A Ghost's Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors by John McDonald

Author:John McDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-01-14T23:30:00+00:00

Under the truce reached by General Motors' lawyers and mine, General Motors was given time to consider how they wanted to respond to the suit. On February 28, Ennis, as noted, had sent General Motors the summons but not the complaint. Their move was either to return the summons and receive the complaint, meaning defend in court, or alternatively to "satisfy the complaint" legally by paying or negotiating the damages. Now, after they had stretched this time period through excuses to several months and following the Time Inc. division, they had, on July 9, returned the summons-which meant, as Brownell had notified us, that General Motors was prepared to fight it out in court.

I returned to Cranberry Island and wrote two letters to my lawyers regarding the strategic situation that had been left by the set of meetings with Brownell. The first, to Bert Mayers, is dated July 14, 1962.

Cranberry Island, Maine

Friday, July 14, 1962

Dear Bert,

I don't know how to evaluate this point but I offer it to you and Bill and Eddie for your consideration. We have so far rested the evidence of General Motors' suppression of the book on the Hogan letter to Sloan in, I believe, June of 1959. Brownell defends the suppression as motivated by good business reasons, namely, public relations, the avoidance of possible legislation leading to the dissolution of General Motors, and antitrust. My impression was that under pressure from you and Eddie he was a bit shaky about the antitrust aspect. The point I want to offer, for what it is worth, is that the original suppression of the book was not motivated by such generalized reasons, but specifically by a Grand jury action of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department in, I believe, the fourth week in January, 1959. Eddie should have in his files some newspaper clippings which give the exact date and nature of the proceeding. Sloan informed me a few weeks later that owing to this government action, General Motors had given the book to Bromley to review. On March 4, Sloan told me that Bromley for General Motors objected to the publication of the book and requested the cancellation of the arrangements then underway with Doubleday for publication. Sloan said that Bromley's request was motivated as follows: The government suit for the severance of Du Pont from General Motors had been decided in the Supreme Court on the issue of power; that is, ownership by Du Pont of twenty-three percent of GM's stock gave Du Pont the power as a supplier to General Motors to control GM's purchasing and was therefore in restraint of trade, whether or not any abuse of that power had occurred (the court also said that the abuse had occurred, but that this was not necessary to the decision). Bromley, according to Sloan, reasoned that the government's new action against General Motors (the one begun in January, 1959) would eventually be decided in the Supreme Court on the same principle: power. In this case the power would be fifty percent of the car market (fifty-six percent in 1962).

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