“It had to be a sports car but more than a sports car,” Iacocca wrote in his memoir. “We wanted to develop a car that you could drive to the country club on Friday night, to the drag strip on Saturday and to church on Sunday.”
Mustang Fever
The Mustang, introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, was an unqualified hit. Iacocca and the car appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, with Time calling him “the hottest young man in Detroit.” As for the car itself, Time swooned: “Priced as low as $2,368 and able to accommodate a small family in its four seats, the Mustang seems destined to be a sort of Model A of sports cars, for the masses as well as the buffs.”
Iacocca “will probably go down in history as the first modern example of a charismatic business leader,” Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana wrote in 2002. Iacocca’s turnaround of Detroit-based Chrysler “made him a celebrity and even a national hero,” one who relied on an “inspirational leadership” style that presaged that of Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs, among others, he said.
Ford sold more than 400,000 Mustangs during the first model year. The car’s styling captured young buyers, and Mustang clubs sprang up around the country.
Not everybody believed Iacocca deserved the share of credit he got.
“The model was totally completed by the time Lee saw it,” Eugene Bordinat Jr., Ford’s design director at the time, told Time in 1985. “We conceived the car, and he pimped it after it was born.”
Sparring Executives
Iacocca became president of Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford in 1970. At 46, he was second in command only to Chairman Henry Ford II, grandson of the company’s founder and seven years his senior. During Iacocca’s eight-year tenure, the two men sparred over topics big and small, from car design to perceived personal slights.
Executive-suite reorganizations in 1977 and 1978 resulted in de facto demotions of Iacocca and led to a showdown meeting on July 13, 1978, at which Ford ordered him to resign. His last day on the payroll was Oct. 15, his 54th birthday. He had been at Ford for 32 years.
Years later, Iacocca devoted 40 pages in his autobiography to settling the score.