The "American Century" has become the "American Crisis," and that happened in just twenty-five years. That's the theme of David Halberstam's latest book called The Reckoning . It's the story of the Ford Motor Company and the story of Nissan, a Japanese car maker since the late 1930s. It is now a very successful importer to the US. Basically Halberstam believes the American automobile industry, Detroit since the Second World War, became a shared de facto monopoly failing to listen to congress, failing to notice Japan, and mostly failing, he says, because the car companies came under the control of the financial people rather than the car people. David Halberstam talks with us now about one very important year in auto biz, 1964, and about several important people, beginning with Yutaca Catayama of Nissan.
"Catayama, who is a kind of exuberant, somewhat aristocratic man, was very frustrated. At home in Tokyo, there seemed to be no place for him in the company. He loved making cars. He was on the wrong side politically, and that's a very political company. And so he was almost exiled to America on the assumption that selling cars in America would be a sure place: if you wanted someone to fail, that's what you would do. And he came here, and he loved America. I mean, he was more at home, oddly enough, in America than he was in Japan. In the beginning he would almost, I mean, sell cars hand by hand. He would go to the Japanese gardeners in Los Angeles and sell these little pick-up trucks and he found these, you know, almost used car dealers whom he convinced to be Nissan dealers, and he would hand ... he'd drive the cars down to their lots, and he got to know the business, and just it began to surface in '64. That's a very important demarcation point, 1964."
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