But now it’s payback time. As they say in Economics 101, there’s no such thing as a free lunch–and Bill Ford’s just gotten the chit for 43 years of privileged existence. He’s learning the hard way that no matter how much you try to be one of the good guys, there’s a downside to running a company with your name on the door–people expect you to step up when trouble strikes, and they wonder where you are if you don’t. So we’re soon going to see this mediagenic mogul cash in his years of accumulated PR chips and his good-guy image and grab Ford’s steering wheel to try and drive the company through its current crisis.

Yes, Bill Ford’s problems pale in comparison with the suffering of the people killed or injured when the Firestone tires on their Ford SUVs failed and the anguish of their friends and survivors. But you still have to feel for the man, who must occasionally wake up wondering why he’s worked so hard instead of taking the easy route and living as a trust-fund baby.

To understand what’s undoubtedly going through Bill Ford’s mind, you need a brief course in Ford-family history, a soap opera that’s been playing for most of this century. Great-grandpa Henry, who started the whole enterprise, was a self-taught industrial genius who prospered wildly, helped change the world by making autos accessible to the masses, but who became a vicious crank and a notorious public anti-Semite in his later years. Ford Motor, getting clobbered by General Motors under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan (no relation to me, unfortunately), fell into such disarray that the family had to gang up on Henry and oust him to salvage the company. Bill’s grandpa Edsel was appointed by Henry to run the show, but died early under the pressure of trying to run a company while dealing with its increasingly dysfunctional founder. Bill’s uncle Henry II was installed to run the company at the age of 26, after the first Henry was deposed, but found himself presiding over an almost total ruin. Henry II did some notable things–helping revive the company, creating the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, removing the company’s anti-Semitic baggage by opening an auto plant in Israel and befriending many individual Jews. But Hank the Deuce, as we Michiganders called him, grew increasingly erratic and autocratic.

Bill Ford, by contrast, became chairman when things were going wonderfully well at Ford. The biggest business problem he had faced until recently was a minor rebellion by some disgruntled Ford investors who were unhappy with the way Ford Motor chose to ladle out billions of dollars of surplus cash to its stockholders. That’s one of his good-guy initiatives, which include proenvironment policies typical auto magnates would laugh at.

He’s had everything his way up to now. He could enjoy being a Ford and still cultivate the image of a reformist. He could be chairman and deliver the good news and high-minded change talk while President Jacques Nasser did the dirty work of running the company. He could pick and choose when to play an operational role. But now he faces a crisis that is making the job a lot less fun and threatens all his commendable efforts to improve and modernize the company’s image, and that may leave him with a lot less choice about how visible a role he’s going to play. But for now, at least, the time has come for us noninheritors to be a lot less jealous of Bill Ford. Yes, he’s still rich, he’s still pretty good-looking, he’s still charming and, even though he served an apprenticeship and worked hard, he got to run a gynormous company at a young age because of who his family is. Even if he botches the crisis, he’ll still be a Ford and he’ll still be rich. But if he can step up and deliver in this crisis, it will be clear that he deserves the job, regardless of how he got it.