Retired Ford engineer Ben J. Smith said that he “wrote some very very strong letters to the product planning people and to Bob McNamara” when his manually-retractable roof design for the original Ford Mustang was rejected.
The problem with that story, as reported by Daniel Strohl (2020), is that Smith said he started work on the project in mid-1965 (Strohl, 2005). This was four-and-a-half years after McNamara stepped down from the presidency of the Ford Motor Company to become John F. Kennedy’s defense secretary (Wikipedia, 2020).
This is a pretty basic fact error so I wondered whether Smith misremembered when he got involved with the Mustang. Might it have been early in the car’s development? According to The Complete Book of Mustang, a small team of Ford staff didn’t begin “putting ideas down on paper in earnest” for a four-seater Mustang until “late in 1961” (Mueller, 2002; p. 26). In addition, this book shows photographs of mockups of two-seater proposals only going back to July of 1961. McNamara left in January.
It would be newsworthy if Strohl had come up with hard evidence that McNamara was involved in the development of the Mustang — particularly in a supportive way. The conventional narrative, aided and abetted by Lee Iacocca, was that McNamara was fixated on building utilitarian cars such as the Falcon (Mueller, 2002).
Instead, Strohl shares Smith’s quote without clarification or correction in two stories. Perhaps Hemmings didn’t want to antagonize a source and his family (Smith recently died). If so, that’s understandable. Nevertheless, once a fact error leaks into the Internet it can take on a life of its own.
Also see ‘Separating truth from spin with AMC’s Bob Nixon’
If you are interested in the chronology of McNamara’s tenure at Ford, Aaron Severson (2013) offers a useful overview. He begins by stating that “one of the things you notice when you do a lot of research in a particular field is that certain pieces of information are repeated over and over again even though they’re wrong.”
Severson is quick to add that he “can’t claim any particular moral high ground” because he has made factual errors himself. However, he displays an admirable commitment to fixing errors as he discovers them. The larger auto history media outlets aren’t always as good on this front.
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RE:SOURCES
- Mueller, Mike; 2010. The Complete Book of Mustang: Every Model Since 1964 1/2. Motorbooks, Minneapolis, MN.
- Strohl, Daniel; 2005. “Transformer: The Story Behind the Retractable Hardtop Mustang.” Hemmings Classic Car. Published in October.
- ——; 2020. “Ford Skyliner retractable hardtop engineer Ben J. Smith dies at 97.” Hemmings. Posted February 3; accessed February 3.
- Severson, Aaron; 2013. “A Historical Note: Ford Division General Managers.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted March 13; accessed February 4, 2020.
- Wikipedia; 2020. “Robert McNamara.” Page last edited January 31; accessed February 3.
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