Ford's Lawyer

Clifford B. Longley, Chicago born, was taken to Kalamazoo when he was old enough to talk. He talked his way successfully through grade schools and the better part of a high school course. Then he went back to Chicago, studied engineering and took a diploma. At length, he wound up in Washington with the U. S. Engineers.

This part of Clifford Longley's life, however, came to an abrupt end. In 1909, when he was 21, Engineer Longley determined to become Lawyer Longley. He entered the University of Michigan. One year, in the middle of his law course, he set aside to attend to his finances and went to Torento to earn some money. But by 1913, he had achieved his second diploma, this time in .law, and he was ready to begin life in earnest.

Six years later he arrived at the offices of Henry Ford. He was then a young man of 30, sandy-haired, straight as a spruce, well-muscled. In the legal department of the Ford Motor Co. were 21 hopeful lawyers. Each of them would have liked the distinction of being chief counsel for one of the greatest businesses in the world. But Lawyer Longley disappointed the hopes of all 21 in exactly two years, and then still further disappointed nine of them by cutting the department's force to twelve.

Hundreds of cases, involving tens of millions of dollars, came into his charge. When Motorman Ford launched his attacks on the Jews (TIME, May 2, 1927 et ante), Lawyer Longley found himself pitted against such famed Manhattan legalites as Samuel Untermyer and Louis Marshall in the most celebrated libel suits since Boss William Barnes charged the late great Theodore Roosevelt with tippling. Together with Missouri's Senator Reed and Lawyer De Lancey Nicoll of Manhattan, Lawyer Longley battled the charges of Aaron Sapiro and Herman Bernstein. In the end, Mr. Ford retracted and the cases were settled out of court.

Clean victory for Lawyer Longley was scored in the Mississippi anti-trust cases, when the Ford company was charged with price-fixing and monopoly.

Most recently, Lawyer Longley has been in London, organizing the English Ford corporation, biggest of all automobile corporations established on the other side of the Atlantic, with a stock issue of $35,000,000. It was not Lawyer Longley's fault that Manhattan bankers played a joke on Mr. Ford by buying the stock which Mr. Ford had intended for British ownership.

Last week, friends and admirers of Lawyer Longley read with amazement the following newsflash from Detroit: "The legal department of the Ford Motor Company has been abolished and its entire personnel dismissed as of next pay day." Pressed for explanations, Lawyer Longley grinned. He knew, of course, that the despatch had stated only a half-truth. It was true that the Ford company had abolished its legal department. But Lawyer Longley, as a member of the Detroit firm of Longley & Middleton, remains chief Ford counsel, and with him will be most or all the dozen lawyers who sensationally "lost" their jobs.