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George Love, chairman of the Chrysler corporation in 1963, was an improbable person to be the captain general of a great company making cars, for he had spent most of his life as a coal merchant, latterly as chairman of the Consolidated Coal Company of Pittsburgh. He had been brought in to direct Chrysler after several setbacks affecting his predecessor, William Newberg, who had had to resign hastily. Love had the grace to admit: “I don’t know what a carburettor is and I’m too old to learn.” Tall, jovial, and seemingly easygoing, he was thought to be a man who

The visit of General Franco to Villaverde set the seal on an epoch in Eduardo’s life. He seemed to have reached the summit of a mountain from which he could see several continents: the past of autarchy, the brilliant present of free enterprise, and a glittering future of international exports. Eduardo seemed confirmed as the favourite industrialist of the government, a man at ease with the ministers and generals who surrounded the head of state and a close friend of the head of state’s daughter and son-in-law, Carmen and Cristóbal, Marqués de Villaverde. Several courtiers of General Franco—Pacón (General

For the next five and a half years, October 1963 to May 1969, the life of Barreiros Diesel and its remarkable factory at Villaverde was increasingly marked by akulturkampf,a struggle of cultures, the Spanish and the North American. The ways of Barreiros Diesel and Chrysler were opposed. Neither was able to adapt to the other. It was no one’s fault. But the chasm was profound. The list of ways in which Barreiros was supposed to adapt in respect of accounting in the contract of October 1963 was only a beginning. To begin with, these comments would have seemed

In ancient Mexico there was a legend that one day the lost white god Quetzalcoatl would return from the East. He would revive forgotten practices, and carry out a much needed reform of society. Perhaps he would bring justice and wisdom. Some Mexicans believed that Cortés might be the lost deity. In the 1960s, Europeans looked on Americans from the United States in much the same kind of expectant light—though the new gods would come from the West. They brought many things but not always wisdom. Thus it was that at the end of 1963, less than three months

Barreiros Diesel at the moment of Chrysler’s capture of power in the company at the end of 1967 was worth a little more than $36 million. That included 850 million pesetas for the land on which the fábrica had been built (the property totalled 1,306,000 square metres), and over 140 million in buildings (no less than 300,000 square metres of industrial buildings).¹ Most of the old products of the company were still a success: Eduardo, through the gifted Julio Vidal, the ablecoruñéswho served the firm in Egypt, had most advantageously just sold two hundred military lorries (the Panter

The chief concession that Eduardo gave to Chrysler in the summer of 1969 was one that declared that after he left Barreiros Diesel, he would not work in the world of motors for five years. That did not disturb him as much as might have seemed likely, for the struggle with Chrysler had worn his patience thin. He had also, as we have seen, interested himself in several projects in Galicia: gold mining, for example. He had been interested too, as we have seen, in the possibilities of oil in the Spanish African colony of Fernando Poo—Equatorial Africa. That

Curcio, Vincent. Chrysler: The Life and Times of an Automotive Genius. Oxford Univ. Jul. 2000. c.640p. permanent paper. photogs. index. ISBN 0-19507896-9. $35. BIOG