Prologue
Sept. 8, 2000
On the fringes of Capitol Hill, a few long blocks northeast of the Capitol and a block from the United States Supreme Court, the Hart Senate Building seems like a mammoth, million-square-foot afterthought. Unlike the neoclassical grace of nearby houses of government, the Hart building is decidedly contemporary, even as it shared the same white marble skin. Across the mall, the cramped Capitol, with its famous dome and history, may have been the site for formal meetings of the House and Senate, but the real business of government, the nitty-gritty of legislation, deal making, back slapping and back stabbing happened here and in the adjoining Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Constructed in the late 1970s and occupied since November 1982, the Hart was named for the late Senator Philip Hart, a Michigan Democrat who served from 1959 to 1976, and who had a reputation for placing principle before political expediency. An infantryman wounded on D day, Hart was an antitrust enforcer, consumer advocate, environmental crusader and a leader in the fight for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Above the building's main entrance, an inscription described him as "A man of incorruptible integrity and personal courage strengthened by inner grace and outer gentleness. He advanced the cause of human justice, promoted the welfare of the common man and improved the quality of life. His humility and ethics earned him his place as the conscience of the Senate."
Tab Turner didn't even see this dedication as he strode into the building with a law clerk in tow. He barely noticed the gargantuan sculpture Mountains and Clouds, with its 39-ton stationary black mountains sculpted from sheet metal and two-ton orbiting clouds made of aerospace aluminum. His mind was on other things.
Turner had been invited to sort through material on behalf of the Senate Committee investigating Ford and Firestone after a rash of tragic crashes involving the Explorer, Ford's flagship sports utility vehicle, and standard-issue Firestone tires. As lives on four continents were shattered in violent squalls of rubber, asphalt, metal and glass, the companies bickered publicly over responsibility. Ford blamed the tire. Firestone blamed the Explorer. And Turner blamed them both. His mantra, customized for this age of sound bites: "It's a bad tire on a bad car."
Forty-one, bespectacled and built like the former college All-American football player he was, Turner was dressed in litigation chic: a sports jacket layered over dark slacks and shoes, his hair short and to the point. Often he referred to himself simply as "a car attorney from Little Rock, Arkansas," but in reality there was almost nothing aw, shucks about him. He was fast becoming one of the richest trial lawyers in America and a billion-dollar legal empire in his own right.
Over the course of a decade Turner had filed hundreds of lawsuits against automakers over faulty ignition switches, defective safety latches and seat belts, "sudden acceleration," poorly designed transmissions, exploding gas tanks and rollovers. He had faced off against just about every car company-Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Isuzu, Toyota, Nissan, KIA, Hyundai-and a host of tire makers. But it was the SUV that made up the vast majority of his practice, and Ford his greatest adversary.
In the absence of effective government oversight Turner had become a self-appointed national auto safety magistrate. Although lawyers are often justly lampooned, litigation has become far more effective in shaping responsible business practices than government. When juries speak, Corporate America listens. It's why trucks have alarms that sound when they back up and farm machinery comes equipped with safety guards. It's a reason cancer-causing asbestos no longer poisons homes, schools and workplaces, and why fast-food restaurants, aware of their potential super-sized liability, have forced meat packagers to clean up processing plants. And one day, Turner hoped, it would convince SUV makers like Ford to build vehicles that would be less prone to roll over and kill people.
Turner made his way upstairs in the elevator and down a long hallway to join one of Senator John McCain's aides, who led him to a modest conference room. Inside, by Turner's count, were some 40 boxes of Ford material to which Firestone had added 15 more, all of it piled high against a wall and clearly labeled, covering everything from vehicle stability and suspension to tire testing. Arriving at 9 a.m., he figured he would need the entire day to comb through everything, especially the document dump Ford flew in especially for the occasion.
He first met congressional researchers in late August and found they shared a mutual respect for documents. Unlike depositions, which relied on witnesses' memory and were colored by bias, the written word would help them re-create events to determine what executives and engineers were thinking at a particular time. More to the point for Turner, they played well with juries, who were more likely to believe an internal memo than a paid expert witness. But with time running out, the researchers needed a guide familiar with the terrain, someone who knew what needles to look for in this haystack of paper.
They showed Turner a document index from Firestone and another from Ford. "This, this," Turner told them, quickly marking the relevant entries, "these are the key things you need to look for. The rest is junk." He also handed them a package of the top 20 critical documents he had unearthed over the years and a detailed chronology he compiled listing key internal memos, failed stability tests, engineers notes, correspondence between Ford and Firestone and lawsuits.
A few days later he found himself taking stock of the material inside the Hart Building. Just as he thought, about half of the boxes Ford had shipped pertained to its F-Series pickup truck and not the Explorer, Ford's way of burying the committee in paper. But Turner couldn't chance missing anything, so he carefully reviewed each document one at a time-in case someone at the automaker had misfiled something either by mistake or on purpose. (It had happened before.) He plucked out what he thought was relevant and piled it on the table. At one point McCain's aide poked his head in and told Turner that Ford representatives were on their way up. "OK," Turner mumbled, and continued on his paper chase. Although the aide didn't say it, Turner knew he was to stay behind the closed door until they left.
Turner already possessed most of the juicy documents but it didn't take him long to find material he had never seen before, evidence that would only serve to strengthen his case against the two companies. Stuck in the middle of one of the boxes labeled "tire testing" was a brand-new affidavit by James Avouris, a Ford engineer, who stated he had tested Firestone tires on an Explorer when Turner knew his studies had been performed on a Ford F-150 pickup truck, which didn't handle at all like a fully loaded SUV. Turner had been at it barely an hour and already caught Ford in a lie. There were also quite a few recent documents pertaining to the Middle East, correspondence between the two companies that illustrated the automaker's concern over tire quality. Turner put brackets around the pertinent sections.
One dated Feb. 25, 1999, from John C. Garthwaite, the national service manager of Al Jazirah Vehicle Agencies Inc., a Saudi Ford dealership, noted that tread separations were "beginning to become an epidemic." Firestone was "clearly trying to distance" itself from a potentially serious problem and had "done nothing to re-assure me that there may not exist a defect in a particular batch" of tires. Another from Glenn R. Drake, Ford dealer operations manager in Dubai, questioned whether Firestone was "not telling us the whole story to protect them from a recall or lawsuit." A third cited Firestone's qualms about alerting consumers about free replacements because "the U.S. [Department of Transportation] will have to be notified since the same product is sold in the U.S."
Firestone also provided good reading. Turner knew the company had conducted more than 1,000 tests on the AT tire but in the course of litigation had only come across about 400 of them. But he couldn't possibly study all of them in the conference room. Besides he wanted the complete boxed set. So Turner had his law clerk call some friends. When they arrived Turner began passing them boxes, which they carried down the hall and into the elevator, out the front entrance and to a waiting car, which the clerk drove to Kinkos.
Turner had requested that staffers photocopy the material and send it to Little Rock, Arkansas, but they told him it was against policy-which was how he ended up in the nation's capital. But no one said anything about the human train he set up and Turner believed it was better to apologize after the fact than ask permission first.
At the end of the day Turner handed the material he pulled to McCain's aide. He got the distinct impression that Ford and Firestone rushed to make the deadline and had included documents they either hadn't read through or fully comprehended. He was sure the committee would find them useful.
It was the biggest auto safety scandal in history, affecting more than 4 million sports utility vehicles. Treads were peeling off tires on the nation's number one selling SUV, leaving a trail of death and misery in their wake, and no one seemed to know why. Two corporate icons whose brand names were eponymous with the products they sold were at each other's throats, quarreling over seemingly minute engineering differences. A trial lawyer armed with a treasure trove of internal documents had made it his mission to shine a light on their darkest secrets just when the companies were at their most vulnerable. A rollover victim who survived against all odds refused to settle for anything less than the one thing she craved above all else: justice. The media, sensing a cover-up, saturated the airwaves and monopolized the front pages of newspapers for months, unheard of for a consumer story. The result was a massive recall, consumer panic, governmental hearings and the culmination of a lawsuit that would become a watershed for all future auto safety lawsuits-and shake the foundations of both companies.
The feud between Ford and Firestone meant the end to an almost century-long alliance that once captured the public's imagination, a partnership that had survived an economic depression, two world wars, the deaths of their respective founders, creeping globalization, the sale of Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. to Japanese rubber giant Bridgestone, and countless changes to the U.S. car market. For the two blue-chip manufacturers, which shared bloodlines and a common history, it wasn't just business, it was personal. Chairman William ("Bill") Clay Ford II was great-grandson to both company founders. His father married Martha Parke Firestone, granddaughter of Harvey Samuel Firestone, in 1948 in an imposing display of extravagance, and the public embraced the two families as American royalty. He called the fallout between the companies "a horrendous period" for him.
The Fords and Firestones maintained a famously cordial and profitable relationship since before the days of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. Henry Ford Sr. and Harvey S. Firestone were friends and fishing buddies long before most people had heard of their companies. They first met in the 1890s when Firestone worked as a salesman for the Columbus Buggy Company and Ford, an employee of Edison Illuminating Co. in Detroit, was experimenting with the newfangled automobile. Thirty years and 15 million Model Ts later, both men were rich beyond their wildest imaginings.
As their success grew, so did their friendship. Clad in starched-collar shirts and three-piece suits, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone car-camped with luminaries like Thomas Edison and President Warren Harding in a "chuck-wagon," an early SUV-like vehicle Ford adapted from a roadster he designed. They traveled around the country, sleeping in tents with their wives, hairdressers and butlers. Newspaper editors ordered reporters and photographers into trees to document these trips for articles like "Millions of Dollars Worth of Brains Off on a Vacation'' and "Genius to Sleep Under the Stars."
Their close relationship helped them weather the first threat to their partnership, and it too involved tread failures. In 1932 Ford introduced a V-8 engine so powerful that quick starts turned the tires to scrap, leaving "snakes" of rubber on the road. Harvey Firestone gave his engineers 48 hours to come up with a solution, then kept his factory open 24-7 to produce enough tires to fulfill its contract-and ensure that Ford wouldn't have to pay a nickel more than the agreed upon price. When asked to describe his business friendship with Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford once said, "During all those years in business, I knew I could trust his word all the way. And I think he felt he could trust mine."
But in the year 2000, as the death toll rose and public confidence in the two manufacturers plummeted, trust would be in short supply. The companies' survival depended on convincing consumers and government investigators that the other was at fault for crashes that claimed almost 300 lives, and crippled hundreds more.
Only one of them could win back the public; otherwise they both could lose.
Copyright 2003 Adam L. Penenberg