At the height of his career, Lee Iacocca, who would have turned 100 this year, was one of the USAʼs most celebrated business leaders and, as the son of Italian immigrants, the embodiment of the American Dream. Being the architect of the spectacularly successful Ford Mustang (60 this year) gave him his first taste of real fame, aged 39, when both Time and Newsweek put his face on their covers. Six years later he was president of Ford, but the cruelly public manner of his undermining and dismissal by the Machiavellian Henry Ford II in 1978 made headlines almost as big. This was a trauma matched only by childhood memories of the Depression. Iacocca said later he was 11 before he realised he was Italian: “I kept looking on the map for a country called ʻDagoʼ or ʻWopʼ.”
Iacocca joined Ford in 1946 and rose quickly through the ranks. As assistant general sales manager of Fordʼs Philadelphia district, the slick ʼ56 for 56 promotion (a 1956 model for $56 a month) got Iacocca noticed by his boss, future defence secretary Robert S McNamara. In 1960 Iacocca became general manager and, presiding over a talented team of marketing people, he sowed the seeds for the Mustang as an after-hours project at first. In the first two years alone it generated $1.1bn in net profits.
Iacocca turned his attention to Fordʼs ailing Lincoln-Mercury division and revitalised its fortunes with one of my favourite American cars, the spectacularly cheesy 1968 Continental MkIII. Less impressively, his Ford Pinto became a PR disaster when it was discovered that its vulnerable fuel tank made it likely to catch fire in a rear-end impact. Many did, fatally, but the often-repeated tale that Iacocca signed off on a plan to pay out on lawsuits rather than recall cars is not strictly accurate.
Two weeks after leaving Ford, Iacocca took on the presidency of the ailing Chrysler Corp. By cutting its workforce and rationalising its product range, he was able not only to stave off bankruptcy, but also turn the firmʼs fortunes around and pay back the huge government loans used to fund the restructuring of the company. Iacoccaʼs role in the TV ads for the K-car – “if you can find a better car, buy it,” was his famous pay-off line – made him Americaʼs most widely recognisable business leader, and the success of these new models added lustre to his reputation as the ultimate ʻcomeback kidʼ.
That obscured the
