John Stephen Bugas (April 26, 1908 – December 2, 1982) was the second in command at Ford Motor Company during the presidency and chairmanship reign of Henry Ford II (the oldest grandson of founder Henry Ford). He is best known for taking control of the company away from Harry Bennett so that John could be in command of it—including drawing pistols on each other—following the death of Edsel Ford.
As the Detroit Free Press wrote of Bugas:
Early life The Bugas family originated from Slovakia. The parents of Jack Bugas, Andrew (Andrej) P. Bugas (born in 1867) and Helena L. Bugas (the name "Bugas" was then spelled "Bugos"), were both born in eastern Slovakia, in the village Lučina near Prešov. Andrew Bugas immigrated to the United States in 1882 (following his father, John P. Bugos, who immigrated in 1878, though died back in Slovakia, at that time part of Austria-Hungary, in 1902) and became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 26 in 1891.Men of Wyoming. Slovak Institute & Reference Library
In 1901, Andrew Bugas was elected to the Wyoming State Legislature (as a Republican) and served six terms until 1907. Andrew and Helena Bugas married in 1902 and from 1903 to 1929 had a total of eight sons and two daughters.
Jack Bugas was born in 1908 in Rock Springs, Wyoming. In 1909, the Bugas family moved to Wamsutter, Wyoming. There, Andrew Bugas opened the first agency for the Continental Oil Company, operated a small hotel and post office, ran a road construction and trucking company, and developed a family ranch he would name the Eagle's Nest.
When Jack Bugas was in his early teens, his father's debts forced the family to mortgage the Eagle's Nest. Bugas worked for years to help retire his father's debts, including quitting school at the age of 16 for two years when his father placed him in charge of a road construction crew—an experience which Bugas would later say was "the hardest and most important in his life" and "what gave him confidence and taught him self-reliance."From FBI to Ford Motor . Made in Wyoming. Retrieved on November 5, 2013. Bugas later recalled standing with his father outside the Eagle's Nest weeping as they burned the paid-off note.
Bugas had a favorite story about ranch life in Wyoming:
Bugas claimed that as a child he would punch cows for entertainment.
Bugas graduated from Laramie High School.
The "tall, rangy" Bugas (at 6'1") was a "star forward" for four years on Willard Witte's University of Wyoming basketball team (including the 1934 national championship team), and was also on the baseball and track & field teams and a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He graduated cum laude from college and law school (which he funded by working as a forest ranger, trucker, timekeeper and refinery laborer) in 1934, and went to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation the following spring.
Federal Bureau of Investigation
"Adept at the art of fisticuffs while wearing a suit," Bugas rose quickly through the ranks of the FBI. By 1938 J. Edgar Hoover appointed him head of the FBI's Detroit office, a strategically very important position as at the time Michigan counted "heavily in the national defense plans." According to the FBI, Bugas "oversaw the shift in focus from violent crime to national security. As war loomed in Europe, concern about possible espionage and sabotage attacks on vital American industries like Detroit's automobile manufacturing plants moved to the forefront. Guarding the secrets of American technology and manufacturing were crucial to the war, and the Detroit Division played an important role in protecting these critical assets."A Brief History. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Retrieved December, 2015.
Bugas established a reputation as a "man with unlimited patience and efficiency" in his work on "notorious kidnapping, espionage, bank robbery and other major cases." At the FBI, he most notably led the quashing of two Nazi spy rings (including German Countess Grace Buchanan-Dineen, whom Bugas "turned" to a double agent) and personally captured Public Enemy Number One Tom Robinson at gunpoint. Most of all, Bugas made a notable record when he "kept sabotage in war plants at 0."
Bugas was known in the bureau as "an 'agent's agent-in-charge,' a man all like to work for" ("the highest compliment in the service"), always leading his men personally on important cases.
Bugas and Hoover would remain close friends until Hoover's death in 1972.
Ford Motor Company In 1944, Jack Bugas left public service to join Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford, still deeply shaken by the Lindbergh kidnapping, hired Bugas away from the FBI to protect his grandchildren, Henry Ford II and his siblings. Bugas began working under head of security Harry Bennett. Some say Bennett (who had originally been hired by Henry Ford to stifle attempts at unionization) targeted hiring the "tough-as-nails former FBI man" in hopes of neutralizing him, as Bugas's 1941 FBI investigation and discovery of theft from Ford's Rouge plant implicated some of Bennett's cronies.Two Henrys struggle for power. Automotive News. June 16, 2003.
Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's only child, once mentioned to Bugas "how vulnerable he felt his family was to Bennett's machinations." Bugas quickly became an "Edsel loyalist," and with that an enemy of Harry Bennett. Bennett once recalled that Bugas "seemed to sit around most of the day, his jacket off and his gun jutting from the shoulder holster beneath his arm." When Edsel Ford died an early death in 1943 at the age of 49, his widow Eleanor blamed Bennett.
After Edsel's death, Eleanor struggled to get Henry Ford to step down and let Edsel's oldest son Henry Ford II take control of the company, including by threatening to liquidate her and Edsel's Ford stock—almost half of the outstanding shares in the company. But according to Ford II, it was a few allies, most notably Jack Bugas, who ultimately swayed the senior Ford to step aside.
When 28-year-old Ford II was selected by his grandfather in 1945 to succeed him as president of Ford (at that time America's largest private corporation), Bugas was immediately put in charge of taking control of the company from Harry Bennett's entrenched gangster element in management, and of ousting Bennett. When Bugas fired Bennett in his office, Bennett called Bugas a "son of a bitch" and drew a loaded .45 automatic on him (which Bennett kept in his desk drawer, often taking target practice into the wall over a visitor's shoulder). In response, Bugas pulled a .38 from his shoulder holster, exclaiming, "Don't make the mistake of pulling the trigger, because I'll kill you. I won't miss. I'll put one right through your heart, Harry."
Kiplinger Magazine wrote in 1947 that "no one has risen faster in the Ford organization than big, brown-eyed John Bugas." The "practical and energetic man"F&ES working paper, Issues 7-10. Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. 1978. ultimately became second in command at Ford as "Henry Ford II's closest confidant,". He helped restructure and revitalize the struggling company, which faced considerable financial and strategic challenges transitioning from military manufacturing to a peacetime economy, and by 1956 make it a publicly traded corporation. The Ford initial public offering was the largest and most oversubscribed the United States had ever seen, raising nearly $700 million — roughly $5 billion in today's terms.
Bugas even came to play a role in car design at Ford, most notably of the Cortina (which later became the Corsair). One of the most distinctive features of the Cortina's styling came about because Bugas, as head of Ford's International Division, "demanded circular tail-lights in the Ford tradition" rather than the three-pointed star shape in Charles Thompson's original design. Bugas made the change while Thompson was off ill.
At Ford, Bugas held various vice president titles (among them industrial relations, international import-export group), as well as consulted directly with Henry Ford. Bugas also served as a member of the board of directors starting in 1950.
In 1960, Ford chose a new president, the second in its history that wasn't a member of the Ford family. Surprisingly, Robert McNamara was chosen over Bugas, who "believed he would have little competition in his rise to the top of the company". Bugas never knew that Ford II had discussed the matter of his appointment to the presidency with Goldman Sachs head Sidney Weinberg, who talked Ford II out of it. Bugas nevertheless over the years became one of the top holder of Ford stock options (and with it extreme wealth). In an interview, Bugas claimed to be chauffeured in and drive only Fords and Lincolns, including various Shelby cars.
Although Ford had exclaimed for many years "As long as I'm alive, John Bugas will have a job at Ford Motor Company," in 1968, Bugas resigned suddenly from Ford as a vice president and director. This occurred the same month that Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen was hired as the next president, despite the fact that Bugas was long widely expected to be the successor to the top job.
Bugas took on new directorships in other companies. He moved into an office in the Standard Oil of Indiana Building and worked on oil leases for a partnership he had with Marathon Oil Company and Max Fisher, a Forbes 400 member with whom he had been investing in Wyoming oil wells since the 1950s. Fisher, Bugas, and Henry Ford II "were the closest friends amongst Detroit's business elite," as well as frequent poker adversaries.At John Bugas' Ranch. The Max M. Fisher Archives. Retrieved October, 2014. Bugas also became more deeply involved in the management of his vast Wyoming cattle ranches.
In the major reshuffling of Richard Nixon's cabinet posts in 1973 during the growing Watergate scandal, Bugas narrowly missed being selected by Nixon as Director of the FBI (instead of William Ruckelshaus).
A 1991 book claimed, anecdotally: "As if to illustrate the power of directives at Ford, the company still insists on spelling employee with one final e ['employe'], a practice begun by a directive from John Bugas in the mid 1940s! He is said to have insisted that the spelling of employee conform to current newspaper style," while another story says that his intention was to "save a lot of money in typing and paper costs."
Wyoming cowboy
Bugas would always retain a love for his home state of Wyoming, saying "Its wide, un-cramped spaces ... give me a feeling of personal freedom I have never felt anywhere else."
Over the years (starting in 1949) he acquired over twenty-thousand-acres in Sunlight BasinView of John Bugas Ranch in Sunlight Basin. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Retrieved on November 1, 2014. ("by far the largest private ownership") and Clark's Fork,Mounted cowboys gathering Jack Bugas Hereford cattle on Clark's Fork Ranch. Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Retrieved on November 1, 2014. within the Absaroka Mountain Range in northwest Wyoming (near what is historically known for being the home of Buffalo Bill). There he owned multiple working cattle ranches, with over 800 head of Hereford cattle, and he would frequently return to his beloved ranches with his wife and children, teaching them to move cattle and enjoy the Wyoming life as he so did.John Bugas Timeline. Made in Wyoming. Retrieved on November 5, 2013. He would spend his time there riding, fishing, and hunting amidst the ranch's twelve-thousand foot mountain peaks, canyons, waterfalls, and rivers. Later in his life, Bugas traveled to his ranches every May and October for the cattle drives.
Bugas's picturesque ranch was used as the filming set for the Marlboro Man cigarette advertisements.