John Bugas

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."

Bugas died in 1982, at the age of 74, at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital a week after undergoing heart bypass surgery.

In addition to his Wyoming ranches, for the last twenty-five years of his life Bugas's main home was his sprawling country estate in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which he named Woodland. Woodland was designed by noted architect Hugh T. Keyes, who also designed Bugas's Wyoming lodge, as well as the main homes of Max Fisher, Ford II's brother Benson Ford, Ford President Semon Knudsen, and Ford Chairman and CEO Philip Caldwell. Woodland became the unofficial site for many discreet Ford meetings (as well as discreet poker games), including with Henry Ford, McNamara, Lee Iacocca, Carroll Shelby, and Hoover. It was also the site of large Republican fund-raising parties in 1976 with President Gerald Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in attendance and in 1980 with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. Woodland is not unlike the fortified "Castle" compound built by Henry Ford for Bugas's predecessor and nemesis Bennett, where Bugas and his family spent much time. Like Henry's and Edsel's houses, Woodland also had a Ford-built, detached industrial power house serving the main house. Bugas also owned riding stables nearby. (Upon Bugas's death, Woodland was purchased by Max Fisher's close friend and fellow Forbes 400 member Alfred Taubman, and the house was later featured in a Vogue magazine spread.)

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).

Bugas and Hoover would remain close friends until Hoover's death in 1972.

He was married to Margaret Stowe McCarty (a descendant of Harriet Beecher Stowe), with whom he had three daughters and a son, until her death in 1972. In 1975 he married Joan Murphy, a former Ford Agency model twenty-five years his junior (who survived him).

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.

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.

In a 1955 speech, Bugas notably coined the term "consumerism" as a substitute for "capitalism" to better describe the American economy:

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.

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. Bugas also became more deeply involved in the management of his vast Wyoming cattle ranches.

Over the years (starting in 1949) he acquired over twenty-thousand-acres in Sunlight Basin ("by far the largest private ownership") and Clark's Fork, 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. 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 led the fight at Ford in 1949 against Walter Reuther's demands for noncontributory pensions for United Auto Workers members by posing the practical argument that increased costs of production cannot simply be passed on (or "shifted forward") to the consumer in the form of higher prices. (In so doing, he implicitly advanced the Austrian "subjective theory of value", which states that the value of a good is not determined by the cost of labor required to produce that good—the Marxian "labor theory of value"—but rather by the subjective importance the end consumer places on that good.) Bugas explained that, if the employees didn't fund their own pension, the company would have to pay for it by raising car prices, and to think that the company could do this at its whim was a fallacy. He wrote to Reuther: "Old-age security is a highly desirable goal, but it must be paid for. There is no 'kitty' from which Ford can draw." (Reuther cheekily retorted that Ford could find its workers' pensions "from the same source that is used to finance security for high paid executives.")

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" 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.

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."

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.

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 Bennet.

"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."

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.

Though the term "consumerism" first appeared in 1915, it was Bugas who first adopted it to illustrate the "consumer sovereignty" concept of Mises, "as a means of contrasting the American economy to that of the Soviet Union."

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.

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.

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.

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.