Meet the Men Who Are Being Handed the Keys

For the foreseeable future, the U.S. government will play an unprecedented role in the nation's auto industry by virtue of its multibillion-dollar investments in General Motors and Chrysler.

But exactly how this critical public-private partnership will work is still being developed, even as leadership of the automakers is overhauled.

As a result, the new alliance between the government and the automakers will be defined by a group of people who are either new to their jobs or new to the industry.

Together, they must negotiate the inevitable tensions between the government and private businesses.

Despite having ownership stakes and the right to appoint board members at both auto companies, the Obama administration said, the firms generally will be left alone to run as commercial enterprises. The government said it will weigh in on "core governance" issues but refrain from day-to-day decisions. That promise is already being tested -- environmentalists are pressing for cars with lower emissions, unions are calling for more domestic jobs and elected representatives are protesting plant closings.

Here's a look at some of the people defining these new alliances.

General Motors

Fritz Henderson, 50, became chief executive in March after the Obama administration ousted his predecessor, G. Richard Wagoner Jr. A Detroit native, Henderson is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he pitched on the baseball team; he later earned an MBA from Harvard. He is a company man: Henderson started at GM in 1984 and took over as chief executive after serving as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. "The GM that many of you know, that let too many of you down, is history," he said this week when the company announced that it was filing for bankruptcy.

Kent Kresa, 71, became chairman when Henderson took the reins. A former chairman of Northrop Grumman, Kresa has been a GM director since 2003. At the government's direction, Kresa has been recruiting new GM board members, meeting weekly with autos task force chief Steven Rattner. He said this week that he is excited about GM's future but sad to leave parts of the old GM behind. "It's very bittersweet," he said.

Albert A. Koch, 66, GM's chief of restructuring, is the managing partner at the advisory firm AlixPartners, which had been helping to draft the turnaround plan. Koch previously served as interim chief financial officer of Kmart, among the largest retailers in history to file for bankruptcy protection. He will report to Henderson.

Ray G. Young, 47 , is GM's chief financial officer. Born in Ontario, he has been associated with General Motors since 1986, rising from a finance staff position and, before that, management positions in Brazil and Japan.

Chrysler

Sergio Marchionne, 56, is Fiat's chief executive, and he will run Chrysler. He had never worked in the auto industry when Fiat hired him in 2004 to turn the company around. From that success, he has been trolling for potential merger partners to create a company large enough to compete in the global marketplace.

Marchionne was born in Italy and has dual Canadian and Italian citizenship. He is also vice chairman of UBS.

C. Robert Kidder, 64, will be Chrysler's chairman. Kidder, the former chairman and chief executive of Borden Chemical and Duracell International, is one of four Chrysler board members named by the Treasury.

Since 2006, Kidder has headed 3Stone Advisors, a private-equity firm that focuses on clean-technology companies. He also serves as a director at Morgan Stanley and Schering-Plough.

Kidder replaces Robert L. Nardelli, who is returning to Cerberus, the private-equity firm that installed Nardelli as Chrysler's chairman and chief executive when it bought the automaker from Daimler in 2007.

Lucio A. Noto, 71, is one of three directors named by Fiat to the nine-member board of the new Chrysler. Noto joined Mobil in 1962 and climbed the ranks to become its chairman and chief executive. He helped build Mobil's operations in Japan, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Noto is managing director at Midstream Partners, an investment company focusing on energy. He has been critical of the Bush administration's energy policy.

Alfredo Altavilla, 45, Fiat's chief executive for powertrain technologies, will be a board member of the new company. He is in charge of business development at the Italian automaker and played a key role in its discussions with Chrysler.

Obama's Autos Task Force

Ron Bloom, 54, is an unusual hybrid, with both union and Wall Street experience.

He spent the early part of his career working for the investment banking firm Lazard Freres, where he dealt with corporate mergers and acquisitions. In 1990, he and a colleague founded their own firm.

Since 1996, Bloom has worked for the United Steelworkers union, serving at times as a lead negotiator during a tumultuous decade in which the American steel industry underwent bankruptcies and labor contract revisions.

The former investment banker drives a weathered Ford Taurus.

Steven Rattner, 56, brings investment banking experience to the president's task force. After studying at Brown University, Rattner landed a job at the New York Times and began an astonishingly rapid ascent. By 28, he was the paper's London correspondent. He then dropped newspapers for a career in investment banking, working for Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Lazard Freres.

In 2000, Rattner co-founded a private-equity firm, Quadrangle Group, which manages New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's (I) personal fortune and advises him on his media empire. Rattner lives in an opulent apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and pilots his own plane to a summer home on Martha's Vineyard. Along the way, Rattner has become a leading Democratic fundraiser, contributing to the presidential campaigns of Al Gore, John F. Kerry, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, finally, Barack Obama.