Same again.
Nor will the United States automobile industry.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lee Iacocca.
Applause
Crazy about you, Chip.
Applause
Music
Look, and we shouldn't be surprised, like seven million he sold of his autobiography.
Seven million? How many letters? Seventy-eight thousand?
Yeah, about. Give or take a thousand.
Oh my. And he couldn't buy your lunch. Not long ago.
And he got the Heave-ho, you remember that? From Ford? Henry.
I remember.
You remember.
Listen to this, I'll be very brief.
Chairman of the board of Chrysler Corporation since September 1979.
He's been with Chrysler since November of 78.
Mr. Iacocca spent 32 years with the Ford Motor Company. You know that.
He rose from management trainee to president and chief operating officer.
He was credited with creating the Mustang.
And that was as big a hit as Detroit has ever seen.
Boy, here it comes, here it comes. I remember the excitement.
As you know, his wife, his first wife, Mary, died in 1983.
They are the parents of two daughters, both of whom have married recently.
His mother, Peel, gives him advice and he calls her six times a week.
I read it in the book.
Take her picture again. Give him the monitors, Brian, for the audience.
That. Here is Mrs. Iacocca.
And you know what? She he said, Ma, I bought American Motors.
And she said, what for?
That's right. You read the book, right?
Or at least that part of it.
You know, here you are as devoted a son.
If we are to believe your testimony, and I don't see any reason to doubt it.
You took you took your mother to White Sulphur Springs, a business convention.
She sat next to the chairman of Motorola and probably gave him some advice, too.
Right, right.
She said, you have enough to do.
She still call you Lido? Lido.
She's have enough to do. You didn't take her advice. Why not?
You think if you stand still, like your past said, you fall backwards?
Yes. You mean on American Motors?
On anything. I mean, why would your mother's advice not be valuable on that one?
Well, she thinks I work too hard, like all mothers, that I should slow down a little bit and enjoy life.
And I listen to her, but then do what I want to do.
How old are you, Mr. Iacocca?
I'm 63. No, really, I'm 64 in ten days. I better come clean.
Well, we want you to come clean. 64.
And you heave seriously, seriously thought about running for president.
No, I didn't. Where'd you read that?
It's in here.
Well, I thought about it for ten minutes, maybe.
Oh, no, that's not the impression you leave the reader.
No, no, I...
There were people very serious, and you were...
I listened to them. Yeah.
My mom, my kids thought I wouldn't do well, that my temperament was such that I would probably die quickly.
And I decided it was...
Actually, I was sitting in bed one morning, and I was like this, and I...
It was a Saturday where I could sleep in, and I...
I mused about being president, and I fantasized.
And then I thought of the debt, and I thought of the trade deficit,
and I thought of the homeless and the drug problem, education, and I...
I kept thinking this. I pulled a sheet up over my head and didn't get up for about three hours.
Right then I knew I had made up my mind.
It was scary.
You think that before...
When a man announces, or a woman announces for president, that you ought to give the voters some idea of who you would choose for cabinet.
He does in his book.
Here's who he would choose. And incidentally, 63...
That is not... You're not ancient, kid.
Forget it.
Well, all right. Let's give them...
Sam Nunn, vice president.
Iacocca Nunn.
Don Rumsfeld, secretary of state. Remember him? Was with the Ford administration, and then Searle.
Jack Welch.
The guy who runs this shop here, NBC.
He owns your company.
Yeah. Well, it isn't my company. We're tenants here. They're our customers.
You're closed on him.
They're our customer, and they're always right.
Jack Welch is the... You want him for secretary of defense. He's the chairman of the board of one of the largest defense suppliers, and he's like fifth...
He understands it.
All right. Felix Rowland and Paul Volcker, or Paul Volcker for treasury. Peter Yuvoroff for commerce. Doug Frazier for labor. He likes Douglas Frazier, former UAW boss.
He was on your board.
And for secretary of communications, Tom Brokaw.
This is a new job.
It's a new job, and he says he'd use them to cover Sam Donaldson.
All right, let's talk now. We've got to... Let's see how much we can cover here.
Go.
All right.
You'd like... President Reagan called you from the ranch. He was actually chopping wood to express his concern about your wife's well-being at a time when we know now she had very little time left.
You were very touched by that.
Very.
You visited him at the White House, and he really didn't say anything, and then suddenly all the white coats were dismissed, and Reagan started pouring French wine for his guests, saying, don't tell the guys in California they'll kill me. I found this.
And he's pouring. As charming a guy as you'd ever want to meet.
Absolutely.
And you think he's a lousy president.
Well, not lousy. I mean, he did a lot the first four years, but after the first term, I think that there were so many problems that weren't addressed and that we're going to face them for the next 20, 30 years. Mostly debt.
But he did a good job. He gave the country hope. He built up the defenses of the country. He cut taxes.
Any time you talked to him about something, he would drift off into an anecdote. At once he gave the punchline, the show was over, and you were out the door.
He was a great storyteller. Just a charming person.
But you do seem to be backing up now on what is very, and incidentally, this appraisal. I know you probably don't get a big kick out of bashing presidents, and I know that that's not. You've already told us that you think he's a wonderful human being.
But you do not think he's a good president at all, not even a little bit.
I don't think he'll be a great president. I think for the time he was a good president. I think after the so-called malaise, after Nixon, then after Carter, we needed a little respite.
We needed a little rest, and he gave us that kind of morning in America talk, and we wanted that. That's what the public wanted. We liked it.
But is it honest, or is it self-deceptive?
Well, only history will tell that. I don't know. I think we now have a lot of problems facing us, and the next eight years are going to be tough, some of the worst.
Here's what you told your Chrysler people. You know, in life there are some people you meet you just like to pal around with. They're fun. They put you in a good frame of mind, and they make you feel terrific.
Well, that's Ronald Reagan. He's not Dr. Strangelove. He's Dr. Feelgood.
I want him to be my pal, but not my president.
Well, I still feel that way. I would love to go horseback riding with him. I would love to have dinner with him.
When it comes to some of the affairs, the tough problems of today, I think he, in the second term for sure, drifted away from what the issues of this, facing this country are.
Right. Okay, you've got so much in here, so forgive me. Now, you don't have to talk fast, but I want, let's see if we can get, because these people want to get you, too.
Bruce Springsteen wouldn't play the Liberty Gala.
Never heard from him. The boss never called back. Would you believe that?
You wanted him for the Meadowlands where you were going to have the guys who-
All the working men, right. Yeah.
Born in the USA-
I don't know whether, I never talked to Bruce. I don't know him, but his agent never called back twice.
You got fired because there's a conflict of interest between raising the money and appropriating it. Is that it?
That's what they said.
Fired.
You're the wealthiest guy who ever got fired in my, I've never heard of.
The guy who raises, it's a government idea, the guy who raises the money should never be accountable for it. I didn't agree with that.
So I thought if we raised $300 million from the American people, we should be the ones to tell them how to spend it, and they said, no way. Park Service will take over from here on in. They fired me.
Uh-huh. Your father took you twice to see the Statue of Liberty as a kid.
Yep, twice. As a little kid.
And you wonder about people who live in New York who have never even seen the thing.
I know. I had some congressmen as we approached Statue of Liberty the 100th anniversary that had never been here, so they hurriedly called up and said, we better go over and see it.
Yeah.
Because they'd never been there.
You know, uh, Donald Regan was here. Right?
He was.
There, sat right there.
I had lunch with him about a month ago.
Are you impressed? You did?
Yeah.
You had lunch with Donald Regan?
Yeah. He wrote me a letter and said, let's bury the hatchet. We call each other names so long, why don't we stop this? It was very nice of him.
Yeah.
He bought, he bought the lunch, you know.
You, uh, you called him a nasty son of a bitch.
I think he called me something akin to that.
Oh, he called you a nasty son of a bitch.
I don't remember, but we called each other names. We didn't get along too well.
You wanted, you wanted to keep an executive jet following.
Oh, no, it had nothing to do with that. I read it in his book.
That was trivial. Well, he took trivial stuff. He, uh.
And you, you wanted to reduce the, uh, the, uh, the service, uh, charge.
I really didn't.
From one percent to one half percent.
I just figured I was paying him back seven years early all this money, this billion, two hundred million.
That Chrysler deserves.
And he wanted to sell these warrants, these pieces of paper, and, and, and he won.
But it cost me three hundred and fifty million dollars profit to the government to buy him back.
I thought he should have cut him back a little bit because they were ten year warrants and maybe I'd pay him thirty percent of the three hundred million, but I lost.
I didn't think, I, I, I thought I got a bad deal.
Well, you know, the, but the, not a few taxpayers would argue, look, we already gave you one point two guaranteed bill be as in boy billion.
All right, hooray for you. Not all of us were crazy about that. We thought this was America, the land of the free enterprise.
So all right, we did it. And then what do you know? You pay us back.
But now, now you want more.
No, no.
Now you wanted a profit of three hundred and fifty million on the billion, too. And that was almost usury.
I thought there was too much to pay. But anyway, that's it.
That's really what it's done.
You had a nice lunch then with Donald Rees.
Nice lunch.
I always figured it cost me three hundred and fifty million dollars.
You thought seriously about buying General Motors. Tell the people.
Well, not seriously.
Oh, here we go.
It's like a fantasy. I said it wouldn't be nice. Anybody, anybody can be raided nowadays. It's a shame, but that's the truth of the matter.
So a couple of guys came to me and said they have so many assets. Why don't we at least look at it?
We looked at it for about a day and then we chuckled ourselves at that.
As I said in the book, it'd be easier to buy Greece, a country than General Motors are so big and they needed forty billion dollars to buy it.
So we dreamt a little bit. We thought big, but that was the end of it.
Victor Potemkin, one of the biggest GM dealers in the world. New Yorkers are familiar with this name.
Called and said he had to see me. It was very important.
Understand this guy now. He's got about, according to you, fifty dealerships, including a couple of Chrysler and Dodge franchises.
He's got mostly GM though, doesn't he?
Yeah, mostly GM.
So here comes Victor. Sits down with the big guy here.
He says to you, after talking to a lot of large dealers, he said the consensus was that if Iacocca took over General Motors, Iacocca could save them.
Well, he went beyond that. He didn't put it in the book. He said I have a hundred million dollars to chip in.
I can get a few guys together and I said, Victor, a hundred million. We need forty billion. That won't cut it.
He said, but we can get it financed and we can do like all these other guys do.
We can take them over, sell off their hot assets, take on a lot of debt, get some junk bonds, pay it off.
That's what's going on in the country today. I didn't cotton up to that. So we really never got serious.
General Motors is pretty big. It's as big as most countries.
You really give them a shot for the Saturn. You think that was all hype and no-
Well, time will tell. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but it was a lot of hype. I mean a lot of hype.
A lot of bazzazz. Razzmatazz, you say. In effect, GM is simply announcing another Chevy for 1990.
This is not the new car, as Mr. Iacocca is telling his readers.
And then even, and it's true, you make the point that four governors even showed up on the Donnie show to beg the nation to support them in this runoff.
You had them.
I did. I don't know if beg is the word they'd necessarily agree with, but-
So you saw this. In a way, you were kind of jealous, weren't you? I mean, they knew how to get the public's ear, huh?
It was fantastic. I wish I had thought of it. It was a great PR program.
Actually, I had everybody fighting to see if they could give them tax money to have the plant land in their state.
And they hit about 40 of the 50 states, actually, and they got a lot.
You also tell your readers how shocked you were at the positive results that you achieved when you went on TV and you said, we goofed. We're sorry.
You mean on the odometers?
Odometers.
Well, I told the truth. We goofed. And I told the public that it won't happen again, and I was sorry, but we'd make amends by paying them.
And we did that, and it went away in 24 hours, and I always felt that that's what politicians should do.
In other words, if Reagan had gone on television and said, look, I was really-
They were torturing our hostages. I couldn't- I led with my heart. I asked this nation to stand with me now.
Standing ovation.
It would have been, yes.
Now, what is this-
He got bad advice.
He got bad advice where he wasn't thinking that day, because when you goof up, the first thing you do, you've got to come clean. You've got to be honest.
If you do that, most people will rally around you. They may say you're stupid, but they won't think you're dishonest.
And I think that's what happened in Orangate. They felt that they were covering something. They didn't come clean.
I would advise anybody, young people, anybody, if you make a mistake like that, just lay it out.
Lay it out. If you make a mistake with your parents, tell them you made a mistake.
You might get the hell beat out of you, but you learn from it. So that's all I was trying to say in the book.
I understand. Now, it will not please you if I call this audience's attention to the fact that Chrysler now finds itself in an others.
We've got to call this a scandal. You have put out 400 lemons out there, and you've recalled them.
You've paid the people. You said, I'm sorry, these weren't the cars that we promised you they were, and the law obliges, and we take them back.
And then you sold them as demos. And you have not told the new customers. You've called them demonstrators.
Now, this will just take a moment, Mr. Aikoka. The New York Daily News, the same beloved paper that ran on the occasion of the odometer scandal.
Your picture, the worst picture. Your mother must have thought that you were ill.
Would you buy a used car from this man? Would you buy a used car from this man? This is after the odometer.
And it said you may have already. Yeah.
Here comes the Daily News again. Editorial.
It's fine as far as it goes that Attorney General Robert Abrams has nailed the Chrysler Corporation for violating New York's lemon law.
The law requires auto companies to re-purchase vehicles that are out-and-out duds.
Chrysler complied but resold some 400 lemons as demonstrators.
Chrysler has agreed to give the victims refund and free repairs, but what about the next step, bringing criminal charges against the execs who provided over, execs who presided over this scam?
The company claims that it was an inadvertent oversight. That might wash if there were one or two cars, but 400? Come on.
That's smacks of deliberate fraud. Those responsible, and not just low-level employees, should stand trial for it.
Well, what do they want to do, send me to jail? What are you saying? That's what they're saying.
Now, wait a minute. It's true. It was inadvertent. It was a goof. It's stupid to do it.
500,000 cars were sold in New York State. Out of the 500,000 cars, 400 cars were declared lemons under state law.
Of those 400, they shouldn't have been sold without having told the person that these were lemons.
So we said to them, look, we made a mistake. We'll buy them back. We'll do whatever it takes.
200 of the people liked the lemons so much they didn't want to come back. The other 200 were paying off. It's costing us a million, two million dollars.
And it's an absolute goof. It shouldn't have happened. But there's nothing criminal about that.
We have to see the people who weren't smart enough in the administrative end to not have marked these.
There are 40 lemon laws in 40 different states. They vary all over the lot. It's a rather complex subject, but it shouldn't have happened.
So I'm sorry about that, too. Twice I'm sorry with you today already. Don't you think you're reading anything good in the book?
Now, don't get crazy. Don't get crazy. I do not think that America's strength and integrity will be enhanced if we send Iacocca to the slammer.
I do gently, however, ask you whether or not as a nation we're being honest with ourselves and whether or not the auto industry and most big business itself is not engaging in the same kind of self-delusion.
You know, Detroit did not acknowledge for a long, long time in the 60s that the Japanese were building a better car.
When a Yahoo from West Germany landed a plane in Red Square, they, the Soviets, fired the head of the entire military apparatus.
You have to pay a price in that country. What price are the powerful paying for their goofs?
This is not an inadvertent, as the Daily News points out. Doesn't that bother you a little bit? The big guys get away.
Well, I don't know that the big guys get away. I mean, we tried to make amends to the people for a mistake we made, but I don't see anything criminal about it.
It shouldn't happen again. You might fire a couple of the guys. I was in Italy when I read about it. In fact, I didn't even know about it.
You say you don't know that things are going on in the company. All you can do is do more and apologize. You've got to make good.
So we're going to pay these people and make sure it doesn't happen again. That's about as much as I can tell you.
But your broader subject, are we all too tolerant of all kinds of mistakes in a country? Yeah, I think there's a lack of discipline.
I think in many areas there's a lack of integrity, of honesty. And I think it's paralyzed us in many parts of our society, including our own government and business and unions.
You tell a very moving story about the marriage of your first daughter. Kathy is your older of the two?
Yeah, she's here.
What father would not identify with how you feel? You put a number on her, a countdown number on her, the number of days left?
Right, if she'd play a game. 25 days until the wedding? Yeah.
And then what did you do on the wedding day? You give her a zero? How'd this go?
I said no days to go, zero. And then I gave her a necklace and some earrings for her wedding present.
You tell the reader, and it's very moving, how much her mother was missed that day.
And that you had the feeling that maybe somehow her mother would be there when you got to the end of the aisle in the office.
What father, who's a widower, couldn't identify with that?
Then you had another marriage with your other daughter. And you're crazy, you got lucky, do you? Sons-in-law are good guys, huh?
Well, boy, it's a good thing. I don't want you mad at me, kid, I'll tell you.
And you never missed a swimming meet? You never missed a piano recital?
I don't think ever. Maybe once in a while if I was traveling.
That's something for a big shot like you. Well, you know, you guys are always in your executive jets flying around.
Well, that's where everybody today feels that way. I mean, family life in many areas has gone plum to hell.
And I cherish my family, I cherish my daughters, and I think most of this audience does.
Every chance you have, you tell them you love them, you go stroke them, you see them, they're growing up, they'll reflect you all their lives.
What's so strange about that? That has nothing to do with whether you're rich or poor or black or white.
You've got to have love of family. I mean, I don't know why that's so unnatural.
Yeah. No, obviously, we're on your team. We agree. We agree that that's a good idea.
Thank you.
This audience is entitled to know, Mr. Ayakoka, and you are entitled to ignore the reference.
You give us a very honest and I think very conservatively and lovingly drawn portrait of your marriage to a woman a generation younger than you,
in which I think you present yourself very honestly, confused, very eating alone was bad enough, but living alone really scared me.
Dying alone scared me even more. You draw an autobiographical picture of yourself as a very lonely guy. You're eating alone at night.
This is Mr. Chairman of the You Know What? He's eating, he's alone.
And you met her during the all the pooh-bah with the statue. And you were tentative, boy. You didn't think.
And not surprisingly, a lot of people wrote and said, you follow your heart. Don't worry about what the people say.
And middle-aged women were telling them to marry somebody your own age.
That's right. They said, pick on someone your own age.
Now, and after, I don't know how long the marriage was, eight months, I don't know, the worst happened.
And you tried to reconcile. They went to a marriage counselor. She didn't want to move.
She did not want to move to Detroit from New York. One very major problem.
You know, you tell your viewers, I still had a lot of love for that girl, even as they walked out of the divorce thing.
But I'm not going to ask you to comment because I am told that you've asked us not to discuss this on the air.
Well, I mean, it's in the book, so you can't. I'm not a bad guy for it.
Sixty-three you are. You're out of here a couple of years, you know.
I have a contract with the company until I'm 67.
Is that good?
I think so.
You don't want to go fishing?
No, not really. Every day I wouldn't want to go fishing, play golf.
Got to keep active, so I'll stay with the company and then we'll see.
I said in the book I may teach school for a while. I don't know. I got a lot to say.
Yes, you also say in the book that maybe you've got to deal with the issue of after your divorce.
Maybe I have to learn to live with the hand that was dealt me, and that's to be alone for the rest of my life.
Sounds bad, doesn't it? Did I say it that way?
That's all he says here.
Well, everybody's got to live with hand dealt them. You know, you've got to handle things as they come along.
Are you more adjusted now? You can't be any nicer sitting there alone. Are you still eating alone?
Mostly. I travel a lot though and have company. But generally life is quieted down quite a bit.
I've got to just get one more thing.
His mother called him during all this divorce stuff and said, you have to work at it.
Work at it. Work at it more.
Hey.
Is that like a mom?
Yeah. Should all moms and sons like the Iacocas hear present, then we'll be back in just a moment.
President Reagan, that you weren't too pleased with him.
Sir, who kind of stands out in your mind as one of the most outstanding presidents that you have voted for?
Well, Harry Truman, but I didn't vote for him. My wife did. She bet me 15 to 1 that he would win and I said no way.
And he turned out to be one of the great presidents of all time.
Mr. Iacocca, I'd like to ask you what you think about Bush nominating and getting Quayle to run with him.
How do you feel about Quayle, President Quayle?
I don't feel very good about it. I think it's the choice of the nominee, in this case Mr. Bush, to pick whomever he chooses.
But this is a big country and there were a lot of tremendous people he could have chosen.
I was literally stunned by it. I thought he'd pick Bob Dole or somebody. I just thought he would, but he didn't.
Are you prepared to tell us for which tickets you will vote?
Oh, no, no. I don't think anybody should ever tell anybody how they're going to vote. These guys count on your vote.
Always, never, never.
Mr. Iacocca, I remember talking back to your commercial. You said if you find a better car, buy it. I said I did.
And it was a Japanese Accord Honda, which I'm still driving. It's about seven years.
Well, that's a lot of people wrote that way. Thank God a lot bought our cars, too.
Mr. Iacocca, I really believe in buying American-made cars.
And I have always insisted that we buy an American-made car in my house, even though I'm outvoted.
However, what disturbs me is that I'm finding out that even though I'm buying an American car, it's manufactured in Canada or in a foreign country.
That's not helping the American worker. I think we have to do more here in this country for our blue-collar workers.
Well, I agree about actually, actually you find as the world is changing, it's called local content, how much of the total car is built here.
In our case, it's about 85 percent of our total cars. Pieces do come in from other parts of the world.
We would just hope that Japan would reciprocate and do the same thing, because they don't do that.
They're 100 percent Japanese and they send them in on wheels, and that's the reason the trade deficit is so big on autos.
But I don't think you'll ever see, we'll ever go back to where you have 100 percent of a car made in a country of origin,
because the world is shrinking and you're buying from a lot of different places in the world.
Our job is to get good quality and be cost-competitive. We should be able to do it here.
So, but the woman's point is it's more and more difficult to make a patriotic argument for the purchase of an American, so-called quote, American-made automobile.
I have never made a patriotic argument. I think we should try to buy American if we're equal in cost and price and quality.
And 80 to 83, we lost our way, really in the 70s. The Japanese did better quality work and it showed up.
They had better fuel economy when the OPEC crisis came. And we've worked now about seven or eight years, but we're just about there.
We've plowed billions in and we now have good cars.
You believe that the American automobile, that Detroit lost the baby boomers.
Oh yeah, a lot of them. God, in California, just look at the numbers.
What are the numbers? What is the number of Japanese-owned percentage of Japanese?
In California? Well, in California, that's the biggest. In Hawaii, it's even bigger. The closer you get to Japan, probably 65 in Hawaii, 50% in Japan.
And in the nation?
50% in California.
50. And in the nation, about 23, but then you include Korea on top of that and the German cars.
And then what do you get?
About 30.
So three out of every ten cars is an import.
Import.
And half of all cars in California are imports.
Since I was on your show five years ago, we've gone to an imbalance of trade with Japan on cars alone from about, well, in total trade, we've gone from 13 billion to 60 billion with Japan alone.
Half of that is cars. That's how big the change is.
They're selling 30 billion.
About, of cars and parts and trucks in this country.
And, well, they sold 2.3 million here and Chrysler, I think, sold 700 over there.
Yeah.
And GM and Ford sold another thousand. We're not that bad, okay?
They've got a lot going for them. They do a lot of good things.
But there should be a better balance than that.
Yeah.
But we don't want to get into that today. That's the whole trade issue and that's going to be facing the next president.
If the next president doesn't handle that, I've told both Dukakis and Bush, they're going to be one-term presidents.
They've got to start to attack the two deficits, the budget deficit and the trade deficit.
Right.
They have to tie them together.
Chrysler owns what percentage of Mitsubishi? 14? Or is it more?
Well, we once had an option to go to 35, but we never took it years ago. We started 18 years ago.
We now own about 24 percent.
24.
Yeah.
So you own 24 percent of a Japanese conglomerate, a multinational Japanese conglomerate.
Well, not the conglomerate, just the auto. I wish I owned part of the conglomerate. It's huge.
The trading company, the auto company alone, Mitsubishi Motors, we own, we're a minority partner at 24 percent.
But how does that influence? What is the honest answer to this question?
How does that influence your power at the table at which you would hope to negotiate a relief from the dumping that you say is unfairly making it difficult to sell American products in this country?
Well, nobody has any quarrel with owning a piece of a company or owning a piece of our auto industry.
I don't think that's the issue at all.
The issue is that when we started, we had in 1970, Chrysler, when they could, didn't have the money.
That's a long time, long before I got there. Didn't have the money to do a small car.
They invested in that company, which was a small company, to build them a small car because they didn't have the $500 million to do their own.
At that time, the Japanese were getting eight or nine percent of the market, and we were selling 80,000, 90,000 cars.
And that's what free trade is all about. We sold them something. They sold us something.
Then the avalanche came. Now they're up to three million cars. Now they're up to this 30 billion imbalance.
Now the jobs are sailing out of the country. Now it's a different ballgame completely.
You're never going to have a lot of American companies own a lot of German companies and English companies, either majority or minority.
We can't own anything in Japan. It is very difficult to own anything in Japan.
I know.
All we would like is some reciprocity.
I understand. But just one more time.
When the Japanese engage in what you would consider to be unfair trade practices in the United States, Chrysler benefits because you own 24 percent of a company that is doing this dirty deed.
Not necessarily. It's not unfair. What do you mean unfair trade practices?
You would call certainly trucks, dumping trucks into the market below the cost.
Well, yeah.
Enhances the vitality.
But if they're breaking rules under our regular conventions, if they're dumping trucks and selling dumping is selling a truck for less money here than they do in Japan, we have rules.
You handle that issue. The fact that we own 24 percent of a company, we can't say break our rules. We've got to retaliate.
You see, there's a misconception in this country. We're out of pocket $150, $160 billion a year in trade.
We should be retaliating. We're the guys getting mugged. And everybody's worried about the other side.
Everybody's also worried about what happens to America's international companies that rely on their own well-being, rely on the international market for their own future.
Boeing, to name one. Can't Boeing then get shut out if we start punishing? I don't have to tell you this. I mean, this is the whole —
Well, I don't believe in protectionism. There's got to be free trade, but there's got to be some balance. A train runs both ways. We're just not — they're not buying enough from us.
That's all.
Can you encapsule for us briefly, what is the IACOCA prescription for this agony?
Well, the prescription is tough. All we want is to deal in our own self-interest and be fair. Japan doesn't break any rules.
We tolerate them shipping in anything they want to our market, and they heavily restrict what we ship into their market.
On top of that, then, we take care of all of their defense. These are the two things that have made Japan the great nation it is.
So all we have to do is get their markets open. Now, the Congress of the United States just finished an 1,125-page bill on this subject,
which says to the president, if we're getting hosed, you should stop it. He had that — he had all that — the possibility before.
So we have got to start dealing in our own self-interest, and if they don't deal with us fair and square, we've got to put a stop to it.
Now, suppose we get your ideal world in the international marketing community. What is it that Japan would want to buy from us?
From us?
Yeah.
Well, they should be buying a lot of agricultural products. They've got restrictions on everything. No beef, no citrus, no ravioli if they have beef in them.
You can put cheese in them, but if you put beef in, they think we're smuggling beef in. They've got — I say a lot in my book.
I could have said more. Their restrictions are a legion. They're dazzling, in effect, to keep our products out.
They won't let us bid on their airport. They won't let us send in skis. What do they say?
On building at their airport, we don't know their soil conditions. On ski, they have different snow conditions.
They always have a reason why American products don't suit their market. The oranges are too big for them.
They have little tangerines. They say their stomachs are small. Well, these are true. These are all the atrocities.
But the truth is, they have rigged up a series of things that are intended literally to keep a lot of products out of the — and we, with open arms, say, send us all you've got.
And when you're done with the year, they've got a $60 billion advantage in shipping us stuff and not buying ours.
So they can buy a lot of things from us, especially food products, agricultural products, all kinds of things.
Do we have — and they're benefiting by the fact that they are not investing much of their national wealth in military hardware.
Oh, my God. If we get into that, are they benefiting? The average person in Japan pays $164 toward defense.
Every American taxpayer in this room pays about $11.64 or $1,000 more to do what? For the free world.
But we protect Japan. We protect the sea lanes so they can get their products in, their oil ship. That is unfair.
That is absolutely unfair. And what this government's got to do —
— if somebody has got to face up and ask these very powerful, rich people now to share the burden as we did for 25 years after World War II, it's that simple.
Do we have Mr. Iacocca's agreement that this country's rush to a 600-ship Navy and the Reagan military buildup has shot us in the foot,
it has not made us stronger, and the lesson is certain — the Japanese learned the lesson.
Militarism almost destroyed the nation. They were in ashes in the early 1940s. Now they may own the whole place.
And one of the reasons for their strength is they decided not to throw all the hard work.
Oh, no, they didn't decide not. We told them you can't. MacArthur saw to that after the war. They can't rearm.
Well, maybe somebody ought to tell us that. And then maybe we'll be the big guy.
I don't know. It's a complicated subject, but spending 300 billion a year — just think if you — I don't suggest we do this, but they argue that they can cut 5 percent.
If they cut 300 billion to 150 billion, we'd have no deficit. If we had no deficit, we'd have real prosperity, real economic prosperity.
So why don't we just cut it in half? Instead, we're short 150. We borrow from Japan that 150 billion. We pay them interest on it.
It seems ironic. We pay them interest on that 150 to defend them.
Yes, that's right.
But something's wrong.
Now, one other thing.
That doesn't meet the best of the common sense.
Let's understand this. This hand you got about — let's understand this. You can't become — you can't get elected to Congress or any other national office if you say you're going to cut the defense budget.
Well, yeah, they call you a communist if you —
I didn't say you could.
I mean, they really do. But I just met with Frank Carlucci, who's a terrific secretary of defense.
We might expect that from an IACO.
Right, a good Italian boy, a good Italian boy.
And he specifically said — he said, very simply, I can cut $10 to $20 billion out of the defense budget and never cut personnel and never cut one-arms programs —
How?
— just by becoming a more efficient businessman. Let me budget multi-year. They budget every six months down there. Get rid of some of the fraud in the waist. Get Congress stopping to pork barrel all this.
And we'll be back in just a moment.
Nice-looking couple or not?
Well, you've done something right here, Mrs. IACO. You must be very proud of it.
Very much so.
He — he not only went to Lehigh, he then — he goes to General Motors, and then he went to Princeton.
Went to Princeton one year.
You were how old, Mrs. IACO, when you came over?
Seventeen.
Seventeen years old.
Very young bride.
Yes, I bet you were.
Well, you certainly have done something right here with Leigh IACO, who's gotten so much attention. I hope you bought a copy of the first book.
Yes, I guess I did. Maybe two of them.
We should also say that Mr. IACO's sister is here, Delma. We're glad you're here. And daughter, Kathy, with an I, I'll remember that.
And Ned, just one of two of the greatest sons-in-law's in the world. We're glad you're here. Thanks for coming by to say hello. Yes, ma'am.
Yes, how would you like to be remembered?
You mean when I die?
Good family man. Good, strong kids. Lots of grandchildren. Just had a grandchild four months ago.
You waited up until five in the morning for Kathy to come home. Was it Kathy or Leah?
Oh, you mean when they went out to see you?
In Florida.
Oh, that was Kathy and Ned. It was 4.05 to be exact.
4.05. Was he in the driveway when you got home?
He was in the kitchen.
At the table.
I was cooking pasta. I was so nervous.
You know, she's married now. It's okay. You can relax. What's the moral of this story? You're never not a parent?
I never relax.
Why should our American money be worth less than Japan and Germany? We put them on their feet and now we got it where we needed it.
Well, they all produced us and we out-consumed them and we goofed off for a decade and we got to get with it and the next president has got his work cut out for him. That's what he's got to do.
We've got to produce more, consume less, we've got to save more, we've got to borrow less, we've got to export more, import less and there may be some pain attached to that.
But nobody wants to hear it. That's why you're not hearing from these two guys running for president.
That's right. And you also can't say that you'll raise taxes.
Well, I guarantee you the next president of the United States is going to raise some taxes. What we should be doing right now is discussing with us who are going to vote for these guys what kind of tax, if they have to, they might lay on us.
The American people will not tolerate that. Ask Walter Mondale.
Ask Walter Mondale. Right, he's bass fishing four years. All he did was say to Reagan, I've got to raise taxes, bang-o, 49 states he lost.
So how do you figure that then? How can, for all your, all your selling skills, and they are considerable, you can sell my widget anytime. You can't, even you couldn't do this.
You are stepping here forward as a man really that's got a lot of power in that you don't, you're not asking for any public services.
Well, I'm not running for office, but we are going to raise taxes. We will have to. There might be some pain for a while. It might be a consumption tax, it might be a gas tax. I'm on the National Economic Commission.
You're laughing. I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I, but I'm not, I think before, it would be difficult to raise taxes if we had 10 or 20 billion dollars a waste, let's say in the Defense Department or other departments.
Before we cut that out, the American public wouldn't tolerate a tax increase. So we've got work to do. We are spending too much. Literally we are spending too much.
Congress, 535 guys, they never saw a spending bill they didn't like. They get, they keep serving them up. Even the President gets too many of them. He doesn't know what to do with them.
So we've got to freeze something and cool it for a while and cut some of these expenses. The key is, we as America, we own it. We don't want anything of ours cut.
Right. And nobody, you never write your congressman and say please start with me. Please cut something. Please raise my taxes a bit. But the American public is pretty smart.
If we do it fairly and honestly, they know we've got a problem and they know we'll have to tighten our belts a little bit for a while and all pull together. That's all Japan does.
We are a different society. We can't be like them. But when they pull on their oars, they're all together. Oars are all over the lot. We're worrying about every pressure group and interest group in the world. And it won't work that way anymore.
And we'll be back in a moment.
There is the part of the I Cook a Family album. Give us your shortest speech about the 20 million dollars a year. What is this 20 million dollars? Should anybody make 20 million a year?
No. Start with her. No, I, you mean, are you talking about my salary? It wasn't my salary. Michael Jackson made a lot more, but that's beside the point.
Shortest speech, I get paid well, probably too well. I get paid 800,000 dollars a year and I get a bonus depending on how good a year is. I have half a million and I can live well on a million and three. I give the government half or have been giving them half.
But I got notoriety, as you know, last year when I sold stock that was given to me when the company was going broke for three dollars and it went to 100 and I kept it.
So when it got to there, I'm getting old. I sold some and I got 20 million dollars because everybody who kept the stock got the same thousand percent increase. And I don't apologize for that because that's a system here.
I give most of it to charity. I'm not going to live to be 100. I don't need that kind of money, but that's our system and that's the kind of money I made for one year. I will drop a lot this year. I'll drop to about a million and a half.
I know. Pretty sad, huh?
Now you're six, you sold seven million of the first book. Some of that went to charity, didn't it?
All of it.
Are you going to keep this? Well, you know, what are you going to have in your pocket when you're fishing here in the senior years?
You're going to keep the proceeds of this book, aren't you?
No, it's going to my daughter runs it. Iacocca Foundation funds diabetes research and education.
This is a friendly question. All my adult life I've been a head of romance with cars as the head of one of the largest car manufacturers in the world. What is your favorite car in terms of when you produce and what is the what do you think is the best car that you produce?
Well, it's easy now because we bought Lamborghini and we have and we have a Countach, a new Silver anniversary model that sells for 150 grand. I drive one, but I can't afford one.
Yeah, sir. I hope you take it a lot of criticism. I just want to say I read your first book. I admire you very much. I own your first Chrysler Baron, which I still have. And I just bought the new Chrysler Baron convertible. I think it's the greatest car I've ever had.
You're not a plant, huh? No. All right. Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah. And we'll be back in just a moment.
Let's be impressed with Ford, the performance of Ford over the past. Yes, they're doing very well.
Hi, are you still involved with Ellis Island? Do you ever think the island will open? Oh, yes, I hope so. We collected 305 million dollars from you people. So now up to 320. The island should be finished next year. The Great Hall will be open and it'll be fantastic.
Will you preside in any way? Are you going to be in the fifth row or where will you be for this thing? Are you fired from that or those? Oh, no, no, I was in the first row. Weren't you at the July 4 celebration? I was out on the water, to be honest. You were in the front row also. You had a big yacht, probably. No, no, small.
Small yacht. No, I'll be in the front row. It's going to be a big event.
Criesley, you admit, made two goofs. How are you going to prevent a third? Oh, we've done more than two goofs. Some you haven't heard about. Well, you depend on your people. You delegate to people and they have to be good people.
Service is provided and promotional fees paid by the following. At Volvo, we've been safety testing our cars almost as long as we've been building them because we want to make sure our customers keep coming back.
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The Drake offers an exciting weekend in 421-0900.
The Volvo spot interrupted Leigh Iacocca, but they won't interrupt me saying Talking Straight is the latest title of his latest book.
Good evening.
America, a place, the harbor of Plymouth in England, a tiny ship called the Mayflowers being boarded by 102 people. There are 70 men and women, 32 children, a handful of cocks and hens and pets, and a dog.
Some of the voyagers are people who today we call pilgrims. They are leaving their homeland to seek more religious freedom in the New World.