The reckoning.

• Author: Cumberford, Robert

The Reckoning.

David Halberstam.William Morrow & Co., $19.95. David Halberstam has produced the best and most important book ever written on the auto industry, but making cars is not its subject. Rather it is about the decline of American wealth and productive capability, the apparent inability of the richest nation the world has ever seen to maintain the ethic and attitudes that created its strength, and about the unexpected rise of a totaly defeated and starving near-feudal Japan to a position of supreme economic power in the same 40 years.

There is a distressing inverse symmetryto Halberstam's history: the American standard of living declined as financially-oriented bureaucrats took over power in Detroit, while the growth of Japanese industrial superiority was fueled by a single-minded desire to do a better job and a religious following of American teachings.

In choosing the paradigmaticauto industry to tell his story, Halberstam singles out the force-- sheer productive capacity--that allowed the U.S. and its allies to win WWII, and that now has led Japan to world economic mastery. His indepth studies of the number-two companies in each country, Ford and Nissan, allow us to see exactly how, and above all why, the balance of productive power shifted so sharply.

The auto industry isn't aboutcars; it's about money and men, and Halberstam gives us the men so clearly and truthfully that it is difficult to believe that he has not been a Detroit--or Tokyo--insider all his life.

Some of his characters are largerthan life: Henry Ford, the cramped and mean-spirited puritan who put the world on wheels, changed society for all time, destroyed his only son, Edsel, and had the war not intervened, in his senility would have destroyed his own company; Henry Ford II, savior of his grandfather's company, and finally very nearly as destructive as the old man; Yukata Katayama, architect of Nissan's success in America, punished and ignored because he failed to play company politics the right way; William Gorham, the American inventor who created the first Nissan car almost single-handedly in 1933.

Others amaze by having acted inways seemingly inconsistent with their characters: Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the generous victor reforming Japanese society to make it liberal and prosperous; Joseph Dodge, the...