Henry Ford II (1917-1987) was an American industrialist. He turned his grandfather's faltering automobile company into the second largest industrial corporation in the world.

Henry Ford II was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 4, 1917, the grandson of the automobile pioneer Henry Ford. After graduation from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, in 1936, Henry entered Yale University, where he specialized in sociology, a study that evidently influenced him a great deal. He lacked sufficient credits to graduate but left college anyway in 1940 to marry and begin work at the family firm, the Ford Motor Company.

In 1941 Ford was drafted and became an ensign at the Great Lakes Naval Training School. Meanwhile, conditions at the family firm--which had been losing money under the autocratic control of his grandfather--deteriorated further. A crisis was reached with the death of Ford's father in 1943. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Cabinet deactivated Ford from the Navy...