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Indeed, the Harvard Business School, M.B.A.s and "bean counters" are used almost interchangeably as synonyms for button-down corporate caution. Iacocca, born and raised in Allentown, Pa., regards the risk taking of his Italian-born father as the way to do business. In the 1920s and '30s, Nicola Iacocca made and lost and remade rather glamorous small fortunes: hot dogs, movie theaters, rental cars. Young Lido, a monkish boy denied military service in World War II (4-F because of a childhood case of rheumatic fever), took an engineering degree from Lehigh University (B+) and then spent a year at Princeton (M.A.). "I wasn't interested in a snob degree," he says in Iacocca, despite the Ivy League diploma. "I was after the bucks."
In the fall of 1946, soon after the Red Arrow train brought him to Detroit, he realized that sales, not engineering, was his truest calling. Very well, they said to the upstart, you can sell: trucks, in Chester, Pa. Undaunted, he sold and sold and sold. During the next nine years, he hustled up the regional sales ranks. Finally, weeks after his marriage in 1956, Iacocca got called back to headquarters as a marketing manager under the chief "whiz kid," Ford Vice President Robert McNamara. Iacocca officially indulged his ^ love of the punchy phrase. Earlier that year he had devised a $56-a-month credit plan for Ford buyers ("$56 for '56"); later he was intent on the Mustang's exceeding the Falcon's all-time one-year auto sales record of 417,000 ("417 by 4/17"); still later, he introduced his "shuck the losers" plan to winnow out unprofitable departments. In 1960, Iacocca took over as head of the Ford car division.
In April 1964, Ford introduced the Mustang. It is difficult to overstate the attendant hoopla. The car and its principal corporate patron, Lee Iacocca, appeared on the cover of both TIME and Newsweek. Iacocca, TIME declared, "is the hottest young man in Detroit," brilliant, an "ingenious automotive merchandising expert." Twenty-one years later, a metal sculpture of a Mustang hangs over Iacocca's desk at Chrysler, and a 1964 Mustang convertible, a gift from his wife in 1981, sits in his garage in suburban Detroit. "I'm generally seen as the father of the Mustang," he says in his book's 17-page chapter devoted to the car, "although, as with any success, there were plenty of people willing to take the credit." Ford's design director at the time, Gene Bordinat, has been galled ever since by Iacocca's putative paternity. "The model was totally completed by the time Lee saw it," says Bordinat, now retired. "We conceived the car, and he pimped it after it was born."
But Iacocca's salesmanship--his hucksterism, even--accounted for much of his personal success in the mid-'60s, when carmakers were discovering the youth market. For snazziness and corporate profligacy, Detroit has not equaled itself since. The introduction of a sporty new sedan, orchestrated by Iacocca, typified the wonderful wantonness. In 1966 he sailed dozens of Lincoln-Mercury dealers to the Virgin Islands, where after a meal on a beach at sunset, an amphibious landing craft thrashed ashore. Out onto the sand popped a brand-new white Cougar driven by Singer Vic Damone, who proceeded to croon.