A Letter From the Publisher: Apr. 1, 1985

Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca has had such a long and distinguished career in the auto industry that even before the reporting on this week's cover story % began, TIME's Detroit bureau had amassed a bulging storehouse of information on him. The files date back to 1964, when the magazine produced the first of its four cover stories on Iacocca. Then a Ford executive, he had just launched what quickly became the hottest-selling new car in the U.S., the Mustang. While preparing for this week's cover story, Detroit Bureau Chief Paul Witteman found among the office records some of his own notes on Iacocca from 1978. "When I first saw him at the Ford annual meeting, he was keeping a low profile," Witteman recalls. "The next time we crossed paths was in November 1978, as he was emerging from behind a curtain into the threadbare Chrysler pressroom with a big cigar in his hand. He was about to be introduced as the company's newest employee."

By 1981 Iacocca was presiding over Chrysler's press briefings in what he dubbed "the gloom and doom room" because of the bad news he was forced to report every quarter. He had made his second cover appearance in 1980 as a symbol of the auto industry's plight. Two and a half years later, when Iacocca had turned Chrysler around, he was on the cover again. "Iacocca was by then referring to the pressroom as 'the boom-boom room,' " Witteman remembers.

For this week's report, Witteman traveled with Iacocca to Rochester on the Chrysler executive jet, watched Iacocca make decisions in Detroit about new models, and observed him working the crowd at a cocktail party for House Democratic leaders at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. He interviewed Iacocca's two daughters as well as present and former executives at Chrysler and Ford and even joined Iacocca at home for a dinner prepared by his fiancee.

Associate Editor Kurt Andersen, who wrote the story, accompanied Witteman for an interview with Iacocca at Chrysler's New York City offices, and in Detroit watched an adroit Iacocca performance before a group of securities analysts. "He is a marvelous pitchman," says Andersen. "Most politicians and business figures are chronically guarded. I was surprised to find a company chairman talking a mile a minute, saying remarkable things, and never placing anything off the record." That alone would be enough to make him a journalist's delight.