Robert D. McFadden

Charles G. Koch announced the death in a statement, which provided no other details but noted that David Koch had been treated for prostate cancer in the past. “Twenty-seven years ago,” the statement said, “David was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a grim prognosis of a few years to live. David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state of the art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay.”

Hitching his star to the soaring ambitions of Charles, his older brother, David Koch (pronounced coke) became one of the world’s richest people, with assets of $42.2 billion in 2019 and a 42% stake in the global family enterprise, Koch Industries. He also became a nationally known philanthropist and the early public face of the Koch political ascendancy, as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president in 1980.

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the tea party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.

A gregarious, socially prominent New Yorker who loved the ballet, Koch saw his name emblazoned on cornices at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital — the Manhattan institutions on which some of his $1.2 billion in charitable gifts were bestowed.

He was a familiar figure at society galas, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball star who long held the single-game scoring record — 41 points — for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, the Engineers. He also had what New York magazine called a “seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh.”

Koch had palatial homes in Manhattan; Southampton, New York; Aspen, Colorado; and Palm Beach, Florida. He kept a yacht in the Mediterranean for summer getaways and rented it out for $500,000 a week. His friends and acquaintances included Winston Churchill Jr., Prince Charles, and Bill and Melinda Gates.

He had both bad experiences and good luck. He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people at Los Angeles International Airport. He broke down in tears on a witness stand in Kansas during a civil trial that nearly tore his family apart over money. And for years, he and Charles faced, and denied, accusations of having exploited libertarian principles for self-serving purposes.

They insisted that they adhered to a traditional belief in the liberty of the individual, and in free trade, free markets and freedom from what they called government “intrusions,” including taxes, military drafts, compulsory education, business regulations, welfare programs and laws that criminalized homosexuality, prostitution and drug use.

An Electoral Force

Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.

But they said they had not given money to any Tea Party candidates. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” David Koch told New York magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.”

Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.

Among the groups they supported was the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. ALEC, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.

As part of their long-standing crusade for lower taxes and smaller government, the Koch brothers in recent years opposed dozens of transit-related initiatives in cities and counties across the country, a review by The New York Times found. Campaigns coordinated and financed by Americans for Prosperity fought state legislation to fund transportation projects, mounted ad campaigns and public forums to defeat transit plans, and organized phone banks to convince citizens that public transit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

By early 2017, Charles and David Koch, with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion, had become the leaders of a libertarian juggernaut loosely allied with the Republican Party, which, after eight years in the wings, again controlled the White House, both houses of Congress and many state legislatures.

Under the administration of Donald Trump, the Koch brothers’ prospects in Washington seemed improved, at least superficially. But beneath the surface lay substantive political and personal differences between the Kochs and Trump. While the Kochs did not endorse Trump, David Koch attended his election night victory party and later met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Kochs contributed heavily to Vice President Mike Pence’s two campaigns for governor of Indiana, and counted a half-dozen close allies among the president’s cabinet choices and Republican advisers.

“The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016,” The Times reported in September that year, “and they are determined to steer it toward their free-market vision.”

That proved prophetic. As the 2018 congressional elections approached, the Kochs’ frustrations with Trump broke into an ugly and open exchange between Charles Koch and the president. Charles denounced Trump’s restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive, and threatened to withhold the family’s support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus “overrated” and “a total joke in real Republican circles.”

Politics and Profits

Critics accused the Kochs of buying influence and using their political machine to manipulate elections and government policies under a guise of patriotism and freedom. Those efforts, critics said, cloaked an agenda to cut taxes and federal regulations governing business, the environment and other interests, primarily to benefit the Koch family and its enterprises.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and a critic of the Koch brothers, said in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” (2016), that the libertarian policies they embraced benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation’s worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations.

“Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others,” Mayer wrote, “but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth.” The Koch brothers rejected the allegations.

Koch money also funded initiatives to undercut climate science and to counter efforts to address climate change. As Mayer put it in her book, “The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.”

In interviews after the book was published, Mayer said that investigators who she believed were hired by the Koch brothers had tried to intimidate her by digging up false information, including accusations of plagiarism, to smear her reputation.

While the brothers portrayed themselves as equal partners promoting libertarian ideas, Charles was the major decision-maker, just as he was the dominant voice in Koch enterprises, according to Daniel Schulman’s 2014 biography, “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.”

There were other differences. Charles has lived most of his life in a walled compound in Wichita, Kansas, a secretive kingpin surrounded by lawyers, public relations retainers and security guards. By all accounts he reads economics, history and political philosophy, listens to opera, eats lunch in the company cafeteria with his employees and rarely gives press interviews.

David, by contrast, was an extrovert who attended several dinner parties a week and bantered with reporters, politicians and friends in New York society. His outgoing personality was on display in a nationally televised interview with Barbara Walters on ABC in 2014. His vice-presidential run with Ed Clark, an oil company lawyer nominated as the Libertarian presidential candidate, drew nearly 1 million votes.

Brothers against brothers

David Hamilton Koch was born in Wichita on May 3, 1940, the third of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, an oil engineer and entrepreneur, and the former Mary Clementine Robinson, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Kansas City physician.

David and his brothers — Frederick, seven years older; Charles, five years older, and David’s twin, William — grew up in Wichita under the discipline of an emotionally distant father, who taught them to fight and compete with one another. That spirit carried into adulthood, engendering feuds and lawsuits that became public displays of avarice and fraternal malice.

Fred Koch made millions in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the right-wing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.

After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, his sons inherited significant stakes in the company. Charles became chairman, chief executive and the strategist behind its expansion into chemicals, pipelines and consumer goods, eventually making Koch Industries the nation’s second-largest private conglomerate, with interests in 60 countries, more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of more than $100 billion.

David graduated from the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at MIT, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s in 1963. He worked for engineering firms in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City before joining the family company in 1970 as a technical services manager. But he did not settle in Wichita, as Charles had.

Instead, he founded a Koch Industries office in New York City, where he had already put down roots. He was known as a playboy whose penthouse parties were attended by models. In 1979, he was named president of his own division, Koch Engineering, which later morphed into Koch Chemical Technology Group. He became executive vice president of the parent company in 1981.

The oldest brother, Frederick, was the only sibling who took no active role in the family business; he attended Harvard and Yale and became a collector and patron of the arts. He was estranged from his father, who disowned and partly disinherited him, but Frederick’s shares in Koch Industries made him wealthy and proved critical later in a family fight for control of the company.

After earning a doctorate in chemical engineering, David’s twin, William, joined the company as a consultant in 1971, but never fit in. He moved from one job to another and complained that Charles was devoting too much money to libertarianism. In 1980, William attempted a boardroom coup to seize control of the company. It failed, and he was dismissed.

In a series of lawsuits that dragged on for years, William and Frederick claimed that Charles and David had cheated them out of $2 billion in a 1983 settlement that paid $1.1 billion for their 5.5 million shares of Koch Industries. Accusations of instability, greed and nefarious conduct peppered the trial, and at one point David sobbed as he testified of family tensions so bitter that private investigators had been hired to pilfer trash and bribe janitors to dig up dirt.

In 1998, a federal jury in Topeka, Kansas, finally ruled that the plaintiffs were owed nothing more, and in 2001 Charles, David and William reconciled, signing a settlement whose terms were not disclosed. They shared a meal for the first time in nearly two decades.

Setbacks and a Retirement

On Feb. 1, 1991, a Boeing 737 USAir flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles, carrying 89 people, including David Koch, crashed into a small commuter plane on landing. All 12 people on the commuter plane and 22 passengers on the jetliner were killed. In a smoky, crowded cabin, Koch pried open an exit and leaped to the tarmac, escaping with cuts and burned lungs.

He learned he had prostate cancer in 1992. He had surgery and radiation and hormone treatments that kept the disease in check for decades. All his brothers had prostate cancer and were said to have been cured.

Koch stepped away from his political and business interests in June 2018. In a letter to employees of Koch Industries announcing his brother’s retirement, Charles Koch said that David’s deteriorating health had made it impossible for him to continue working. The letter did not disclose the nature of his illness. David’s presence in social and political circles, which once ran at the highest levels, had been declining for several years.

A bachelor until he was 56, Koch married Julia Flesher, a former Adolfo fashion assistant, in 1996. They had three children: David Jr., Mary Julia and John Mark. All survive him.

Koch’s philanthropies went mostly to medical, educational and cultural institutions. He listed gifts of more than $395 million in recent decades. The largest was $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to build the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care in a 23-story structure in Manhattan.

At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the ballet venue became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after he pledged $100 million. Another $100 million went to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulatory center, and he gave $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a trustee, for the reconstruction of its plaza along Fifth Avenue. Both were named after him.

A dinosaur buff as a boy, Koch also gave millions to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing and to the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, for the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils, which opened in June.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/us/david-koch-dead.html" id="da528e56-6349-3309-a2ba-ee32b30ff58c">The New York Times</a>.

David Koch, Billionaire Who Fueled Right-Wing Movement, Dies at 79

David H. Koch, who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles from the corporate behemoth they ran and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, has died. He was 79.

Morgenthau’s wife, Lucinda Franks, said he died at Lenox Hill Hospital after a short illness.

In an era of notorious Wall Street chicanery and often dangerous streets, Morgenthau was the bane of mobsters, crooked politicians and corporate greed; a public avenger to killers, rapists and drug dealers; and a confidant of mayors and governors, who came and went while he stayed on — for nearly nine years in the 1960s as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and for 35 more as Gotham’s aristocratic Mr. District Attorney.

For a Morgenthau — the scion of a family steeped in wealth, privilege and public service — he was strangely awkward, a wooden speaker who seemed painfully shy on the stump. His grandfather had been an ambassador in President Woodrow Wilson’s day, and his father was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary. His own early political forays, two runs for governor of New York, ended disastrously.

But from Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of Chinatown, Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the endorsement of virtually all the political parties.

He presided over a battalion of 500 lawyers, a $75 million budget and a torrent of cases every year that fixed the fates of accused stock manipulators, extortionists, murderers, muggers, wife-beaters and sexual predators, and in turn helped to shape the quality of life for millions in a city of vast riches and untold hardships.

While he rarely went to court himself, Morgenthau, by his own count, supervised a total of 3.5 million cases over the years. Many of them were run-of-the-mill drug busts, but there were also highly publicized trials, like those of subway vigilante Bernard Goetz; the Central Park “preppy” killer, Robert Chambers; and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.

His victories included the 2005 conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtains and a $2 million birthday party for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia came to symbolize corporate greed. Found guilty of misappropriating more than $100 million from his company, Kozlowski was sentenced to eight to 25 years, although he won parole in 2014.

In a bizarre case, Morgenthau may have been the only prosecutor in history to convict a mother and son for murder without a body or a witness. The defendants, Sante and Kenneth Kimes, were accused of a scheme in 1998 to assume the identity of their landlady, 82-year-old socialite Irene Silverman, and take over her $7.7 million Manhattan mansion.

Her body was never found, but they were convicted of her murder and scores of other charges in 2000, partly on the basis of Sante Kimes’ notebooks detailing the plot and notes by the victim expressing fear of her lodgers. Sante Kimes denied everything, but Kenneth confessed later that his mother had used a stun gun on the victim and that he had then strangled her, stuffed the body in a bag and left it in a dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Morgenthau’s pursuit of crime sometimes took him beyond Manhattan. In 2004, he won a bribery-conspiracy case against state Sen. Guy J. Velella, a Republican whose district lay entirely outside Manhattan, in the Bronx and Westchester County. Prosecutors using surveying equipment showed that one crime scene was within 500 yards of Manhattan, and argued successfully that it fell within their jurisdiction.

Federal prosecutors said Morgenthau also did not respect jurisdictional lines when he followed the money trails in white-collar crimes to Paraguay, Iran, the Cayman Islands and Belgium. Two weeks before he retired, Morgenthau reached a $536 million settlement with Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second-largest bank, which had helped Iranian, Libyan and Sudanese clients hide shady business in America.

But Morgenthau spent years working with federal prosecutors investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a global enterprise founded by Middle Eastern investors as a nexus for money that flowed in and out of drug cartels, terrorist groups and dictatorships. In 1991, the bank pleaded guilty to federal and state charges in what Morgenthau called the largest bank fraud in financial history, with losses estimated at $15 billion. It was forced to close, pay fines and forfeit all its assets.

He also indicted Clark M. Clifford, an adviser to Democratic presidents, and his law partner Robert A. Altman on charges of taking $40 million in bribes for helping the bank gain control of a large bank holding company. Clifford’s failing health led to the dismissal of charges against him, and Altman was acquitted.

Although he cultivated an image of imperviousness to public pressure, Morgenthau was often barraged with criticism, particularly in cases involving racial bias or police brutality. Critics said he was slow to respond to an epidemic of police corruption in the 1980s, including cases in which transit officers falsely arrested eight black men, who sued and collectively won $1 million in damages.

After the 1983 death in custody of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old black graffiti artist arrested for spray-painting on a subway station wall, six white transit officers who had handcuffed him and were seen forcing a nightstick down on his neck were acquitted of criminal charges in 1985. The verdicts touched off protests by people who contended that Morgenthau had mishandled the prosecution.

And in a case that seemed to confirm national impressions of New York City as a cesspool of crime and race hatred, Morgenthau was vilified for what many called a waffling prosecution of Goetz, a white loner who shot four young black men on a subway train in 1984 after they surrounded him and demanded money. One victim was left paralyzed and partly brain-damaged.

“You don’t look so bad, here’s another,” the gunman told one prone victim as he fired again and fled.

Variously hailed as a hero who acted in self-defense and denounced as a racist self-appointed vigilante, Goetz was first indicted only for illegal possession of a gun. After a public outcry, another grand jury indicted him for attempted murder. But the more serious charges were dismissed on a technicality, and he was finally convicted in 1987 on a weapons charge and served six months in jail.

The disappearance of a 6-year-old boy, Etan Patz, from a Manhattan street in 1979 — a case that generated a movement to raise public awareness, increase law-enforcement resources and pass new legislation to find missing children — riveted the city and the nation for decades, as theories and suspects came and went without enough evidence for a prosecution during Morgenthau’s tenure.

But the case was reopened by District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in 2012, and Pedro Hernandez, a former bodega stock clerk who confessed to luring Etan into a basement and attacking him, was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering the boy. Hernandez, 56, who had lived in New Jersey for years, was traced through a tip from his brother-in-law. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Morgenthau lost about a quarter of his cases, and some that he won proved to be miscarriages of justice. The most glaring example was the conviction of five young black and Latino men from Harlem, four of whom falsely confessed on videotape to the 1989 beating and rape of the 28-year-old investment banker who became known as the Central Park Jogger.

After serving terms of 7 1/2 to 13 years, the five were exonerated in 2002 after an imprisoned serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. Morgenthau ordered a new investigation, including DNA tests that confirmed the Reyes account, and moved to clear the men in court.

“If only we had DNA 13 years ago,” Morgenthau lamented.

“I think it was his finest hour,” said Barry Scheck, a founding director of the Innocence Project of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, which promotes the use of DNA to reverse wrongful convictions. “Very few DAs would have done that, but he could with his stature, self-confidence, guts and commitment to principle. In that and other cases I’ve seen, I believe he has asked, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’”

Morgenthau was probably the most innovative prosecutor in the city’s history. To pursue financial crimes, he hired scores of accountants and detectives with financial expertise. He promoted DNA testing and other modern investigating techniques. Enlarging the homicide bureau and other units, he hired Spanish-speaking interpreters and hundreds of black, Hispanic and female prosecutors, and he created the office’s first sex-crimes and consumer affairs units.

He stressed the prosecution of career criminals, drug pushers, child pornographers, landlords who harassed tenants and perpetrators of attacks on gay men and lesbians. And throughout his tenure he opposed the death penalty, arguing that it was inhumane and was ineffective as a deterrent.

In later years, many New Yorkers wondered if he was too old for the job. As he ran for a ninth term in 2005, he faced rigorous opposition in a Democratic primary for the first time in decades. The challenger, Leslie Crocker Snyder, a former state court judge, was endorsed by a number of longtime Morgenthau supporters. But Morgenthau won the primary, 59-41%, and the general election, with 99% of the vote. He had run unopposed in general elections for 20 years, and did so again in this, his last race.

In a grandfatherly cardigan, his lanky legs propped on a desk and his wispy white hair afloat, Morgenthau looked like an aging prep-school master, not America’s best-known DA, a model for the prosecutor played by Steven Hill on the long-running TV drama “Law &amp; Order.” Some took his occasionally mismatched socks for absent-mindedness and his guttural voice for gruffness. He was typically mild-mannered.

Despite his highbrow upbringing, his inflections were New York: “had to” came out “hadda.” He loved Dunhill Montecruz cigars, allowing himself two a day until he quit years ago. His health seemed good even in his later years. But decades of strain in one of the city’s most demanding jobs were apparent in the stooped shoulders and the gaunt face lined with legal decisions.

By 2009, when he decided not to run for another term, Morgenthau was a virtual institution, despised by the enemies a prosecutor inevitably acquires but widely admired by New Yorkers and revered by generations of assistants he had hired and mentored, many of whom had gone on to judgeships and careers in politics and the law — extensions of his influence who regarded him as an embodiment of integrity.

His former protégés included Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court; Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division; and Vance, who succeeded him as the district attorney.

Looking back on Morgenthau’s career, Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University, said in 2011, “He turned the district attorney’s office into the premier law-enforcement office in the country, apart from the United States attorney general’s office.”

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. His grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice against Armenian genocide. Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Roosevelt’s treasury secretary from 1934-45, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and U.S. senator.

Robert grew up with his brother, Henry III, and his sister, Joan, in New York City, on the family’s farm in upstate East Fishkill, New York, and in a privileged world of estates, private schools and social connections, notably with the Kennedys of Boston and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York. He attended the Lincoln School in Manhattan and graduated from the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts in 1937 and from Amherst College in 1941 with high honors and a political science degree.

As a young man, he raced sailboats with Jack Kennedy off Cape Cod, spent memorable New Year’s Eves at the White House with his father, and in 1939 roasted hot dogs for King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth II of Britain at the home of his Hudson Valley friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (On leave from the Navy during World War II, he served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and FDR on the lawn of his family’s apple farm.)

While studying at Amherst, Morgenthau met Martha Pattridge, a Smith College student. They were married in 1943 and had five children. His first wife died in 1972. In 1977 he married Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. They had two children.

Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his first marriage, Jenny Morgenthau, Anne Morgenthau Grand, Elinor Morgenthau, Robert P. Morgenthau and Barbara Morgenthau Lee; the children of his second marriage, Joshua Franks Morgenthau and Amy Elinor Morgenthau; and by six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 2014, Franks published a memoir, “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me,” that focused on her long and passionate union with a man almost 30 years her senior.

Morgenthau had been in the Naval Reserve in college, and after graduation he went on active duty as an ensign. He passed his physical exam by concealing the near-deafness in his right ear from a boyhood mastoid infection. An officer aboard three destroyers and a minesweeper during World War II, he survived enemy attacks and won decorations for bravery under fire.

His destroyer, the USS Lansdale, was attacked by Nazi torpedo bombers in the Mediterranean off Algiers on April 20, 1944. Cut by explosions, the ship went down with a heavy loss of life. Morgenthau, the executive officer, saved several shipmates, leapt into the water and swam for three hours in the darkness until he and others were picked up by an American warship. In 1945 his ship, the USS Harry F. Bauer, was hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane off Iwo Jima, but its 550-pound bomb did not explode.

Mustering out after the war as a lieutenant commander, he enrolled in Yale Law School, finished a three-year course in two years and graduated in 1948. He soon joined the New York law firm Patterson, Belknap &amp; Webb and became the personal assistant to the senior partner, Robert P. Patterson, who had been President Harry S. Truman’s secretary of war.

Besides practicing corporate law, Patterson defended people swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, including actor Edward G. Robinson, who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and resisted blacklisting. “Unlike most Wall Street lawyers of that day, he would take loyalty cases,” Morgenthau said of Patterson, one of his early heroes. “He didn’t care what anybody else thought. He did what he thought was right.”

Patterson died in a plane crash in 1952. Morgenthau was supposed to have been on the flight — he had accompanied his boss on every other trip — but stayed behind to write a brief. Morgenthau was a partner in the firm from 1954-61.

After practicing law for 12 years, Morgenthau, who had dabbled in Democratic politics in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where he lived, jumped on the Kennedy bandwagon in 1960 and became chairman of Bronx Citizens for Kennedy. His reward was appointment in 1961 as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, embracing Manhattan, the Bronx and six upstate counties.

His most notable early case was the 1962 conviction of State Supreme Court Justice J. Vincent Keogh and Anthony (Tony Ducks) Corallo, a mobster who got his nickname ducking subpoenas and convictions, on charges of attempted bribery to influence a federal bankruptcy fraud case.

But after 17 months in office, Morgenthau left at the urging of the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, for a quixotic 1962 run to unseat Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, a rising star in the Republican Party’s moderate wing. It was a fiasco. Distant and seemingly distracted at campaign stops, from which he sometimes wandered away, Morgenthau lost by 500,000 votes.

After the election, President John F. Kennedy reappointed him to the federal prosecutor’s job, and he waded in zealously. He created the office’s first special unit to investigate Wall Street and over the next seven years brought charges against stock manipulators, money launderers, tax lawyers and Internal Revenue Service accountants. He also indicted 150 organized crime figures.

Always close to the Kennedys, Morgenthau was with Robert Kennedy at his home in McLean, Virginia, on Nov. 22, 1963, when the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called to report that the president had been shot in Dallas. Years later, facing criticism for hiring John F. Kennedy Jr. as an assistant district attorney, he snapped, “If having a famous father were a disqualification, I wouldn’t have gotten my job.”

He had overwhelming conviction rates but lost two cases against Roy M. Cohn, the aggressive former counsel to the anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy. Acquitted in 1964 of perjury in a stock swindle and in 1967 of mail fraud in a bus-line takeover, Cohn accused the prosecutor of waging a vendetta against him.

“A man is not immune from prosecution just because a United States attorney happens not to like him,” Morgenthau remarked.

In 1968 he again convicted Corallo, this time for bribing James L. Marcus, a former city water commissioner, to win contracts for renovating the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx. In 1969, Carmine De Sapio, the last Tammany Hall power broker, whose prescription dark glasses gave him a sinister air, was also convicted of conspiring to bribe Marcus, who went to prison for taking kickbacks.

After resisting pressure from the Nixon administration for a year, Morgenthau resigned as federal prosecutor in January 1970. He was briefly a deputy to Mayor John V. Lindsay, but quit to again run for governor. Short of funds and support, he soon withdrew from the Democratic primary. Rockefeller defeated the Democratic candidate, Arthur J. Goldberg, in the general election.

Morgenthau practiced law privately until 1974. He then jumped into a special election necessitated by the resignation (and impending death) of Hogan, Manhattan’s district attorney for 32 years, and easily defeated the interim appointee, Richard H. Kuh.

When he took office in 1975, the city was in trouble, threatened by bankruptcy, public-employee strikes and a fraying social fabric. Buildings were abandoned and burned. Garbage piled up in the streets. Graffiti covered subways and buses. Crime was rampant, with 648 murders in Manhattan alone that year. (There were 58 the year he left office.)

The prosecutor’s office was in disarray, too. Many of its 195 lawyers had no phones. Its $8 million budget ran out halfway through the fiscal year. There was little expertise for combating sophisticated criminality. Case processing was inefficient, with different lawyers handling arraignments, indictments and trials.

Morgenthau streamlined the system, achieving greater speed and higher conviction rates by having one lawyer see each case through to completion. His growing influence helped win new laws mandating forfeiture of gains from criminal activity and limiting jury trials for misdemeanors.

His victories included the 1981 convictions of Chapman in the killing of John Lennon, and of a Metropolitan Opera stagehand, Craig Crimmins, in the murder of a violinist at Lincoln Center; the 1988 manslaughter guilty plea of Chambers in the strangulation of Jennifer Levin in Central Park; the 1989 manslaughter conviction of Joel Steinberg in the beating death of his adopted daughter, Lisa; and the convictions in 1991 and 1992 of seven men in the subway murder of a Utah tourist, Brian Watkins.

At the end of his last term, Morgenthau was 90 and had served three years longer than Hogan. He joined the Manhattan law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &amp; Katz. Besides pro bono work, he wrote numerous op-ed articles in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News and The New York Times calling for immigration reform, crackdowns on illegal guns, and improved care for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2009 after announcing that he would not seek a 10th term, Morgenthau ruminated on the night in 1944 when his ship was torpedoed by Nazi warplanes and went down with 47 of his shipmates.

“I was swimming around without a life jacket,” he recalled. “I made a number of promises to the Almighty, at a time when I didn’t have much bargaining power.”

“That I would try to do something useful with my life.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/nyregion/robert-morgenthau-dead.html" id="af2147c1-3af7-3bf6-a33a-7b0c60d0ea03">The New York Times</a>.

Robert Morgenthau, Longtime Manhattan District Attorney, Dies at 99

Robert M. Morgenthau, a courtly Knickerbocker patrician who waged war on crime for more than four decades as the chief federal prosecutor for Southern New York state and as Manhattan’s longest-serving district attorney, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 99.

For 25 years, from the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s to the threshold of almost routine launchings in the 1980s, Kraft played crucial roles in the space program. He devised the protocols for exploration beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, orchestrated early orbital missions and spacewalks, and developed projects that put astronauts on the moon and into the first reusable space shuttles.

Aside from the astronauts who made history — including Alan B. Shepard Jr., with his suborbital flight; John Glenn, in orbiting the Earth; and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to land on the lunar surface — Kraft was the most familiar face of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s early years, the steady ground commander who often explained missions to a rapt world at news conferences.

In an era of perilous experiments hastened by the Soviet success of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, Kraft presided over triumphal breakthroughs in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He also stood by helplessly when a fire killed three astronauts on a launchpad in 1967, but he helped devise the ingenious plan that saved the Apollo 13 crew after an explosion crippled their spacecraft en route to the moon in 1970.

At a time when there were no rules or procedures for space travel, Kraft, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, virtually wrote the book for NASA. He originated the concept of mission control, with authority vested in a ground-based flight director, not in a pilot-astronaut soaring through space at 7 miles a second who might be overwhelmed by pressures, especially during launch or re-entry.

Kraft also developed the templates for a generation of space exploration: global tracking and communications networks; instruments to monitor the condition of astronauts; spacecraft propulsion and operating systems; flight plans; emergency procedures; techniques for splashdowns and recoveries at sea; even programs to train and coordinate the work of thousands of ground personnel. His plans for each mission were thicker than the New York telephone books of those days.

Appearing before hundreds of reporters as NASA’s spokesman in the early missions, first at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and later in Houston, he seemed a mild-mannered, soft-spoken technocrat. But in the windowless mission control room, he became a blunt taskmaster, demanding obedience and precision from subordinates and astronauts.

Wearing headphones, chewing a cigar, seated in a swivel chair at the flight director’s console surrounded by engineers at their computers and 17 projection screens, he coolly absorbed avalanches of incoming data and made tough “go, no-go” decisions during launch countdowns, at separation points of multistage rocket ascents and at other critical times in a flight.

During his NASA years, he never saw a rocket lift off, except on television monitors. Nor did he usually address his astronauts. A “capsule communicator” relayed his instructions, although he went on the air to give emphasis to his orders, to intervene in emergencies and to banter away tensions. His voice conveyed unshakable confidence, though a flight surgeon during one liftoff measured his pulse at 135 beats a minute.

Some astronauts chafed under his commands. In one contretemps, Kraft regarded Scott Carpenter, one of America’s original astronauts, as insubordinate on a Mercury flight and grounded him permanently.

While his relationship with the astronauts was not always smooth, he was adamant about who was in charge. “The guy on the ground ultimately controls the mission,” Kraft told The New York Times Magazine in 1965. “There’s no question about that in my mind or in the astronauts’ minds. They are going to do what he says.”

Kraft directed all six piloted missions of Project Mercury, which made Shepard the nation’s first person in space in 1961 and put Glenn into orbit in 1962.

He also directed portions of the longer-duration, two-astronaut Gemini missions of 1965-66. These included the first rendezvous of two spacecraft and the first spacewalk, with Edward White floating above the United States, giving mesmerizing descriptions of the Earth below. Gemini proved that astronauts could remain in space for the time it would take to get to the moon and back.

As NASA turned to the later Gemini flights and the lunar-landing missions of the late 1960s, Kraft stepped back from direct control of flights and took broader roles in planning and managing Project Apollo, including the selection and mentoring of his successors in flight control.

By then, he was a household name to Americans, and his habit of lighting a cigar amid jubilant cheers and applause at moments of triumph in mission control had become a familiar portrait on television and in newspapers and magazines, a symbol of swelling national pride in outdistancing the Soviet Union.

In 1965, Kraft was on the cover of Time magazine, profiled as the “Conductor in a Command Post.” He drew the comparison himself: “The conductor can’t play all the instruments — he may not even be able to play any one of them. But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes the music. That’s what we do here.”

With his protégés Glynn Lunney and Eugene Kranz in charge of flight controls, Kraft became director of flight operations, with overall responsibility for the dress rehearsals of Apollo 7, 8, 9 and 10; for the historic Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969; and for Apollo 12, a moon landing four months later.

The 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing has been widely celebrated with a host of commemorative events, including television documentaries.

At the climax of Apollo 11’s descent to the lunar surface, Kraft was in mission control and conferred urgently with Kranz when, minutes before the scheduled landing, computer alarms rang out, threatening disaster. The world knew nothing about it until Kraft disclosed the event days later, and credited the Kranz team with resolving it.

“The computer was right on the ragged edge,” he said. Asked if the team had been worried, he snapped, “You’re damn right we were.”

Four more Apollo missions put astronauts on the moon, but Kraft was less directly involved. He became deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1969. However, when Apollo 13 was crippled by an explosion en route to the moon, Kranz called him in to mission control. Kraft chaired a meeting of senior managers, who devised a rescue plan that used the lunar excursion module as a “lifeboat” to save the crew, as dramatized in the 1995 film “Apollo 13.”

In 1972, Kraft was named director of the spacecraft center — renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973 — and held the post for a decade until his retirement in 1982. Besides overseeing the remaining Apollo missions, he played roles in the success of the first crewed space station, Skylab; the first international space docking; the Apollo-Soyuz test project; and the first space shuttle flights.

The shuttle Columbia flew a nearly flawless first mission in April 1981, circling the world 36 times and landing in California. But its second flight seven months later had to be curtailed to two days from five after fuel-cell problems arose.

It was “the prudent thing to do,” said Kraft, who did not light a cigar.

Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. was born in Phoebus, in eastern Virginia, on Feb. 28, 1924, to Christopher and Vanda (Suddreth) Kraft. His father, a hospital finance officer, had been born just before the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World: thus the name. Later, many would consider it appropriate for the son.

Christopher Jr. was a fine baseball player and dreamed of becoming a pro. After high school graduation in 1941, he enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. With the outbreak of World War II, he tried to enlist in the Navy but was rejected because of a childhood hand injury. He graduated in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering.

The next year he joined what is now known as the Langley Research Center, of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It was on the cutting edge of aeronautical research, using wind tunnels to test aircraft designs and working on the X-1 experimental rocket.

In 1950, he married Elizabeth Anne Turnbull. They lived in Houston and had two children, Gordon and Kristi Anne. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

At Langley for 13 years, Kraft distinguished himself by solving complex flight problems and directing the work of test pilots. He also met future leaders of America’s space program, particularly Robert R. Gilruth, who became his mentor and the first director of the Manned Spacecraft Center.

After Sputnik opened the space race, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958. Langley research personnel became the core of its Space Task Group, charged with putting Americans into space, and Gilruth assigned Kraft to Project Mercury.

In retirement, Kraft became a consultant to Rockwell International and IBM. His memoir, “Flight: My Life in Mission Control,” was published in 2001 and became a bestseller.

In 2011, NASA named the mission control center in Houston after him.

Michael Coats, then the director of the Johnson Space Center, called Kraft’s life a testament to his dream of space exploration:

“He is a space pioneer without whom we’d never have heard those historic words on the surface of the moon: ‘Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ Those words effectively put Houston, and this building behind us, on the intergalactic map forever.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/science/christopher-kraft-dead-nasa.html" id="29d27087-fb21-3e2e-a0b5-b817644aaa6b">The New York Times</a>.

Christopher Kraft, NASA's Face and Voice of Mission Control, Dies at 95

Christopher C. Kraft Jr., the legendary founder of NASA’s mission control, who directed America’s first piloted orbital flights, oversaw the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, died on Monday in Houston, two days after the 50th anniversary of that historic moment on the moon. He was 95.

From Jan. 1, 1975, when he took over from an interim successor to the legendary district attorney Frank S. Hogan, to Dec. 31, 2009, when he finally gave up his office in the old Criminal Courts Building on the edge of Chinatown, Morgenthau was the face of justice in Manhattan, a liberal Democrat elected nine times in succession, usually by landslides and with the endorsement of virtually all the political parties.

His former protégés included Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court; Gov. Andrew Cuomo; former Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Lanny A. Breuer, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division; and Cyrus Vance Jr., who succeeded him as the district attorney.

Robert Morris Morgenthau was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1919. His grandfather, the real estate tycoon Henry Morgenthau Sr., was President Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in World War I and a prominent voice against Armenian genocide. Robert’s father, Henry Jr., was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s treasury secretary from 1934-45, and his mother, Elinor (Fatman) Morgenthau, was a niece of Herbert H. Lehman, the New York Democratic governor and U.S. senator.

His victories included the 2005 conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski, chief executive of Tyco International, whose $6,000 shower curtains and a $2 million birthday party for his wife on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia came to symbolize corporate greed. Found guilty of misappropriating more than $100 million from his company, Kozlowski was sentenced to 8 to 25 years, although he won parole in 2014.

Her body was never found, but they were convicted of her murder and scores of other charges in 2000, partly on the basis of Sante Kimes’ notebooks detailing the plot and notes by the victim expressing fear of her lodgers. Sante Kimes denied everything, but Kenneth confessed later that his mother had used a stun gun on the victim and that he had then strangled her, stuffed the body in a bag and left it in a Dumpster in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The disappearance of a 6-year-old boy, Etan Patz, from a Manhattan street in 1979 — a case that generated a movement to raise public awareness, increase law-enforcement resources and pass new legislation to find missing children — riveted the city and the nation for decades, as theories and suspects came and went without sufficient evidence for a prosecution during Morgenthau’s tenure.

As a young man, he raced sailboats with Jack Kennedy off Cape Cod, spent memorable New Year’s Eves at the White House with his father, and in 1939 roasted hot dogs for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain at the home of his Hudson Valley friends Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (On leave from the Navy during World War II, he served mint juleps to Winston Churchill and FDR on the lawn of his family’s apple farm.)

<h1>Lee A. Iacocca, the visionary automaker who ran the Ford Motor Co. and then the Chrysler Corp. and came to personify Detroit as the dream factory of America’s postwar love affair with the automobile, died Tuesday at his home in Bel Air, California. He was 94.</h1>

He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, a family spokeswoman said.

In an industry that had produced legends, from giants like Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler to the birth of the assembly line and freedoms of the road that led to suburbia and the middle class, Iacocca, the son of an immigrant hot-dog vendor, made history as the only executive in modern times to preside over the operations of two of the Big Three automakers.

In the 1970s and ’80s, with Detroit still dominating the nation’s automobile market, his name evoked images of executive suites, infighting, power plays and the grit and savvy to sell American cars. He was so widely admired that there was serious talk of his running for president of the United States in 1988.

Detractors branded him a Machiavellian huckster who clawed his way to pinnacles of power in 32 years at Ford, building flashy cars like the Mustang, making the covers of Time and Newsweek and becoming the company president at 46, only to be spectacularly fired in 1978 by the founder’s grandson, Henry Ford II.

But admirers called him a bold, imaginative leader who landed on his feet after his dismissal and, in a 14-year second act that secured his worldwide reputation, took over the floundering Chrysler Corp. and restored it to health in what experts called one of the most brilliant turnarounds in business history.

He accomplished it with a controversial $1.5 billion federal loan guarantee, won by convincing the government that Chrysler was vital to the national economy and should not be allowed to fail, and with concessions from unions, new lineups of cars, and a new national spokesman — himself — featured in a decadelong television advertising campaign.

“If you can find a better car, buy it,” the blunt Iacocca challenged the public. “I’m not asking you to buy any car on faith. I want you to compare.”

As the 1980s unfolded, his commercials hammered at a theme: “The pride is back.” And so it seemed. The guaranteed loans were repaid in four years, seven years early. Americans were buying cars at a record clip again, including Chrysler’s new minivans and compacts. The company’s $1.7 billion loss in 1980 had become a $2.4 billion profit by 1984.

Chrysler was selling cars as fast as it could make them. Its stock price soared, as did Iacocca’s popularity. His achievement in restoring Chrysler was all the more impressive because it had begun in a national recession and matured against intense competition from America’s larger automakers, Ford and General Motors, and from a rising tide of imported cars from Japan and other countries.

His book “Iacocca: An Autobiography” (1984, written with William Novak) became a runaway bestseller, the leading nonfiction hardcover of 1984 and 1985. With tens of millions of copies in print, it still regales readers with its intimate look at the auto industry of Iacocca’s day, its cast of larger-than-life characters, its accounts of the author’s dismissal at Ford and his rescue of Chrysler.

In 1987, the company that had nearly failed posted sales of $26 billion and sat on a $3 billion cash cushion. Iacocca, who had taken only $1 as compensation in the first year after winning the loan guarantee, was now the industry’s most highly paid executive, with salary and stock options worth $18 million.

Television commercials and news photographs had made him one of the nation’s best-known faces, an oval of grandfatherly features: a balding pate, a fleshy nose, mischievous eyes behind half-rim glasses, thin lips chomping an imported cigar, and a bland political smile that gave away nothing.

A heroic figure to many Americans, he became chairman of a project to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and was in demand for speeches and public appearances that took on the color of a campaign. He conferred with President Ronald Reagan, members of Congress, governors and business leaders. He was mobbed by admirers and pursued by the press. Polls confirmed that a run for the White House was realistic, and his denials of political ambition only fueled public interest in a possible candidacy.

“The loan guarantee debate, Chrysler’s subsequent return to health, and the publication of his best-selling autobiography conferred mythic status on him as the nation’s economic Winston Churchill,” Doron P. Levin, a former reporter and Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, wrote in “Behind the Wheel at Chrysler” (1995). “At the peak of his popularity, many Americans believed not only that Iacocca held the answers to the nation’s economic ills but also that he should lead the country as president.”

But by the late 1980s, storm clouds that Iacocca and other auto executives had long ignored were gathering. The stock market had plunged in 1987, and Japan, long since recovered from the disasters of World War II, had become a world-class economic power, whose fuel-efficient cars were flooding the United States. Americans wanted reliable, well-built cars with innovations like air bags, and Honda and Toyota were supplying them.

Iacocca, as he acknowledged, had drifted too far from day-to-day operations. Instead of reinvesting in new models to rival Japanese imports, he had aggressively expanded into other ventures, acquiring the corporate jet manufacturer Gulfstream and American Motors, a small competitor. By the 1990s, many American cars could not compete with Japanese innovations.

The Iacocca magic, like Chrysler’s earnings, faded as the nation dipped into recession. He persuaded Congress to give some protection to the U.S. auto industry from imported cars, but Japan just set up factories to build cars in the United States.

Iacocca barnstormed the country, demonizing the Japanese as alien invaders. He argued that Chrysler made better cars, that Japan’s “Teflon kimono” had deceived Americans and that the United States was suffering from a “national inferiority complex.”

It backfired. Critics accused him of “Japan bashing” and said Chrysler’s offer of $1,000 rebates suggested a fire sale.

Trying to reverse the decline, Iacocca established partnerships with Mitsubishi, Maserati and Fiat, but they were no panacea. Finally surrendering to pressures to step down, he hired Robert J. Eaton, the head of GM’s European operations, as his designated successor, and retired as Chrysler’s chairman and chief executive in 1992.

“He’s like Babe Ruth,” Bennett E. Bidwell, a retired Chrysler executive, said of Iacocca. “He hit home runs and he struck out a lot. But he always filled the ballpark.”

He was born Lido Anthony Iacocca on Oct. 15, 1924, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, one of two children of Nicola and Antoinette Perrotto Iacocca, immigrants from San Marco, Italy, who named him after the Venice beach resort. He and his sister, Delma, grew up in Allentown.

Their father had little education. He started as a hot-dog vendor in Allentown, borrowed money and went into real estate and other ventures. He lost nearly everything but his Orpheum Weiner House in the Depression. But he later acquired several movie theaters and opened one of the country’s first car-rental companies with a small fleet of Fords, and Lido grew up talking cars with his father.

“The Depression turned me into a materialist,” Iacocca recalled in his autobiography. “Years later, when I graduated from college, my attitude was: ‘Don’t bother me with philosophy. I want to make ten thousand a year by the time I’m 25, and then I want to be a millionaire.’”

He also heard anti-Italian slurs in streets and schoolyards. While attending Allentown High School, he suffered a severe case of rheumatic fever. Unable to compete in sports, he pushed himself in his studies and graduated with honors in 1942. Lingering effects of the illness kept him out of World War II.

At Lehigh University in nearby Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, he became a talented debater, had excellent grades and in 1945 graduated after three years with a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering.

He also impressed a Ford recruiter and was hired for an executive training program. He took a leave to attend Princeton on a scholarship, and after earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1946 returned to Ford. Instead of engineering, he saw his future in marketing in the postwar boom years and lined up a job in sales in Ford’s Chester, Pennsylvania, office, assisting dealers in the eastern Pennsylvania region.

He decided to change his foreign-sounding first name to Lee, a serious concession for a young man proud of his ethnicity. He worked endless hours in the 1940s and early ’50s, honing his speaking skills, studying sales trends and coordinating the strategies of his dealers. They sold cars aggressively, and his career flourished.

In 1956, Iacocca married Mary McCleary, a Ford receptionist in Chester. They had two children, Kathryn Iacocca Hentz and Lia Iacocca Assad, who survive him, as do a sister, Delma Kelechava, and eight grandchildren. His first wife died in 1983 from complications of diabetes. In 1986 he married Peggy Johnson, a former flight attendant. The marriage was annulled in 1987. In 1991 he married Darrien Earle, whom he divorced in 1994.

It took a decade for Iacocca to distinguish himself in Ford’s huge workforce. Then he had a clever idea for a sales pitch. It was “56 for 56”: offering 1956 models with 20% down and $56 a month for three years. The idea was so successful regionally that Ford turned it into a national campaign and made him the corporate director of truck marketing.

He also came to the attention of Robert S. McNamara, Ford’s vice president for car and truck sales and a future Ford president and secretary of defense. As a McNamara protégé, he learned to be an executive — to run meetings, analyze trends and mediate the often competing interests of Ford’s bean-counting financial analysts and its aggressive marketing and sales forces.

He also learned the subtle, sometimes brutal, strategies of the executive scramble — to court allies, evaluate and undercut rivals, whatever it took to gain the next rung up the corporate ladder. Associates said he could humble a subordinate for a mistake one day and praise him the next. He once fired an executive and, on the way to the door, reminded him of their families’ dinner date later in the week.

Iacocca succeeded McNamara as vice president and general manager of the Ford Division in 1960, and four years later secured his place in automotive history by bringing out the Mustang, a small, rakish car with bucket seats and a floor shift that appealed to affluent young buyers and motorists of all ages who had dreamed of owning a sports car.

The Mustang was the hottest-selling new car model in Detroit history, ringing up $1.1 billion in net profits over two years. Its success landed Iacocca and the Mustang on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week in April 1964. The garrulous Iacocca became a favorite of reporters, who delighted in his candor, rare in the car industry.

He produced other winners — the Maverick to compete with imports, the Lincoln Continental Mark III to challenge GM’s Cadillac Eldorado. There were missteps: The Pinto burst into flames in rear-end collisions, and lives were lost. For years he opposed air bags, mandatory seat belts and other safety items, insisting they did not sell cars.

But he outmaneuvered rivals for the executive suite and was named president of Ford in 1970, the No. 2 post, reporting only to the chairman, Henry Ford II.

In the next eight years, as gasoline prices and foreign competition rose, Iacocca cut costs, streamlined operations and turned unprofitable divisions around. He nurtured managers who challenged conventional wisdom and solicited ideas from dealers and unions.

He also began to revel in the glitzy perquisites of his lofty position. He traveled in a private Boeing 727, entertained in lavish Ford suites at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and Claridge’s in London, and partied with Frank Sinatra and other celebrities. His extravagances reportedly offended Ford.

Iacocca’s relationship with the boss had never been close. Ford visited his office only a few times in his eight years as president. Their families rarely socialized. The company was publicly held, but Ford remained autocratic, deciding the fates of executives who came and went.

He fired Iacocca in July 1978, saying he just did not like him. He never gave more detailed reasons. The company posted a $1.8 billion profit that year. Some industry observers said Ford could not tolerate a nonfamily rival, especially one with Iacocca’s brass. In his memoir, Iacocca detailed a long struggle between them, and called Ford a man of limited vision with ethnic and racial biases.

Several months later, Iacocca joined Chrysler. It was debt-ridden, losing millions and had virtually no credit. He closed plants, cut the workforce in half, won large union concessions and sold assets to raise cash. It was not enough. He turned to the government for help, igniting a national debate over a “bailout.”

But Iacocca did not ask for a handout, or even a loan, just a federal guarantee of loans from banks and other creditors. Taking him at his word — that he could resurrect Chrysler, that it was too important to be allowed to fail — Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed the loan guarantee, enabling the company to get back on its feet. Ultimately, Chrysler borrowed only $1.2 billion of the $1.5 billion that was guaranteed, and paid it back long before it was due.

Robert D. McFadden

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