HOW TO BECOME A TYCOON

...Put away that old top-hatted frock-coated pot-bellied Capitalist, you Commie cartoonists, and take a good long look at the photographic portrait of Henry Ford II on page 108 of Life for October 1. Just possibly, it might spur you to something new in the way of lampooning, say, the Capitalist of the Atomic Age...

...he is aware of his limitations (is anyone...

...In fact, classes bore you so much that you flunk a course or two, but you eventually manage to graduate...

...Simple, isn't it...

...That article, read as if written straight-faced, makes out quite a case for young Henry: His contempt for book learning is really dislike of cant...

...Of course, it won't have to be sold if the business-builder-upper has hired high-priced legal advice, as the Fords have done, to tell him how to hang on to his own for his own even after his death...

...A young man with no apparent qualifications whatsoever, a young man whose mental equipment according to the record (and according to an ex-teacher of his who once told me so) is well below par...

...GETTING away from Life and from the Commies but still sticking leech-like to Henry, it occurs to me that the elevation of the ex-crew-manager bears on another matter of sporadic political interest...

...I also remembered a speech I heard Alfred P. Sloan deliver several years ago...

...One of the most hackneyed arguments, of the widows-and-orphans school, against high inheritance a^id estate taxes goes to, the effect that sueh taxes keep the man who has built up a family business—alwayfc by hard and honest toil—from handing it on down to his sons and grandsons, because the business, or a big chunk of it, will have to be sold to pay the taxes...

...Here, on a silver (or should I say tin...

...You must also be the grandson of Henry Ford...

...Somehow I've an uncomfortable feeling that a couple of Communists are laughing behind my back...

...IF our old friends, the Communists, were the least bit smart or subtle—which they are conspicuously not —I should think they would make a lot of merry and fairly effective hay out of the promotion of Henry Ford II to the presidency of the Ford Motor Co...

...But not to your old dirty manual job...

...You deal with sales and advertising...

...You do better with your hands than, to date, with your mind...

...Comes the breath of war and the pre-war draft and you get yourself an ensign's commission in the Navy...

...An interesting illustration of crystal-clarity in the upper story...

...In fact, they came to pray and remained, to scoff...

...Oh yes—one little thing I forgot to mention...

...platter, is the ultimate caricature of capitalism...

...This is of little concern to you...

...At this point, my "you," which has been singular in a plural sort of way, becomes terribly specific...

...To begin with, you have to be born—which everyone is—and grow up for a few years, as most people do...

...I am not just talking about bad delivery...

...The following year, at the age of 28, with barely two years of executive experience behind you, you become president of the billion-dollar-plus corporation for which you so recently worked with your hands...

...You go to conferences...

...He has shown much interest in a guaranteed annual wage, but has remarked that it will not be needed while Detroit is turning out 6,000,000 ears a year, and it may be hard to put through when business falls off...

...Nor is all this all...

...hi3 seeming cockiness is impatience with pretense of formality...

...Incidentally, it was from the Life article accompanying the portrait that I cribbed most of my facts about Henry Ford II...

...Maybe it's just that it doesn't take brains to become a tycoon in the auto industry...

...You make speeches...

...he is eager to learn (a little late...

...The title—need-1 add?—is The Last Tycoon...

...Does it perhaps say, for Henry, that a shield against unemployment may be a good idea except that you don't need it when there's no unemployment and when there is unemployment it's not such a good idea...

...For a couple of years you handle a minor administrative job in this country...

...And I'm afraid they have a right to laughs For if free American enterprise can't do better at finding first-rate brains to run its biggest business—if it can't do better than Stettinius and Sloan and Henry Ford II—it would be wise to clear the path to the storm-cellar...

...Lo and behold, in less than a year you find yourself appointed executive vice president of the company...

...By what standard of public good, as opposed to private dog-in-the-manger-ness, should a large or small cog in the national economy be handed down through the generations like a family heirloom ? I was about to suggest that it' would be a fine thing for the nation if control of the Ford empire could have been forced, by taxes or otherwise, out of the hands of the Ford family, when a disturbing thought came to me...

...becomes, by the accident of'birth, the head of one of the nation's greatest corporations...

...So here I am with the fortuitous head of a family company no worse, after all, than the picked head of a company whose stock is publicly held and sold...

...You are let out of the Navy to go back to civilian work...

...If they should use that Life picture of Henry Ford II, they might borrow for a caption the title of a book by the late F. Scott Fitzgerald...

...Keep that eye bent...

...Into his hands —or more accurately and unfortunately, into his mind —goes the responsibility of formulating policies and making decisions which will affect, directly or indirectly, literally millions of U. S. citizens...

...Yet I wonder whether I didn't catch an occasional undertone of tongue-in-cheek, as though Life maybe found young Henry and his accession to power a touch hard to take...

...STILL, I can't resist giving those Commie cartoonists one more gratuitous hint...

...This is said, believe me, more in sorrow than in anger, for I'm a free enterprise guy myself...

...Young Henry Ford could not conceivably have laid wider open a basic unintelligence than did Alfred P. Sloan...

...That speech was, without a competitor, the worst speech I have ever heard anywhere—which is going some...

...It was composed of two memories: I remembered that General Motors, young Henry's biggest competitor, is not, despite the DuPonts, a one-family corporation in the Ford sense, and that Alfred P. Sloan who heads General Motors did not inherit his job...

...And in case anyone should shrug off this judgment on the ground that my political and social views would probably not be very close to Mr...

...Then suddenly, none other than the Secretary of the Navy decides that your old company needs you more than the Navy needs you...

...I am talking about stupidity of content...

...But, more than that, isn't the ease of young Henry, as he slides under the steering-wheel of the nation's biggest one-family business, something of a jolt to the unspoken assumption that just because pappy or grandpappy was a hot rock, sonny or grandsonny must be a hot rock too...

...RETURNING to the States, you go to work for a few months at a dirty manual job in a factory run by a big corporation...

...Yet that won't solve it either...

...There's Ed Stettinius (enough said) and he was in Steel...

...You go to school, where you play mediocre football and get rotten marks...

...Read that carefully...

...Then you go to college...

...You marry the girl and go off for a honeymoon in Hawaii...

...This time you are an executive...

...Sloan's, let me quickly add that my judgment was shared by scores who came to hear a hero...

...At college you devote almost all your time to courting a pretty girl and assistant-managing, then managing, the crew...

...Since your interests and talents still lie along other lines than the intellectual, you achieve the rare distinction of spending four full years in college and then departing without a degree...