Word: iacocca
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Califano seems somewhat more hopeful. "He says privately what he says in public--that he doesn't want it. But once he made the commitment," he says, "Lee would be phenomenal as a candidate. He knows how to lead. He knows how to communicate." A few who know Iacocca say they think that he could be nudged into...
...Iacocca relishes all the public talk and letters from strangers, even as he forswears--most of the time--any interest in being President. "I've thought about it," he said one recent sunny day in New York. "Sometimes I say, 'Maybe I should give it a shot. It's only four years. It'd be fun, an honor.' People tell me I should run, and I wonder if I should listen." Then he brought himself up short. "A woman wrote me a letter and says, 'You'd probably get killed in office, but you owe it to the country...
...however, the ambition seems satisfied by the continuing frenzy of his work, by the attention his policy pronouncements are getting and by the downright amazing adoration he encounters all over the country. Lee Iacocca did not set out to become the object of a personality cult, but hey, what the hell? It is fun for him to be able to turn down a $300,000 TV commercial for Pepsi. "I took a powder," he explains. It pleases him to decline movie producers' serious offers to buy the rights to Iacocca. "The hell with the half-million advance," he says...
Inside Chrysler, not surprisingly, the Iacocca legend has held sway for some time. He is adored by the 3,984 dealers, high-torque salespeople more temperamentally akin to Iacocca than many of his executive-suite colleagues. "Dealer meetings are particularly difficult," says Chrysler Public Affairs Vice President James Tolley. "We have to have security people to keep the dealers off him." Among Chrysler blue-collar employees, the admiration often seems more like a kind of fealty than mere employee loyalty. "I owe it all to Iacocca," says Sarah Haynes, a Chrysler assembly-line worker now back at work after...
Where his friend Iacocca is concerned, former United Auto Workers President Douglas Fraser is no longer surprised by such heretical outbursts of labor affection for management. "I get asked by people all the time to have Lee autograph copies of his book," says Fraser, whom Iacocca put on Chrysler's board five years ago. "Even at Solidarity House." Solidarity House is U.A.W. headquarters...