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Iacocca became Ford's president in 1970. Eight years later, Chairman Henry Ford II demoted and exiled him. "He'll always be mad at Henry Ford," says Kathi Iacocca, 25, one of his two daughters. "He will take it to his grave. People who don't understand his anger don't know my father." Says a former Iacocca colleague: "He believes in reprisals for his enemies." In the book, Henry Ford is depicted as venal and mean, an almost unbelievably unappealing character. Iacocca asserts that his former boss was paranoid, vulgar, personally extravagant at company expense, cruel and sexist. Many former and current auto executives, including Iacocca's friends, think he was wrong to carry the vendetta so acidly into print.
Even the author, now that he has disgorged all the animus, entertains second thoughts. "Maybe I shouldn't have written a couple of those things," Iacocca concedes. Yet another time, he could not contain his old angers as he defended his view that people are divided into two camps--"nice guys" and jerks (his own term is far earthier). "I know, I know," he said to the suggestion that life is not that simple. "But if a guy is over 25% jerk, he's in trouble. And Henry was 95%." Finally, many Ford executives bristle at Iacocca's implication in the book that it was he who made the company hum. Indeed, they claim he left Ford in disarray, strategically aimless. Then there are his professions of humility. Says a Ford executive: "He suffers delusions of modesty."
Iacocca earns an estimated $3 on every copy of his book that Bantam sells. That comes out to about $4 million so far. But he also earned $1 million in salary and bonus last year, and is probably worth about $20 million besides. His publishing income he is giving away. The money will endow the Lee Iacocca Foundation, a philanthropy run by Daughter Kathi. Part will be passed on to the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. His wife Mary, who died in 1983, was diabetic.
Iacocca's other principal civic work is his chairmanship of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Centennial Commission. The renovation of the statue will be finished in 1986. The more ambitious Ellis Island project, which is to include a new museum of immigration, will take until at least 1987 to finish. "Everybody's getting into the act," he gushes. "How about this--we even got $2,000 from the Hell's Angels!" Commission Architect John Burgee says that when the two of them take inspection tours of the enormous Ellis Island entry hall, Iacocca, the immigrants' son, chokes up.
For meetings of the commission or of Chrysler's board, Iacocca comes to New York about three times a month. He stays in the company's three-room suite at the Waldorf Towers. In Boca Raton, Fla., he owns a condominium (with five bathrooms) overlooking the Atlantic. But much of his time he spends at home in Bloomfield Hills, a sylvan suburb northwest of Detroit.