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The Commuter. All through his career, Donner has insisted on the privacy of his family life. In Who's Who he lists neither his wife, his children nor his clubs. Three years after he joined G.M., he married Grand Rapids-born Eileen Isaacson, whom he began to court when she came to Three Oaks to teach high school. Winters, they live in a Fifth Avenue apartment. (Their son and daughter are both married.) Summers, they live in a big (22 rooms), comfortable home in Sands Point, Long Island. Donner commutes to the city on the Long Island Rail Road, and from Pennsylvania Station to his office, 25 blocks away. U.S. industry's highest-paid businessman joins rush-hour straphangers on the subway.
Though he plays an occasional game of golf, Donner's prime recreation is still reading—mostly history, which he feels helps him "to learn how mistakes have been made in the past. And successes." No recreation, however, can really compete for his attention against the activity he loves best: running G.M. For despite his quiet, intellectual exterior, Donner delights in the unpredictability and endlessly changing nature of his business. "We're a very restless crowd in the auto industry," he says proudly. "We're always under strain. This business wouldn't be any fun if we weren't under strain. It would be like selling soap or matches."
Trustbusters' Target. The manufacturing and the selling of cars are only part of the strain. Because G.M. has made itself so big, it must live in constant dread of the Justice Department's trustbusters. Since last summer, the Antitrust Division has assigned a special team of eight attorneys to keep watch on the giant automaker. The Government already has four antitrust cases against G.M. in pretrial stages: 1) a criminal indictment charging that the company has monopolized the diesel electric locomotive market by unfair use of its power as the railroads' largest freight customer; 2) a suit alleging that G.M. monopolizes 85% of city and intercity bus sales; 3) an effort to nullify G.M.'s acquisition of Ohio's Euclid Road Machinery Co.; and 4) a suit charging that G.M. and three Southern California auto dealer groups conspired to prevent the sale of Chevrolets through discount houses.
For several years past, there have been persistent rumors that the Justice Department would like to go even further and cut G.M. down to size by breaking off Chevrolet as an independent corporation. (Rival Automaker George Romney has long urged that G.M. be split up.) Now that G.M. dominates more than half the auto industry, the rumors come in louder and stronger. "Dominate," observes Donner dryly, "is a word like discriminate. It was a perfectly nice word until a few years ago."
Donner denies vehemently that G.M. "has ever worked aggressively to stifle competition." But he insists with equal fervor that General Motors does not—and cannot—attempt to hold down its auto sales for fear of antitrust action. No institution, he argues, can sensibly set out to be second best, or to do less than its best. So long as General Motors continues to grow on the strength of price competition and product performance, he believes that both law and equity are on its side.