Word: donners
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Detroit Donner sleeps in one of the company's eight executive bedrooms at its 15-story headquarters building. He is up at 7:30, breakfasts in the executive committee dining room, and by 8 a.m. is ready to do business with G.M.'s early-arriving executives. Evenings, he sometimes leads a group of the top brass to a Detroit Tigers night baseball game. "I'm very careful to be pro-Yankee when I'm in Detroit," he notes with a grin...
...Commuter. All through his career, Donner has insisted on the privacy of his family life. In Who's Who he lists neither his wife, his children nor his clubs. Three years after he joined G.M., he married Grand Rapids-born Eileen Isaacson, whom he began to court when she came to Three Oaks to teach high school. Winters, they live in a Fifth Avenue apartment. (Their son and daughter are both married.) Summers, they live in a big (22 rooms), comfortable home in Sands Point, Long Island. Donner commutes to the city on the Long Island Rail Road...
Though he plays an occasional game of golf, Donner's prime recreation is still reading-mostly history, which he feels helps him "to learn how mistakes have been made in the past. And successes." No recreation, however, can really compete for his attention against the activity he loves best: running G.M. For despite his quiet, intellectual exterior, Donner delights in the unpredictability and endlessly changing nature of his business. "We're a very restless crowd in the auto industry," he says proudly. "We're always under strain. This business wouldn...
...even further and cut G.M. down to size by breaking off Chevrolet as an independent corporation. (Rival Automaker George Romney has long urged that G.M. be split up.) Now that G.M. dominates more than half the auto industry, the rumors come in louder and stronger. "Dominate," observes Donner dryly, "is a word like discriminate. It was a perfectly nice word until a few years...
...Donner denies vehemently that G.M. "has ever worked aggressively to stifle competition." But he insists with equal fervor that General Motors does not-and cannot-attempt to hold down its auto sales for fear of antitrust action. No institution, he argues, can sensibly set out to be second best, or to do less than its best. So long as General Motors continues to grow on the strength of price competition and product performance, he believes that both law and equity are on its side...