The Reckoning Quotes

“Iacocca made his pitch: He wanted Ford to build the Fiesta, but with a Honda engine and transmission in it. Honda was delighted: He would like nothing better than this joint production with an American company, whose very name he revered. The price of the Japanese parts would be only $711. He could deliver 300,000 and do it quickly. Iacocca was even more delighted; he had an instant car and an unbeatable one at that. It could be in the dealers’ showrooms in only eighteen months.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“The fury with which Japan unleashed itself upon international trade, the kind of economic Darwinism that was at the center of its impulse, originally came not just from each company’s desire to conquer the world but from its desire to take market share away from domestic competitors. In Japan there was always someone ready to undersell someone else, and there was always someone on the edge of bankruptcy.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, “There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“In 1953, at the beginning of the Eisenhower era and the glory years of the auto industry, Hudson’s had done $153 million in retail sales; in 1981 the downtown Hudson’s had done only $44 million—a figure, if adjusted for inflation, about 6 percent of the 1953 total.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“When, in the immediate postwar era, someone at Chrysler had designed a smaller, low-slung car, K. T. Keller, the company’s top executive, had mocked it. “Chrysler builds cars to sit in,” he said, “not to piss over.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Nothing appalled Deming more than the idea of the interchangeable manager. “What is the motivation and purpose of men like this?” he would say with contempt. “Do they even know what they do anymore? What do they produce?” All they knew about was numbers, not product. All they thought about was maximum profit, not excellence of product.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Nissan asked him to make an estimate of what it would cost to run the plant. When he finished it, he typed it up, signed it, and—according to the procedure he had been taught at Ford—brought it to his new boss, Takashi Ishihara, president of Nissan, to sign. Ishihara seemed surprised when he looked at it, and said nothing. A few days later he brought it back to Runyon with his signature at the bottom. “Frame this,” he said, “because it is the last piece of paper I will sign for you.” Runyon looked puzzled. “We searched very carefully for the man to run our factory,” Ishihara continued, “and we picked you, and you are our man and we trust you. We don’t have to sign papers anymore. From now on it is just yes or no with us.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“His counterpart at Chevy, a man named Bill Holler, had once gathered all of his regional salesmen around a brand-new model, opened the door, looked at them all long and solemnly, and then slammed the door as hard as he could. “Boys,” he announced, “I’ve just slammed the door on the best goddam car in the world”—and a huge cheer went up.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Research is an organized method of finding out what you are going to do when you can’t keep on doing what you are doing now.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Because Japan had no defense industry, he knew, and not even an airplane industry, the best engineers of a generation were being funneled into other, seemingly more prosaic sectors, like automobiles, for example, and steel. These industries, which in America were having increasing difficulty competing for top engineers, were getting the absolute cream in Japan. This advantage in talent was already making a considerable difference, Hayashi believed, as Japan’s heavy industries began to compete in the world’s markets.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“By 1957, a mere eleven years after its devastation, Japan not only had the most modern steel mills in the world but was the foremost steel producer in the world. But that was just the beginning: In the decade following 1957, Japanese steel production grew by 170 percent—while the American steel industry grew only 20 percent. The American steel industry, believing itself invulnerable, was headed by a complacent and insular management which was slow to bring in modern technology and which, even as the challenger grew more proficient, locked the industry into ever costlier labor agreements. By 1964, 28 percent of Japan’s steel exports was going to America. In Japan, a thrust in shipbuilding followed closely upon the success in steel; by 1956 Japan had replaced Britain as the world’s leading shipbuilding nation.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Steel is the nation, went a Japanese saying. If the nation had a strong steel industry, then it would have a strong shipbuilding industry, and it would be a powerful, respectable nation again. Thus the efforts in the postwar years centered first and foremost on steel. The recovery did not come easily. At the end of the war only three of the nation’s thirty-five blast furnaces were in operation, the others closed down as much from lack of raw material as from American bombs. The nation was poor, hard currency was limited, but the government poured much of its treasure into steel. By 1949 Japan had reached its prewar steel-production figures.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“McNamara was like a drill, relentlessly boring in on the assembly plants. No one worked as hard as he did, no one was as single-minded. Every day there was some new regulation, some new instrument of control. “I can’t deal with him,” Wiesmyer would tell friends. “This guy is crazy. It’s not about cars—I can deal with cars. It’s about numbers. Do you know what this guy does for a vacation? He climbs mountains. How can you deal with a guy who on his time off flies to some God-forsaken place and then climbs a mountain? You know, he pays good money to do that.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Mr. Ford, here is our new plant,” Lord Perry, who was the head of Ford in Europe, said proudly. “Where is the water?” the old man asked. “There isn’t any water,” Lord Perry replied. “Well, let’s get out of here,” Ford said. “I don’t even want to look at it.” That had ended the ceremony. Ford had driven off, and they had torn down the plant and moved it to a deep-water site.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“The Grosse Pointe that he was raised in was an isolated place of provincial splendor. It is unlikely that in pre-World War II America there was another community quite so sheltered and quite so rich. There was neither economic nor social diversity. Catholics were viewed with suspicion and, on occasion, hatred. (When Henry as a young man married a Catholic and converted, it sent shivers throughout the community; his oldest friends regarded it as at least partly a declaration of independence from his past.) Jews too were unwelcome, and there was a great deal of dinner-party discussion as to whether Walter Chrysler was actually, despite what he claimed, Jewish. Neither World War II nor the coming of modern communications and transportation, which so changed and expanded people’s lives, had yet occurred. It was a secure, comfortable, insular place, largely untouched by the modern world. If Grosse Pointers traveled to New York, they traveled by train, on The Detroiter, where they knew the porter and he knew them; if they traveled to Europe they traveled with each other. The assumption was that Grosse Pointe was the center of the universe; once, announcing the engagement of a Grosse Pointe girl to a young man from Cincinnati, the Detroit Free Press used the headline “Local Girl to Marry Eastern Man.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Nothing in the period that followed was too good for the Rouge; it had the best blast furnaces, the best machine tools, the best metal labs, the best electrical systems, the most efficient efficiency experts. At its maturity in the mid-twenties, the Rouge dwarfed all other industrial complexes. It was a mile and a half long and three quarters of a mile wide. Its eleven hundred acres contained ninety-three buildings, twenty-three of them major. There were ninety-three miles of railroad track on it and twenty-seven miles of conveyor belts. Some seventy-five thousand men worked there, five thousand of them doing nothing but keeping it clean, using eighty-six tons of soap and wearing out five thousand mops each month. By the standards of the day the Rouge was, in fact, clean and quiet. Little was wasted. A British historian of the time, J. A. Spender, wrote of its systems: “If absolute completeness and perfect adaptation of means to end justify the word, they are in their own way works of art.” Dissatisfied with the supply and quality of the steel he was getting from the steel companies, Ford asked how much it would cost to build a steel plant within the Rouge. About $35 million, Sorensen told him. “What are you waiting for?” said Ford. Equally dissatisfied with both the availability and the quality of glass, he built a glass factory at the Rouge as well. The”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Alexander Dow, his boss at Edison, who thought him immensely talented, tried to dissuade him. “Electricity, yes,” Dow told Ford. “That’s the coming thing. But gas—no.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“To William Ford, on his own land at last, free of the old country, the farm was liberating; to Henry Ford, bored and restless, it was like a prison. (Cows came to symbolize his hatred of the farm. They were lazy, and they lay around all the time. He spent an entire lifetime railing against them. “The cow is the crudest machine in the world,” he once said. On another occasion he said that if people would destroy all the cows in the world, they would eliminate the sources of war. When his company became large, he had his labs working constantly to find substitutes for dairy products.)”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“I still like boiled potatoes with the skins on,” he said, “and I do not want a man standing in back of my chair, laughing up his sleeve at me while I am taking the potatoes’ jackets off.” Of pleasure and material things he was wary. “I have never known what to do with money after my expenses were paid. I can’t squander it on myself without hurting myself,” he said, “and nobody wants to do that.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“When one of the children of his friend Harvey Firestone boasted that he had some savings in the bank, Ford lectured the child. That money was idle. What the child should do, Ford said, was spend the money on tools. “Make something,” he admonished. “Create something.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“The weaknesses of the system, the inherent dangers of being a part of a domestic monopoly in an industry open to other countries, had not yet revealed themselves. So, while other areas of the American economy remained competitive, no one challenged the auto industry until the full-scale assault of the Japanese in the seventies. When it finally came, the extent of American vulnerability surprised even those who had been critical.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“In the late fifties Romney had been a forceful advocate of breaking up GM. That, he believed, would make everyone leaner and more competitive. In 1957 he went before the Kefauver Senate committee on monopolies. Before he testified he was summoned to the Ford headquarters by Henry Ford and Ernie Breech, the chairman of the company, who were nervous about what he was going to say and wanted to get some idea of his thrust. Romney explained what he wanted: the breaking up of GM and perhaps even Ford. “But that would just make the competition tougher,” Ford had said. “If you broke up GM the rest of us would suffer.” “That’s exactly what I mean,” Romney had said. “Listen, I think it’s tough enough the way it is—it’s a damn hard dollar,” Ford had answered.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Krandall had recently done a paper entitled “The Decline of Ford’s Market Share,” a serious, pessimistic warning that he had reason to believe had never reached Henry Ford. So Krandall, who was thinking of retiring anyway, seized this opportunity to confront a boss he rather liked. The Ford Company, he told Ford, was not equipped to deal with the Japanese challenge. Not only was it doing poorly, he said, but it might not be able to hold its existing share in the future. Krandall had suspected a short, testy answer, but instead Ford looked at him and agreed. “It may not be long,” he said, “before we’re selling not just cars but apples.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“for one measure of economic power was the ownership of sports teams—the Tigers had been owned by the Briggses, an old manufacturing family for whom the baseball park had been named, and the football team by William Clay Ford, Henry’s brother—and in the early eighties the two newest owners, of the Tigers and the hockey Redwings, were pizza franchisers.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“Listen, girlie,” said one of the executives of Cadillac, a particularly troubled company, to Maryann Keller, an astute and skeptical financial analyst on Wall Street, “it’s ready to turn around, and it’s going to be bigger than ever.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“When I was at Oldsmobile,” he said, “there was something I learned that I’ve never forgotten. There was an old guy there who was an engineer, and he had been at GM a long time, and he gave me some advice. He told me, whatever you do, don’t let GM do it first.” That was it, Davis thought later—the Detroit line, the symbol of the protected industry. Don’t let GM do it first, let the other guy make the early, expensive mistakes.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“That did not augur well, for these alienated, complacent workers, whether they knew it or not, were under challenge from purposeful, disciplined workers around the world, and their jobs and their whole way of life were in the balance.”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning

“The Rouge was Henry Ford’s greatest triumph, and with its completion he stood alone as the dominant figure in America and the entire developed world. He”
― David Halberstam, The Reckoning