From now on, I’m buying nothing but [Chrysler] Plymouths

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 248.

US presidents have around ten weeks to assemble their governing team. Ike was adamant in avoiding cronyism, preferring big businessmen who would take a financial hit through government service as opposed to ‘business failures, college professors [crossed out and replaced by ‘political hacks’] and New Deal lawyers’. His appointments included ‘Engine Charlie’ Wilson, the President of General Motors, as secretary of defense, George Humphrey, the President of the Mark Hanna Company, to the Treasury, while the Boston banker Robert Cutler became national security advisor. The cabinet consisted of ‘eight millionaires and a plumber’ – a token and useless trade unionist. Engine Charlie in particular was ‘a classic type of corporation executive: basically apolitical and certainly unphilosophic, aggressive in action and direct in speech – the undoubting and uncomplicated pragmatist who inhabits a world of sleek, shining certitude’. He combined an ability to be coldly callous towards the ordinary worker with credulousness about doing a ‘package deal’ with the Soviets over Korea. After one too many Wilsonian monologues, a fellow cabinet member scribbled: ‘From now on, I’m buying nothing but [Chrysler] Plymouths.