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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 669-670



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Ferrytale: The Career of W.H. "Ping" Ferry. By James A. Ward (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001) 238pp. $49.50


Wilbur H. Ferry (1910-1995) was exactly what Nation editor Victory Navasky called him—a career "troublemaker." Hugh Ferry, his father, chaired the board at Detroit's Packard Motor Car Company, but Wilbur was an unlikely candidate for such a vocation. Hugh may have dropped out of school somewhere between the fifth and tenth grades, but he made sure his football-star son went to a Jesuit high school and then to Dartmouth (where his primary interest was drinking). Lacking the proper corporate gene, Ferry took a teaching job at Choate after graduation. The Episcopalians in charge assigned their young Catholic a Bible class and made sure that the only two Catholic students on hand came under his wing. Ferry had Joseph Kennedy for English and John F. Kennedy for Latin. The brothers called him "Creeping Wilbur." Escape came every weekend with benders in Hanover or New York City, and after returning from one of them, he lost a sneaker crawling back to his room at dawn. Later that morning, the headmaster confronted him, sneaker dangling from his hand. Joe and Jack's promise to have "Daddy ... fix it" notwithstanding, the discharge stood (20).

For much of the remaining Great Depression years, Ferry pursued his vocation on the road—drinking, brawling, and getting locked up repeatedly. A stint running a Havana craps table suggested at least the possibility of a regular job. Next came service as Eddie Rickenbacker's public relations man at Eastern Airlines and newspaper work in New Hampshire. Pearl Harbor commenced a successful search for "a very friendly doctor" who added a bogus epilepsy diagnosis to a generic bad back in search of a 4F. After landing a job with the Office of Price Administration, Ferry moved to New York to handle public relations for Sidney Hillman's CIO-PAC . He also put in a few months as an operations analyst for the Air Force. [End Page 669]

In effect, the Cold War allowed Ferry to make his mark. He helped Henry Ford II establish the Ford Foundation and, with Robert Hutchins, incorporated the Fund for the Republic. Ferry and the Fund were subsequently enrolled in the blacklists of the Joseph McCarthy era since Ferry had the odd habit of publicly attacking J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, and the Fund had the even odder habit of supporting projects analyzing the intolerance of the Red-hunting apparat. If the Fund for the Republic eventually lost its edge, Ferry never did. When Chester Bowles was headhunting for the Kennedy cabinet, Ferry recommended a Ford man—Robert McNamara. But when McNamara proved a hawk on Vietnam, Ferry called a press conference to announce his resignation from the Democratic party in protest. Old habits remained as well. Other press conferences were called to attack the FBI director again, and time could be still found to go on the road for drinking bouts with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk.

Even while slowing down as he neared retirement, Ferry would always have pet projects to be pursued with the usual twist. His anti-death penalty phase, for example, promoted televised executions as the most expedient path to abolition. He always managed to find new companions—most notably, in the 1980s, Edward P. Thompson and others involved in the European nuclear disarmament movement. His new wife, Carol Bernstein, had money and just as strong an urge to send checks to virtually any left-of-center activist or scholar who took the time to mail a seventy-five word letter describing his or her complaint. (In fact, such was this writer's introduction to Ferry twenty-five years ago.)

Ward, has written something of an unauthorized authorized biography, a readable and fascinating work that is much more than an obscure study of a marginal historical figure.

 



Kenneth O'Reilly
University of Alaska, Anchorage

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