“Satan has his sights on the United States of America!…Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.”

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/21/santorum

Since Bennett was always paranoid of being under attack, he included many security features in the lodge. The lodge was surrounded by a moat full of pointed posts. The bridge over the moat was kept loaded with dynamite. The lodge itself has many fascinating custom features. Hidden behind a hinged bookcase in the study is a secret passageway which leads to the dock. Every step of the staircase in the passageway is a different height from the others to make tripping more likely. Bennett would practice running down the steps so that he memorized their spacing to give him a head start if pursued. There is also a hidden room which was home to a central point in the ventilation system, where conversations from multiple rooms could be clearly overheard. The roof of the building featured a guard station parapet at one end, complete with a fireplace to keep Bennett’s men warm while on 24-hour armed watch when Bennett was at the lodge in colder months. Bennett also had a private airfield with an airplane at the other end of Lost Lake. In the event of an attack, Bennett could take the secret passageway, emerge by the dock, take a boat across the lake, and escape by airplane. The attack never came.

I guess when you kill people for a living, you get kind of paranoid about being killed.

It didn’t take Bennett long to assemble a collection of football players, boxers, wrestlers and even Detroit river gang members as Service Department employees. Bennett possessed no car making skills at all. His success with the company came solely from his close relationship with Henry Ford and his ability to get things done. All Henry had to do was ask, “Can you take care of that Harry?” and it was done.

Bennett was so loyal to Henry Ford that during a newspaper interview a journalist asked Bennett, “If Henry Ford asked you to black out the sky tomorrow, what would you do?” Bennett thought for a moment as said, “I might have a little trouble arranging that one but you’d see 100,000 workers coming through the plant gates with dark glasses on tomorrow.” In the mid-1920s, Bennett often drove to Henry Ford’s Fair Lane mansion to ask his boss if there was anything he could do for him. By the time the Model A production was in full swing in 1928-29, the morning meetings had become a habit. For the better part of 20 years, Harry Bennett spent his days at Henry Ford’s side.

Bennett led Ford’s opposition to the Ford Hunger March of unemployed workers on March 7, 1932. Dearborn police and Ford service department men including Bennett opened fire on the protesters as they advanced toward the Ford River Rouge Complex. Four marchers were shot to death, and Bennett himself was hospitalized after being hit by a rock.

Upon the death of company president Edsel Ford, the founder’s overshadowed son, in 1943, Bennett was Henry Ford’s choice to succeed Edsel. This did not sit well with Edsel Ford’s widow, who blamed Bennett for her husband’s early death. In 1945 Henry Ford II was summoned to Henry Ford’s estate and informed that he would be the new president of Ford Motor Company. As his first act, Henry Ford II, then 28, handed Bennett his walking papers. Bennett got in a parting shot by telling Ford, “You’re taking over a billion-dollar company that you haven’t contributed a thing to.” That afternoon, Bennett departed, ending his strange 30 year career with the Ford Motor Company.

The bizarre and ruthless Bennett era was finally over. Afterwards, Henry Ford II went to Henry Ford to inform him of his first executive decision: “I went to him (Henry Ford) with my guard up. I was sure he was going to blow my head off.” Henry Ford, quite nonchalantly said “Well, now Harry is back on the streets where he started.”

The standout in “Ghost Writers” is “Not Even Lions and Tigers,” Steve Amick’s wryly funny tale of enforcer Harry Bennett driven mad by the “haints” of strikers and organizers he bloodied in the service of Henry Ford (though, he’d insist to his disappointed ma, “he was in his office for most of it”). As he exhibited so well in his novel “Nothing But a Smile,” Amick is just great at nailing place and period with the energizing element of utterly authentic speech. His Bennett flings off sentences studded with gems like “whorebath,” “hoohaw” and “cooked up the wheeze” (translation: authored the joke). Plus, we get some local history: Harry Bennett, born on Ann Arbor’s Wall Street; stepson of an early member of UM’s engineering faculty; a frustrated artist who raised Wyandotte chickens on his Geddesburg estate. Now you know.

http://annarborchronicle.com/2011/10/23/column-book-fare-16/

http://books.google.com/books?id=Gh03vjFxzX4C&pg=PT21&lpg=PT21&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://unicornbooty.com/blog/2012/02/21/omg-a-rick-santorum-portrait-made-entirely-of-gay-porn-nsfw-ish/