Read Online Dethroning the King by Julie MacIntosh - Free Book Online

President Nixon in 1971, which had boosted the costs of its beer’s ingredients, and rival Schlitz had come up with a novel battle tactic—a way to brew beer in just 15 days, less than half the time it took Anheuser, using new techniques that sped up the fermentation process.
    Still, Gussie wasn’t convinced that his son was ready to be chief. In 1971, at the age of 72, he named trusted deputy Richard Meyer as president of the company. Gussie remained CEO and chairman of the board, but the move was nonetheless historic: Meyer became the first person who wasn’t a member of the Busch family to rise to such a lofty position. It served as a forceful reprimand for August III, who had put some of Anheuser’s old guard on alert with his abrasive attitude and efforts to fill the company with workaholic clones of himself.
    â€œThe talk,” reported BusinessWeek , “was that the elder Busch was teaching his chilly, tough-minded son some humility.”
    It didn’t work. If anything, the move fanned the flames already burning within The Third’s strident loyalists, who felt Gussie was past his prime. “The company was run like a corner grocery store,” said Robert Weinberg, one of the first executives August III recruited, who was forced to resign after disagreeing with Gussie during a board meeting. “I couldn’t give my secretary a twenty-five dollar a week raise without the old man approving it.”
    By 1974, Gussie was growing increasingly rattled by Miller’s aggression and success. As Anheuser’s profits and share price dropped through the floor, he started grasping at straws to turn things around by slashing the company’s sales and marketing budgets and firing a slew of workers at headquarters, a shocking move that caused consternation within Anheuser’s ranks. Concerns mounted that Gussie had lost his edge. After Gussie’s lieutenant, Richard Meyer, resigned in 1974 to protest the job cuts, Gussie finally installed his son—who was already an 11-year veteran on the company’s board of directors—as president.
    The Third and his league of loyal underlings had a grand vision for Anheuser-Busch, and they were ready to unleash it on the market as soon as he became president. First, though, they had to wage war at home. Gussie was showing no indication that he planned to relinquish the CEO title. For a man in his mid-70s, he remained full of vigor and aggression—and that, for The Third, was the problem. The only thing now standing in his way was his own aging father.
    So in May of 1975, The Third deposed Gussie with the same cool, detached efficiency that became a hallmark of his tenure. Fittingly, for a man whose life revolved around the brewery, 37-year-old August III seized control not in a heart-to-heart with his dad at the family dinner table but within the emotionally sterile atmosphere of Anheuser-Busch headquarters, through a dramatic and painstakingly choreographed boardroom coup. The power grab gave The Third a chance to show his remarkable ability to play one-on-one politics behind closed doors, a tactic he employed to great success for decades afterward with his own board of directors. He courted each member of Gussie’s board individually to ensure he had the support of enough of its members, and secured commitments from a range of executives that they would resign if he was not elected CEO. Confident that he had the backing he needed, The Third then called for a vote on the matter by the board of directors.
    The night before the board’s scheduled meeting, Gussie summoned every director out for a face-to-face chat in the imposing “gun room” at Grant’s Farm, one of many testaments on the estate to the family’s longstanding fascination with firearms. As Walter C. “Buddy” Reisinger, a great-grandson of Adolphus Busch, strode toward the gun room’s door, it swung open and another board