone in the company who had clashed with his son (except Bennett), showing up at the River Rouge to announce, “I'm going to fire everybody around here who worried Edsel!” But he also wrestled with his own inner torment. “The Misses [
sic
] sits down and cries and gets over it, feels a little better. I just cannot do it,” he told an associate. “I just have a lump here and there is nothing I can do about it.” He compulsively revisited his own abusive treatment of his only child, which he knew in his heart to be the real problem. Alone with Bennett, he returned to the topic day after day as he tried to assuage his guilt.

“Harry, do you honestly think I was ever cruel to Edsel?” he would ask. “Well, cruel, no; but unfair, yes,” Bennett answered. “If that had been me, I'd have got mad.” Ford would reply, “That's what I wanted him to do—get mad.”
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Though he could do nothing to bring back the son he had failed to remake in his own image, he made a pathetic attempt to enshrine Edsel's memory. In 1944, he dedicated the Edsel Ford Building at Greenfield Village. The small brick structure contained a replica of Edsel's boyhood workshop, which had sat over the garage at the Fords' old Edison Avenue home. It was filled with small machines and workbenches like the ones his son had tinkered with so many years before. “He wanted to preserve the things Edsel used when he was a boy on Edison Avenue. I thought he was quite sentimental about it,” noted a friend.
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As Henry's agitation over Edsel's death subsided, a permanent cloud of gloom and guilt settled in its place. It became clear that he had suffered an emotional wound that could be bandaged but would never really heal. One day he came to get a haircut from Joe Zaroski and pulled out his wallet to show some family pictures. “Joe, look. This is Edsel when he was a little child, and I was very proud of him,” Henry said. “My son had everything to live for, but he worked too hard and now he is gone.” Zaroski glanced at Ford's face. “He had tears in his eyes. He was a lonely old gentleman.” Bennett, who saw Ford every day, concluded that it was “impossible to describe how deeply the loss of his son hit him. After that he wasn't anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic or anything else. He was just a tired old man who wanted to live in peace.”
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Edsel's death particularly accelerated Henry's mental decline. He seemed to lose both his zest for life and his tenuous grip on reality. “The sparkle went from his eyes,” noted one associate. Ford began to live more in the past. As his memory failed with regard to immediate issues and personalities, he asked befuddled questions about basic matters that he knew already, or should have known. At times he seemed aware of his memory loss, but offered the sad explanation that he
wanted
to forget. “I put those things out of my mind so I won't have to worry about them,” he told Rufus Wilson.
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Edsel's death also caused a brief rift between Henry and Clara. For years she had endured the tension between her husband and son, sharing some of Henry's misgivings about the boy's lifestyle yet sympathizing with Edsel's wish to lead his own life. Loyal to the two most important people in her life, she refused to choose between them. Edsel's passing, however, with its crushing load of grief, seems to have roused resentment over her hus-band's long persecution of their only child. For weeks after the funeral, they
barely spoke; he walked the fields and woods of their estate, inconsolable, and she sat silently in the mansion, weeping and brooding. “After fifty-five years together their son was the one subject they could not discuss. The wound was too deep and painful,” wrote an observer. Finally, one morning, Clara told Henry that the flowers were in bloom and they needed to gather some bouquets for the house. Handing him a basket and garden scissors, she led him into the gardens, where they spent the morning together. Although few words were spoken, they seemed to reconcile emotionally and move back into their familiar routines.
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In many ways, Edsel Ford's death claimed a second victim: it sent his father into an emotional nosedive from which he never really recovered. But Henry made one final, brash move that reflected some of his old fire. It created a crisis that damaged not only his personal well-being but that of the company he had headed for forty years.

The night before Edsel was buried, Henry Ford called Charles Sorensen. The production chief, who had grown used to his boss's occasionally bizarre communications in recent years, was nonetheless astonished. Ford announced his intent to take over again as president of the Ford Motor Company in order to allay any fears about its future. “My immediate reaction was ‘impossible,’ ” noted a despairing Sorensen. “Mentally and physically he was unable to handle the job.” Nonetheless, at a directors' meeting held on June 1,1943, Henry Ford was elected president. Thus began what one historian of the company has called “the years of the Mad Hatter,” as a mentally unstable Ford presided over the dissolution of his empire.
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Near chaos ensued. Almost immediately it became obvious that the founder was not up to the job. Henry fell into reveries for the past. He fantasized about the golden age of the company, telling Joe Galamb, “Joe, we have to go back to the old days, the Model T days. We've got to build only one car. There won't be any Mercury, no Lincoln, no other car—just the one Ford.” Directors' meetings were a farce. Ford would enter the room with Bennett, walk around and shake hands with everyone, and then say, “Come on, Harry, let's get the hell out of here. We'll probably change everything they do, anyway.” His mental lapses dismayed everyone who encountered them. Even Bennett had become concerned by the fall of 1943: “Mr. Ford was not himself at intervals. He was losing his memory, and on occasions his mind was confused.” In such fashion, one of the world's largest industrial concerns began floundering and listing in the middle of a global war.
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Agitation and confusion reigned. Edsel Ford's family resented that the company directors, meeting only four days after his death, had reinstalled Henry in the presidency and surrounded him on the board with Bennett and several of his cronies. Eleanor, perturbed by the treatment her husband had endured for years from his father and Bennett, believed that her eldest son, Henry II, had been cast aside. She had several furious arguments with her father-in-law over the new company arrangement. Clara, in her quiet way, backed Eleanor by touting her grandson's qualities. But Henry remained obdurate. He distrusted his namesake because of the boy's conversion to Catholicism when he had married in 1940 and his bevy of wealthy friends from Grosse Pointe. He continued to back Bennett to the hilt.
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Other equally powerful divisions prevailed at the company. After Edsel's death, Sorensen assumed even greater responsibility for production at Willow Run and the Rouge, but he grew weary of Henry's feebleminded meddling and Bennett's hostility, and started to buckle under the strain. He contemplated retirement, and pleaded, at every opportunity, for Henry to bring his grandson into the company to take over. Meanwhile, Bennett stepped into the power vacuum and became de facto head of the company. He claimed to be the spokesman for Henry Ford, and whenever a decision needed to be made he would disappear for several hours, return insisting he had talked to his boss at Fair Lane, and issue a directive. No one felt secure enough to challenge him. Bennett moved ruthlessly to purge the company of all who had been allies of Edsel and Sorensen. By 1944, he had fired or pressured out A. M. Wibel, the purchasing manager; John Crawford, Edsel's most trusted assistant for many years; Fred Black, the public-relations man; Lawrence Sheldrick, the engineer who had played a key role in developing many Ford automobile models; E. T. Gregorie, the designer who had worked with Edsel; and several other executives.
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