Auto magnate Lee Iacocca, the father of the Ford Mustang and the man who saved Chrysler in the 1980s, has died. He was 94.
His youngest daughter told reporters Tuesday evening that he had died at his Los Angeles home from complications from Parkinson’s disease.
The son of Italian immigrants, Mr. Iacocca rose through the ranks of Ford Motor Co. from engineer — he was the lead man in the team that designed the iconic Mustang in 1964 — to CEO.
In an early gesture typical of his flair for showmanship, he made the covers of both Time and Newsweek on the week the Mustang made its debut — his face bigger than the car in the Time illustration.
After his dismissal at Ford in quarrels with Henry Ford II, he joined Chrysler and became CEO there too as the smallest of the Big Three U.S. automakers was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1970s.
Rare for an automobile CEO, Mr. Iacocca became the public face of Chrysler’s TV campaigns and became identified with the slogan about Chrysler’s vehicles, “if you can find a better car, buy it.”
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Ever the showman, Mr. Iacocca persuaded Congress in 1979 to guarantee $1.5 billion in loans to launch its new “K-car” and other initiatives, and also won huge concessions from workers, dealers, bankers and suppliers.
By 1983, Chrysler was making record profits and Iacocca announced at the National Press Club in Washington that the firm would repay back the guaranteed loans seven years ahead of time, actually making money for the U.S. government on fees for the loans the taxpayers had effectively co-signed.
His ads of that era often cut a patriotic angle too.
“A lot of people think America can’t cut the mustard any more … well when you’ve been kicked in the head like we have, you learn pretty quick to put first thing first. In the car business, product comes first,” he said in one 1984 ad.
In the ad, Mr. Iacocca says “product is what brought us back to prosperity” and goes on to tout features of Chrysler that American cars hadn’t been noted for over the previous two decades, including gas mileage and recalls.
Under his tutelage, Chrysler also developed the first U.S.-brand minivans and its dominance of that new market segment for decades helped keep Detroit’s Big Three a Big Three. He also acquiring American Motors and its profitable Jeep division — still a mainstay of the Chrysler line.
By now one of the most famous businessmen in America and a Time magazine cover subject, President Ronald Reagan named the Chrysler boss chairman of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission to work on restoring Lady Liberty and the associated fundraising.
He retired from Chrysler in 1992.
His time at Ford had, apart from the 50-years-and-running Mustang, some hiccups, most notably the result of his push to develop a cheap fuel-efficient vehicle from scratch (throughout the 1950s and 60s, U.S. sedans were noted for enormous size and for miles-per-gallon scores often in the low-teens).
But the result was the Ford Pinto. A TV investigative report made the small vehicle notorious for exploding when hit from behind because of a design flaw regarding the gas tanks. All Pintos from 1971 to 1976 were recalled in 1978 and the model discontinued shortly thereafter.
Mr. Iacocca returned as the public pitchman for Chrysler in the mid-00s. In addition to reprising his “if you can find…” line, the ad campaign boosted Chrysler’s offer of employee-payment prices to all U.S. consumers.
A few years later, Chrysler had to be bailed out by the U.S. and Canadian governments and eventually sold to Italian auto giant Fiat.
Mr. Iacocca was married three times and had two children, daughters Kathryn and Lia, by his first wife Mary McCleary, who died in 1983. He had been divorced from his third wife for more than 20 years when he died.
Besides accepting Reagan’s Statue of Liberty post, Mr. Iacocca had a record of supporting Republican politicians, including endorsements of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney in the 2000 and 2012 presidential races, though he backed Democrat John Kerry in 2004.
In one of his memoirs, Mr. Iacocca said he considered running for president in 1988 before being talked out of it by a Democratic friend, then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts.
The slogan he’d decided on in the planning stages of his campaign? “I like I.”
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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