COLUMN ONE : Detroit in Rearview Mirror : Thousands of U.S. auto veterans have joined the Japanese. Although caught in the trade crossfire, some see themselves in the vanguard of a borderless economy.

In the 1960s, Robert McCurry gave birth to one of Detroit’s more successful advertising tag lines, the one inviting motorists to drop by the ol’ dealership and see “the Dodge boys--the good guys in the white hats.”

Today, the 68-year-old McCurry is a Toyota boy whose hat, from here, looks black. A refugee from Chrysler and onetime Michigan State football star, he is the sales boss who has helped lead the U.S. arm of the Japanese auto maker to such impressive heights over the last decade.

Other credits: He enlisted Joe Garagiola for the “Get a car, get a check” television ad campaign in the mid-1970s, marking the modern-day invention of the rebate. He got Chrysler into hydroplane racing with a dual Chrysler engine so powerful that it exploded in its first race on the Detroit River.

“McCurry had panache,” recalls a retired Chrysler officer.

That doesn’t sound like Japan’s kind of guy. But McCurry, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., says he has helped teach the conservative Toyota how to be aggressive, Detroit-style, both in word and deed.

And there are plenty more with the same kind of training, stemming from a talent transfer that began in the 1960s. McCurry is merely the most visible among thousands of ex-Detroit auto sales, public relations, advertising, manufacturing, design and engineering veterans who have committed their professional lives to the Japanese after fleeing the Big Three American firms or, as McCurry was, being invited to leave.

Indeed, although the Japanese have become a sort of chinning bar for the U.S. auto industry, these rapidly multiplying ties with Detroit are transferring culture the other way, too.

As a result, Detroit’s expatriates have been “cast into a neutral space in terms of patriotism,” says one of them, Gerald Hirshberg, a Cleveland native, Ohio State alumnus and former Buick design chief who is now vice president of Nissan Design International Inc. in San Diego.

It can be an uncomfortable role these days. Trade tension between the two nations is at a peak, insults are being hurled in both directions across the Pacific and tens of thousands more U.S. jobs are falling victim to a brutal automotive competition that the American side has been losing.

Virtually all these transplants have friends in Detroit, and many grew up here. Relatives have arguably lost jobs because these departed family members have done such a good job for the Japanese. Other families are faced with divided loyalties. A prominent example: Charles M. (Chuck) Jordan, veteran design vice president at struggling General Motors, raised a son named Mark, who is now a top-ranking Mazda designer and helped create the landmark Miata sports car.

Yet many see themselves as ground-floor participants in the borderless economy, their positions in the industry transcending such quaint notions as them-against-us.

The role “feels neutral to me,” says Hirshberg, whose studio designs Nissan vehicles for sale in Japan and Europe as well as the United States. “I could feel the shrinking of the globe in a very personal way. It’s been overwhelmingly exhilarating.”

But in the face of today’s criticisms aimed at Japan, some have started firing their own broadsides, drawing on personal experience to pummel the U.S. auto industry over its allegedly poor management, insular culture, hypocrisy, scapegoat hunting and other widely perceived sins.

The most vocal such critics lately have been top executives at Toyota and Mitsubishi. But listen to an evaluation of President Bush’s recent trip to Japan, with Detroit’s Big Three chairmen in tow, by Jan Thompson, a former Chrysler sales manager who is now director of advertising at Mazda: “Why didn’t Bush take Jack Welch (chairman of General Electric) or John A. Sculley (chairman of Apple Computer), people we all respect? He took a bunch of whiners.”

This season’s chief Detroit-basher has been McCurry chum Richard Recchia, the ranking American sales executive at relatively small Mitsubishi Motors, a former mid-level Chrysler man who grew up in Detroit. The amiable and mild-mannered Recchia enraged a few car dealers and cheered many others at a February speech in which he described U.S. auto executives as racist and insane.

Recchia borrowed some parts of the speech from McCurry’s laser-tongued public relations man and speech writer, James Olson, an ex-Ford man who also oversees Toyota’s U.S. lobbying efforts as vice president for external affairs.

At Ford, Olson aimed his invective in the other direction, he admits. Especially outspoken in his criticism of the Japanese in the early 1980s, he also wrote speeches for top Ford executives demanding a “level playing field” with Japan and “breathing room” for Detroit. Another one, he recalls, was: “Give us a 200-yen dollar, and we will push them back.”

Is he just a hired mouth, or has he changed the way he thinks?

“I got tired of the defeatist prose. I was writing a lot of stuff at the end that I didn’t believe anymore,” he says of his days at Ford. “I saw things I didn’t agree with and I began to think the management was a little insular. I grew disheartened.”

He also confesses to self-interest, presumably the bottom line for most: The path was crowded at Ford, and Toyota came to him in 1984 with a promotion and a raise of 30% to 40%.

“I saw the handwriting on the wall, and it said they were better than we were and I’d better start thinking about my own family and career,” he says, adding that Detroit’s woes “give me pause, in that I can empathize with all the people losing their jobs. But it doesn’t give me pause, because they mismanaged, they deserve what they’re getting. I don’t think the Japanese are competing unfairly, and I have no problem with foreign ownership of business in this country.”

Also, the perceived hypocrisy of Japan’s critics in Detroit who themselves are importing hundreds of thousands of Japanese vehicles annually makes suggestions of disloyalty ring preposterous to some.

“If General Motors can bring in all those Geos, why can’t a GM guy go to work for Nissan?” asks Moon Mullins, a PR man who followed McCurry from Chrysler to Toyota.

Transplanted Detroiters figure that their new employers won’t go out of business, that they are providing good cars to consumers, that they are increasingly creating U.S. jobs to partly offset Detroit’s losses and that, by the way, Southern California, where most of them live and work, is nicer than Detroit.

“I knew my path with Chrysler was going back to Detroit, and I didn’t want to go,” says Mazda’s Thompson, a Detroit native who had been Chrysler’s Los Angeles district manager.

Some like to take vicarious credit for the fact that the U.S. industry is rehabilitating itself and building better cars than it used to. Besides, notions of nationality in the auto business increasingly seem absurd: The latest evidence is a new minivan designed by Nissan and built by Ford that will roll out of a plant near Cleveland this spring.

“I have evenings when my wife and I look at each other and I think, ‘I wish I could be doing this for an American company,’ ” says Hirshberg, the minivan’s chief designer. “But I do not, when I think critically, think I have done anything but help America. Detroit has never made cars as well as it’s making them now, and it’s not because they wanted to. And when I finish designing a vehicle like the (minivan), I defy anybody to tell me what culture that car represents. To me, that’s wonderful.”

When Nissan (under the Datsun nameplate) and Toyota first began shipping credible autos here from Japan nearly three decades ago, the only jobs they created were in sales and at the port in Long Beach.

They would hire whomever they could get from Detroit, which was riding high at the time, to peddle their dinky little cars. Norman D. Lean, who preceded McCurry as the top American at Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. in Torrance, recalls the day he was working at a Ford sales outpost in Massachusetts in 1969 when the phone rang. A colleague answered, listened a moment, then called out:

“Hey, does anybody here want to be national service manager for Toyota?”

“Everybody else laughed,” Lean says.

Today, the American ranks of the Japanese auto makers are swollen not merely with former Big Three car peddlers but with designers, engineers and manufacturing experts, establishing nothing less than a second auto industry in the United States.

The eight Japanese-owned car assembly plants and perhaps 200 components plants built in the United States during the 1980s, although faulted for continued heavy use of Japanese parts and technology, have given the expatriates a basis for claiming that they are not expatriates at all.

The expansion has significantly broadened the employment profile of the Americans working for Japanese firms and is blending the two cultures in ways that would be hard to undo.

To be sure, Japan’s reputation for treating Americans in its U.S. branches as mere handmaidens without clout has had its examples in the auto industry. But as political pressure forces the Japanese to bring American designers, engineers, manufacturing experts and hourly workers into the car-building process, localizing and integrating their U.S. operations, the domestic influence inevitably makes itself felt.

Mazda, the only Japanese auto firm willing to set up a wholly owned assembly plant in Detroit’s back yard and agree to union membership, clearly needed a Detroiter for the prickly job of human resources vice president at its Flat Rock, Mich., factory.

Mazda turned to Henry G. Schultz, a longtime skilled-trades worker at General Motors, whose first crack at joining management’s ranks came from Volkswagen of America in 1978. As Mazda began doing a decade later, VW was taking on a unionized American work force in its first U.S. manufacturing venture.

The low-key Schultz rose to become labor relations manager, but VW’s U.S. venture failed. Approached three times with job offers from troubled Chrysler, Schultz turned them down for fear Chrysler would fail too. Nor did he figure GM would take him back as anything but an electrician. He joined Mazda in 1986, with the initial task of evaluating more than 100,000 applications from U.S. workers for 3,000 jobs at the new Flat Rock plant.

Schultz, who still carries his UAW skilled-tradesman card, is a valuable bridge between Japanese top management and the local UAW leaders in what has been a rocky, but productive, few years. Last month, the Flat Rock plant began producing the new Mazda 626, billed as the first car built by a Japanese firm with enough U.S. content--75%--to achieve government status as a domestic car.

“I felt more disloyal going over from the union to the management side at VW than I do working for the Japanese,” he says.

Ad executive Thompson, who went from Chrysler to Toyota before winding up at Mazda in 1987, says she finds the Japanese opening up to women managers, narrowing another cultural crevasse: of 14 Mazda managers reporting to her, she says proudly, seven are female.

But perhaps Detroit’s biggest influence on the Japanese is in sales philosophy, as personified by McCurry. His habit of constantly visiting dealers has lately become a trademark of the Japanese auto firms here, something that Detroit’s top sales executives are accused of forgetting.

Ironically, his flashy style--he prefers the term “aggressive”--ultimately led to a falling-out with Chrysler’s top management in 1978. The company at the time was being run into the ground by accountants, most post-mortems agreed, and they considered McCurry a blowhard. By the time potential soul-mate Lee A. Iacocca came along, McCurry had left unlamented.

At Toyota, the push was to upgrade the company’s many Mom-and-Pop dealerships to be able to handle the fast-growing volume of vehicles the public wanted to buy. He says he taught the Japanese to make the dealers happy so they would order more cars and push harder.

“I developed a sincere reputation with the Japanese,” he says. “I’m a dealer-oriented guy, and that was a new arena for them. The aggressiveness didn’t bother them. They learned a new mode of operating, and I think they respected that.”

McCurry dismisses talk of a feud between him and Iacocca, apparently rooted in the mistaken assumption that Iacocca had fired him from Chrysler. Their public views on auto trade are diametrically opposed, he says, but so what?

“It’s just good competition,” he says, opting not to feed the U.S.-Japan rhetorical binge. “He’s a good car man.”

They know each other only slightly. Both attended the celebrity bash in Morocco put on by the late Malcolm Forbes in 1989, where McCurry’s wife asked to meet Iacocca.

“We had a nice chat,” McCurry recalls. “Afterward my wife said, ‘He’s just like you.’ ”