Never Complain, Never Explain: The Story of Henry Ford II

...It is enough to say that a multi-billionaire who truly desires the reclusive life has little trouble achieving that aim...

...It was even worse when he cited-by news account, page, and date-the trendies' own critical comments about Kennedy's record and his pre-1960 qualifications for the presidency...

...To remind Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...In an era of instant history and instant forgetfulness, this is no small reward...

...Having earned his niche as the biographer left-wing mythologists love to hate, the man who first debunked Camelot, punctured Arthur Goldberg's stuffed shirt, applied the coup de grace to the crumbling mystique of Jimmy Carter's populism, and had the chutzpah to point out that imperial skulduggery at the White House antedated Richard Nixon, has now turned his attention to one of the Great Society's most avid capitalist supporters, the third-generation rich boy who once confided that he arranged his life "so that nobody will ever know anything about me, or as little as possible...

...But as Lasky makes clear, Henry Ford II, from the time he hired one of the country's leading public relations agents to develop his image as a statesman-of-industry in the early 1940s, has always been a public man, a heavy-handed wielder of power and influence whose reach extends far beyond the automotive empire he inherited...

...But - behind these revealing glimpses, the plumbline that runs throughout the story of Henry Ford II is that of a man born, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote of the dynastic heirs of another generation, with too much of the world's money and too little of its brains...

...It's that, like LBJ, his favorite president, he alone be the arbiter of what the world will know about him...

...One of the rewards of reading a Vic Lasky biography is that the author reacquaints us with our recent past...

...Indeed, the very technique liberal critics fault in Lasky's books- that he ferrets out contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts and columns to establish his thesisis the perfect antidote to the sort of crisis-to-crisis revisionism one finds in the histories of our time written by such leading public relations agents as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...

...or Henry again, arrested for driving under the influence while in California, dismissing the incident with the four-word axiom that encapsulates his life's mode and gives this book its title...

...A failure in private life, ultimately a failure in running the business formed, indeed invented, by his grandfather and nurtured by his father Edsel, Henry the Second would seem to be living, breathing evidence of the shortcomings of public relations and image-making...

...that, before being starstruck on the road to Los Angeles, he worshiped at the temple of Adlai Stevenson and ridiculed Kennedy as an opportunist-that's hitting a man low...

...The result is a biographical bull's eye, as fascinating in its revelations regarding the mythology of Detroit and the ego-magnetic auto industry as Lasky's previous books were in dealing with Washington and the libido-driven political industry...

...It was the same with Lasky's post-Watergate book: To go into the stacks and dig out accounts of FDR's imperial abuse of power and of the shady tricks practiced by JFK and LBJ prior to the Nixon Reign of Terror-that is the foul technique, as the Times's critic was quick to point out, of a literary hit man...

...Once again, Lasky has gone to the stacks, delved into the records, but more: He has sought out those who not only know the Ford behind the public relations chrome but, for their own reasons, are willing, even eager, to render eye- and ear-witness accounts of his battles with his business associates, stockholders, wives, and family members...

...So, too, with Henry Ford II, the playboy (now grown to playelder) who would be remembered in history as American industry's pioneer statesman, opening new frontiers of civic responsibility and social consciousness for twentieth-century capitalism...

...Not an unreasonable desire for a private man, nor even for a private multi-billionaire...

...But as we learn from this revealing biography-and from stories making the New York-Washington rounds concerning the subject's efforts to stifle it prior to publication-what Henry Ford II desires isn't secrecy...

...That Lyndon Johnson's friend Henry Ford II shared that confidence with Barbara Walters and an audience of millions on ABC's "World News Tonight" only begins to tell us of the man's unique perception of himself as one of God's, or as the case may be, Our Ford's, Chosen People...

...there is Henry, recipient of a laudatory letter from the Americans for Democratic Action for proposing "a lasting contribution to the unity of the free world," privately calling Charles Revson, the cosmetics czar, "Le Beau Kike" because of Revson's attentions to Ford's separated wife, Cristina...

...There is, it would seem, just so much even the most resourceful PR-man can do with a cross between Charles Foster Kane and Mad Ludwig.nd Mad Ludwig...

...and James MacGregor Burns-not to forget Barbara Walters and her fellow slick-and-shine trendies in the news media...

...For those who like gossip of the broad-gauge historical variety, the book is a trove: Here are young Henry the Second, outgoing Ford Motor Company president Harry Bennett, and Henry's aide, John Bugas, all packing rods, not because of labor-management problems, but in the heat of a stockholder fight that would result in Bennett's being pushed out to make room for the future states-man-of-industry...

...Lasky's demolition of the myth of Camelot was all the more infuriating to the image-makers because the author of JFK: The Man and the Myth dug up Kennedy's own words as a congressman and a senator to raise doubts about JFK's credentials as a liberal saint...