Free Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

Among the Johnsons’s closest friends were Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his wife, Mila. Mila and Laurie Johnson would prowl Manhattan, power shopping for the prime minister’s residence. Nabisco began sponsoring the Dinah Shore women’s golf tournament, and Johnson transformed it into a star-studded affair. His growing stable of celebrity athletes, now called Team Nabisco, was paraded about at the tournament. Gerald Ford and Bob Hope graced the Pro-Am. Johnson’s friend Oleg Cassini put him on a billboard.
    Johnson had always loved rubbing shoulders with celebrities, of course. But in the past there had been a sense that it stemmed from his recognizing the foibles of the upper class. He would return from an elite social occasion in Britain giggling about how the royal family was “all fucked up,” or telling tales of that crazy Maggie Thatcher: “A pisser,” he would chortle. The Merry Men, mired in cookies and crackers, loved it, even while some of them began to worry their man was becoming more an insider of the circles he ridiculed than an outsider.
    If Johnson grew indifferent toward Nabisco, it was because he couldno longer see much of a future in it. The cookie wars had changed his thinking; he regarded the battle with Frito-Lay and P&G not as a final victory, but as the successful deflection of a shot fired across his bow. There would be another giant like Procter & Gamble—maybe even P&G itself—that would come after him again. Nabisco, after all, had fatal weaknesses. No amount of work was going to revitalize its aging bakeries anytime soon. Johnson, in fact, never bothered to formulate any kind of master plan for reshaping Nabisco. Years of scrambling had soured him on long-range planning. Instead he spent his time enjoying the high life, putting out corporate fires as they flared, and waiting.
    Someone had once codified the Standard Brands culture into twenty Johnsonisms. Number thirteen was “Recognize that ultimate success comes from opportunistic, bold moves which, by definition, cannot be planned.”
    On a spring day in 1985, less than a year after being tapped Nabisco’s chief, Johnson took a call from J. Tylee Wilson, chairman and chief executive officer of RJ Reynolds Industries, the North Carolina-based tobacco giant. Would Johnson be interested in getting together for lunch? Maybe, Wilson said, they could do some business.

Chapter
2
     
     
    Imagine you lived in this great old house. You grew up in it, and all your happy memories are in it, and you take special care of it for the next generation. Then one day, you come home to discover it’s been turned into a brothel. That’s how I feel about RJR.
    — A former RJR Nabisco employee in Winston-Salem
     
     
    If not for the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company, the modest skyline of downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina, would not exist at all. For years the business was headquartered in a twenty-two-story stone building that, when completed in 1929, was considered such an architectural gem it was decided to take the design to New York and execute it on a grander scale: the Empire State Building.
    On one side of the miniature Empire State is the stolid headquarters of Wachovia Bank & Trust. Its vaults stuffed with Reynolds stock and deposits, Wachovia grew to be one of the South’s preeminent banks. On the far side of the Reynolds building is a taller, more modern structure that houses the overflow of employees from headquarters. Two blocks away rises a glass-sheathed skyscraper that is the tallest in town. Its anchor tenant is Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice, North Carolina’s biggest law firm, whose practice is firmly anchored in Reynolds Tobacco.
    If not for Reynolds, Winston-Salem would be like a lot of other little southern cities of 140,000 souls. Except for the demiskyscrapers, the downtown is largely scruffy—a place of tired old stores and tired oldpeople. Reynolds makes Winston-Salem different.
    From downtown, its