The reckoning

National Review, Jan 30, 1987 by David Brooks

The Reckoning

by David Halberstam(Morrow, 728 pp., $19.95)

AS HAL SPERLICH rested in hisGrosse Pointe home with visions of fuel efficiency pounding in his head, he could not have known that the product of four thousand years of Asian culture was about to come barreling forth from the East, shattering the casual complacency of pampered American psyches, smashing the hollow confidence of Western ethnocentrists, shackling the American worker in a union-made straitjacket of humiliation, degradation, and ruin. He could not have known that the front-wheel-drive mechanism, the very idea he had unsuccessfully pitched to the Ford Motor Company establishment that morning, would alter the eternal destiny of all mankind.

David Halberstam's books reallyought to come with soundtracks; the man has a flair for the melodramatic. His latest relapse into best-selling elephantiasis is The Reckoning, about the decline and fall of the United States. This is a subject that brings out the youthful enthusiasm in Mr. Halberstam; he caresses every American defeat and humiliation, extending his story to 728 masochistic pages.

He believes he has captured America'sdisgrace in the inability of the Ford Motor Company to keep up with its Japanese rivals, specifically Nissan. While America was indulging in big, bawdy road machines, the Japanese were turning profits back into product, preparing the way for their eventual domination. This is an extremely familiar theme. Mr. Halberstam distinguishes his book by sweating the details.

For Halberstam, history is biography,and so is sociology, and so is engineering, and anthropology, and political philosophy. The Reckoning is a collection of thumbnail biographies of the men who owned and managed, worked and organized in these two car companies. I counted 109 major characters, and hundreds of walk-ons. The reader had better stay alert, or he might confuse Katsuji Kawamata with Yutaka Katayama. Just because Halberstam hasn't mentioned Charlie Maxwell since page 20 doesn't mean he won't expect you to know Maxwell when he suddenly reappears on page 680.

Aside from the fact that there aretoo many of them, Halberstam's thumbnail biographies are superb. Lee Iacocca and John DeLorean are familiar, but the average newspaper reader will learn a lot from Halberstam's portraits of Henry Ford II, Bill Knudsen, Robert McNamara, and the remarkable men who built Nissan and crushed the Marxist labor unions that threatened its existence. By virtue of these biographies, The Reckoning is fun to read, with the pace of a summer novel and the added benefit that it actually teaches you something about the car business.

Halberstam runs into trouble whenhe tries to generalize from his miniportraits. He will deliver fifty pages detailing the quirks of various Ford executives, and then, called upon to classify the whole group, he will revert to a banal stereotype. He will tell us they are bland corporate clones, with little blonde housewives and a taste for martinis, but devoid of imagination or interests beyond their own careerism.

In Halberstam's view, the problemswith the car industry--and, by extension, with America--are simple. The white hats are worn by the "good car men,' engineers and creative people who are obsessed with product innovations. If left alone, they would lead Ford to market dominance. Unfortunately, their efforts are frustrated by the guys in the black hats, the finance men, typified here by McNamara. The finance men scarcely know what a car is. All they care about is numbers-- short-term profits and stock performance. Halberstam sees every episode in the history of Ford as a conflict between these two forces.

The only complication in this formulais the workers. At first they are among the good guys, but by the Sixties they are overpaid and spoiled; they join the forces of reaction.

These observations may be essentiallyaccurate--never underestimate the self-destructive capabilities of a corporate bureaucracy--but surely the situation is not nearly so pat. I began to doubt Mr. Halberstam's credibility when he misrepresented Ford's recent history, which is one of tremendous accomplishment. For the past six years, Ford has been making superior cars, capping its success with the Taurus, which was named Car of the Year in 1985 and has been selling phenomenally well. One would think that in a book of over thirty thousand lines, Halberstam could have squeezed in more than seven lines about the Taurus. But Ford's recent success doesn't fit into Halberstam's Decline and Fall of America thesis.

Halberstam's picture of the broaderAmerican economy is equally warped. He describes America's failures in almost pornographic detail, concluding pessimistically (of course) with the sentence, "Few [are] discussing how best to adjust the nation to an age of somewhat diminished expectations, or how to marshal its abundant resources for survival in a harsh, unforgiving new world, or how to spread the inevitable sacrifices equitably.'