By February of 1958, the Edsel had been on sale long enough for everyone at Ford Motor Company to agree on one thing.
Nobody wanted to be the first man in the room to say what everyone already knew.
The conference room on the upper floors of Ford World Headquarters smelled of cigarette smoke, coffee, furniture polish and expensive wool. Beyond the windows, Dearborn lay beneath a winter sky the color of a galvanized washtub. Inside, a dozen men in dark suits sat around a table large enough to launch aircraft from, each with a folder in front of him and an ashtray within easy reach.
At the head sat Henry Ford II.
The Deuce.
In front of him were several stacks of paper containing the accumulated results of one of the most carefully researched, lavishly promoted and expensively launched automobiles in American history.
They were terrible.
Ford had expected Edsel to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 cars during its first year. At the rate things were going, the actual number would not come remotely close. Dealers were complaining. Salesmen were demoralized. Inventory was accumulating. Some dealerships had begun holding contests in which the grand prize was an Edsel.
People weren’t entering.
That particular fact seemed to bother Henry Ford II more than anything else.
“You mean to tell me,” he said, looking over the top of his glasses, “that we’re trying to give the damn things away?”
Nobody answered.
“And people still don’t want them?”
Still nothing.
There are silences caused by uncertainty.
There are silences caused by grief.
And then there is the special silence created when the man asking the question has his grandfather’s name on the building.
Dan Donley sat three chairs from the end.
He was the newest man at the table, which meant he had not yet learned all the reasons he should keep his mouth shut.
That would prove important.
The Edsel had not been a foolish idea when Ford began developing it years earlier. Quite the opposite. Market research had shown a seemingly obvious hole in the Ford Motor Company lineup. Chevrolet buyers could move upward into Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick. Plymouth buyers could aspire to Dodge, De Soto and Chrysler. Ford had Mercury, but there seemed to be room for something else, a separate marque occupying the profitable middle ground of an American automobile market that appeared destined to grow forever.
Ford called it the E-Car.
The experimental car.
Hundreds of names had been considered. Consultants had been consulted. Poets had reportedly been asked for suggestions, which was probably the first indication that automobile executives had been left unsupervised.
Eventually the car was named Edsel, after Henry Ford’s late father.
That gave the automobile a name carrying enormous emotional significance inside the Ford family and virtually none outside it.
Then Ford spent years developing the thing.
Unfortunately, America spent those same years changing.
By the time the Edsel arrived on September 4, 1957, the booming mid-priced automobile market it had been designed to conquer was beginning to collapse. Buick, Oldsmobile, Dodge, De Soto and other aspirational marques were suddenly discovering that buyers worried about mortgages and layoffs did not necessarily dream of moving one rung higher on the chrome ladder.
The recession of 1957 and 1958 had arrived.
People started looking at smaller cars.
Cheaper cars.
Cars that drank less gasoline.
The Edsel entered the marketplace dressed for a party that had already been canceled.
And then there was the styling.
Nobody in the boardroom mentioned that immediately.
Eventually somebody had to.
“The grille,” said a product planner.
Henry Ford II looked at him.
“What about the grille?”
The product planner suddenly discovered considerable interest in his notes.
“There has been some…reaction.”
“What kind of reaction?”
Another silence.
Dan Donley had read the same reports.
Horse collar.
Toilet seat.
Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.
And several descriptions involving female anatomy that had apparently originated in taverns rather than focus groups.
Nobody volunteered those.
The vertical grille was only part of it. The 1958 Edsel was an automobile designed during an era when Detroit believed there was no styling problem that couldn’t be solved by adding another six inches of chrome. Its rear lamps climbed diagonally toward the center of the car in bizarre gull-wing shapes that made the rear end appear to be preparing for takeoff. The dashboard featured a rolling-drum speedometer. The automatic transmission could be operated through Teletouch pushbuttons mounted in the center of the steering wheel.
It was innovative.
It was distinctive.
It was unmistakable.
Unfortunately, those were not necessarily synonyms for desirable.
Worse, Edsel wasn’t really one automobile.
It was practically a federal bureaucracy.
There were Rangers and Pacers and Corsairs and Citations, along with Bermuda, Villager and Roundup station wagons. Some rode on Ford-based platforms. Others were derived from Mercurys. Eighteen body styles spread across four model series attempted to occupy nearly every conceivable price point between Ford and Mercury.
Instead of filling a hole in Ford’s lineup, Edsel appeared to be wandering around inside it looking for the exit.
Henry Ford II continued through the numbers.
Dealer inventories.
Advertising expenditures.
Production costs.
Warranty claims.
Sales projections.
Market penetration.
Each page landed on the polished table with the dull authority of another shovelful of dirt.
The men around Donley had supported the E-Car program.
At least officially.
Several had privately questioned it from the beginning, but corporate courage is a commodity frequently discovered in storage only after the chairman leaves the room.
Donley listened.
He made notes.
He crossed some out.
Then he stopped writing entirely.
The answer was becoming obvious.
The Edsel didn’t need fixing.
It needed retreating.
When Henry Ford II finally reached the end of the presentation, he removed his glasses.
“Suggestions?”
Nobody moved.
A cigarette burned unnoticed in an ashtray.
Somewhere beyond the windows, thousands of Ford employees were building automobiles.
Donley stood.
Every face turned toward him.
He had been raised in Fort Stockton, Texas, where men learned early that there were occasions when silence demonstrated wisdom and others when it merely allowed somebody else’s bull to remain in the pasture.
This was beginning to smell like the second kind.
“We’re trying to save the wrong car,” Donley said.
Henry Ford II stared at him.
“Explain.”
Donley walked toward the presentation board.
“We designed Edsel for the market we thought we’d have. We don’t have that market anymore. We can’t recreate 1955. Buick can’t. Oldsmobile can’t. Chrysler can’t. We certainly can’t.”
Nobody interrupted.
“So stop pretending.”
That produced movement.
One executive leaned backward.
Another removed his glasses.
The Deuce’s expression changed by approximately half a degree, which was apparently enough to make three vice presidents reconsider their wills.
Donley continued.
“Four series become two. Ranger and Corsair. Citation goes. Pacer goes. The Mercury-based cars go. Bermuda goes. Roundup goes. One basic Ford-based chassis. One hundred twenty-inch wheelbase. Ten body styles instead of eighteen.”
Someone finally spoke.
“That’s half the line.”
“That’s the idea.”
Donley pointed toward a photograph of the 1958 Edsel.
“And that grille gets smaller.”
Nobody laughed.
“The grille stays because otherwise we’re admitting we were wrong.”
“We were wrong.”
The silence returned.
Henry Ford II leaned back.
Donley kept going.
“The public doesn’t need us to confess. They already voted. What we need is a car they’ll buy.”
He moved around the photograph.
“Flatten the rear treatment. Get rid of those taillights.”
“Styling considers them a signature element.”
“They look like the car is trying to flap its wings.”
Somebody coughed into his fist.
It might have been laughter.
“Replace them with round lamps. Six lenses across the back. Tone down the trim. Square the body. Make the whole thing look calmer.”
“And Teletouch?” somebody asked.
“Gone.”
That created actual murmuring.
Teletouch had been one of Edsel’s technological showpieces, an automatic transmission controlled by buttons in the center of the steering wheel.
It had also proved troublesome, complicated and expensive.
“We put the shifter back where Americans expect to find it. On the column. Use a Ford-based instrument panel. Lose the rolling speedometer. Lose anything expensive that doesn’t help sell the automobile.”
An engineer spoke.
“The E-475?”
“Gone.”
The massive 410-cubic-inch V8 had made sense when Edsel was supposed to stalk Buick and Oldsmobile buyers.
Donley tapped his pencil against the table.
“Give the Ranger a 292. Keep larger engines optional. Six-cylinder availability where it makes sense. The biggest engine we need is the 361.”
“That’s three hundred and three horsepower.”
“Which ought to be sufficient to get a family to church.”
A few smiles appeared.
Henry Ford II wasn’t smiling.
But he was listening.
That was enough.
Someone from Marketing raised his hand slightly, as though they had all suddenly returned to school.
“Won’t it be obvious that we’ve made the Edsel a dressed-up Ford?”
Donley looked at him.
“Is it obvious that Pontiac is a dressed-up Chevrolet?”
Nobody answered.
“Is it obvious that Dodge is a dressed-up Plymouth?”
Still nothing.
Donley put both hands on the table.
“We might produce automobiles, gentlemen, but what we sell is illusions.”
Now even Henry Ford II looked interested.
“We sell the illusion that the man buying a Mercury has moved up from the man buying a Ford. General Motors sells the illusion that an Oldsmobile owner has accomplished something the Chevrolet owner hasn’t. Half of Detroit is built on the same frame rails with different chrome attached.”
The Marketing man started to object.
Donley continued.
“We’ve got to create an illusion that the Edsel is a step up from a Ford rather than something that was a mistake from the beginning that might not be around in two years.”
That did it.
Henry Ford II’s jaw tightened.
Around the table, several men suddenly found their pencils fascinating.
Donley knew immediately that he had stepped on the rattlesnake.
He also knew there wasn’t much point taking his foot off now.
“So that’s the plan,” he said. “Stop trying to make Edsel revolutionary. Make it sensible.”
The Deuce said nothing for several seconds.
Then he looked at the photographs.
The numbers.
The projections.
Finally he looked back at Donley.
“Do it.”
The resulting 1959 Edsel was one of the fastest corporate reversals Detroit had ever attempted.
Only a year earlier, Ford advertising had presented Edsel as glamorous, advanced and dramatically different. Henry Ford II himself had called it “the only truly new car on the American road.”
Now the advertising department performed an about-face vigorous enough to leave skid marks.
The headline on promotional material for the new car proclaimed:
1959 EDSEL MAKES HISTORY BY MAKING SENSE
The automobile that had arrived promising to reinvent the medium-price field was suddenly described as an “all-new quality car in the low price range.”
Low price.
Right alongside Ford.
Precisely where Donley had said it needed to be.
The extravagant 1958 lineup disappeared. Ranger and Corsair remained. The Mercury-derived big cars vanished. Ten body styles replaced eighteen. The enormous 410 was gone, and buyers could select from an inline six and three V8s, topping out with the 361-cubic-inch engine producing 303 horsepower.
Teletouch disappeared.
So did the rolling speedometer.
The dashboard became recognizably Ford-derived.
The column shifter returned.
And the exterior styling underwent the automotive equivalent of being sent home to change clothes.
The vertical grille remained, but narrowed considerably. The extravagant 1958 rear treatment was flattened. Those bizarre rising taillights disappeared, replaced by six round lenses spread across the rear. The body became lower, squarer and calmer.
Nobody was going to mistake a 1959 Edsel for a Rambler.
But it no longer looked as though it had been designed during an argument.
There was even a Corsair convertible.
Long.
Low.
Wide.
Chrome from one end to the other.
With the top down, whitewall tires turning and a V8 rumbling through dual exhaust, it was an attractive automobile.
That may have been the cruelest part.
The 1959 Edsel was finally becoming the sort of car Edsel perhaps should have been from the beginning.
America no longer cared.
Sales dropped again.
Fewer than 45,000 1959 Edsels found buyers.
Ford’s nearly twelve hundred Edsel dealers had invested in showrooms, signs, inventory, advertising and promises. Now many were staring at automobiles that depreciated while sitting under fluorescent lights.
The sales force had gone from enthusiastic to embarrassed.
The brand was bleeding.
Donley slowed the hemorrhage.
He could not resurrect the patient.
Within Ford, however, people understood what he had accomplished. He had taken a sprawling product line conceived for a vanished market and cut away everything he could. He reduced manufacturing complexity. Lowered costs. Simplified the automobile. Redirected Edsel toward a price class where buyers still existed.
Most importantly, he bought Ford something it desperately needed.
Time.
Because while Edsel staggered toward the inevitable, Dearborn was already turning toward automobiles with futures.
The Thunderbird became a four-seater and found a much larger audience.
The compact Falcon was coming.
The Comet would follow.
And the basic Falcon architecture would eventually prove astonishingly versatile, spawning generations of successful Ford products.
Resources could move toward tomorrow instead of disappearing into yesterday.
There would still be a 1960 Edsel.
Barely.
Introduced October 15, 1959, it was essentially a heavily restyled Ford wearing the remnants of an identity nobody quite knew what to do with.
Thirty-four days later, Ford announced Edsel production would end.
Three model years.
Hundreds of millions of dollars.
One of the most famous failures in American business history.
And that meant somebody had to be blamed.
Corporations are peculiar organisms. They can make decisions collectively, approve them unanimously, defend them enthusiastically and then, when those decisions become catastrophic, discover that the entire affair was apparently the work of one guy.
Dan Donley had become too closely associated with Edsel.
The fact that he had been brought in to help rescue it became less important than the fact that his fingerprints were now on it.
Henry Ford II fired him.
No ceremony.
No brass band.
No mention that Donley had been the man willing to stand up in a room full of executives and say the thing none of them wanted to hear.
There was, however, one small consolation.
Donley was allowed to keep a 1959 Edsel Corsair convertible.
White.
Black sweep panel.
Black top.
Red interior.
It was one of the cars he had fought to create.
He drove it south.
Past Toledo.
Past Cincinnati.
Past Memphis.
Across Texas.
And eventually all the way back to Fort Stockton.
Jim Bowie High School hired him to teach auto shop.
The irony was considerable.
One year Donley had been sitting in Dearborn boardrooms discussing national automobile strategy with Henry Ford II.
The next he was explaining to sixteen-year-olds why a carburetor float should not be adjusted with a pair of pliers and profanity.
He preferred the second job.
Teenagers, he discovered, were considerably easier to understand than corporate executives.
When they did something stupid, they usually admitted they had thought it would be fun.
The Corsair became a familiar sight in the Jim Bowie parking lot. Students learned its peculiarities. Donley used it occasionally in class to explain ignition systems, automatic transmissions and the strange manner in which Detroit could spend millions of dollars solving problems nobody had.
Then somebody asked him to coach girls’ basketball.
Donley knew automobiles.
Basketball he understood mostly as something involving a ball and an insufficient number of carburetors.
He took the job anyway.
In 1961, Jim Bowie went to state.
Fort Stockton briefly forgot that girls’ basketball was something it had previously regarded as an activity intended to keep young women occupied until marriage.
Two years later Donley met a former player who had returned to town after college.
She had been a power forward.
A very good one.
She was also several inches taller than Dan, which prevented him from winning most arguments because she could simply look down at him until he reconsidered.
They married in 1963.
For their honeymoon, Donley pulled the Edsel out of the garage.
He washed it himself.
Waxed the long white body.
Polished the chrome.
Vacuumed the red interior.
Then he folded the black convertible top behind the rear seat.
His bride put two suitcases in the trunk.
They headed east on Highway 290 toward San Antonio.
The 361 settled into its rhythm.
The whitewalls hummed against Texas pavement.
The narrow vertical grille split the warm morning air while the six round taillights grew smaller in the mirrors of whatever they passed.
Somewhere outside Junction, she slid closer across the broad front seat.
“You ever wish you’d stayed at Ford?”
Dan thought about it.
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
He looked across the long white hood.
“Nope.”
She smiled.
“Then why’d you keep the car?”
Donley drove another mile before answering.
“Because the car wasn’t the mistake.”
That was all he said.
There wasn’t much else to say.
History remembers the Edsel as a failure, and history isn’t wrong.
But history has the luxury of knowing how things turn out.
The men sitting in that Dearborn boardroom in early 1958 didn’t.
They were surrounded by numbers telling them that years of planning had failed, hundreds of millions of dollars were disappearing, dealers were furious, customers were indifferent and an automobile carrying the Ford family’s most personal name had become a national joke.
Most of them responded the way people usually do when confronted with a disaster they helped create.
They waited for somebody else to speak.
Dan Donley stood up.
He couldn’t save Edsel.
Nobody could.
But for one year he helped transform an automobile that had been conceived as an extravagant answer to a question America was no longer asking into something simpler, cheaper and better suited to the world that actually existed.
It still failed.
Sometimes correcting course doesn’t get you to the destination.
Sometimes you’ve already missed the turn by a hundred miles.
But it can keep you out of the ditch.
And years later, on warm evenings in Fort Stockton, an aging white Edsel Corsair convertible could occasionally be seen cruising slowly down Dickinson Boulevard, its top folded behind the red seats, six round taillights glowing in the dusk.
Most people who saw it knew what it was.
An Edsel.
One of the greatest failures in automotive history.
Dan Donley knew something they didn’t.
It was also the car that brought him home.
