Sublime

President Truman’s conduct had been exemplary. Not only had he quietly ordered John back from Korea, but he had also destroyed the only remaining copy of General Marshall’s 1945 letter, which could have been so embarrassing to Eisenhower.i

Mr. Pratt was, you might say, a stand-in for me when I was president. He had a great capability for handling large problems with plainness and simplicity. He could get to the point.

As Harrison said, his basic view didn’t change during the decades he ran railroads—service customers, control costs, utilize assets, don’t get anybody hurt, and recognize and develop people—and over time, he gained more confidence.

Harrison, though, knew human nature and was toughest to work for when the railroad ran well. The boss worried that his people would get complacent. “When things were bad, it’s when he was most supportive,” Creel said.

Stephens was the president of the railroad, which was a wholly American-owned stock company with its main office in the old Tontine Building on Wall Street. The capitalization was a million dollars.

Because the concern hadn’t very strong financial backing, Ford Motor Company agreed to underwrite the new tools and dies necessary for the work. This was common practice with us when suppliers ran into financial trouble when expanding their facilities enough to meet our needs.

Nobody can bullshit him,” said Hargrove in 2017. “Not the management, not the union, not the workers.” Harrison knew their jobs. That gave him credibility in the field, but it also created angst among employees.

In engineering work in the drafting room, it was plain to the men to whom he gave his work that he could not make a sketch or read a blueprint. It was to his everlasting credit that, with his limited formal education, his mind worked like a modern electronic calculating machine and he had the answer to what he wanted. The trick was to fathom the de