On the other are the high-stakes players who see companies as assets to be flipped or managed in order to capitalize on the moment. That’s just good business, they’d argue. For a case in point, look no further than Auburn Hills, Chrysler’s hometown. Two years ago, DaimlerChrysler chair Dieter Zetsche was hailed for the automaker’s amazing comeback, but when the fix turned out to be short-lived, he announced in February that Chrysler would be sold. At least for now, the family members who control Ford can’t bear the thought of a similar fate. They’ve held their collective breath as the board suspended their dividends and management pledged nearly all of Ford’s assets as collateral in order to borrow more than $23 billion to finance a two-year restructuring effort. You might consider Ford the anti-Chrysler. And this, it turns out, is Bill Ford’s moment in history: the fight of his life for the soul of his company.

The family scion has always been a passionate idealist with a clear vision for the company. A century ago the Model T bestowed on society the joys of freedom and mobility. Ford Motor, he believed, could show the world it was not just do-gooderism but also good business to help solve the challenges of controlling pollution and maximizing safety. Yet his timing couldn’t have been worse. He took charge of an ailing company just as the U.S. auto industry was about to implode, and the company sank further on his watch. Now, 100 years of history and the Ford family legacy turn on how successfully he and his new C.E.O. navigate the company through today’s treacherous landscape. Can they keep Ford going, and if so, how?

Bill Ford is mainlining espresso. He has a machine in his office, and he jumps up to refill his cup. “Some things don’t change,” he says, laughing—he’s talking about his caffeine habit. But the world as Ford Motor knows it may be about to change in ways he could never have imagined. Outside his window, silhouetted against a gray winter sky, is the River Rouge assembly plant built by his great-grandfather and company founder Henry Ford. Today’s newspapers are filled with reports of a possible merger of G.M. and Chrysler.

“I’m not surprised,” says Ford. But any auto-industry merger would take at least two years of “real management stretch,” he reasons. “We felt the best thing we could do was to get our house in order. That doesn’t preclude anything down the road. Because even if ultimately a partnership made sense, we’d be a much stronger partner if we were a stronger stand-alone company.”

He sounds confident, but it took a midlife crisis to get there. Last year, in the midst of what Steve Hamp—Ford’s brother-in-law and then-vice president and chief of staff—would call a “boiling, white-hot” summer, truck and S.U.V. sales plunged as gas prices spiked. And though Ford had accelerated his Way Forward restructuring plan, the company was clearly sliding way backward. Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian’s push in June to marry G.M. to Renault-Nissan had put Ford’s board members on edge; they hired investment bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to analyze all of their possible choices. The news had been so relentlessly bad, Ford recalls, “there were some mornings I literally didn’t want to get out of bed.”

It was his eighth year as chair and his fifth as C.E.O. In the spring, Ford had decided not to replace his outgoing president and chief operating officer, Jim Padilla, so that he himself could delve more deeply into the company’s inner workings. As a result he’d come face-to-face not just with the shocking recalcitrance of Ford’s culture but with his own shortcomings as a C.E.O. He’d been too nice, too hands-off, too reliant on a weak team. What he needed now was someone to perform triage, and he was willing to swallow his pride and step aside if he had to. He’d found the right man for the job, one who knew manufacturing, understood unions, and could appreciate both Ford’s culture and its storied past. Best of all, he was a fixer, not a quick fix.