An Alcoholic's Challenge

John Brennan's career at Ford Motor Co. seemed to be a classic American success story. In 31 years with the automaker, Brennan, now 56, rose from unskilled laborer through a variety of sales and administrative posts to chairman of Ford of Switzerland. His jobs involved attendance at endless rounds of lunches and social affairs, most of them bibulous. Consuming more and more liquor on the way up, Brennan became an alcoholic, subject to recurrent blackouts. Finally, five years ago, he took early retirement from Ford. Now he is suing the company for $1.3 million, contending that his job environment started him down the road to alcoholism and the company persuaded him to take early retirement rather than helping him to rehabilitate himself.

As Brennan tells it, he began drinking seriously in Washington in 1950 while representing Ford. Later, he maintained liaison for Ford at the United Nations, where he put in hours at the delegates' bar, "followed by long martini lunches." Brennan was promoted to higher posts in The Netherlands --which involved more social drinking --Austria, where he started drinking alone, and finally Switzerland. When he at last sought help, Brennan says, he was met in a Zurich hotel room by higher Ford officials who persuaded him--"over a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label"--to take early retirement.

Kicked Habit. Ford says that it intends to "defend the suit vigorously"; presumably, it will contend that other executives have operated in the same environment without becoming alcoholics. Brennan's weightiest charge is that, although Ford had helped other alcoholic employees in the U.S. get treatment, he was never even told that such help was available. After a long struggle, Brennan kicked the drinking habit--so successfully that he is now business manager of an alcoholic-treatment center in Lake Orion, near Detroit.

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