Lee Iacocca
At a time when corporate scandals seem to break on a regular schedule, it's hard to summon the image of CEO as trusted father figure. But back in the '80s, there was Chrysler Corp. chief Lee Iacocca, ably playing the role by acclamation. Square-jawed and plain-spoken, the man who brought the venerable Ford Mustang and the family-friendly minivan to market appeared to save his struggling company single-handedly through a mix of pluck, hard work, and savvy salesmanship. Long before the hot-rod 1990s made being a business leader fashionable, Iacocca was a phenom.
He further buffed his reputation by raising, at President Reagan's request, $540 million to refurbish the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Today, at 79, Iacocca is asking Americans to pony up again, this time looking to raise $11 million to fund clinical trials for research into a cure for Type I diabetes. With this type of diabetes, previously called juvenile diabetes, the body doesn't produce insulin, which it needs in order to use sugar. Having Type I diabetes increases the risk of serious complications like heart disease, blindness, and nerve and kidney damage. Iacocca's wife, Mary, died from diabetes complications in 1983, spurring the business leader's intensely personal crusade for a cure. Encouraged by recent advances in research using mice, Iacocca says he's trying to spur the players in the diabetes fight into a final assault. "I'm not going to wait for the pharmaceutical companies or the regulators to do this," he says. "The system works slow."
Although a former corporate chieftain, Iacocca is going the populist route with his appeal. After anteing up the first $1 million himself, he had planned to get "10 of my richest friends to come up with $1 million each," he says. "^ But my 10 rich friends haven't come through." So, the heart of his effort is a website, www.joinleenow.com, where he looks for "a million people to give $10 each."
Iacocca shakes his head at SUVs. "It's crazy," he says, with some irony, because it was his Chrysler that bought the first name in SUVs, the Jeep, before the mania took off. "Four-wheel drive, with all that weight, for your wife to go have her hair done?" he laments. "Think of it --we have a war going on that centers around oil." Detroit "should get cracking on hybrids, or the Japanese are going to lose them in the dust --again."
And what's he driving? He's got a sporty Dodge Viper for fun and a $125,000 Mercedes S600, a gift from the head of DaimlerChrysler. But for everyday driving, it's a minivan. -Christopher H. Schmitt
This story appears in the September 13, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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