Potato cars, monks, Trump, going Japanese, Dr. Ruth and a little solicitor: Iacocca riffs, quips and diatribes

A look back at some of Lee Iacocca’s memorable quotes:

"If you keep beating that drum, in the end, the customer's got to try your car. And when he does, he'll decide whether you're just shitting him or delivering. I think it's time to start beating the drum ...  I always go after the leader. Early in my life, GM was the leader. So when I was at Ford, we went after Chevrolet. Now Honda's the leader -- so I took them on. What should I compare myself with, the Yugo? ... We shipped a lot of crap in 1980; by 1985, it was much better. We think we're really pressuring Honda now." 

-- Iacocca, in a January 1991 interview with Playboy, on Chrysler's latest television spots that claimed Chrysler cars were better than Honda or Toyota. Iacocca had also been storming the country and taking shots at mostly Japanese automakers, which were stealing share from the Detroit 3.  

“Every kid wants to grow up to be a cowboy, and I got to be one. It’s been a hell of a ride, but nobody gets to be a cowboy forever. And that includes me.”

 -- Iacocca, his voice cracking with emotion, as he bade farewell to Chrysler shareholders on May 14, 1992, at his last annual meeting as chairman and CEO, in Auburn Hills, Mich. He retired at the end of 1992.

“People have been asking me my biggest challenges, accomplishments and thrills, but why look back? I treasure my role in bringing out the Mustang, the Chrysler turnaround, the Statue of Liberty project and the ongoing minivan revolution. But the biggest moments of all, the ones I’m the proudest of and the ones I hope someone ties my name to someday, lie in the days to come and where the company goes from here. We’re really only custodians of the present, but we do have a big hand in creating the future. It’s not the big tree you cut down as it is all the little ones you plant along the way.”

-- Iacocca, suspending the verbal shots he normally reserves for Japanese competition and government fiscal ineptness to reveal personal thoughts with shareholders at Chrysler’s annual meeting on May 14, 1992, in Auburn Hills, Mich. It was his last annual meeting as company chairman and CEO. He retired at the end of 1992.

"It sounds like we're talking in a tomb. I wonder if someone is trying to tell us something."

-- Iacocca, holding his first product meeting in the Rotunda, Chrysler's vast styling dome in Highland Park, Mich. -- known for poor acoustics -- after being named president and COO of the ailing company on Nov. 2, 1978.

''I think America is getting an inferiority complex about Japan. Everything from Japan is perfect. Everything from America is lousy ... Now that's got to stop.”

-- Iacocca, in a late 1980s TV commercial

"Once, in an interview, I was asked about the recognition of Chrysler products in Japan, so I said, 'Jesus Christ, they certainly know the Jeep -- they saw enough of them in World War II!' You know what I really wanted to say? I wanted to say, 'But they always saw the ass end of the Jeep -- running over them.' Now that would be Japan bashing, right?"

 -- Iacocca, in a January 1991 interview with Playboy, on his use of fiery words that rekindled the anti-Japanese sentiment in the U.S. in the 1940s.

"Those guys need me. Anybody who builds a car this bad can use some help."

-- Iacocca, joking to his friends in college about the bad cluster gear in the transmission in his beat-up 1938 Ford, on his early passion to go work for Ford, in his 1984 biography.

“I don’t need a $100 million mistake. Try to make it a $5 million mistake if you have to make one.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1983 interview with Time, on his demands on his top managers.

"I know Trump fairly well. Now that's an ego that's gone screw-loose, gone haywire. What the business establishment of this country has to do is get away from this new financial-transaction mentality. It used to be that Wall Street, the financial markets and the banks were there to promote and fund the companies that produced goods and created jobs. Now they've taken on a life of their own: 'What's the play? Where can we make a fast buck?' What we really need to do in this country is get back to the factory floors."

Iacocca, in a 1991 interview with Playboy magazine, when asked about the business world and its leaders at the time, and specifically Donald Trump, already a wildly famous real estate deal-maker and best-selling author.

"We'd make a terrific ticket -- I'd tell them what to do and she'd tell them how."

-- Iacocca, amid rampant speculation he was planning to run for U.S. president, joking in 1987 that noted sex counselor Dr. Ruth Westheimer would be an ideal running mate.

“But that doesn't count the $1.5 million in country club membership for the Japanese. They think we’re all fat cats here, but I don’t see any monks over there where the perks aren’t as obvious.”

-- Iacocca, at his last shareholder meeting in May 1992, defending his compensation when a Japanese shareholder, speaking through an interpreter, noted that Japanese executives average only $350,000 in pay, vs. $1 million or more in Detroit.

"You know, I was once asked to do some work for Nissan. That I couldn't do, that I couldn't stomach. I can't go Japanese no matter what you paid me."

-- Iacocca, in The New York Times, in July 19, 2005, after agreeing to appear in several Chrysler commercials years after he retired.

"I'm called a Japan basher. What? I'm not allowed like Willy Loman to shine my shoes, put on a smile and go out and sell -- to stand up for my product? Don't call me a Japan basher, that's like calling me a racist. I've never sold an inferior product just 'cause it carried the American flag.'"

-- Iacocca, during an April 1990 speech in Chicago as part of "Chrysler in the 90s," a six-city tour for journalists, stockholders, government officials and business leaders.

"We can't let the fat creep in here the way it did in 1986 and 1987. When we bought American Motors, the fat really dropped on our heads."

-- Iacocca, in a Sept. 1992 interview with Fortune, on Chrysler's earnings outlook ahead of the launch of a new generation of large cars and a redesigned Ram pickup.

“Henry Ford wants you to be blunt, and I happen to be blunt. We don’t try to Alphonse and Gaston each other, and we don’t try to beat around the bush.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1964 interview with Time.

“Styling sells cars, but it is the quality that keeps them sold.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1964 interview with Time.

"I do admit that we finally had to have the government tell us to put a [price] label on the car. And then we started rebates and all the financing gimmicks, and a guy doesn't know what the hell he's paying for a car."

-- Iacocca, in a December 1992 interview with Automotive News.

"As long as [there's] overcapacity in the total system, you're never going to eliminate [the retail rebate]. There's nothing wrong with running specials and giving people even factory discounts. But we really took over from the dealer and taught the customer to look to us for an inflated price, and then we'll give him a factory rebate and then you see if you can get another $200 from the dealer. So you really get right in the midst of making the retail deal when you think of it. That was dumb."

-- Iacocca, in a December 1992 interview with Automotive News.

“Government officials make it sound so easy: just retrain everybody. When one industry gets hurt by this avalanche of Japanese cars, you switch them all to washing cars. This isn’t the jelly-bean business. What if, God forbid, we go to war, and we’re fighting the guy who’s been supplying us with all the trucks and tanks? Do we rent them from him? … I think the consumer is in for a little bit of a jolt when he sees the retail price increases this fall. But we’ve got to start to get some of the $80 billion investment back.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1984 interview with Time. Iaccoca was the chief negotiator of Chrysler’s $1.5 billion government-guaranteed loan in 1980.

“ ... there is nobody, I mean nobody, whether I talk to Muskie, whether I talk to, someone, Secretary of Transportation, that ever wants to talk to me as a businessman about costs. ... We're not only frustrated, but, we've reached the despair point ... I have a feeling that the auto industry -- I'm only speaking for Ford ... we are in a downhill slide, the likes of which we have never seen in our business. And the Japs are in the wings ready to eat us up alive. So I'm in a position to be saying to Toms and Volpe, 'Would you guys cool it a little bit? You're gonna break us.' And they say, 'Hold it. People want safety.' I say, 'Well, they, what do you mean they want safety? We get letters. We get about thousands on customer service. You can't get your car fixed. We don't get anything on safety! So again, give us a priority.' We cannot carry the load of inflation in wages and safety in a four-year period without breaking our back. It's that simple, and that's what we've tried to convey to these people.”

-- Iacocca, to President Richard Nixon in a private April 1971 meeting in the Oval Office, with Ford CEO Henry Ford II and John Ehrlichman, assistant to the president. Secretary of Transportation John Volpe was proposing new passive-restraints regulations at the time. Iacocca argued that cars already had some $140 in safety equipment, such as collapsible steering columns, and the cost to add more safety equipment would be hard to pass along to U.S. consumers reeling from inflation.

“I don’t want you to buy a car on faith. I want you to compare. If you find a better car, buy it.”

-- Iacocca, in one of his many television commercials for Chrysler, in the 1980s

“You can go with Chrysler, or you can go with someone else -- and take your chances.”

-- Iacocca, in another of his many television commercials for Chrysler in the 1980s

“I doubt that many partnerships like ours existed. It was often impossible to tell where Chrysler ended and K&E began. When we didn’t have the money to pay, Leo got his other clients to be supportive. It was 24/7 high-wire stuff.”

-- Iacocca, in a 2010 letter to support Leo-Arthur Kelmenson’s nomination to the Advertising Hall of Fame. Kelmenson's ad agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, produced Ford ads and later Chrysler advertising that made Iacocca a pitchman and helped rescue the company after winning federal loan guarantees.

“We exposed some of the more prevalent myths about Chrysler. We were not building gas guzzlers. We were not asking Washington for a handout. Loan guarantees for Chrysler did not constitute a dangerous precedent ... The ads were unusually straightforward and frank. Ron took an aggressive approach, which I liked very much. We knew all too well what the man on the street was thinking about Chrysler, so we tried to put ourselves in his place and anticipate his questions and doubts ... It was time to advertise our cause instead of our cars.”

 -- Iacocca, in his best-selling 1984 memoir, “Iacocca,” on Ronald DeLuca, a creative director at Kenyon & Eckhardt who orchestrated the advertising campaign that spared Chrysler from insolvency in the 1980s and transformed Iacocca's career as a pitchman.

“I was arrogant, but GM made a science of goddamn arrogance. I think the Townsends of this world, the Henry Ford’s and some of the GM chairmen wrecked this industry. That arrogance should be gone now. We got our comeuppance. If GM and Ford keep thinking that way, we’ll run over them. If they had been on the ball, I don’t think we’d have made it. So who wants to wake them up?”

-- Iacocca, in a 1983 interview with Time. He blamed leaders of Detroit's automakers, including himself, for the “miserable” state of affairs in the industry after Japanese and other foreign automakers captured 28 percent of the U.S. market the year before.

"We can't blame the Japanese for the rental car business, where you turn them in every couple months. Chrysler invented that, too, by the way. We created all these program cars and we started to compete with our new cars with a slightly used car and we wonder what the hell has happened. That was the dumbest thing that was probably ever done in Detroit. Now we're cleaning that up."

-- Iacocca, in a December 1992 interview with Automotive News, accepting blame for so-called program cars that run through a daily rental company and then flood back into the used-vehicle market as "nearly new."

“If you only talk cars, people say you’re a provincial son of a bitch. If you’re outspoken, then they say you are running for office.”

-- Iacocca in a 1983 interview with Time. Despite sightings of red-white-and-blue IACOCCA FOR PRESIDENT bumper stickers, he never expressed interest in politics.

"People are hard up. They're looking for somebody, anybody, to listen to, and in the end the thing that distinguishes me from all the others is that I don't bull____ them."

-- Iacocca, in Life magazine in 1986, amid talk he was running for U.S. president.

 

"Well, it's here ... It's time for me to step down and retire as chairman of Chrysler … You know, I'll tell you, when it's your last turn at bat, it sure is nice to hit a home run."

-- Iacocca, in his last commercial as Chrysler chairman and CEO, in 1992, introducing what the company billed as another achievement, a car design that gives people more room, on the Chrysler Concorde, Dodge Intrepid and Eagle Vision.

“We can be a first-rate company as long as we respect our size and don’t try to have any delusions of grandeur.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1986 interview with Business Week

"If Henry was king, I was the crown prince. And there was no question that the king liked me."

-- Iacocca, in his 1984 autobiography, on being Ford’s president.

“I know. I know. But if a guy is over 25 percent jerk, he’s in trouble. And Henry was 95 percent.”

-- Iacocca, in a 1985 interview with Time, when challenged with his view that people are divided into two camps -- nice guys and jerks. Iacocca was defending his autobiography, which he used to detail his volatile relationship with Ford Chairman and CEO Henry Ford II. Iacocca, president of Ford, was fired by Henry Ford II in 1978.

"He just sat in his ivory tower and said, 'My God, we're making money!' He was there every day to throw his weight around, but he never knew what made the place tick."

-- Iacocca, in his 1984 autobiography, painting Henry Ford II as "an old pro at spending money."

"I should start a third party just to shake things up."

-- Iacocca, still flirting with a foray into politics, in a 1991 interview with Playboy.

"We're going to show the world that an American-owned company, smack in the middle of urban America, building an American product with American components -- and, most importantly, using American workers -- can build the best sport utility vehicle in the world."

-- Iacocca, dedicating Chrysler's $1 billion Jefferson North assembly plant, home of the new Jeep Grand Cherokee, in Detroit on March 31, 1992.

“I never expected to be chairman. They have a (Ford family) chairman to this day, Bill Ford Jr. I was happy. We were making close to a billion dollars a year. We made $800 million that year. My mother said, ‘What would they have done to you if the company had been doing poorly?’”

-- Iacocca, in the 2005 book “Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry,” on being ousted by Henry Ford II.

“If there’s one thing you could say about me, it’s that I converted to airbags. Yes, you can say I was a born-again Christian when it comes to airbags. People write me and say, ‘Thanks, you saved my life.’ They never write and say, ‘Thanks, you raised my dividend.’ You can say that airbags are my greatest fulfillment. We have more than 1 million cars out there with airbags in them and only one has gone off (prematurely) and hurt somebody.”

-- Iacocca, a leading opponent of airbags in the '70s, but a leading proponent in the ‘90s, in a 1991 interview with the Chicago Tribune, on his legacy.

“We've got to pause and ask ourselves: how much clean air do we need? How much are we willing to pay? Since the cost is being passed on, this has become a tax to drive -- and a stiff one.”

-- Iacocca, in a Sept. 1974 interview with People magazine, on federal pollution-control regulations.

"That goddam [Ralph Nader] keeps saying I invented the slogan 'safety doesn't sell.' I said no, no, you guys got that all wrong. I said we're not able to sell safety. [In the late 1950s] GM is still selling performance and I'm selling padded dashes and deep-dish steering wheels and goddamn seatbelts, of all things. And we're losing our ass, we're not selling our cars."

-- Iacocca, in a December 1992 interview with Automotive News, referring to his early career at Ford.

“I wouldn’t want to do it again -- put my family through it. But it came over time. It came as an insidious wind. You knew that something was up. But I was made president in 1970 and I always said, ‘Well, I lasted two terms, eight years. That was a pretty good tenure to be president.’”

-- Iacocca, in the 2005 book “Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry,” on being ousted by Henry Ford II.

"I don't know what happened, to be honest. You look back and say, 'Well, God dealt you a pretty good hand.' But those days were tough. I don't like the way he did it. Every quarter he found something to change. And then [Philip] Caldwell came in. For five years he kept giving the message that he wanted to make sure the power was spread. Henry was concerned that his family was so weak and I was too strong, and he wanted to decentralize."

-- Iacocca, in the 2005 book “Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry,” on being ousted by Henry Ford II.

“But it was one of those things where Henry made up his mind, and nobody wanted to go against Henry. Henry had told Frank Murphy, ‘It’s either him or me,’ and the board had to knuckle under.”

-- Iacocca, in the 2005 book “Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry,” on being ousted by Henry Ford II. Frank Murphy, former chairman of Times Mirror Co., was a Ford director.

 

“Listen, I wasn’t much for carrying a grudge. We had a bad moment. That’s past. First of all, I don’t think about the past. We did a lot of stuff. We had a lot of good days.”

-- Iacocca, in the 2005 book “Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry,” on being ousted by Henry Ford II.

''I have been getting about one offer a week. Everybody has a concept out there. But these people are just so damn good, so I let them use my mug. I won't be just a figurehead in anything that I do. I thought it was time to get baptized in the e-commerce world.''

-- Iacocca, on deciding to become a board member and pitchman for the Online Asset Exchange, a business-to-business website he described as an industrial-strength eBay, in The New York Times in Feb. 2000.

"Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car."

-- Iacocca, in his 2007 book, “Where Have all the Leaders Gone?”

''... That borders on being un-American. A lot of people have worked hard for four years on behalf of this project. So have I, and I do not appreciate being disenfranchised on somebody's whim. But I will not denigrate the epic work of the foundation to date, nor the incredible generosity of the people who have given so much … How that money is spent is far more important than how it was raised. I am not about to meekly surrender [money] to the National Park Service to do with it as they will … [He offered me] fancy titles and laudatory letters if I'd only get out of the way. But I refused the gold watch and scroll routine. I refused because I know who sent in the money we raised. I know who they sent it to. And it was not to Secretary Hodel or his little solicitor.''

-- Iacocca, in a 1984 public spat with Interior Secretary Donald Hodel, over plans to refurbish the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Hodel, citing potential conflicts, had just dismissed Iacocca from a federal advisory commission on the future of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Iacocca remained in charge of raising funds to restore the landmarks.

"I've got to stop getting fired like this. People are going to start thinking I'm a drifter."

-- Iacocca, joking after his dismissal from one of the committees working on the reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. 

"Their oversight is just too extreme. That's why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn't stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you."

 -- Iacocca, in June 2009, urging Chrysler and GM to pay off their federal loans as quickly as possible to avoid government interference.

“I’ve made so many mistakes over the years I’ll have lots of bugs, but I really can’t think of one thing that sticks out because my dad taught me you can’t live your life over, so don’t look back.”

-- Iacocca, on his biggest regret, in a 1991 interview with the Chicago Tribune

“What do guys like me do who’ve had the world by a string? I got some notoriety, a little more than I deserved, and made some money in the car business. I made some mistakes, but it averaged out pretty good. Now that chapter has closed, and I don’t think much about cars anymore.”

-- Iacocca, in a June 1996 interview with Fortune