How Lee Iacocca Created the Celebrity CEO, for Better or Worse
Saving Chrysler was a big accomplishment, but Iacocca’s legacy is more about making the cover of Time.
Bigger than life.
Photographer: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
When I heard on Tuesday night that Lee Iacocca had passed away, I was momentarily taken aback. Not so much because he had died — he was, after all, 94 — but because, for someone who had been such a larger-than-life figure for so much of his career, he had been out of the limelight for so long.
Iacocca first burst into the public consciousness in 1963, when he made the covers of both Time and Newsweek1 in the same week, standing in front of the brand new Ford Mustang, which he had (allegedly) masterminded as a top Ford executive. His last public act took place in 1995, when he and the financier Kirk Kerkorian made a foolhardy attempt to take over Chrysler. Although he later formed an investment company, and dabbled in this and that, this once unforgettable figure spent the last two decades of his life, well, forgotten.