"Sixty to Zero" GM - New Book by Alex Taylor

Good insight and history of GM being driven into the ground. Author and writer, Taylor relates how he gave GM every benefit of the doubt for years but in the end found nothing would stop the downward slide into bankruptcy.


Sixty to Zero -
a Company Loses Power
Reporters, in their hearts, rooted for GM, for all the good it did.
May 24, 2010 (a book review)
By PAUL INGRASSIA

Many of the journalists who covered the long decline of General Motors that led to last year's bankruptcy were, in their hearts, rooting for the company. Such reporters—I among them—would seize on the occasional piece of good news about GM to write something upbeat. It would be a journalistic coup, after all, to be the first writer to call the company's turnaround. In any case, no one who grew up during GM's heyday, in the 1950s and 1960s, wanted to see an American icon self-destruct.

Insights into the journalistic mindset, as well as keen observations about GM itself, are what make "Sixty to Zero" an enlightening and engaging read. Alex Taylor III, a longtime auto writer for Fortune magazine, doesn't hesitate to tell one on himself, so to speak. He reveals repeated instances where he bent over backward to be nice to the company in print, only to be dismayed at the GM glitch, snafu or outright disaster that followed. Media skeptics say that reporters revel in negativity. "Sixty to Zero" shows that the opposite is true.

Not that Mr. Taylor was always upbeat. In January 1992 he wrote a cover story that questioned CEO Bob Stempel's ability to fix the mounting problems at GM. An irate Mr. Stempel summoned Mr. Taylor and his boss to Detroit for a dressing down. But 10 months later GM's board reached the same conclusion, and Mr. Stempel was out. In 1996, Mr. Taylor raised hackles at Ford. His scoop about management- succession prompted an internal witch hunt, with lawyers poring over phone records. The search never found Mr. Taylor's sources.

View Full Imagebkrv.sixtybkrv.sixtybkrv.sixtySixty to Zero/By Alex Taylor III/(Yale, 254 pages, $26)

The title "Sixty to Zero" is a clever play on words. Cars can be rated by the time they take to accelerate from a standing start to 60 miles per hour, but during much of Mr. Taylor's career GM was decelerating, from corporate success to financial collapse. The process took about three decades, from 1979 to 2009. Mr. Taylor's book is partly a history of Detroit in this period and partly a memoir.

The narrative begins with Mr. Taylor's 1950s boyhood in Greenwich, Conn., where he grew up with private schools and sailing lessons, got a radio internship in college, and decided to become a journalist. His younger brother, John, was the family's car nut. It was only when Mr. Taylor headed to Detroit to take a job at the Free Press that he became fascinated with cars and the companies that made them. He worked in Detroit for a few years and then headed to New York and Time magazine, and eventually Fortune.

As he continued to cover the car industry, Mr. Taylor showed a knack for capturing the human side of Detroit's larger-than-life executives. GM Chairman Roger Smith volunteered in a 1987 interview that the blotchy rash on his face was due "99% to stress." The admission surprised Mr. Taylor and knocked down GM's stock.

Mr. Taylor recounts an article a decade later headlined "My Life as a Gay Executive" about Allan Gilmour, Ford's former chief financial officer. During his career Mr. Gilmour had been discreet about his private life, though it was widely assumed within Ford that he was gay. By the time the article appeared he had retired and made his sexual orientation known. It would have been easy for Mr. Gilmour, once the front-runner to become Ford's CEO, to claim that his orientation caused him to be passed over. But he took the high road. "Whether being gay hurt my chances," he told Mr. Taylor, "I honestly don't know. I've heard some people say it did, but I doubt it."

In his book Mr. Taylor writes: "Like everything else Gilmour did, the story was related with thoughtfulness and feeling."Another classic was Mr. Taylor's 1996 cover story about Lee Iacocca's trouble adjusting to retirement in Los Angeles. "If you go to somebody's house for dinner, everybody looks at each other's clothes," Mr. Iacocca complained. "There are a lot of guys you never heard of with these young girls, and it's showtime."

The chronology of "Sixty to Zero" jumps back and forth, but Mr. Taylor's efforts to come to grips with GM's decline provide a unifying thread. In a 1990 article, "The New Drive to Revive GM," he described the company's mounting problems and added: "No one—not even its competitors—can take any pleasure in the plight of General Motors." A year later he wrote an over-optimistic piece about GM's iconic but fading Buick brand, claiming that its new models might well produce a revival. In the end, the cars flopped. He now confesses: "I was anxious to write a positive GM story, and this one looked easy to pull together."

In 1994 he wrote another "glowing story" (his words) about GM, saying the company was finally turning the corner thanks to financial discipline and some promising models. Alas, the story was undermined within days by the company's sub-par financial report and glitches in launching the new cars. Pressed by Fortune's editors to write an explanation for the difference between his gush and the company's performance, he did, though it wasn't his best story. "Rereading it fourteen years later," he writes, "I didn't find it very convincing."

In February 2006, Fortune carried a prescient piece predicting GM's bankruptcy, but the author wasn't Mr. Taylor. "I was too close to [CEO Rick] Wagoner and GM to think the unthinkable," he confesses. In early 2008, Mr. Taylor wrote "that a real turnaround was at hand at GM." But it never happened. "I had swallowed GM Kool-Aid for the last time," he says. As GM deteriorated further, "I ratcheted up my criticism of Wagoner." Within a year Mr. Wagoner was gone, and GM was bankrupt.

As for the future, Mr. Taylor says that "success is a long way off." He states that GM, with the rest of Detroit, must improve its products and "appeal not just to red-state customers but to more critical buyers on the coasts." But Mr. Taylor, who recently retired from Fortune but still writes for the magazine, doesn't conceal where his heart lies: "The United States needs a domestic auto industry for its jobs, technology, wealth creation, trading balances and prestige. But it isn't entitled to one—every day it needs to earn the right to keep one."

/Mr. Ingrassia, former Detroit bureau chief for the Journal, is the author of "Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road From Glory to Disaster."/