FALCON & “SQUARE BIRD” FATHER ROBERT MCNAMARA DEAD AT 93

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The Washington Post and the Drudge Report are reporting that former Ford Motor Company “Whiz Kid” and President Robert McNamara is dead.

While most of the news reports will undoubtedly focus on McNamara’s controversial tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense during portions of the Vietnam era or his subsequent leadership at the World Bank, his pre-Kennedy era tenure in the upper echelons of FoMoCo should not be ignored.

McNamara has often been described as an opposite to Lee Iacocca. While Iacocca was sometimes a master at flash, repackaging, superficial trendiness, and self-promotion, McNamara reportedly favored a more conservative “appliance motoring” "bean-counter" approach.

Thus, McNamara was a key figure in the development of Ford’s first modern compact car: The Falcon. Although the Falcon was initially a massive hit – and a well-needed one in the wake of the Edsel debacle – its prosaic styling, bland specifications, and tepid initial performance were clear counter-points to its platform cousin, the Iacocca-championed 1964 ½ Mustang. In fact, under the skin, the first production Mustangs were little more than gussied-up McNamara Falcons (albeit with optional V8s, bucket seats, and other “youth market” frivolities).

The [Falcon]rolled out in the autumn of 1959 . . . . It was sensible in every way, basic [Six]-cylinder transportation priced at just $1,912. It was the car McNamara left for automotive historians to judge him by, and it reflected his sense of value and utility and austerity. . . . He remained forever proud of the Falcon. He bought one soon after moving to Washington and once drove up to an elegant dinner at Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Washington home in his beloved compact. LBJ burst out laughing.

Ford’s car guys hated the Falcon too. “McNamara made a car that looked like him. He had had those granny glasses and he made a granny car,” said Harold Sperlich, of Ford and later Chrysler. “He didn’t seem like a car-company president, if you will,” said Mac Gordon, an automobile journalist, who interviewed McNamara many times at Ford. “Ed Cole, his famous counterpart at Chevrolet, was a real car guy. You’d go into his office and see pictures of race cars and air bags, car stuff. Not in McNamara’s office.” Secrest says: “You would not have found him in an interview talking about being underneath a car as a kid, trying to make himself sound like a great car lover. It didn’t mean anything to him.”

Yet the Falcon wasn’t small enough or elemental enough for McNamara. He was a strong supporter of the V4-powered, FWD “Cardinal” project. Although the Cardinal followed in the tire tracks of Sir Alec Issigonis’ revolutionary 1959 BMC Mini and was somewhat predictive of the direction the auto industry would be forced to take fifteen to twenty years later, Iacocca promptly killed it, even though McNamara had reportedly devised a virtual "no loss" plan to domesticate it as a VW Beetle fighter.

McNamara’s practical “appliance motorist” streak directly lead to Corvette’s five decades of mostly unchallenged hegemony at the crest of the American sports car marketplace. McNamara failed to understand the need to fight Corvette in the “halo” true sports car class. Thus, although the first generation Thunderbird outsold Corvette and at times outperformed it in speed trials, McNamara bought the idea of a heavy, bloated four-seat boulevard tourer for the T-Bird’s second generation.

McNamara’s 1958 “Square Bird” marked the end of any serious retail challenge for the two-seat sports car market. Although Carroll Shelby’s rare and hyperexpensive Cobras would sometimes rule the racetrack and Ford would occasionally dabble in mostly irrelevant, low-production mid-engined two-seaters (Pantera, Ford GT), McNamara’s myopic abandonment of the two-seat high performance niche has consigned Ford to “second class” status on the streets for decades. Hundreds of thousands of Ford owners have switched to Chevrolet over the decades simply because Ford offered no legitimate V8 sports car as a capstone to the Ford line-up. Ford’s failure to contest the “Corvette” market has also held back development of several generations of Ford V8s. Much of Chevrolet’s grassroots motorsports dominance since 1955 has flowed from the wellspring of Corvette development.

McNamara poisoned the developmental well for Ford by taking the Thunderbird out of the game only a few short model years from inception.

McNamara’s heavyweight “Square Bird” did, however, predict the later explosion of interest in the personal luxury market. In fact, the four-seat Thunderbird virtually created this segment (probably much to the consternation of the utilitarian McNamara). But the death of Ford’s production challenge to Corvette marked a certain “flabbiness” that persists to this day. A real “car guy” would never have ceded the nationalistic high ground of sports cars to Zora Arkus-Duntov and Corvette.

Robert McNamara was no “car guy.”

Moreover, McNamara’s FoMoCo was content not to compete in the World-Class luxury car segment (Bill Ford’s Continental Division had already been shuttered when McNamara was the first outsider to assume Ford’s presidency). McNamara’s oversight opened the door to European and Japanese luxury dominance after the 1970s. The leaner “bullet” Thunderbird-based Continentals were conceived on McNamara’s watch and became an icon of McNamara’s next employer – the Kennedy Administration. But McNamara’s Lincolns were actually a mass-produced retrenchment from attempting to lead in the upper echelons of the world luxury market or even to beat Cadillac at home. Consequently, generations of Ford customers have been forced to abandon FoMoCo products once mass-produced luxury and near luxury vehicles were no longer satisfactory.

The mindset rooted in the McNamara-era has deprived Ford of important “halo” products for decades, and compensation for it may have directly led to the ill-fated Premium Auto Group disasters of the past decade.

Most of McNamara’s later tenure was consumed with the emerging death of the “Beat GM” vision. Coping with divisional consolidation, recession, the ridiculous AMA “racing ban,” import invaders, and the Edsel mess were the currency of the McNamara era. McNamara and his fellow “Whiz Kids” may have helped Henry Ford II transform his grandfather’s dying “clunker” of a company into a modern, grey flannel suit corporation, but McNamara and his statistical management cronies mostly failed to regain the market leadership that Old Henry had blown decades before. And much of the bureaucracy designed by the Whiz Kids became an albatross in McNamara’s “out years.”

Thus the verdict on McNamara at Ford might be analogous with some of the commentary on his flawed and controversial role in the Vietnam conflict. While he may have been an emotionless “technocrat” both at Ford and in the Government, he was, as David Halberstam wrote in "The Best and the Brightest" "a prisoner of his own background . . . unable, . . . to adapt his values and his terms to . . . realities.”

In Halberstam's judgment, McNamara "did not serve himself or his country well. He was, there is no kinder or gentler word for it, a fool." Some would argue that, the success of the Falcon notwithstanding, his long-term legacy at Ford was little better.