Lee Iacocca, an ambitious salesman who dominated the automobile industry like nobody since Henry Ford, died. He was 94.
Business icon Lee Iacocca speaks after he receive honors at the Ellis Island Family Heritage Awards at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum at the Great Hall on Ellis Island April 13, 2011 in New York.
In a characteristic response, Iacocca snapped in a 1992 interview with The Times: “Machiavelli, my ass.” Iacocca exploited his high visibility to attack U.S. and Japanese policies that he said were killing American jobs. The message hit home as factories closed by the thousands in the 1980s and the nation's economy seemed to wither in the face of competition from Japan.
By the late 1980s, new problems, some traceable to Iacocca mistakes, threatened Chrysler anew and he came under fire from Wall Street. Part of the solution was to eliminate thousands more jobs while he collected enormous paychecks, and his image with Democrats and labor suffered. That was how he wanted to be measured, he said at his retirement. “It's a hell of a note,” he added, “but I have a feeling I'm going to be remembered only for my TV commercials.”
He also had established the Iacocca Institute, to improve executive leadership, with his alma mater Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. But the family lost everything during the Depression, an experience Iacocca said he never forgot. Like many who lived through those years, he said it instilled a mania for success and, especially, for money.
McNamara, headed for bigger things himself, was pivotal to Iacocca's rapid advancement. McNamara became president of Ford in 1960 and within two weeks was tapped by newly elected President John F. Kennedy to become Secretary of Defense. That was when America was first confronted with the Iacocca phenomenon. In a memorable publicity coup by a Ford press agent, Iacocca and the new Mustang appeared simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek the day the car went on sale.
With Henry Ford II as chairman and chief executive and Iacocca as president, Ford Motor maneuvered past the Arab oil embargo, regulatory pitfalls and other events of the 1970s while building a large and profitable European subsidiary.In an industry of Midwestern blandness, both men stood apart. Iacocca had never been a Detroit insider.
In July 1978, Iacocca was summoned to the chairman's office where Henry, flanked by his brother, William Clay Ford, said, “I think you should leave. ... Sometimes you just don't like somebody.” The closest Ford, known as a womanizer and serious drinker, came to explaining the firing was a more prosaic comment about Iacocca to another author: “He was not morally qualified to be chief executive of Ford Motor Company.”
He inherited a lineup of cars that were rusting out from underneath their owners and a chaotic system in which the factories built cars whether people wanted them or not. Vast parking lots around Detroit were filled with new, unwanted Dodges and Plymouths, running a tab of millions of dollars a day in double-digit borrowing costs at a time of double-digit inflation.
“He was always selling something. A product, an idea, himself,” said historian Lewis. “He was one of the greatest salesmen in American business history.” But Iacocca anticipated the 1990-92 recession sooner than his competitors and prepared for it by cutting $3 billion in costs out of the company, even as he was building a new $1-billion technical center north of Detroit and a $1-billion assembly plant in Detroit's worst ghetto.
“When I got here it was crisis time, and I guess I don't fold under heat and I was a good crisis manager,” Iacocca told The Times in 1992. “Then people wrote that when things go well, I'm a lousy manager. Well, that's OK. Times do change and you adapt or you die. We survived and we survived happily.”
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