Enzo Ferrari, by Brock Yates

...Freidel devotes less than a third of his space to the New Deal, indicative of increasing recognition that, of FDR's achievements, it was World War II, not the New Deal, that led to the most decisive shifts in American life...

...Ferrari's other son, Piero Lardi, was born to his mistress...

...Yates has filled the stoup of Ferrari holy water from the coldest well he could find, yet a surprisingly sympathetic portrait emerges...

...Roosevelt, it asserts, was sincere when he affirmed a faith in capitalism...

...How is it that old Ferraris, many with shaky underpinnings, which by rights shouldn't have survived for thirty or forty years, can sell for as much as $4.2 million...

...From its entry onto the Grand Prix stage in 1952, Ferrari's participation was essentially continuous, entering nearly 500 races and becoming the only constructor ever to win more than 100...

...After all, any modish scholar-historian knows that "the significant questions" involve not Great White Men, nor even personalities as such, but rather the oppression inflicted upon women, minorities, and the American working class during the past century of Corporate Liberal dominance...

...How is it that a single automobile marque holds such a narcotic desirability for persons who will never, ever be able to afford one...

...Niki Lauda, the buck-toothed Austrian who won fourteen races in four seasons for Ferrari, and who last made the news when one of his Air Lauda passenger jets crashed in Thailand...

...To please the auto enthusiast, the mechanical trivia is necessary...

...He would set driver against driver, taking advantage of their enormous pride and destructive egos...

...This task he left exclusively to talented and beleaguered subordinates, who toiled in an office environment that could have taught the Medicis a few things about staff morale...

...When one gets beyond a surface layer of politicians, the New Deal emerges quite clearly as the most ambitious effort undertaken up to that time by an anti-commercial intelligentsia to manage a national economy...

...More specifically, he seeks to cut through three generations of automotive blather and a wealth of self-serving prose issued by William Jeanes is editor-in-chief of Car and Driver magazine Ferrari himself...

...In Enzo Ferrari, Brock Yates, editorat-large for me at Car and Driver, has set out in search of Ferrari the man...

...When a warrant was issued for his arrest, he fled to Neuchatel...

...The climax of this volume occurs with the publication of Emile, in which Rousseau, once again a Protestant, had included the "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Priest," an essay repudiating revelation...

...Yates has a weakness for overusing a good anecdote here: we learn on at least three occasions that Laura Ferrari missed a belt loop or two as she aged...

...Although conservatives go largely unheard in the academic debate, one finds among numerous policy advocates (e.g., George Gilder) and historically oriented economists (Murray Rothbard, Herbert Stein, Gene Smiley, Richard Vedder, and Lowell Gallaway) a conservative critique of the New Deal that deserves more attention...

...The book is saturated with technical information—this being, ironically perhaps, its only off-putting quality for the general reader...

...a reviewer of Frank Freidel's volume asked recently...

...On these occasions, Ferrari would grieve publicly, only to brag later in private about his stellar performance as a mourner...

...Some, including Luigi Chinetti, the man who made Ferrari cars a staple in the United States, shed valuable light on the subject . . . though the word subject seems inappropriate to this kingly enigma...

...by Laura Ferrari, Dino's mother, on those occasions when she spied him at work in the factory...

...Three weeks later, Gerhard Berger, an Austrian, drove his Ferrari to victory in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza...

...Of course, as is so often the case, most of those unfortunates who live outside academia see things differently...

...The Ferrari team owns the longest and most distinguished record in Grand Prix racing history...

...Many years ago, Irving Babbitt remarked that "In the name of feeling, Rousseau headed the most powerful insurrection the world has ever seen against every kind of authority...

...After examining in detail the lingering rumor that Dino died from inherited syphilis, Yates ultimately dismisses it for lack of evidence...

...But this is nit-picking when set against the scope and sweep of the work as a whole...

...Not that Ferrari himself ever quite decided who he was...

...The answer is to be found in the determination of Enzo Ferrari himself . . . but it was not a determination to build great automobiles for customers...

...Most of his subordinates, although not conscious socialists, neither understood capitalism nor empathized with the day-to-day problems of businessmen who had to make profits and meet payrolls...

...The series dates from 1950, and a two-car team today requires something on the order of $20 million a year if it is to be competitive...

...The personality parade goes on and on, each new marcher underlining the difference between the adventurers who sought fame on the Grand Prix tracks of the 1950s and 1960s and the colorless, if talented, technicians who do it today...

...Traditional and tightly focused, it is the best one-volume narrative yet written of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency...

...Not surprisingly, his criticism of his subject is restrained...

...Piero was later acknowledged by the elder Ferrari and, as Piero Lardi Ferrari, given a place in the organization, although he was subjected to shrieks of "Bastard...

...The great Ferrari road cars (and more than one expert will question the adjective) were no more than an outgrowth of Ferrari's infatuation with what writer Robert Daley called "the cruel sport...

...and world champion Phil Hill, the high-strung Californian who won a tragic championship in 1961 after his Ferrari teammate Wolfgang von Trips was killed on the track...

...6 6Elerrari" is the name most people r will give you if you ask them their dream car...

...New Deal policies may have aborted recovery by nibbling at the capitalist system around the margins: through the imposition of higher taxes, especially on capital gains and undistributed corporate profits...

...Depression...

...22 William Jeanes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 41 born poor, neglecting to mention that his father owned three automobiles, a considerable stable at the turn of the century...

...On Sunday, August 14, 1988, Enzo Ferrari died at his home in Modena...

...A reviewer of the first volume of Cranston's life complained that he had made Rousseau seem "almost normal...

...The reader meets fascinating drivers: the great Nuvolari, for whom Ferrari spent a lifetime seeking a replacement...

...How can a model lineup that ranges in price from around $85,000 (a simple Mondial t) to as much as $600,000 (the staggeringly fast F-40) have such mass appeal...

...A young radical and isolationist at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s, Frank Freidel mellowed into an admirer of FDR during the postwar era and has devoted most of his career to this biography (three earlier volumes covered Roosevelt's pre-presidential life...

...If pressed, most will declare that Roosevelt fell short because of a regrettable lack of imagination that caused him to ignore John Maynard Keynes's advice to run even more enormous budget deficits...

...Ferrari credited Dino with designing a V-6 engine, a credit that Yates demonstrates conclusively to be a canard...

...in his native Italy, when he was not a pariah (as when his cars were suffering a losing racing season) he was a national monument...

...All are to be found here, to the delight of the reader who combines a love of automobiles with a modicum of curiosity about Ferraris,racing drivers, and the Grand Prix circuit...

...Here Cranston's second volume ends...

...The size of his father's "little shop" ranged from five or six workmen to fifty or sixty when it became his father's "factory...

...That evening, at one of his haunts in the company of old friends, he could fart, belch, curse, and chase women with the energy of the Modenese paisano he claimed—at times—to be...

...to please the general reader, the sex, intrigues, and personality quirks must be included...

...In a series of ghostwritten "autobiographies," he added and subtracted from reality at will...

...It must be remembered that as a proportion of federal revenues, Roosevelt's deficits were the greatest in peacetime American history...

...From the moment he became involved with the Alfa Romeo racing effort in the 1920s, he livedfor the day when a team of cars bearing his name would dominate international Formula One racing...

...In case that is not enough, Yates takes a further step that will not endear him to followers of the prancing horse: he reveals that an inordinate number of Ferrari victories were recorded at times when competition ranged from poor to mediocre...

...He was an accomplished intriguer but not an adroit self-promoter, though his orchestrated press conferences became something of a legend...

...Ferrari lovers will continue to wave similar figurative banners, standards that will flutter undampened by the revelations of Enzo Ferrari...

...Since Protestants were then being executed for heresy, this attack on Christianity brought down on Rousseau the wrath of the authorities...

...The story of how his company's prancing-horse emblem came into being is equally cloudy, as are a welter of other incidents...

...This life is so well researched, richly detailed, and illuminating that the wait will be well worth it...

...Tersely and accurately, Cranston summarizes Rousseau's political ideas and attempts to rescue him from the most common accusation against him—that he provides the rationale for revolutions against the state and endorses totalitarianism (in subordinating the citizen to the "general will...

...Laura and Ferrari maintained a chilly marital relationship for decades, unaided by Ferrari's mother, who had little affection for Laura...

...At noon, before a roomful of drooling Ferrari buyers, he could pose as a national treasure...

...Formula One is the rulebook name for Grand Prix racing, an annual global "league" that is unquestionably the world's most expensive and most technologically advanced, and which confers the World Driving Championship...

...In pursuit of their own vision of the just society, they persuaded themselves of the merits of planning by a (supposedly) disinterested class of academics and independent professionals...

...By all accounts a pleasant young man, Dino Ferrari became closer in death than in life to his father, who would begin every day with a visit to Dino's tomb (once violated by would-be grave robbers, who apparently sought to hold the corpse for ransom...

...This would seem to be a simple enough task...

...After all, Ferrari was the most famous man in all of motordom...

...Yates, through the eyes and memories of more than a hundred former Ferrari employees, friends, and enemies, and through the observations of contemporary journalists, gives us a clear picture of a puzzling figure...

...This book provides it...

...24.95...

...Liberal historians, the author among them, have never asserted that Roosevelt beat the Alonzo L Hamby is professor of history at Ohio University...

...15.95 paper Alonzo L. Hamby 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991...

...But seeking the truth about Ferrari poses problems...

...they have preferred instead to dwell on FDR's reforms, compassion for the unemployed, overwhelming popularity, and success in effecting the most important American political realignment of the twentieth century...

...and that she was wont to steal tips and bread from the tables of restaurants...

...His only heir died young...

...You may not hear a model number or name, such as 348th or Testarossa, but you will hear the name Ferrari more than any other...

...but he did so from the viewpoint of inherited wealth...

...It is to be hoped that Cranston's third volume will address the question of whether these judgments are to be sustained...

...Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are the slogans of Rousseau's ideal state, which revolution is permitted to create...

...Count Alfonso de Portago, surely goaded to his death by Ferrari...

...Rousseau would go on to England, where he wrote the Confessions, and ultimately return to France in 1770...

...The literate public craves good biography...

...Laura Ferrari is a story in herself, and was either a former streetwalker or the prim daughter of respectable citizens, depending on which version was in vogue...

...No, Enzo Ferrari made icons of himself and his cars by means of a brutish, zealous, and unstinting commitment to racing...

...As to his mind, Cranston remarks that "those readers who cannot imagine Rousseau as anything other than thoroughly paranoid must wait for the third volume of his biography, which will trace the last tormented years of his life...

...Of the 103 victories it had recorded through 1990, 93 came in Ferrari's lifetime...

...If, as Cranston points out, this claim sounds paradoxical, Rousseau argues that the citizen surrenders his rights and possessions to the volonti angrale, or "general will," which is said to aim at the impartial good...

...Ferrari seems to have attracted a few cronies, but no true friends...

...W hen it came to doing it his way, Ferrari made Frank Sinatra look like a fence-straddler...

...This has always been the nature of big-time motor racing, but the news that Ferrari often fattened up on sub-standard opposition—the facts and figures back this up—will not find willing eyes and ears among the Ferrari faithful...

...five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio...

...Often, death resulted...

...Officials at the Ferrari factory in the town of Maranello, a suburb of Modena in Italy's Emilia-Romagna, gave no help when Yates sought access to records...

...He would, for example, claim to have been ENZO FERRARI: THE MAN, THE CARS, THE RACES Brock Yates/Doubleday/465 pp...

...He described his work in life as manipulating men, not building cars...

...Enzo Ferrari, called it Commendatore or it Cavaliere by his admirers and sycophants, died at the age of 90 in 1988, but not before making his the best-known name in the world of cars, with the possible exception of Ford—a company that thought so much of Ferrari's operation that it once tried unsuccessfully to buy it...

...F errari, by some yardsticks, lived a hell of a life...

...Ferrari was neither the smartest engineer in automotive history (he was not even an engineer) nor the greatest stylist (if he ever so much as sketched a car, the incident has gone unrecorded), and he was certainly not a great racing driver (he was adequate, but no more...

...He treated the men who drove his cars—with the possible exception of the Canadian Gilles Villeneuve, the Englishmen John Surtees and Mike Hawthorn, and Tazio Nuvolari, who starred for Ferrari's Alfa Romeo team—as expendable chattel...

...Forget the legends spread by the Ferraristi: that old Enzo spent nights laboring to build the world's greatest road cars...

...In the W ho needs or wants "heroic biography...

...But that is the dilemma that faces any biographer whose subject is intertwined with objects, cars in this case, that are themselves the subject of countless books...

...Cranston concedes that a like objection may be raised against this second volume, which only mildly anticipates Rousseau's eventual insanity...

...Just take Ferrari for what he was, and you can't help but feel affection for the old reprobate...

...and through a rhetorical policy of business-bashing that surely was economically counterFRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY Frank Freidel/Little, Brown/710 pp...

...Even the most slavish of devotees, however, will enjoy the detailed racing history that is so well complemented by a social (or anti-social) history of the Ferrari team...

...Like most academics the author is a man of liberal sentiments...

...Persons close to Ferrari were reluctant to speak for the record, though many were willing to serve as unnamed sources...

...And Lord Acton, in his Lectures on the French Revolution, remarked that Rousseau gave "the first signal of universal subversion...

...Debunking the myth that Ferrari lived to create great road cars (and revealing that Ferrari said privately that he thought the people who bought them were spendthrifts, fools, and worse) should make Yates the Salman Rushdie of Ferrari fanatics...

...But, in my judgment, Cranston's heart is not in it, and —since this is a conventional biography rather than a history of ideas—there is no extended critique of the historical effects of Rousseau's revolutionary doctrines...

...swirling crowd of delirious fans, a banner showed itself: "Ferrari, we followed you in life, and now in death...

...through insufficient efforts to revive international trade (the reciprocal trade program amounted to more symbol than substance...