The "Animal Handler"

Four months after being ousted as president of Ford Motor Co., and six days after he had stunned the auto world by taking the same post at troubled Chrysler Corp., Lee Iacocca, 54, sat down with TIME Correspondents Barrett Seaman and Paul Witteman to muse about his new job and his industry. Iacocca's conversation is pure stream of consciousness, leaping from topic to topic at machine-gun speed; it is also refreshingly blunt and unencumbered by modesty. Excerpts: ON WHY HE CHOSE HIS NEW EMPLOYER: I had many offers to be chief executive of big [nonauto] companies. But when I was 14 decided to go into the auto business. [At Princeton University] I went for a master's degree in engineering and I built an automatic transmission, a torque converter, by hand; that was my thesis. [At Ford] I got pretty damn good, just through the passage of time. After 32 years I really became, in my trade, a brilliant brain surgeon and suddenly I find myself dismissed, shocked, and my thoughts were: "I don't want to operate on a guy's feet, because I won't be good at that; I'm a brain surgeon." And that was the auto business to me; I figured that's where I'm strong and where I can do things easy.

HIS ROLE: My job is to handle the team. The animal handler and trainer, that's me. And I can do it because I've been there; I've made every goddam mistake there is to make. HIS STRATEGY: I don't need to tell you that we aren't making any money around here. We've got to husband our resources; there will have to be some retrenchment as already indicated by our moving out of Europe. [At home] we have to be more selective than the other guys. We can't stand the luxury of play periods. The bigger you are, the easier you can say: "Let's do a Corvette, boys. We won't make money for ten years, but so what? It's an image builder." We don't have any money to build image. We've got to build good cars, sell them in volume and make money. THE FEDERAL MILEAGE STANDARDS: That action alone took one of the biggest industries in the U.S., one of the biggest employers, one of the biggest taxpayers, and accelerated the requirement for capital and the demands for people. We have guys working 16, 18 hours a day about to fall down at their desks. And the industry is having difficulty as these years kick in at two miles a gallon each. When the heat turns on through '82 and '83, it's going to separate the men from the boys.

GOVERNMENT REGULATION: I don't want to preside over a $10,000 Omni. But I don't see anything that's going to deter [the regulators] from making their appointed rounds. The way things are--and you don't have to be a mathematician to take $5,000 [roughly the present price of the Omni] and compound it for five years at 10% inflation rates and then add on all these goodies--it could be [a $10,000 car]. HIS GOALS: I really believe that if we can turn this company around, then I will have capped a career. I will have helped 200,000 people in their livelihoods. We are the biggest private employer in Detroit; I would have helped the city. They won't know it, but I will have helped GM and Ford compete more So what the hell more would you want to do to end an auto career? The only other option, I guess, was to take all my money and run.

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