Word: forde
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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...
...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...