Lee Iacocca, father of the Ford Mustang who later rescued Chrysler, dies at 94
Lee A. Iacocca, an ambitious immigrant’s son and salesman extraordinaire whose blunt and swaggering persona dominated the automobile industry like nobody since Henry Ford, died Tuesday. He was 94.
Iacocca, who spent his last years living in Los Angeles, hacked out a spectacular career, punctuated by his role as father of the wildly popular Ford Mustang in 1964, his epic 1978 firing at the hands of Henry Ford II and his dramatic rescue of Chrysler in the early 1980s.
A powerful speaker with ego to spare, Iacocca became a heroic figure to millions of Americans. He also became a household name by starring in Chrysler’s television commercials, where he pointed a finger at viewers and delivered a sales pitch that entered the lexicon: “If you can find a better car, buy it.”
But Iacocca also attracted countless critics who considered him a hypocrite and self-promoter, and saw his downfall from the presidency of Ford Motor Co. as just deserts for what they viewed as his Machiavellian scheme to reach the top.
In a characteristic response, Iacocca snapped in a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “Machiavelli, my ass.”
But few dispute his subsequent achievement at Chrysler. He took over a decrepit company that was moments from bankruptcy, persuaded Congress to guarantee $1.5 billion in loans to launch its new “K-car” and extracted big sacrifices from workers, dealers, bankers and suppliers. Chrysler regained its health and Iacocca triumphantly paid back the government loans seven years early.
Fiercely debated across the nation as Iacocca jawboned Congress into backing the company, the corporate bailout and TV ads gave him a visibility that was unprecedented for a businessman in modern times.
“He was easily one of the greatest figures in the history of the automobile industry,” said David Lewis, a professor emeritus of business history and Ford expert at the University of Michigan. “And he was second only to [the first] Henry Ford in the amount of publicity he generated.”
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.
Two phenomenally successful books and Iacocca’s leadership of a money-raising blitz to refurbish the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island in the mid-1980s further honed an image as a patriot and champion of working people, and prominent Democrats seriously touted him as a candidate for the White House.
But he recognized that his dictatorial and often profane style wasn’t suited for politics. He publicly discouraged talk of the presidency, and later turned down an appointment to the U.S. Senate from his home state of Pennsylvania.
Iacocca’s name and face turned up so often that he entered pop culture and some wearied of him. Besides his commercials, he made a cameo appearance on the TV series “Miami Vice” and turned down an offer to host “Saturday Night Live.” Chrysler’s ad agency even test-marketed a commercial starring an Iacocca Muppet bantering with Kermit and Miss Piggy.
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.
Meanwhile, his strident attacks on Japanese trade policy, even as he imported Japanese cars for Chrysler, offended many who saw his speeches as racist and self-serving. And sentiment turned against an auto industry that was seen as having mismanaged itself into trouble once again.
But by the time he retired as chairman of Chrysler on Dec. 31, 1992, he had overseen a second and more fundamental turnaround.
A series of dramatically styled cars and trucks, developed on Iacocca’s watch in radically new ways, made Chrysler the hottest — and most profitable — auto company of the mid-1990s.
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.”