R.I.P. McNamara: The Father of the Ford Falcon

[R-Design]

Originally Posted by NYT

Robert S. McNamara, who died on Monday at 93, will be remembered for the war in Vietnam. He is less recalled as the father of the Ford Falcon compact, introduced 50 years ago this fall. He was not only the defense secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but a key executive at the Ford Motor Company.

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...ord-falcon/?hp

[cob115]

yea just read bout him today,was a great man

[blueoval]

dammit, wrong mcnamara died. :P

[XR8putts]

Originally Posted by blueoval

dammit, wrong mcnamara died. :P

R.I.P Robert S. McNamara

[Sprint XR8]

Robert McNamara: Before Vietnam, There Was Ford

"He wore granny glasses, and he put out a granny car." That's how one auto writer, quoted in Robert Lacey's excellent 1986 book, Ford, summed up Robert S. McNamara's tenure at Ford Motor Company, during which he launched the plain-jane Ford Falcon compact to compete with Chevy's Corvair and Chrysler's Valiant. As is so often the case with McNamara, who died Monday in Washington, aged 93, it was a neat soundbite, but nowhere near the whole story.

McNamara was of course best known as a controversial Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, where he oversaw the escalation of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. But before Vietnam, there was the Ford Motor Company.

McNamara was one of a group of young officers from the U.S. Army Air Force's Office of Statistical Control hired by 28 year old Henry Ford II in 1946 to help rescue the ailing automaker. The "Whiz Kids" helped install fiscal and process discipline at Ford, the management of which had become ever more ad hoc as aging founder Henry Ford's dementia grew more apparent. By 1948 McNamara had assumed the role of leader of the Whiz Kids, and was clearly on a trajectory to the top. By 1955, he was general manager of Ford Division.

McNamara was never the archetypal Detroit auto executive. While most of the Motown elite chose to live in leafy, mansion-filled suburbs like Grosse Pointe, McNamara preferred the more relaxed campus-town atmosphere of Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan. And he had difficulty in regarding the automobile as anything more than mere transport. He was most certainly not a car guy.

McNamara showed his iconoclastic product streak early by authorizing a four-seat Thunderbird, much to the horror of purists who saw the original two-seat T-bird as a potential rival to Chevrolet's Corvette. He was implacably opposed to the Edsel program, arguing from the outset that if Ford needed to move into the mid-price market, it would be better to simply upgrade the top-of-the-line Ford than waste money creating a new car, a new division, and a new dealer network.

McNamara was right in both cases. First year sales of the four seat Thunderbird exceeded total sales of the two-seater since launch. And Edsel, part of an ambitious plan to tackle GM's Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac divisions that involved building three basic bodies -- small, medium and large -- across five divisions -- Ford, Edsel, Mercury, Lincoln, and Continental -- foundered in the teeth of the Eisenhower recession. With a little help from politically adroit McNamara.

Sources inside Ford insist McNamara effectively killed the Edsel before the first car had even been sold, deliberately letting slip at its launch the car would be discontinued. The day after the first Edsel went on sale in 1957, McNamara was made a group vice-president responsible for all FoMoCo cars and trucks, and sure enough he began hacking away the division's budget almost immediately. Within months he had reduced Edsel's future product plans to little more than a different grille for 1960 Fords.

Conceived in the late 50s, the Falcon was McNamara's sort of automobile: Inexpensive family transportation. But the Falcon would prove to be one of the single most important Ford cars ever made, for without the Falcon's cheap, light, simple platform there may never have been a Mustang.

Former Ford boss Lee Iaccoca claims market research had identified an emerging youth market for which the Mustang was created. But that's not how product planner Don Frey saw it. "Most of the market research stuff was done after the fact," Frey told our sister publication, Mustang Monthly, way back in May 1983. "They made it all up afterwards - somebody did - in order to sanctify the whole thing. The market research that you read [of] is a bunch of bull..."

In fact, Ford design chief Gene Bordinat and his head of advanced design Don DeLaRossa had come up with the idea of putting Ford's new 289 cubic inch V-8 into the engine bay of a Falcon, and designing sporty new sheet metal around it, to create a rival to the hot new Chevy Monza in 1961. Market research was used to sell the idea of the Mustang to Henry Ford II the following year. That the car could be built using a lot of existing hardware created for the Falcon helped the business case enormously.

So you can draw a direct line from McNamara's Falcon to today's Mustang. And there's barely six degrees of separation between that Falcon and the new Camaro.

How so? Well, Ford Australia starting building the original 1960 Falcon as a rival to GM's hot-selling Holden. In a nice piece of reverse engineering, Ford Australia's engineers popped the Mustang's 289 V-8 and four speed manual transmission into the 1966 Falcon sedan to create the first Falcon GT. The Falcon GT's prowess inspired GM to counter with the Holden Monaro GTS 327 coupe in 1968, igniting a performance car war that would ebb and flow between the two Aussie subsidiaries for the next 40 years. One outcome of that rivalry was the 1998 Holden Monaro coupe, which begat the Pontiac GTO, which led to the idea of a new Camaro being done off Holden's Zeta platform.

Robert S. McNamara was made president of Ford Motor Company on November 9, 1960, the day John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the White House. Barely eight weeks later, on January 3, 1961, he resigned to become Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, reportedly forfeiting over $1 million in stock option profits in the process.

The Falcon nameplate might have disappeared from the U.S. market in 1970, but it's still Ford Australia's core vehicle. McNamara wouldn't have recognized it, and he certainly wouldn't have approved of cars like the 422 hp Falcon GT-P. But 50 years on, Falcon is still very much a part of the Ford family, the company's second-oldest nameplate after the F-Series. Not bad for a granny car.
http://blogs.motortrend.com/6529402/...ord/index.html

[Fairlane]

Definately a very interesting character. A man who got the US involved in Vietnam, whilst realising it was a total disaster at the same time.

Extremely intelligent, but also flawed. It is always interesting reading about how McNamara saved the Falcon from becoming an Edsel, making it as a cheap comptitor for the Corvair & Plymouth Valiant. The edsel was the anti-thesis of the Falcon, bloated overblown and designed by 'mad men' style adverstising exectutives. Fortuntely the Corvair was junk, so it sold well. I still can never understand why Ford US ditched the Falcon for the Maverick, and latterly the American fox based Fairmont, but what can I say they are idiots.

Got to be thankful for Macnamara because in an alternate world in which the US falcon wasnt made, Ford Australia would have built Australianised Zephry's/Zodiacs (they went very close to going ahead with this in 1958), and then probably Tannus/Granada's, then we probably have ended up with that stretched 'Capricorn' FWD 626 in the 80s and today we would all be driving Commodore's.