Lee Iacocca

What failed

He joined Ford in 1946 and was made president on 10 December 1970. In 1975 Henry Ford II authorised $1.5 million of company money to investigate his business dealings and his private life. In 1977 allegations broke that the fuel tank of the Ford Pinto — a car a California appeal court later said he had conceived and been the moving force behind — could be punctured in a rear-end collision and burn; on 9 June 1978 Ford agreed to recall 1.5 million Pintos and 30,000 Mercury Bobcats. Five weeks later, on 13 July 1978, Henry Ford II fired him, in a year the company was reported to have made a $2 billion profit. He was fifty-three. The sacking was not simply a whim: he had gone looking for support among Ford's directors, which gave Ford the excuse he needed, though the accounts of what passed between them conflict. He went to Chrysler as president and chief operating officer later that year, at a time when the company appeared to be on the verge of going out of business. Chrysler lost $1.126 billion in 1979 and a record $1.7 billion in 1980, and in November 1981 persuaded its suppliers to accept delayed payments in what its own executives called its closest brush with bankruptcy.

What happened next

Chrysler's chairman John Riccardo resigned on 17 September 1979 because he thought the company more likely to get federal help under new management, and Iacocca succeeded him three days later. He obtained the loan guarantees, capped at $1.5 billion, of which Chrysler drew $1.2 billion, and the price was cost cuts and cancelled programmes including the long-running turbine engine. The K-car came in 1981 and the minivan in late 1983, which then led the industry in sales for twenty-five years. Chrysler posted a $170.1 million profit for 1982, its first in five years; on 13 July 1983 Iacocca announced the remaining $800 million of federally guaranteed loans would be repaid by September, seven years early; and in 1984 the company posted record profits of more than $2.4 billion. The setbacks did not stop there. Interior Secretary Donald Hodel sacked him in February 1986 as head of the public commission renovating the Statue of Liberty, though he stayed on as head of the private foundation raising the money. Chrysler lost $795 million in 1991, and in March 1992 the board named an executive from General Motors, Robert Eaton, to succeed him when he retired at the end of that year. In April 1995 he joined Kirk Kerkorian in a $22.8 billion bid for Chrysler; the board he had once chaired said within hours that the company was not for sale.

The point

The record does not run upward. He was sacked at fifty-three from the presidency of the company he had worked in for nearly thirty-two years, five weeks after it recalled 1.5 million cars whose design he had been the moving force behind — and the presidency was never the top job at Ford, which was the one he did not get. What is remembered as a rescue was $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees rather than a gift of cash, conditional on at least $1.43 billion in matching money and concessions from Chrysler itself, banks, financial institutions, other creditors, suppliers, dealers, stockholders, unions, employees, management and state and local governments. Twelve years after the loans were repaid he bid $22.8 billion for the same company and the board he had once chaired turned him down the same afternoon.