GM's 'Engine Charlie' Wilson learned to live with a misquote

WASHINGTON -- It's the misquote that keeps on going, one of history's impermeable mistakes: What's good for General Motors is good for the country.

Former GM President and Chief Executive Charles E. Wilson never said those words, and what he did say didn't mean that. But the axiom took hold as the motto for corporate bravado in politics, spawned countless variations and still gets referenced 55 years later.

Wilson -- known as "Engine Charlie" -- rose through GM's ranks to become president in 1941, and oversaw the company's transformation into wartime production. Following the war, Wilson steered GM into the boom of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when sales soared to more than 3 million vehicles a year.

But President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower's decision to tap Wilson for secretary of defense in late 1952 shocked Washington. GM was at the peak of its influence; it had more employees than the populations of Delaware and Nevada combined. It also was one of the largest suppliers to the Defense Department, and many lawmakers called on Wilson to shed his GM shares, which were worth $2.5 million at the time -- $19.5 million in today's dollars.

In his closed hearing on Jan. 15, 1953, Wilson defended his investments and his integrity, saying he never could have risen to the top of GM if he had been crooked. Sen. Robert Hendrickson, R-N.J., asked whether, given his investments in GM, he could make a decision that would hurt the company. Because the hearing was closed, reporters relied on secondhand descriptions from senators and staffers of what Wilson said.

"His answer, as quoted by one senator, was 'Certainly. What's good for General Motors is good for the country,' " the Free Press reported a few days later.

Opponents jumped on the comment as a sign of Wilson's -- and GM's -- hubris. The committee released a transcript of the hearing several days later, but the phrase already had lodged itself in the national mind. By September, former President Harry Truman was using it as part of his speech to Detroit's Labor Day festivities.

Wilson's actual reply, in full:

"I cannot conceive of one, because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."

Wilson sold his GM shares to win Senate approval. He would go on to make several other verbal gaffes as defense secretary, spurring cartoonist Al Capp to base a character in his Li'l Abner strip on him, named Gen. Bullmoose. He was fond of saying "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for the U.S.A.!"

When confronted with his supposed quote in the years that followed, Wilson inevitably attempted a correction. But as Time magazine reported when Wilson stepped down in 1957, he accepted his notoriety: "I have never been too embarrassed over the thing, stated either way."

Contact JUSTIN HYDE at 202-906-8204 or jhyde@freepress.com.