He compared Ford to Nissan…which, given subsequent events, probably wasn’t the best choice. After the book came out, Ford prospered with the original Taurus, then with the Explorer, while Nissan began its downward spiral.

Robert McNamara (who rose to the top at Ford before joining the Kennedy Administration as Secretary of Defense) doesn’t come off too well in that book, either. Halberstam ties McNamara to the rise of top managers who really didn’t have much of a “feel” for cars themselves, and regarded the actual business of making and selling cars with disdain.

McNamara and his protege, Ed Lundy (who would go on to wield enormous power within Ford), were more concerned with balance sheets and stock prices than with cars.

Having funds tied up in a poorly performing investment doesn't make sense. When the investment is as large as GM it can hurt our country. Liquidating GM and putting the real estate, machinery, and labor to better uses would be, in the long run, good for our country. This is what corporate raiders do. When they see a badly performing company they analyze the company to see what value it has.

Cerberus Capital Management at Chrysler is a good raider because they try to save the company if possible but when that isn't possible the company is broken up and sold off in pieces if necessary to recover the purchase and make a profit. We should look forward to a raider stepping in to save GM from its present managemant or to breaking it up and putting it out of its misery. Under no circumstances should we use tax money to save GM. GM has been in operation for approximately 100 years which is amazing for any company in any industry and now maybe it is just too old, too fat, and too tired. But tying up capital for mostalgia doesn't make any sense.

OK, guys, enough with Vietnam. I can see the parallels and so forth, but this is about General Motors and TTAC is about cars in general.

Nor is this about me. I remind you that TTAC does not allow discussions of our editorial stance or style underneath unrelated posts. Anyone who wishes to discuss this subject is free to email me at robert.farago@thetruthaboutcars.com to engage in that discussion,

Please move on.

Moyar describes himself as a revisionist, so if you don’t care for the label, take it up with him.

By every account the US was not defeated militarily in Vietnam.

That’s a pointless argument. The US failed to achieve its objectives and ultimately had to leave. That’s a political defeat, by any measure. The fact that the kill ratio was high in favor of the Americans did nothing to secure victory.

This is a classic case of the parable of the blind men and the elephant, one of missing the big picture by fixating on one aspect that comprises only one part of the equation, then further misinterpreting the result.

The US was unable to successfully occupy and stabilize Vietnam, and was unable to convince Americans of the worthiness of the cause. That’s a defeat. This is not a football game, where the body count serves as a scorecard. This was ultimately a political conflict, and you can only gauge success or failure by the political outcome, which was dismal.

So it’s understandable why you’d miss the connection with the auto industry as well. You seem to think that because GM hasn’t failed in every respect that it therefore must be a success, when success is measure by other means entirely. The ultimate measure of success for any business is sustainable profitability, and that is a mission at which GM has utterly, miserably failed. Giving a pay increase to a guy who was instrumental in the failure seems misguided at best, but not surprising given the failures of GM’s board. Mediocrity begets mediocrity, and during times of crisis, mediocrity will just not do.

I was “considering” The Reckoning and its stunning analysis of the car biz. I do my best to not consider things I was too young to know about and haven’t throughly studied. If I offended RF with my ignorance, I will apologize to him offline. (The same applies to Keller’s book on GM in the 1980s.)

I’ll defer to the other commentators who are better equipped to debate your argument.

Just because one guy agrees with you does not make it so. Moyar’s book is a piece of revisionist history. Given your religious faith, I would suggest that the word “revisionism” should be setting off alarm bells just about now.

Have you read the book? How do you know it’s “revisionist”? By every account the US was not defeated militarily in Vietnam. Can you name a single military engagement in Vietnam that the US lost? Tet was a disaster for the North. Yes, it came at the cost of a lot of US blood, which is how the left was able to spin it as a defeat, but the North’s losses were staggering. Yes the North briefly took Hue (murdering thousands of innocents) but they were evicted. Yes, there was a siege at the forward Marine base at Khe Sahn but every military historian considers it a tactical victory for the US. Khe Sahn was Dien Bien Phu replayed, only with a different outcome.

It’s interesting that one comment called me a denialist and you bring up the specter of revisionism. Both of those terms are associated with those he minimize or deny the Holocaust. Am I supposed be cowed into accepting your worldview just because Jew haters use those terms?
The rabbis of the Talmud pointed out that just because idolaters worship the sun is no reason not to enjoy sunshine. Before the neo-Nazis at the IHR tainted the word, revisionist was a perfectly acceptable term for alternate or corrective viewpoints. For example Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a man for whom I have some admiration for, founded a movement called Revisionist Zionism.

That is seriously reaching. You couldn’t have offered a less cogent argument.

The lesson to be learned from Halberstam’s death is that those with histories of causing multiple vehicle accidents should probably not be used for livery work. Absolutely positively nothing to do whatsoever with Halberstam’s work, or with Boyar’s agenda of making Americans feel victorious about a conspicuous defeat.

It’s no surprise to me that the Vietnam revisionists would also defend General Motors, yet another noteworthy example of failure that is defended by the apologists who just help to run it into the ground. The enablers aren’t going to bring GM to profitability, and unfortunately, it is the employees and the shareholders who will pay the price for this hubris and addiction to mediocrity.

Bozoer:
The Vietnam War denialism I get, but statements like “Frankly, his reliability as a journalist ranks about the same as his abilities as a driver” are just vile. Yes Halberstam was killed in a car accident. As a passenger. But I’m sure you knew that.
Happy Purim to you too.

What denialism? Gen Giap acknowledged in his memoirs that the North lost the Tet Offensive, that the VC were no longer an effective fighting force after ‘68, and that they only way they could win was to cultivate antiwar sentiment in the west and get the US to withdraw. Sound familiar? Had the US Senate not cravenly voted to stop all military aid to the RVN, they would have been able to hold off the North. The North’s offensive in ‘75 was not as large as the one in ‘73 that was repelled.

I realize that the idea that the US was defeated militarily in Vietnam is an article of the faith on the left. Faith isn’t facts.

Halberstam was a journalist, an observer, who liked standing on the sidelines offering his criticism without having to get his hands dirty. He wrote about war without ever being a soldier, he wrote about baseball without ever playing the game at a competitive level. He wrote about the car biz without ever having built or even worked on a car. That he died as a passenger, while someone else was doing the driving seems of a piece with how he acted in his career.

It’s curious, however, that auto journalists always single out GM for in-person maligning. Why only ambush GM execs? Bill Ford, that cosseted trust-fund baby, basically ran FoMoCo into the ground. A cabal of obscure accountants now run the show at Chrysler. Why single out GM??

Oh, and to all you Prius-devotees: please note that the Prius is a success because Toyota DUMPED the car on our shores during its early years, selling it for less than it cost to build. (Rumor is, they’re still doing it.) That is absolutely illegal.

Yet you bash GM for truthfully revealing that hybrid technology is cost-prohibitive. So spare me your high-mpg stories. Every gallon of gas you save was at the cost of an American worker.

By the way, Halberstam was not driving the auto during his fatal accident. A grad student was driving and was recently prosecuted for negligence.

I see… your helplessness, you can meet the guru, you can have the privilege of the secret handshake, yet the caravan of apathy goes on. If those steering the mighty ships across the oceans are lost in the bank accounts that devilishly caress their basic instincts, yet nothing comes from their homo sapiens, you are destined to cease your genetics in an afterlude of a cash bleeding conflagration .

I imagine the people of sparkling eyes, who have a vision, a dream curving beyond logics, their wives pulling out hair in hours of abscence. I see the mighty men whose eyes were not blurred by a puppy love or 40 degrees of Cranberry vodka,but by their creations of every single new curve sculpted by their artisan minds in the metal.what makes me a car lover, a die hard fanatic, a petrol head with hands permanently paint and putty licked , what makes me a man, a personality, is the same what should have made a good car to be ..a good car. unfold the wings for attitude.

I count no hours. i shall pass for no slips in making cars. none shall pass, . what should i do to stop the extravaganza of rebadge, spendthrift of outsourcing, waste of labours under pretense of slim-sizing? I am already on my knees. do you ever see, Bob, the middle class crying families behind your parachute? The unborn children of slender paychecks and insecure future, the deserted factories of loneliness and rust. give me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,I lift my xenon headlights behind the golden door.

As far as what other questions he “should have asked” …..I think he already knew those answers,so why bother.

When it comes to the GM story , RF is probably one step ahead of most of us..

I see. If I understand, one right-wing hawk’s opinion transcends basic facts, i.e. that US government officials didn’t know that Pham was a spy.

Just because one guy agrees with you does not make it so. Moyar’s book is a piece of revisionist history. Given your religious faith, I would suggest that the word “revisionism” should be setting off alarm bells just about now.

I take your point, up to a point.

_I’m_ certainly interested to know if the Captain is properly incentivized–I work at a GM dealer.

But insofar as GM has an interest in boosting perception of the strength of its turnaround plans, it must make its case to the public, in many cases through journalists.

I don’t have a high opinion of the Fourth Estate myself, indeed, like Mr. Duranty you cited above, they’re just as likely to be a fifth column.

But journalists can and must ask questions on behalf of the public, any member of which may have a certain stake in the future of GM, if only as a car owner.

Halberstam was twenty-eight when he came to Vietnam. Before he left, fifteen months later, he would do more harm to the interests of the United States than any other journalist in American history.

Reuter’s correspondent in Saigon, Nick Turner:

“I could understand Dave being angry and wanting to use his position to change many of the things that were wrong. But it often carried over into personal vendettas and often he saw things in clear-cut ideas that were not always clear-cut.”

More of Moyar on Halberstam:

That’s a rather odd and tunnelvisioned twisting of the facts. Halberstam was a reporter, one of many who covered the war. Pham was in the employ of both Reuters and Time, and had earned the trust of US officials in the military and the State Department to the extent that he was the only Vietnamese member of the media to have access to off-the-record meetings.

He fooled everyone, perhaps aided by the fact that he had lived and been educated in the US, so he knew how to earn the trust of Americans. It wasn’t Halberstam who gave Pham access to US military installations.

Bozoer Rebbe: A clever play on Bebe Rebozo, methinks–Shabat Shalom!

No, though I’m old enough to remember RMN’s buddy. The Bozoer Rebbe is my Purim persona. Lots of chassidic groups are named after cities that begin with a B, Belz, Boyan, Breslov, so I decided that I was the Rebbe of Bozo.

His question about the bankruptcy-proof pension goes directly to Mr. Lutz’s incentives.

If you learn that the captain of your ship gets paid fully even if the ship sinks, you then might want to count the lifeboats, see if one’s missing…

Yes, that’s why I asked if RF owns any stock in GM or works there. If I’m on the ship, the captain’s incentives are relevant to me. If I’m not a passenger or have no personal or business interest in the ship, I’m not sure how much that cap’n makes is any of my business.

Shabat Shalom!

And a Freilichen Purim to you!

The fact that he got a Pulitzer means nothing. Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer in the 30s when he worked at the NYT as Stalin’s PR guy.

I might trust what Halberstam wrote about baseball, if I could verify it independently.

Frankly, his reliability as a journalist ranks about the same as his abilities as a driver.

I have to partially agree with many of the previous posters that faced with the limited opportunity to ask Bob Lutz just one question I don’t think I would have picked the one RF did. Having said that – if you were to have a little on-line competition among TTAC readers to come up with that hypothetical one question YOU would ask if you were to meet Bob Lutz (and just for fun let’s assume that he is compelled to answer truthfully, ho ho) then you would probably come up with a huge variety of different opinions on what would be the most useful or telling question. So I am not surprised that RF’s choice would not be the same as mine or some other reader’s.

I do have to disagree with an earlier poster who derides RF for asking about Bob’s pension, as if it has little or nothing to do with the pressing issues facing GM. The fact that his pension is almost certainly bankruptcy-proof and that he will undoubtedly profit in a myriad of other ways irrespective of how GM does – is highly relevant. The fact that there is effectively little or no penalty for failure at the highest executive levels can only contribute to the lack of performance amongst the highest echelons of the Detroit 3.

This discussion thread also brings up a philosophical question about TTAC’s coverage of the Detroit 3 in general. Does the fact that TTAC seeks to expose the truth about what is really happening to these companies (rather than simply pretending that none of this is happening) imply that TTAC is secretly willing Detroit to fail? I really don’t believe that it is, though I guess that for anyone intimately involved and dependent on the Detroit 3 I can easily see how it might look that way.

I can understand how Detroit 3 managers and employees would want to put the best spin on events and even delude themselves about the true gravity of the situation. After all, how on earth can you maintain morale and focus on the job if everyone has simply given up the cause as lost? Similarly, it would be commercial suicide for the corporate PR machine to admit how bad things really are as it would undoubtedly scare off many potential customers with worries about the quality of the product coming from a disintegrating manufacturer and the uncertain future for warranty and product back-up.

However, at the same time one can’t help feeling that this lack of willingness to face the facts is exactly what got these companies into the trouble they are in now? The “emperor’s new clothes” approach of papering over the cracks will only keep working so long before the whole damn house of cards comes crashing down. The longer the problem is denied or at least down-played the harder it will be to do anything meaningful about it when the reality come a knocking some day soon.

To keep with the Hitler WW2 analogy…. Wasn’t the fact that Hitler’s generals were pretty reluctant to tell him the full truth about how badly things were really going towards the end of the war (not surprising when you consider the brutal ways in which they punished under-achievers) a contributing factor in their loss because by the time the true position was clear it was often all too late? Still, for the Detroit 3 executives a mildly humiliating retreat to a golden-parachuted retirement in the sun sounds infinitely less grim than a cyanide pill in a conrete bunker?

BTW- if you do decide to have a “come up with that one question for Bob” competition, can I have a TTAC souvenir mug as reward for my idea!
(just kidding….)

Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage. His thesis behind The Best and The Brightest was sound, to the point that the title of the book has become synonymous with McNamara’s failures in Vietnam. So sorry, but I don’t understand your point.