At the end of the second bruising day of testimony on General Motors? ignition switch recall, Mary Barra was in no mood for more questions.
As soon as she was excused from a Senate subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, the GM chief executive was hustled out the door and into an elevator, surrounded by a cadre of company officials.
It was a hasty retreat from what has become a searing crisis for Barra and a management team that had hoped the congressional hearings would buy the company time to start its recall of 2.6 million small cars and complete an internal investigation of why it failed to fix a deadly safety defect for more than a decade.
Instead, the hearings showed that GM?s strategy to put Barra front and centre, relying on its own team of advisers, has not defused the growing anger among lawmakers and consumers? disgruntlement with the company.
Now Barra is increasingly looking outside for help.
On Thursday, GM confirmed that it had hired a crisis management adviser, Jeff Eller, who cut his teeth in the Clinton administration and also represented Firestone in its tyre recall in 2000. He joins Kenneth Feinberg, a lawyer who specialises in compensation claims for victims of disasters, and Anton Valukas, a former US attorney who is conducting an internal investigation.
The creation of the team of outside advisers stands in marked contrast to GM?s early approach to handling the crisis, when it looked primarily inward to set strategy.
Unlike Feinberg, the high-visibility lawyer known for his work distributing payouts after 9/11 and the BP gulf oil spill, Eller is much more of a behind-the-scenes player.
The item on Eller?s r?sum? of most direct interest to GM is his work for Bridgestone/Firestone in 2000, when the company was facing a typhoon of public outrage, mounting litigation and Washington inquiries over defective tyres that caused Ford Explorers to roll over, a problem eventually determined to have led to more than 200 deaths.
Eller?s firm, Public Strategies, was among a cadre of outside firms, including law and lobbying firms, that the company hired to help make its case. Several people involved in the Ford/Firestone investigations contacted on Thursday said they did not remember Eller. But one of his colleagues at Public Strategies, Wallace Henderson, a lobbyist, was widely thought to have been instrumental to Firestone because of his close relationship with the chairman of one of the investigating committees. He was a hunting buddy and former staff aide to representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who ran the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the time.
Before that, Eller was among a coterie of 30-something aides in the early years of the Clinton administration, but never had the stature of generational peers like George Stephanopoulos, Rahm Emanuel or Dee Dee Myers. He ran an office that reached out to local media.
He did not stay long at the White House, leaving in 1994 to go Austin, Texas, where he built a successful career in public relations and crisis communication at Public Strategies, eventually becoming president, chief executive and chairman of the firm.
This year, after Public Strategies was purchased by Hill & Knowlton, he went out on his own with the Jeff Eller Group, a firm with a profile so low that it does not appear to have a website.
Eller declined to be interviewed on Thursday, sending back a short email referring all questions to a GM spokesman.
A GM spokesman, Greg Martin, said that Eller was retained as part of a larger effort to add specialists with experience in similar crises.
?As we have from the start, we are drawing upon those who have deep experience and expertise in these matters,? Martin said. ?Jeff will join a team that is helping us guide our response.?
GM executives had counted on Barra to deliver a core message that the company has become more trustworthy since its emergence from bankruptcy in 2009, and has shed its old bureaucratic culture and outwardly arrogant reputation.
But several lawmakers who grilled Barra seized on her unwillingness to share information about events leading to the switch recall, citing it as an example of why GM should not be trusted
Other senators said they wanted to directly question Valukas, as well as GM?s own corporate lawyers, at future hearings.
A person who has discussed elements of the recall strategy with GM executives said they believed that Barra was untainted by events that took place before she became chief executive in January.
But her measured, carefully worded responses only seemed to inflame senators who demanded candid answers. In one exchange, senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, railed at Barra because GM had not provided safety documents to lawyers representing the family of a Chevrolet Cobalt crash victim.
?This is hiding the truth from families that need to know,? McCaskill said. ?It?s outrageous and needs to stop.?
