Automobiles: Jockeying for Position

For more than a decade now, Lee Iacocca has been synonymous with Chrysler Corp. -- for good and for ill. Almost singlehandedly he persuaded Congress in 1979 to bail out the ailing car company with a $1.5 billion loan guarantee, then paid back the money seven years ahead of schedule. After two best-selling autobiographies and 11 years of hawking his cars on TV, he became a household fixture.

Back at the Highland Park, Mich., headquarters of America's third largest automaker, platoons of loyal lieutenants toiled in his broad shadow, the best of them hoping to inherit the Chrysler crown one day....