Lee Iacocca

Lee A. Iacocca, the visionary automaker who ran the Ford Motor Company and then the Chrysler Corporation and came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile, died on Tuesday July 2 2019 at his home in Bel Air, Calif. He was 94. He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, a family spokeswoman said. Mr. Iacocca, the son of an immigrant hot-dog vendor, made history as the only executive in modern times to preside over the operations of two of the Big Three automakers. He was so widely admired that there was serious talk of his running for president of the United States in 1988. In a 14-year second act that secured his worldwide reputation, took over the floundering Chrysler Corporation and restored it to health in what experts called one of the most brilliant turnarounds in business history.Americans were buying cars at a record clip again, including Chrysler’s new minivans and compacts. The company’s $1.7 billion loss in 1980 had become a $2.4 billion profit by 1984. He became chairman of a project to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and was in demand for speeches and public appearances that took on the color of a campaign. But by the late 1980s, storm clouds that Mr. Iacocca and other auto executives had long ignored were gathering. The stock market had plunged in 1987, and Japan, long since recovered from the disasters of World War II, had become a world-class economic power, whose fuel-efficient cars were flooding the United States. By the 1990s, many American cars could not compete with Japanese innovations. Finally surrendering to pressures to step down, he hired Robert J. Eaton, the head of G.M.’s European operations, as his designated successor, and retired as Chrysler’s chairman and chief executive in 1992. He was born Lido Anthony Iacocca on Oct. 15, 1924, in Allentown, Pa., one of two children of Nicola and Antoinette Perrotto Iacocca, immigrants from San Marco, Italy, who named him after the Venice beach resort. He and his sister, Delma, grew up in Allentown. While attending Allentown High School, he suffered a severe case of rheumatic fever. Unable to compete in sports, he pushed himself in his studies and graduated with honors in 1942. Lingering effects of the illness kept him out of World War II. At Lehigh University in nearby Bethlehem, Pa., he became a talented debater, had excellent grades and in 1945 graduated after three years with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering. He took a leave from Ford to attend Princeton on a scholarship, and after earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1946 returned to Ford. Instead of engineering, he saw his future in marketing. He was named president of Ford in 1970, the No. 2 post, reporting only to the chairman, Henry Ford II.He fired Mr. Iacocca in July 1978, saying he just did not like him. Several months later, Mr. Iacocca joined Chrysler. In 1956, Mr. Iacocca married Mary McCleary, a Ford receptionist in Chester. They had two children, Kathryn Iacocca Hentz and Lia Iacocca Assad, who survive him, as do a sister, Delma Kelechava, and eight grandchildren. His first wife died in 1983 from complications of diabetes. In 1986 he married Peggy Johnson, a former flight attendant. The marriage was annulled in 1987. In 1991 he married Darrien Earle, whom he divorced in 1994.