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world's largest. GM sold half the vehicles purchased annually in America, coming in year after year in the number one spot on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest industrial companies. Driveways and garages up and down the street in my parents' affluent Long Island suburb were filled with Ford Country Squires, Lincolns, Cadillacs, and the like.
    In those upbeat days, Detroit's offerings echoed the optimism of the space age, drowning in chrome and sporting glamorous-sounding names like Galaxie, Starliner, Thunderbird, and Barracuda. My best friend in high school got a Camaro convertible as a graduation present from his parents, and we all thought it was about the coolest thing around. It was perhaps a precursor of things to come when in 1966 my mother abandoned our family's preference for Fords and bought herself a small Mercedes, and our family became among the first I knew to own a foreign car.
    I was a college junior when gasoline prices first soared to shocking levels, which ended Detroit's hegemony and opened the floodgates for small, inexpensive, fuel-efficient Japanese imports. Competition, high gas prices, and stagflation squeezed the U.S. carmakers hard in the 1970s, ending with Chrysler nearly bankrupt and Ford and GM deep in red ink. At the
New York Times
I helped cover Chrysler's pleas for a government bailout. In one story I described the debate as a "first-rank political and economic controversy over whether it is obligatory, or even desirable, for the Federal Government to come to the rescue of a large, ailing corporation." That question, it turned out, would trail me.
    On highways and streets, imports—Corollas, Civics, Datsuns, and Volkswagens—became as popular as American cars. I'd shared the use of a Ford Pinto in college (one of the worst cars ever built), but when I got to pick my own car, I chose a sporty Datsun 260Z. Volvos competed with U.S. station wagons, and Mercedes and BMWs displaced Cadillacs and Lincolns at the luxury end. In 1982 came the first successful "transplant"—a Honda factory opened in Marysville, Ohio, where non-union American workers turned out Accords just as efficiently as workers in Japan. Such plants enabled Detroit's rivals to avoid import restrictions and lessened the effects of currency swings, increasing the pressure on the Big Three.
    That is not to say Detroit didn't have successes. After its first bailout, Chrysler, fired up by Lee Iacocca as its CEO and TV pitchman, invented the minivan and changed the world of driving for suburban moms. Ford launched the Taurus, a radically curvaceous full-size car that critics first ridiculed as a "flying potato," then hailed as a design breakthrough. Consumers made it the best-selling car in America, displacing the Honda Accord. These late-eighties successes drove Ford and Chrysler to record-breaking profits and lit up their stocks. Ford's stock price rose 1,500 percent between 1981 and 1987.
    But beneath it all was an undertow. U.S. automakers' market share was eroding as the Germans and Japanese developed a better bead on what buyers wanted. Confronted with lagging demand, Detroit was always a lap behind in cutting capacity, raising productivity, and renegotiating with labor. The financial pages chronicled the Big Three's woes: a steady stream of reports about plant closures, layoffs, concessions to unions, and struggles with regulators and consumer watchdog groups.
    GM, in particular, seemed incapable of effective change. Starting in the 1980s, top management gambled at least $90 billion on computers and factory robots and a sweeping remake of GM's 800,000-employee organization—all in hopes of leapfrogging the competition into the twenty-first century. Instead, the reorganization stalled and a newly engineered generation of Buick Regals and Oldsmobile Cutlasses fizzled in the marketplace.
    In 1989, the once mighty GM became the butt of national ridicule when
Roger & Me,
the most successful documentary ever at