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mentality was not equal to the task which was laid upon him in thinking about this. I think that was really what ailed him. He did not have a first-class mind and he had no real contribution to these problems. He had the salesman's mind. That was all. He couldn't really cope with the problems that were before him.

That I'm sure is the reason why he looked so petty, so childish, so adolescent and was subject to these intellectual terrors. Yet, here he was, the head of it. His personality was such that they had all, every one of them, with the exception of Kettering who operated in a field so different from Sloan's that it didn't really matter to him what Sloan said or did, were in a kind of terror about Sloan. As Sloan had grown deafer and deafer he became more and more of a difficult party to deal with in his own company, because he would just make out he couldn't hear.

Knudsen said to me once, “You know, Alfred only hears what he wants to hear.” That was a very sensible conclusion. They'd all had that experience with him.

This made him a kind of a maverick in their outfit. In their directors' meetings he would show brilliance in spots and then he wouldn't hear what other people had to say. He would get his own way over