While the current crop of auto executives are getting flayed at every turn, us “car guys” look back lovingly at the famous leaders and executives from the past. The problem of course is that most of us just point to a group of people we know nothing about and heap piles of praise on the very people who have guided the massive domestic manufacturers into the mess they are in now.

I was in this large group of people until just recently when I really decided to look at how the hell we managed to get into the position we’re in now. The seeds were sewn many decades ago, by the very people we idolize as business geniuses.

It’s easy to look like a genius when your company has over 50 percent market share of the entire US market like GM did during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. You honestly do not need to be much of a visionary or much of a manager to maintain your business and reap the large awards from your work. All those “risky” decisions that the Big Three made back then were actually fraught with no risk at all.

As embarrassing as the Edsel debacle was for Ford, there wasn’t any doubt to the future viability of the company, it was simply a grand failure and an even grander miscalculation on what the typical American car buyer was looking for in a vehicle.

The Edsel experience was a stunner in a lot of ways. Chrysler had missed big time with its Airflow, a car that was literally ahead of its time in the mid-1930s. It had a look and design aesthetic that freaked the public out. The car itself had many modern features and of course, its unique shape is often cited as being the first to have been perfected in a wind tunnel to maximize fuel efficiency.

The Edsel was ugly no doubt about it, but it was not the styling that killed the car. It was the fact that during the whole massive lead-up to its introduction the Edsel was touted to be a revolutionary car when in fact it shared sheetmetal with existing cars in the Ford line-up. The guys at Ford were shown, in the most public of ways, that there were limits as to what they could shoehorn down the buying public’s throat before people started asking questions.

Through the ‘50s and early ‘60s the Japanese were figuring out how to build cars. They were doing it by modeling themselves after the Americans. They were also learning by spending time at US plants, where US executives gladly allowed the humble Japanese engineers in to see their operations, completely ignorant to the fact that they were literally educating their own executioners.

The amazing lack of forethought shown by those men in power at the Big Three during those heady days puts me into the camp that says they were not the heroes and business legends we want to think they were. When the Datsuns began rolling onto our shores, well after the VWs were already starting to sneak some market share here and there, the US companies could have responded swiftly, offering a superior product, and squashing the fledgling importers in their tracks. Instead they continued to light their cigars with hundred dollar bills. The early Datsuns were so bad, the Nissan executives based here in this country admitted to feeling guilty even selling them.

The guys running our companies laughed the cars off, completely ignorant of the fact that every day their foreign competitors were dedicating themselves to being better, more efficient, higher quality manufacturers. We were employing people to stand at the end of assembly lines with mallets and hammers working with the job title of “straightener.”

Is it a wonder that when these cars caught a piece of the market and then proceeded to swallow massive amounts of market share like Pac-Man, US manufacturers were wholly unprepared to do anything but attempt to ramrod the same cars down our throats?

I’m as unabashed a homer as they come when we’re talking about my emotional connection to cars, however, blindly praising the “heroes” of the past that were not heroes at all but really unwitting saboteurs of their own companies is not right.

As insane as it seems to say, I’d place more stock in the current leaders of GM and Ford (Chrysler, not so much) for saving those two massive companies that I would with any leaders from their past. They are dealing with a set of problems that none of their predecessors had the knowledge, gumption, or stomach to confront.