Secrets of the Temple

"I read this when it came out in the mid-80s and it’s always stuck with me. I’m a big fan of Halberstam’s writing anyway. You love him or hate him, what with his constant digression and everything else. The Reckoning is an account of the problems in the American auto industry and is the story of how America goes from dominating the auto industry and really being synonymous with it to losing a step to the Japanese. There are a lot of things I like about the book, but the nub of it is that he bases it in the wider context of American decline and the loss of American supremacy in the post-war period and the rise of the Japanese challenge. That was what everybody was worried about in the 1980s, that we were losing step to Japan and Japan was going to become the world economic power. That all seems sort of laughable now, but this book came out four years before the Japanese went into a long period of stagnation. It reminds an American audience how long we’ve been concerned about this idea of American decline. If you go back and read some of the things he’s writing about in the 1980s, it’s very topical today. In between the late 80s and today we’ve had a series of bubbles – the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the credit bubble – and it all maps this very real and very fundamental idea of long-term American economic decline. We have really not done enough to grapple with this. It’s also a reminder of the fact that the issue really isn’t Japan or China or the other guy, the important thing is our own issues, no matter who the competitor is. We were worried about the Japanese in the 1980s and that seems silly now; we’re worried about China today but you can’t extrapolate Chinese growth indefinitely into the future as if it’s going to continue at ten per cent a year forever, but whether or not China does well or poorly we still have real issues that we’ve got to tackle. The thing that sticks in my mind from The Reckoning is this portrait he does of the Japanese executive who was sent by Nissan to lead the charge into the American market and at the time we saw Japan as an economic colossus, never made a mistake and they’d somehow discovered a secret recipe for prosperity, but the truth of the matter was that they sent this guy to America because they didn’t sell any cars in the US so they didn’t really care about it and he was a problem. He was the guy who wouldn’t do it the way everybody else did and was a problem in the office and so to get rid of him they sent him to America, like an exile, and in fact he turned that into his great personal opportunity and a great opportunity for the company."