That's why we're all here, right? To celebrate E Day, the date 50 years
ago when Ford took one of the autodom's most hilarious pratfalls. But
why? It really wasn't that bad a car. True, the car was kind of homely,
fuel thirsty and too expensive, particularly at the outset of the late
'50s recession. But what else? It was the first victim of Madison Avenue
hyper-hype. Ford's marketing mavens had led the public to expect some
plutonium-powered, pancake-making wondercar; what they got was a
Mercury. Cultural critics speculated that the car was a flop because the
vertical grill looked like a vagina. Maybe. America in the '50s was
certainly phobic about the female business. How did the Edsel come to be
synonymous with failure? All of the above, consolidated into an
irrational groupthink and pressurized by a joyously catty media.
Interestingly, it was Ford President Robert McNamara who convinced the
board to bail out of the Edsel project; a decade later, it was McNamara,
then Secretary of Defense, who couldn't bring himself to quit the
disaster of Vietnam, even though he knew a lemon when he saw one.
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