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.

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.

Up to then there had been something of a gentleman’s agreement among those who might be called The Good Journalists of Washington that the Kennedy Administration was one of excellence, that it was for good things and against bad things, and that when it did lesser things it was only in self-defense, and in order that it might do other good things.

She hated that many of her colleagues hid behind the title “Planned Parenthood.” That was a euphemism. “It irks my very soul and all that is Irish in me to acquiesce to the appeasement group that is so prevalent in our beloved organization,” she wrote.

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.

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.

As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive – both aesthetically and commercially.

She was young and scared, and hadn’t realized there was time to spare.

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.

It hung heavily albeit secretly over the internal calculation of Democratic leaders of the period. But of course it was never discussed in the major newspapers and magazine articles that analyzed policy making in Vietnam. It was a secret subject, reflecting secret fears.