The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

The lead of General Motors in that postwar period was enormous: Ford had very little in the way of a factory, its machinery was badly outdated, not easily retooled. In contrast, GM had converted to war production, but it had been very careful to establish in its factory and production lines the kind of systems that could be easily converted to peacetime production. Chevy thus had a massive lead; it could bring out a car for much less than it actually did, but if it lowered its prices it would kill Chrysler and bring the wrath of the Congress down for antitrust. (“Don’t ever hire anyone from the auto industry,” Gene McCarthy, one of McNamara’s severest critics later said of him. “The way they have it rigged it’s impossible to fail out there.”) So Chevy kept its prices higher and produced a much better car than Ford. The true difference between Ford and Chevy then was reflected in the used-car market: a two-year-old Chevy sold on the used-car market for about $200 more than a two-year-old Ford, a very considerable gap. The prime aim of the two new management teams at Ford was to close the gap. Here Breech and McNamara combined their talents; they had to figure out how to produce a car that was at least partially competitive with Chevrolet, and at the same time make enough profit that could be plowed back into the company to build the desperately needed plants. They could not do it by borrowing from the banks, Ford’s credit rating simply wasn’t good enough, so they did it by ...