When I heard on Tuesday night that Lee Iacocca had passed away, I was momentarily taken aback. Not so much because he had died — he was, after all, 94 — but because, for someone who had been such a larger-than-life figure for so much of his career, he had been out of the limelight for so long.
Iacocca first burst into the public consciousness in 1963, when he made the covers of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, standing in front of the brand new Ford Mustang, which he had (allegedly) masterminded as a top Ford executive. And those were the days when making the cover of Time or Newsweek really meant something!
His last public act took place in 1995, when he and financier Kirk Kerkorian made a foolhardy attempt to take over Chrysler. Although he later formed an investment company, and dabbled in this and that, this once unforgettable figure spent the last two decades of his life, well, forgotten.