Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

This is a book about money and boardroom diplomacy. When the two mix, it ends up drawing greedy, needy men into something like a gold-plated bar-room brawl. It is a fascinating, readable and highly believable account of one of the largest LBO's of the 1980s. ( )

A really interesting and detailed account of some the biggest players and biggest companies in their time. Highly recommended for anyone interested in big business or corporate finance maneuvering. ( )

An exhausistively researched and immensely entertaining of the RJR Nabisco leveraged buyout. At about five hundred pages, its attention to detail is truly breath-taking. Burroughs and Helyar provide insightful, detailed biographies of every major player involved in this deal, histories of each of the companies involved, and seem to have cross-examined their sources about the smallest details of how the takeover bids were put together. "Barbarians" serves as a straight-faced condemnation of eighties-era takeover mania and also illustrates a broader cultural shift that saw quiet, respectable businessmen pushed aside in favor of flashy, self-aggrandizing showmen obsessed with their perks, their bonuses, and their public image. In F. Ross Johnson, RJR Nabisco's shallow, incompetent, buffoonish CEO, Burrough gives us a villain for the ages. The fact that this embodiment of Reagan-era greed walked away from this fiasco fifty million dollars richer, received something called the "United States Silver Medal of Patriotism," and sits on Duke University's Board of Trustees is more proof, as if anybody needed any, that life just isn't fair.

Burroughs, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, knows this territory intimately and seems much more comfortable relating this story than he was talking about John Dillinger's escapades in "Public Enemies." It helps that he knows that he's got a terrific yarn on his hands and he works to keep the book's tempo on "high" from start to finish. This isn't to say that this story's always easy to keep track of. The financial transactions that Burrough describes are complex, and some of the financial slight-of-hand employed by this book's protagonists is positively Byzantine. I often found myself turning to the much-needed "Cast of Characters" that's included in the book's first few pages. Still, Burrough is careful to explain the basics of LBOs and other esoteric financial transactions in language that the average reader can understand, and he's not afraid to let his readers know when the details of a certain deal are best left to the real experts. His privileging of plot over financial nuance pays off handsomely: "Barbarians" is as addictive a book as I've ever had the pleasure to read. Burrough and Helyar's book is a fantastic piece of journalism and is highly recommended. ( )

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Strange to say, this book made me feel as though I woke to find myself in a world filled with nothing but slugs, spiders and toxic ooze. The more I read, the more I was sickened by the people I was reading about. None of them seemed actually human – more like … slug carcasses. Creatures I wouldn’t have wished to even touch for fear I’d be infected with whatever disease they carried around with them: rich, fat, soulless, greedy people craving money more than their own humanity.

And it all started with the fat slug at the top of the squirming pile (F. Ross Johnson) who ran a traditional American company, filled with life-long loyal employees: RJR Nabisco, out of Winston Salem. Didn’t like the way the stock failed to rebound after the 1987 crash. Probably would have recovered without any problem if he’d just left things alone. But he didn’t. Instead he decided to take the company private with an LBO (leveraged buy-out). Tried to sneak around behind the company board to do it and screw stockholders by bidding low, assuming no one would sneak in over him. Instead, the story leaked out before he could perform his hatchet job and all hell broke loose.

The rest of the story details the overstuffed, grunting hogs that immediately swarmed to the RJR Nabisco trough, an episode you just stare at (if it is possible to stare while you’re reading), in disgust. Lawyers, bankers and brokers stampeding over each other to get to the money: Shearson Lehman Hutton, Manufacturer’s Hanover, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, First Boston and Merrill Lynch, rubber stamping boards of directors, more lawyers, skeletal gold-digging trophy wives, more lawyers, public relations liars, more skeletal gold-digging trophy wives, more lawyers … by the end of this disgusting story you had an uncontrollable urge to lean over the nearest bucket and lose 6 lunches in a row.

As for the life-long, loyal employees who’d devoted their lives to RJR Nabisco? No one in the entire story gave a moment’s thought to any of them, including, I'm sorry to say, the authors. The only thing any of these human hogs saw in front of them were dollar signs, gold, bulging wallets and their standing in the local country club. If they had to destroy the lives of 10,000 people to fill their pockets, so what? They were just … workers. They were irrelevant.

Twenty years pass and here we are again. So the other moral of the story is: no one in Washington or Wall Street has the slightest interest in changing their ways. What a depressing book.