When Edsel, president of Ford Motor Company, died of cancer in May 1943, the elderly and ailing Henry Ford decided to assume the presidency. By this point in his life, he had had several cardiovascular events (variously cited as heart attack or stroke) and was mentally inconsistent, suspicious, and generally no longer fit for such a job.[SUP]
[82][/SUP]Most of the directors did not want to see him as president. But for the previous 20 years, though he had long been without any official executive title, he had always had
de facto control over the company; the board and the management had never seriously defied him, and this moment was not different. The directors elected him,[SUP]
[83][/SUP] and he served until the end of the war. During this period the company began to decline, losing more than $10 million a month ($126,990,000 a month today). The administration of President
Franklin Roosevelt had been considering a government takeover of the company in order to ensure continued war production,[SUP]
[48][/SUP] but the idea never progressed.