Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Borrough And John Heylar

CHAPTER 
1 
Ross’s philosophy is, “We’re going to have a party, a very 
sophisticated, complicated party.” 
— * O. C. ADAMS, consulting psychologist to RJR Nabisco
Ross Johnson was being followed. A detective, he guessed, no doubt 
hired by that old skinflint Henry Weigl. Every day, through the streets 
of Manhattan, no matter where Johnson went, his shadow stayed with 
him. Finally he had had enough. Johnson had friends, lots of them, and 
one in particular who must have had contacts in the goon business. He 
had this annoying problem, Johnson explained to his friend. He’d like 
to get rid of a tail. No problem, said the friend. Sure enough, within 
days the detective vanished. Whatever the fellow was doing now, 
Johnson’s friend assured him, he was probably walking a little funny. 
It was the spring of 1976, and at a second-tier food company named 
Standard Brands, things were getting ugly. Weigl, its crusty old chair-

man, was out to purge his number two, Johnson, the shaggy-haired 
young Canadian who pranced about Manhattan with glamorous friends 
such as Frank Gifford and “Dandy” Don Meredith. Weigl sicced a team 
of auditors on Johnson’s notoriously bloated expense accounts and 
collected tales of his former protégé’s extramarital affairs. 
Johnson’s hard-drinking band of young renegades began plotting a 
counterattack, lobbying directors and documenting all the underlying 
rot in the company’s businesses. Rumors of an imminent coup began 
sweeping

the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters. 
Then tensions exploded into the open: A shouting match erupted 
between Johnson and Weigl, a popular executive dropped dead, a board 
of directors was rent asunder. Everything came to a head at a mid-May 
board meeting. Weigl went in first, ready to bare his case against 
Johnson. Johnson followed, his own trap ready to spring. 
As the hours wore on, Johnson’s aides, “the Merry Men,” wandered 
through Central Park, waiting for the victor to emerge. Things were 
bound to get bloody in there. But when it came to corporate politics, 
no one was ready to count out Ross Johnson. He seemed to have a knack 
for survival. 
Until the fall of 1988 Ross Johnson’s life was a series of corporate adven-

tures, in which he would not only gain power for himself but wage war 
on an old business order. 
Under that old order, big business was a slow and steady entity. The 
Fortune 500 was managed by “company men”: junior executives who 
worked their way up the ladder and gave one company their all and 
senior executives who were corporate stewards, preserving and cau-

tiously enhancing the company. 
Johnson was to become the consummate “noncompany man.” He 
shredded traditions, jettisoned divisions, and roiled management. He 
was one of a whole breed of noncompany men who came to maturity 
in the 1970s and 1980s: a deal-driven, yield-driven nomadic lot. They 
said their mission was to serve company investors, not company tradi-

tion. They also tended to handsomely serve themselves. 
But of all the noncompany men, Johnson cut the highest profile. He 
did the biggest deals, had the biggest mouth, and enjoyed the biggest 
perks. He would come to be the very symbol of the business world’s 
“Roaring Eighties.” And he would climax the decade by launching the 
deal of the century—scattering one of America’s largest, most venerable 
companies to the winds. 
The man who would come to represent the new age of business was 
born in 1931 at the depth of an old one. Frederick Ross Johnson was 
raised in Depression-era Winnipeg, the only child of a lower-middle-

class home. He was always “Ross,” never Fred—Fred was his father’s 
name. The senior Johnson was a hardware salesman by vocation, a 
woodworker

Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Borrough And John Heylar