> Henry Ford himself is ... a known anti-Semite Agreed; he's not my favorite person at all and made an awful call by supporting Hitler. But ... > It hardly ta

> Henry Ford himself is ... a known anti-Semite Agreed; he's not my favorite person at all and made an awful call by supporting Hitler. But ... > It hardly takes a leap to look at the abysmal performance of planes built by Ford and suspect that management there was particularly … lackadaisical in their pursuit of quality. Things like that alarm me; it's a proven method for condemning the innocent and unpopular. We can form hypothetical links between many events - Billy is a mean person and disliked Joe, Joe's been murdered, so hang Billy; or, every morning the rooster crows and then the sun rises, therfore the rooster is doing it - but most will be false. We need evidence to differentiate truth from imagination. From the Amazon page, Publisher's Weekly seems to think less of the book (though Kirkus likes it): Although Wallace (Who Killed Kurt Cobain?) is a recipient of Rolling Stone's Award for Investigative Journalism and appears to have done much primary research, he delivers a highly speculative rehash of material handled much better in A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh, Robert Lacey's Ford: The Man and the Machine and such seminal studies as Charles Higham's American Swastika. Wallace tries and fails to sensationalize well-known facts about the parochial American fifth column of the late 1930s and early '40s, a bungling movement of which Ford and Lindbergh were among the most public faces. Wallace sees a conspiracy in what he presents as Ford's pro-Nazi partnership with Lindbergh: a dark and powerful alliance designed to hinder the Allies at every turn. In fact, the two men were far more naive than effectual in their attempts to prop up American isolationism before Pearl Harbor. And Lindbergh, who counted Harry Guggenheim among his closest friends, found Ford's hatred of Jews repugnant. Once war was declared, both Lindbergh and Ford helped the Allied effort. Lindbergh helped develop the Corsair and later, as a "civilian observer," flew more than 25 combat missions over the South Pacific. At the same time, Ford (with Lindbergh's help, and after a few false starts) became the leading manufacturer of the B-24 bomber. Were Ford and Lindbergh half-witted dupes of Nazi propaganda before the war? Undoubtedly. Were they Nazi agents either before or after the start of hostilities? Wallace fails to make the case.