America /The Reckoning

THE RECKONING

DAVID HALBERSTAM, ©1986 ​

The Reckoning  gives a riveting account of the most decisive economic confrontation of this century--between Detroit's Ford Motor Company and Japan's Nissan. Here are young Ford, renegade Iacocca, visionary Katayama--everyone needed to reveal the crucial nuances behind two nations competing for commercial supremacy. Ralph Nader makes an appearance also.

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NOTABLE QUOTES

Ralph Nader was thirty-two years old in 1966 when he took on General Motors.  He was a solitary, distant, wary person who confided in no one and whose closest friends were amazed at how little they knew about him.  A complete loner, without an institutional base...he was the most unlikely of young men to challenge a giant industry.  Yet his timing was perfect.   The auto industry was ripe for criticism, and many Americans, without knowing it, were ready for a citizen's challenge to an entity that for them had come to symbolize an increasingly haunting aspect of American life--bigness and power without apparent accountability.

-The Reckoning, page 490

The symbol of the Iacocca years, the car that made his reputation not just at Ford but in the nation as well, was the Mustang. It came out in 1964, at what would prove to be the highwater mark of the American century, when the country was rich, the dollar strong, and inflation low.  In the middle class even the young had money.

The Reckoning, page 362

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REVIEWS

Kirkus Review

October 1986

The Reckoning

Another sparkling slab of history as high drama from powerhouse journalist (The Best and the Brightest, The Powers that Be) Halberstam. Here the Pulitzer-prize winner focuses on the head-on collision in the 1970's between Ford and Nissan, seeing in the consequent transfer of economic power from West to East the inevitable result of American hubris. The gripping narrative opens in 1973 Detroit with energy expert Charlie Maxwell's warnings of an incipient oil crunch falling on ears deafened by overdoses of power and money. That Ford failed to heed Maxwell is no surprise to Halberstam, whose exhaustive research reveals an industrial giant held hostage to the raging ambitions of generations of owners and managers. If there is a villain to this tale, it's Henry Ford himself, not the genius who invented the assembly line but the aging autocrat who let his company slide into such shambles that for years bills literally were totalled by measuring the height of the stacks of slips on which they were written. Also receiving Halberstam's scrutiny in a series of brilliant and often devastating portraits are Henry Ford II, Robert McNamara, Walter Reuther, and Lee Iacocca (who here loses much of his heroic luster). Interwoven with this tale of greed and pride is the very different story of Nissan, a story of men (and this book is about men, solely) less devoted to ambition than to honor. If there is a hero to this tale, it's the dominant Japanese ethos, which fused Nissan's management and workers into a cohesive unit at the same time that Ford's staff squandered its energies in internecine squabbling. Halberstam worked on this book for five years. An impressive investment with a rich return: this is first-class journalism all the way.

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The New York Times, John Kenneth Galbraith

October 1986

When Nissan Had a Better Idea

Were there a prize for the most ambitious literary undertaking of the year -and considering how prizes proliferate, there doubtless soon will be - David Halberstam would be an easy winner. ''The Reckoning'' is an attempt, no less, to assess the whole postwar industrial and associated cultural, political and larger economic history of Japan and the United States and the economic competition and conflict that have arisen in consequence. This it does by focusing attention on the histories, over half a century and more, of two great industrial companies and their leaders, participants and larger communities - Ford in the United States and Nissan, the makers of Datsun, in Japan. The word focus, however, could be misleading; Mr. Halberstam's lens is extraordinarily wide. No considerable cultural trait or historical event bearing however marginally on his story escapes his attention. He has, all readers will agree, a highly developed talent for digression.
Yet there can be no doubt: this is an impressive achievement. Mr. Halberstam, the author of ''The Best and the Brightest'' and ''The Powers That Be,'' is a highly competent writer; his research was formidable, and especially so in Japan, where he had to work through interpreters and, one supposes, did not have the plethora of secondary sources that now exist on Ford, the Ford family, Detroit and the American automobile industry in general. And he is not content to see his companies from some cold exterior view. He seeks out executives, workers and trade unionists and tells of their lives, aspirations, achievements, disappointments, failures and, especially as regards the managers at Ford, of their unending, vanity-inspired and functionally damaging bureaucratic jealousies and infighting.  [Continue reading this review]

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