Joe Frazer, Father of the Jeep, Part 3
continued from part 2…
Jesse Jones, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Commerce, was a rugged Tennessean who was hard to meet and harder to know. Joseph Washington “Jeeps” Frazer was President of Willys-Overland, a scion of the Virginia Washingtons and Nashville Frazers; but this and more wouldn’t get him in to see Jesse Jones at Commerce. Seeing Jones required more powerful strategy.
On an urgent mission to Washington for his Jeep-building company, Joe Frazer had arrived one morning in 1943 and parked himself in Jones’s outer office, despite repeated warnings that the Secretary wasn’t likely to arrive until evening—if at all.…