Read Online Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar - Free Book Online

dinner, an honored but stunned Schaeberle said, “Who’s going to pay for this?”
    The company was, of course. The company also had to vastly upgrade its pay scale, since thirty-six Standard Brands executives made more than $100,000 compared to fifteen Nabisco ones. Johnson’s base pay was morethan double Schaeberle’s, requiring a vast raise for the chairman. He accepted it reluctantly, but later balked when told his 1983 salary and bonus would total more than $1 million. What would the shareholders say? Schaeberle ordered that his bonus be cut enough to get him back into six figures. Johnson talked him out of it, saying he had it coming to him. If Schaeberle made a million, Johnson had it coming to him as well, of course.
    Johnson continued to upgrade his own life-style, buying a huge French chateau-style house with a forty-acre estate in Sparta, New Jersey. He attempted to commute via helicopter to Nabisco’s headquarters in East Hanover, New Jersey, but was thwarted when town fathers repeatedly refused to allow helicopters to land there.
    Slowly but surely, Johnson closed his grip around Schaeberle’s company. One by one, veteran Nabisco executives began to vanish, replaced by Johnson men. The fall of Nabisco’s powerful chief financial officer, Dick Owens, was a prime example of the way Johnson worked. At the time of the merger, Owens appeared to be at the height of his powers. He was made an executive vice president and sat on the combined companies’ board. Whatever Owens wanted, Johnson got him. He approved a steady stream of Owens’s requests for new aides: a senior vice president here, a vice president there, a veritable raft of assistant vice presidents. In Johnson’s warm embrace, Owens’s financial fiefdom grew steadily.
    Then one day Johnson walked into Schaeberle’s office with his brow furrowed. “Dick is building up a huge financial organization,” Johnson fretted. With unassailable logic, he laid out the dangers of substituting the analysis and judgments of people at headquarters for those of line managers. “We shouldn’t be doing the numbers for the business managers,” Johnson suggested.
    “Well,” Schaeberle asked, “what should we do?”
    “I think Dick is congenitally incapable of decentralizing,” replied Johnson. “I think we need to make a change.”
    And so Owens was shunted aside, replaced, for a time, by Johnson himself. Johnson immediately installed Standard Brands people beneath him, and replaced Nabisco’s financial controls with a system devised at Standard Brands. Only Standard Brands people seemed to understand the new system, which suited Johnson fine. Having changed the playbook, Johnson’s troops now emerged victorious in a string of minor bureaucratic battles. “At any meeting,” recalled a former Johnson lieutenant, “youcould embarrass the Nabisco guys.”
    Johnson had Standard Brands’s Dean Posvar named planning director, a job that put Posvar—and thus Johnson—in charge of board presentations and enabled the Johnson troops to define and thus control board discussion. Johnson’s crony Mike Masterpool took over public relations, giving him control of the outward dissemination of information as surely as Posvar’s planning group and the financial apparatus regulated the inner flow.
    It was the same story all the way down the line, thanks to another Johnson move. Schaeberle had originally planned to keep Nabisco and Standard Brands operations separate within the combined company. But on Johnson’s suggestion, they were integrated. As departments were combined, the timid Nabisco executives were forced to swim with the Standard Brands sharks. When choices for a top position had to be made, Johnson walked into Schaeberle’s office and, while insisting he wasn’t playing favorites, laid out a compelling case for the Standard Brands man. “You’re right,” Schaeberle would say. “This guy is better.”
    To some who caught Johnson’s act during this