The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (103 page)

The wild card in this high-stakes poker game of corporate politics was Henry II. At the urging of his family, and with the help of Sorensen's connections, he had been released from the navy in August 1943 to return to Dearborn to participate in the management of the company. Immediately the twenty-five-year-old moved into his father's old office. Young Ford nosed about the company and studied its various operations, careful all the while to keep a low profile. Bennett distrusted him and did everything possible to isolate him, and most employees were afraid to be seen with the young man because of Bennett's hostility. Pleasant, tall, and handsome, if rather pudgy, and with no business experience and a poor student record including a withdrawal from Yale over a cheating scandal, Henry II did not seem to pose much of a threat. Only gradually did his toughness and determination emerge, as Sorensen glimpsed one day while sitting in young
Ford's office. Henry took a phone call from Bennett, who launched into a tirade over some company issue. Ford listened quietly and put the phone down after the explosion ended. “Young Henry was composed and resumed his talk with me as though nothing had happened,” Sorensen reported. “The boy can take it, I said to myself happily; everything will work out all right.”
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Henry II began to assemble a team of experienced, capable advisers. Mead Bricker and Logan Miller were key production managers at the Willow Run plant. John R. Davis was a sales manager whom Edsel had smuggled to California to protect him from Bennett's wrath in the prewar years, and who now returned to Dearborn. John Bugas, a former head of the Detroit office of the FBI, came to work after investigating wartime thefts at the River Rouge plant. Meeting secretly at the Detroit Club, where Ben-nett's men would have a hard time eavesdropping or planting bugs, this quartet showed young Ford the ropes. They plotted to oust Bennett and reform the company. Henry hated Bennett, later describing him as “the dirtiest, lousiest son-of-a-bitch I ever met in my life.” But he moved cautiously, avoiding direct confrontation while making friends and allies in the Ford organization.
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Against this backdrop of uncertainty and intrigue, the situation with Sorensen reached a climax. Bennett's hostility to his old rival gained momentum when the elder Ford turned against his longtime deputy. Jealous of the favorable wartime publicity that was going Sorensen's way, Ford had become incensed about a 1942 article in
Fortune,
“Sorensen of the Rouge.” It sang the praises of the plant manager and his endeavors to get Willow Run up and running, while barely mentioning Henry Ford. The piece struck a nerve with the old man, an associate noted, because it suggested he was “no longer being able to keep up with the activities” of his own company. Never one to share the limelight, Ford became suspicious that Sorensen was trying to push him to the sidelines. He exploded when he heard that Sorensen was sending out letters under the title “General Manager.” “I'm the general manager here,” he told Bennett, “and if I ever find out there's another general manager around here I'll fire him.”
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Finally, Sorensen succumbed. Hemmed in by Bennett's maneuvers and deserted by Henry Ford, he departed for a vacation in Florida in early 1944 after telling Ford he was considering retirement. The old man, exhibiting signs of incomprehension, replied, “I guess there's something in life besides work.” A few weeks later, on March 2, not quite a year after Edsel's death, Sorensen received a call from Frank Campsall, who conveyed the message that Henry Ford wanted him out. Although shocked, Sorensen immediately issued a statement of resignation. Though he had approved the firing, Ford
never quite grasped either the gravity, or even the fact, of Sorensen's departure. According to Bennett, for months afterward his boss would get into the car and ask to go see Charlie.

Sorensen's departure, along with the enfeebled state of Henry Ford, made it clear that Harry Bennett had become the master of the Ford Motor Company.
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Over the next few months, Henry grew steadily more confused and exhibited irrational fears of persecution. According to Bennett, when Ford was at meetings or gatherings, “usually he didn't know where he was,” and when the old man asked him to check the pills doctors had given him, Bennett discovered that they were “phenobarbital, a sedative.” Then in early 1945, Ford suffered a debilitating stroke while on a trip to Richmond Hill. During the long car ride south in February, he began complaining of illness, and at a hotel stop in Nashville he was suffering from chills and disorientation. The next day, he seemed to recover, but then collapsed upon reaching his winter home. He lay down on a couch and refused to move. Clara believed he had “nerve exhaustion,” and after a very short stay, during which her husband appeared completely listless, they returned to Dearborn. Back at Fair Lane, Ford remained mentally and physically languid and often failed to recognize old friends or associates. “He didn't want to go out or meet anyone,” reported Mrs. Stanley Ruddiman. “During this period he depended very much on Mrs. Ford…. He didn't want her out of his sight.” Ford, Bennett confirmed, was “in a constantly confused state, he was kept from going out in public, was carefully guarded, and was permitted to see no one outside the family.”
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A few years later, in a deposition for a lawsuit, Dr. John G. Mateer, Ford's attending physician, described his patient's condition in the spring of 1945. Ford, he wrote,

The industrialist, Dr. Mateer concluded, could be characterized as “a pleasant vegetable.”
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Henry Ford's collapse in early 1945made the situation at the company intolerable. The family, particularly Eleanor and Clara, quietly planned to move the incapacitated president aside and elevate his eldest grandson into his place. The event that sparked the revolution, however, came accidentally. Around this same time, young Henry discovered a codicil to his grand-father's will that outraged the entire family. The document called for the company to be run by a board of trustees for ten years after the founder's death. The board would be headed by Bennett and consist largely of his friends and allies. No members of the Ford family were on it. Henry II immediately threatened to quit and write Ford dealers all over the country advising them to desert the company. After cooling the young heir down, John Bugas confronted Bennett about the codicil. Obviously perturbed at being smoked out, Bennett hauled out the original document and a carbon copy and burned them, pushed the ashes into an envelope, and told Bugas, “Take this back to Henry.” Though the legitimacy of the document remained unclear—Bennett reported later that the elder Ford had carried the original codicil around in his pocket for a long time, scribbling things on it, including Bible verses, and that it was not even certain he had signed it— its very existence prodded the family into action. Clara joined Eleanor in pressuring Henry to step aside, and he stubbornly refused. Finally, when the Ford matrons threatened to sell their stock in the company if Henry II was not made president, the old man relented.
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Henry asked his namesake to come to Fair Lane. “My grandfather told me he was planning to step down and let me be president of the company,” as young Henry later described the scene. “I told him I'd take it only if I had a completely free hand to make any changes I wanted to make. We argued
about that—but he didn't withdraw his offer.” Clara, sitting in on the meeting, voiced support for her grandson. “Henry, I think young Henry should take over,” she told her husband. “Look, you're not well … and it's about time somebody got in there.” Frank Campsall drew up a letter of resignation, and the founder signed it.
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A dramatic directors' meeting was held the next day, September 21, 1945. As Ford's letter of resignation was read, Bennett leaped to his feet, hurled a sarcastic congratulation to Henry II, and started to leave the room. Other directors prevailed upon him to stay, however, so he was present as the younger Ford was elected president of the company. The new chief officer wasted little time. As the meeting ended, he asked Bennett to come to his office. “I told him, then and there, that I had plans for reorganizing the company and that he didn't fit into them,” Henry related. “I told him that John Bugas was taking over his job as industrial relations director the next day.” “I was frightened to death that it wouldn't stick,” Ford later confessed. Bennett blustered, angrily telling the young man, “You're taking over a billion-dollar organization here that you haven't contributed a thing to.” But he seemed to accept his fate fairly calmly. Only later in the day did he explode. As Bugas sat in Bennett's office preparing to discuss the transition, Bennett whirled on him and exclaimed, “You dirty son of a bitch, you did this to me!” He pulled a .45 automatic from his desk. Bugas, the old FBI man, had anticipated the possibility of violence, and he calmly raised a .38 from the holster under his arm. “Don't make the mistake of pulling the trigger, because I'll kill you,” he replied. “I won't miss. I'll put one right through your heart, Harry.” Bennett set down his gun, and Bugas walked out, not at all sure he wouldn't be shot in the back. Bennett did not fire, however, and for the rest of the afternoon he burned papers in his office wastebasket, then left the plant for the last time. The next day, the new company president went to Fair Lane to tell his grandfather that Bennett had been fired. The old man took in the news, pondered it for a few moments, and responded quietly: “Well, now Harry is back where he started from.”
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After handing over the reins of the company, old Henry fell ever deeper into a mental fog. Mrs. Ruddiman noticed that as his grandson took over the company he appeared curiously detached. “You would almost think he didn't know anything about it,” she said. Over the next year and a half, she witnessed his transformation into a doddering old man childishly dependent upon his wife. “I don't think his mind wandered so much as that it didn't function. He would talk to you, but not as a person or individual he had known,” Mrs. Ruddiman noted. “After he had gone, you had this feeling, ‘I don't think he really knew me.’ ” Clara, shouldering the task of protecting
her husband, who had become a mental invalid, performed brilliantly. She was “just beautiful in her love, attention, and steadfastness,” Mrs. Ruddiman noted.
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From the autumn of 1945 to the spring of 1947, Henry Ford's life became a series of sad vignettes. Although enjoying periods of lucidity, much of the time he seemed unable to think rationally or speak coherently. He followed his wife about the house or sat staring into space. Every few days he went for a ride with Robert Rankin, and they explored the Dearborn area. When he felt perky, he would tell Rankin stories from his youth as, according to the driver, “he began to live in the past.” Once in a while, Ford would be driven through Greenfield Village and try to give the “high sign” to people he recognized, although he never spoke. “The last time I saw him in the plant, he was standing in the middle of the laboratory floor, with a wan smile on his lips, like a lost child, and a faraway expression in his eyes— not noticing any person or thing in particular, and not knowing which way to turn,” reported Irving Bacon. “The spirit of Henry Ford wasn't there any more.” On his last vacation in the Upper Peninsula, he was observed trying to make a phone call. “He could hardly make it. His words were very weak, and Mrs. Ford took over the phone to finish the conversation,” related an employee. “He sat there as if he were more or less in a daze, just looking at the floor. He didn't even look up.” Although appearing emotionless most of the time, once in a while he said something suggesting that he was aware, at some level, of his unhappy state. When visiting the Moir House, where he had lived with Clara many decades before, he told Rankin, “I've got a lot of money and I'd give
every
penny of it right now just to be here with Mrs. Ford the same as I was in the old days.”
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Henry Ford might have been better remembered, however, from an effort made a short time before. With perhaps his final flashes of awareness, he had tried to leave a valedictory in 1944and early 1945, in the months before his last, devastating stroke. Sensing the gathering momentum of his own decline, he had struggled to compose a compendium of his basic principles for future generations to ponder. John W. Thompson became his assistant in this project. When he felt up to it, Ford would talk about issues he felt were important while Thompson took notes. Eventually, the two men began meeting in the engineering lab several mornings a week. Thompson used an Ediphone to record Ford's comments, and then had them typed up. Ford would review the text at the next session and indicate changes.
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The result was a thirty-two-page manuscript entitled “Thoughts for the Future.” Loosely organized and written in short, simple sentences, the essay provided a final testimonial to Henry Ford's deepest beliefs. True to his old
populist principles, he began by extolling “the people.” He argued that Americans needed to express their individualism and remember that “government was not intended to dominate the people. It was designed merely to serve them.” His pacifist convictions produced the assertion that “almost everything that is wrong in this world can be traced to war. It is the one blockade to moral and material progress.” He urged all citizens to join in “the continuing fight for peace.” Of crucial importance, of course, was identifying the “war makers” who stood to profit from mass killing. “You will find greed at the bottom of all wars,” he wrote.
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