Ford; The Men and the Machine

Large Size Book.Spanning more than a hundred years and four generations, the story of Henry Ford, the automobile company he created, and the dynasty he founded is one of the great dramas of our time, yet never before has it been told from beginning to end in all its richness. Now Robert Lacey has captured in one volume the public achievements and the private tragedies, the feuds, affairs, and personalities that make up this epic tale. Ford is above all the story of a handful of powerful individuals whose ambitions have helped shape modern American society: Henry Ford I, the founder, one of history's great figures, whose legendary achievements- the Model T, the moving assembly line, the Five Dollar Day, the Peace Ship- and down-home folk wisdom are recounted in school civics courses. Edsel Ford, the founder's son, who was a gifted car designer and executive, a humane and compassionate man. Always the dutiful, devoted, and subservient son, Edsel could never stand up to his father, even though Edsel had taken his place as president of the company. Harry Bennett, Henry I's flamboyant henchman, who with sinister vigor carried out the old man's darker impulses. Ford reveals for the first time how Bennett struck up alliances with both organized crime, whose thugs beat up and intimidated union organizers at Ford factories, and J. Edgar Hoover, who turned a blind eye to the violence in return for Bennett's information on Communist sympathizers among Ford workers. Henry Ford II, Edsel's eldest son, who wrested control of the company at its darkest hour from his grandfather and Bennett, hired a brilliant group of young executives known as the "Whiz Kids," and transformed Ford into the fourth-largest industrial corporation in the world. As Lacey so vividly relates, Henry II, like his grandfather, is a man of complex and paradoxical impulses. Recounting Henry's often volatile relationships with his three wives, the legendary coming-out parties for his daughters, his present estrangement from them and other relatives, and the alcohol problems that have touched members of the family, Ford is the first book to explore in depth the personal lives of problems of the present generations of Fords. Lee Iacocca, the immigrant's son from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who made it to the presidency, at the right hand of Henry II. Ford provides the first objective account of the titanic battle between these two powerful and gifted men that ended in Iacocca's dismissal. A man of driving ambition and overpowering ego, Iacocca learned how to sell cars with flair and play corporate politics with ferocity. He was brought down only when he made the fatal mistake of imagining he could replace Henry Ford II himself at the head of what was still, no matter how large or modern a family firm.…