A Friden with Style

Arjay Miller bears a marked resemblance to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, an old friend and onetime associate. Both men have stern faces, brush their dark hair straight back, and are thin-lipped and hard-eyed behind their spectacles. "I'm proud," says Miller, 47, "of any resemblance to Mr. McNamara." But the resemblance goes far deeper than appearances, and the qualities that both men share last week boosted Arjay* Miller to the presidency of Ford Motor Co.

Package Deal. Miller takes over from Ford President John Dykstra, who is stepping down at the mandatory retirement age of 65. Much of Miller's career is tied up with former Ford President McNamara. A top student at U.C.L.A. in banking and finance, he at first wanted to become a teacher, changed his mind during the war after teaming up with nine other brilliant young men at the Air Force's statistical school at Harvard. Led by Tex Thornton, now chairman of Litton Industries, and including McNamara, they offered themselves in a package deal to Henry Ford II in 1946, went on to become the famous "Whiz Kids" who revivified ailing Ford.

Miller became the director of Ford's first report analysis department, moved up steadily in the company behind McNamara, and became vice president in charge of Ford's financial affairs after McNamara left Ford in 1961. Ford has been carefully grooming him for the presidency for more than a year, last year created for him the new post of vice president-staff group. In a newly formed triumvirate that will include Chairman Henry Ford and Scottish-born Charles H. Patterson, 60, for whom the post of executive vice president was re-created last week, Miller will supervise everything from planning and design to sales, have vastly more control than Dykstra did.

Gas in the Blood. For Ford, Miller's promotion has particular significance. Like McNamara before him, the razor-sharp, rapid-fire Nebraskan is what is known as a "Friden type"--Detroit's term for financial men, derived from the trade name of a calculator. Miller's move into the presidency is thus a clear sign that the often criticized financial elite will continue to guide Ford's future.

Though many non-Friden Ford oldtimers blame the Friden men for paying more attention to costs than customers, even they admit that Miller has a little gasoline in his blood. He likes to test-drive Fords on the company's spacious Dearborn track, played a major role in toning up the styling of Ford's 1963 1/2 models, which were designed to halt a decline in Ford's share of the market. Miller, in fact, was a nuts-and-bolts man before he was a Friden: at twelve, he bought an old Model T for $10, took it apart to see how it ran. He never got it back together.

* Miller's parents named him Arjay for the initials of his father, Rawley John. It is, says Miller, "a compromise junior."

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