Henry Ford II: 1917-1987: My Name Is on the Building

As the grandson of the founder of the Ford Motor Co., Henry Ford II bore one of the most powerful names in American business. He used it wisely to save the second largest U.S. automaker in its dark days after World War II. He used it arrogantly when he put down executives who dared to contradict him by reminding them, “My name is on the building.”

During the 35 years that he ran the firm, Ford gathered around him men who became important leaders in their own right. Among them: Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and later head of the World Bank; Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca; and Charles (“Tex”) Thornton, who co-founded Litton Industries. Yet none of them ever claimed to understand the man they always addressed as Mr. Ford. When he died last week of complications from pneumonia in Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, he was still unfathomable.

Almost untouchable on his corporate throne, Ford was perhaps the most secure executive in America. A biographer once told him that his book would give Ford the chance to set the record straight about many things. Snapped Ford: “Oh, let the fairy tales continue. Who gives a damn?” His most famous expression, which he borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British Prime Minister: “Never complain. Never explain.”

Ford could afford to play high-stakes games, and he had fun doing it. He stunned the automobile world in 1968, when he offered the presidency of Ford to Semon (“Bunkie”) Knudsen, then a top executive at General Motors. Ford rented an Oldsmobile and drove to Knudsen’s house to offer him the job. Within 19 months, though, Ford fired Knudsen, who had made the error of trying to get too chummy with the boss. One mistake: he constantly barged into Ford’s office without knocking.

Born Sept. 4, 1917, to Edsel and Eleanor Clay Ford, Henry led the privileged yet cloistered life of Henry Ford’s grandson. His boyhood included chauffeur-driven lifts to grammar school. After Hotchkiss, Ford went to Yale, but he did not graduate. Reason: he paid a student to write a paper for him about Thomas Hardy’s novels. Although admitting that he cheated, Ford denied that he was caught because he accidentally dropped the bill for the student’s services into the professor’s lap. “I may be stupid,” he told Biographer Booton Herndon, “but I’m not that stupid.”

After Yale, Ford worked in the company’s engineering department before going into the Navy in April 1941. But in August 1943, a month before his 26th birthday, Ford was released from active duty so that he could return to Detroit to help put the Ford Motor Co. back on its feet. Years of erratic one- man rule by old Henry had left the company a shambles, and the Government was afraid the firm would not be able to produce the amphibious vehicles and planes needed for the war effort.

The founder was then 80 and shakily in control after the death the previous May of his son Edsel from cancer. In his dotage, the old man had surrounded himself with managerial incompetents and given them enormous power. Among them was Harry Bennett, Ford’s pistol-toting aide-de-camp, who had become the company Rasputin. Young Ford demanded that his grandfather turn all management control over to him. “I want a completely free hand,” he said. The old man finally relented. In 1945, at 28, Henry Ford II took charge. His first act was to fire Bennett.

The corporate rebuilding job that young Ford faced was formidable. The company was losing nearly $10 million a month, and labor relations were chaotic. The new boss did what any good manager in trouble does: he sought help. Ford accepted an offer made by a brash team of former Air Force officers and signed them up in a package deal. He gave them salaries that were princely at the time, ranging from $9,000 to $16,000. Among the ten Whiz Kids, as they were called: McNamara and Arjay Miller, both of whom later became Ford presidents. Henry raided GM for the man to head the new team, Ernest Breech, possibly the best production chief in the U.S. at the time.

The Whiz Kids brought modern professional management to Ford. They introduced financial controls and restructured the company along divisional lines, much as Alfred Sloan had done at GM. In the 1950s and 1960s, under Ford and Breech, the reborn Ford Motor Co. prospered and came up with several winners, including the sporty Thunderbird in 1954 and the Mustang in 1964. One failure, though, became synonymous with marketing disaster: the Edsel in 1957. In later years, Ford was not as successful. The company lagged behind its rivals in coming up with the right mix of fuel-efficient cars after the energy crisis of the early 1970s. Ford insisted that Americans would never buy small economy cars, and the firm did not have those models when consumers demanded them.

Outside the office, Ford did what he wanted, when he wanted. A reveler, Ford once led an orchestra through a swimming pool while the musicians played When the Saints Go Marching In. He divorced Anne, his wife of 24 years, in 1964 to marry Maria Cristina Vettore Austin, a divorced Italian jet-setter. That marriage broke up in 1980, and the settlement cost Henry an estimated $15 million. He married Kathleen DuRoss, at the time an operator of a Detroit disco, later that year.

Ford was serious about using the family name for worthy causes. After the Detroit race riots in 1967 left 43 dead, Ford headed an effort to find jobs for blacks. He lent his name and money to the building of Detroit’s Renaissance Center, a financial flop that lost an estimated $140 million in its first four years and had to be refinanced in 1983.

One of Ford’s last decisions at the company was determining who would be the first non-Ford to head it. Iacocca had been in the running, but Ford fired him in 1978. “I think you should leave,” he told him. “It’s best for the company.” Iacocca demanded to know why this was being done to the man who fathered the Mustang and had just led Ford to two years of record profits. Ford shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.” In 1980 Philip Caldwell was picked as Ford’s successor.

Ford spent his final years living in England and Florida. He joined Sotheby’s, the art auction house, as vice chairman, and he sat on the board of directors of a local bank. He continued to work for his old company and at the time of his death was head of the finance committee of the board of directors. To the end, he remained as secure as ever. After all, his name was on the building.