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Chapter 10 The Battle of Press Releases Book: The Indomitable Tin Goose Subtitle: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car Author: Charles T. Pearson Publisher: Abelard-Schuman Year: 1960 |
10 THE BATTLE OF PRESS RELEASES
BUT THE PROTOTYPE had to wait, and so did the franchise program and financing. A “Directive” hit Tucker square below the belt before the new franchise plan was even well under way, and arrangements for a stock offering had just been completed. Enemies began to appear.
During the Roosevelt Administration there developed a system of government by decree, under which even minor officials practically made and enforced their own laws. In practice, it was reversion to an almost feudal form of government, in which heads of departments and bureaus became little dictators.
The instrument which accomplished this phenomenon was called a “Directive,” with which they could bypass standard procedure, largely ignore law and frequently even bluff Congress. Such habits are heard to break, and even after the war some officials were still solemnly issuing directives with all the authority of tablets relayed by fast runners direct from Mount Sinai.
When the smoke cleared away, the burning bush turned out to be photographers' flashbulbs and the tablets just another directive. And instead of Moses, there was Wilson Wyatt, a politician who had once been mayor of Louisville and who for a time held a position of considerable power in Washington. Wyatt's title was Housing Expediter and he was head of the National Housing Agency.
Tucker by this time had moved his headquarters to the Drake Hotel and his associates were scattered over Chicago in hotels and apartments. Some were still commuting from their homes in Michigan, waiting to see if the deal was going to hold together before moving their families to Chicago. Tucker suspected that undercover work was going on against him. The first rumble came about two days before the Wyatt directive became headlines, when information came over the grapevine that “Somebody is trying to take the Dodge plant away from you.”
Most of the Tucker crowd didn't take the threat seriously at first, thinking it was too fantastic, and one of his public relations advisers told him, “This is a political fight. You stay out of it.” Tucker thought otherwise and he, Mrs. Tucker and I grabbed a train to Washington. By the time we got in, Tucker was in the headlines again and newsboys were shouting.
“Read all about it—Wyatt takes Tucker plant!”
On out-of-town newsstands we saw Chicago papers, and a crimson streamer of the Herald American dated October 28 said: “TUCKER LOSES DODGE PLANT.” It was the first hard blow.
In Chicago there were two immediate results: sale of franchises fell to a dribble and Cerf stopped lining up houses to handle the stock issue. There was no percentage buying franchises for a car that didn't even have a plant, and trying to sell the stock with the plant gone would be impossible.
In Washington the picture was even blacker. Wyatt insisted that War Assets cancel Tucker's lease and turn the plant over to the Lustron Corporation of Chicago to build prefabricated houses. (Lustron planned to make sheet steel sections coated with baked enamel for houses that would never need painting.) Wyatt also was backing Lustron for a loan of at least $12,000,000 from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. When some of us inspected Lustron's first house later in Chicago, we wondered what would happen when a kid on a tricycle banged into one of those baked enamel panels.
Wyatt's directive said:
“The office of the Housing Expediter today issued a directive to the War Assets Administration ordering the allocation of the war-surplus Dodge-Chrysler plant at Chicago to the Lustron Corporation of that city. The directive was necessary because War Assets Administration has stated that it is bound by a prior commitment to the Tucker Corporation involving lease of this plant. The Tucker Corporation plans to produce a new automobile, if it can raise the necessary capital.”
What burned Tucker up was the last line, “if it can raise the necessary capital,” and he could have pointed out—though he thought it smarter not to—that to most people an automobile was more important than a house anyway.
He found an unexpected ally in George Allen, head of RFC and a confidant of President Truman, who flatly refused to even consider the loan to Lustron. When Wyatt rushed to the White House yelling “Foul! ”Allen rushed right behind him, and when they came out together they issued a joint state-ment: “We are in complete disagreement.” It was learned later that Wyatt had another directive, all ready to issue, which would have ordered RFC to loan Lustron $52,000,000.
Reporters late in 1946 laid siege to Tucker's suite in the Mayflower Hotel to follow one of the hottest stories that had hit Washington in weeks. War Assets stood by Tucker, saying as he did, that it was a firm lease and throwing the whole mess into the Attorney General's lap. Tucker threatened to sue the government for breach of contract, but he was bluffing and everybody knew it. If the government doesn't want to be sued about the only hope left is an Act of Congress. You've had it.
Overnight Tucker found himself right in the middle of a new battle in which the guns were mimeographs and the ammunition press releases. When one of the departments involved made a public statement Tucker had to be in there with his own press release, because he couldn't afford to wait and ad lib the answers when some lone reporter banged on the door at the hotel. Before it was over, five different government departments or agencies were involved, including the White House, all with their own publicity departments, and Tucker at one time or another was feuding with almost everybody except War Assets. And when they issued a statement, he had to back it up.
We felt like two against the world and it was fortunate that Vera had come along, because she provided a sympathetic sounding board while we planned strategy for the next day. A few week-ends we got out of Washington, but it was hard to relax with more than a year's work going down the drain.
We found a small duplicating service that opened early in the morning and would cut stencils and run off releases while we waited, and this became headquarters for the Battle of Press Releases.
Sometimes a release couldn't be written before checking the morning papers to find out what had been said last, and I would dash them off while the man cutting stencils grabbed pages out of the typewriter before I even had a chance to make corrections. Frequently Tucker didn't know what he had said until he read the release in a cab on the way to another press conference. The various agencies and departments would have people planted in our press conferences, and one of us would sit in the back row at theirs, stealthily taking notes and trying to look like another visitor. But nobody was fooling anybody very much. Every agency had an edge of at least five to one on manpower, and between them they had enough press agents to snow us under.
We stayed in Washington a solid month, living largely on the cuff at the Mayflower, while the operation in Chicago slowed almost to a standstill. Many of the Tucker people in Chicago were ready to give up. Toward the last, when it began to look as if there were some chance of winning, a few showed up in Washington saying, “I knew you could do it. Stay in there and fight, boy!”
When War Assets refused to be impressed with the first directive, Wyatt, like De Lawd in “The Green Pastures,” r'ared back and issued a new directive to give Lustron part of the plant. Next day Tucker told a press conference that the night before, at the urging of the Housing Agency, he had met with Carl G. Strandlund, president of Lustron, to discuss joint occupancy.
Tucker said he offered half a million feet in the main building or a million feet in other buildings, but Strandlund wouldn't settle for less than three million feet in the main building, which was most of it.
Wyatt's proposal was that they wait until March 1 to see if Tucker had the money he needed, and if he didn't Lustron would take over under the terms of his lease. Wyatt was wide open.
“If the need for pre-fabricated housing is so desperate,” Tucker countered, “why is Mr. Wyatt still willing to wait until March 1 to get the Tucker plant—if he can get it then? In direct contradiction to his frenzied screams that housing must get under way immediately, Wyatt's office has already deferred progress more than three weeks trying to get this one particular plant.”
Privately Tucker said, “The hell with him. If I lose the plant I'm dead. I'll either keep all of it or I'll lose it. If all they want is a fight, they've got it.”
It was rapidly developing into a free-for-all. In Chicago the Building Commissioner said Lustron's houses couldn't be put up without changing the building code, and from the building trades came unofficial word that union members wouldn't touch pre-fabricated houses with a pole.
Wyatt enlisted the American Veterans of World War II, whose housing chairman blasted War Assets, charging that the agency “in the past has shown favoritism to speculators and war profiteers.”
“It now proposes to betray the best hopes of veterans to get low-cost mass produced houses,” said the Amvets statement. In sheer bulk, the wordage was becoming impressive.
But the pace was beginning to slow down and Tucker feared that during the lull somebody might put over a fast one. What was needed, he decided, was a shot in the arm. What followed was the highlight of the whole episode, and it added two powerful enemies to his already formidable opposition.
First came a series of broadcasts by commentator and columnist Fulton Lewis, Jr., who had a wide following across the nation, and who specialized in government stink stories. “That's the Top of the News as it Looks from Here,” over the Mutual network, was accepted as gospel by an unofficial fan club that numbered thousands.
The story was right down Lewis' alley, all about baokstage intrigue in government, and Tucker added the element of suspense with a mysterious “Mr. X” who, he said, would be unmasked when the time was right. The first broadcast told of Tucker's gallant fight against the Housing Administration, and the demands of “Mr. X” for half a million dollars in stock and legal fees for services which, Tucker declared, were of no help whatever.
Then Drew Pearson joined the fray, identifying “Mr. X” as Theodore Granik, New York and Washington attorney and former counsel for the U.S. Housing Authority, which preceded NHA. Pearson predicted that an investigation would find Granik “blameless of wrongdoing.”
Whereupon Republican Senator Homer Ferguson from Michigan charged in, opening an investigation before his Senate Surplus Property Committee. Witnesses included Tucker, Granik, Wyatt and officials from various agencies. Tucker said he had an agreement with Granik but it was solely for financing, and when Granik couldn't produce the deal was off.
Granik called Tucker's story “an unvarnished lie,” and Wyatt swore there was no skulduggery in his office. The hearing ended up in pretty much of a draw, but it very probably started the enmity of Drew Pearson, whose broadcast next year knocked Tucker stock down from $5 to less than $3 overnight. In the hearing Granik was represented by Thurman Arnold, former trust buster in the Roosevelt Administration. Arnold's son was married to Drew Person's daughter, which may seem a tenuous relationship to start a war, but war it was from then on.
Certain of Fulton Lewis' colleagues would say that Tucker sold him a bill of goods in the “Mr. X” story, and that by the time Lewis woke up he was married to it and couldn't pull out without losing face. One former Tucker man said Lewis' leg man—I think it was Frank Morrison—still wouldn't talk to him four years later.
Granik later sued for more than a million dollars damages for breach of contract, claiming eight per cent of Tucker's stock and $180,000 legal fees, but the suit never came to trial. To what extent Tucker's charges were true only he and Granik knew, and they weren't likely to agree. But the “Mr. X” business served Tucker's purpose in keeping the story alive until somebody could be forced into taking action. If Tucker had quit anywhere along the line, Wyatt would have gobbled the plant.
These were blows at Tucker's prestige, below-the-belt punches which served to mar the popular conception of Tucker. A new and different myth was being created by his enemies, a conception of him that Tucker would have to correct, an idea he would have to fight with every ounce of energy and resource he could summon.
As when he was trying to get the plant, Tucker exerted every pressure he could to keep it. He was in constant touch with John R. Steelman, aide to President Truman. Late in October he received a letter from House leader John W. McCormack saying:
“Following my telegram to you, I am enclosing a copy of my telegram to Wilson Wyatt, which I am sending to you for your information.” McCormack's wire to Wyatt said, “It would be a grave mistake to allow some other company under guise of making some kind of buildings to prevent Tucker company from going ahead with its plans.”
One of Tucker's associates went to Reuther again, with the logical position that the Auto Workers would be out in the cold if the plant went to Lustron. And again, as when he got the plant, nearly everybody who took even a small part in the fight claimed credit for winning it. It could have been Reuther who saved the day, or it could have been a combination of people and influence.
One thing is sure: if Tucker hadn't jumped into the fight with both feet and stayed in it, he would have lost the plant, and been forced ' to make a new start with at least a year's work wasted.
After the excitement of the committee hearing died down, the Christmas holidays were close and it seemed unlikely that any action would take place until after New Years. So there was no point in staying around Washington.
Wyatt and his whole housing program were on the spot and nothing but the White House could save. He put it up to the President, who left on vacation without making a decision, leaving Wyatt the loser by a technical knockout. Early in January after Wyatt resigned, Frank Creedon, new Housing Expediter, withdrew the Wyatt directive and Tucker was back in business.
But the fight had cost a lot of money and Tucker had lost a lot of time. More serious, he had lost much of his prestige, his organization had almost fallen apart and the franchise program would have to be started all over again.
The battle with Wyatt was over, but the war was just beginning. Tucker had gotten a glimpse of the kind of opposition he would have to overcome. It made him more resolute than ever. If there was to be a war, Tucker would be in there fighting. And the fight would require a tremendous load of work.
One of the first jobs was to create a body for the prototype which would live up to its advance billing.