Read Barbarians at the Gate for Free Online

could play that game. Soon, Weigl was pretty sure he was being followed.
    Then, a spark. Johnson had allowed an executive fired by Weigl to exercise his stock options after leaving the company. When Weigl found out, he was furious. He hadn’t fired the man to see him profit on stock options. He called up Johnson, who was out of town, and gave him ten kinds of hell. Johnson should have canceled those options, Weigl stormed…and stormed…and stormed. Exercising those options had been totally legitimate, Johnson protested, and blocking it would have beenagainst the law. “We’ll write our own law,” Weigl declared.
    Finally Johnson could take it no longer. “Henry, you can take it and shove it,” he said, and hung up.
    The breech was now total, and that afternoon Johnson phoned two of the board’s most powerful members to tell them so. “Look, I’m gone,” he told Ellmore (“Pat”) Patterson, chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust. “This guy is completely mad. I figured I could hold it and hold it, but I can’t anymore.” He made the same speech to Earle McLaughlin, chairman of the Royal Bank of Canada, who had championed Johnson’s rise at Standard Brands. “Well, we figured it would happen,” McLaughlin said, but urged him not to move precipitously. When a special board meeting was set to discuss the matter, Johnson agreed not to resign and circulated the same message to his coconspirators. “Keep your powder dry,” he said.
    Then, less than two weeks before the board meeting, a popular Standard Brands executive named Bill Shaw dropped dead of a heart attack. The cause, everybody believed, was extended overexposure to Henry Weigl, and while that postmortem was medically dubious, Shaw’s death did manage to crystallize the rebellion. “Ross, you’ve got to do something,” said Bob Carbonell, who ran research and development. “If you don’t do something,” sputtered Emmett, “we’re all gone.”
    It all came to a head on a Friday morning in mid-May, when the directors convened. As Johnson waited outside, Weigl recited the litany of abuses his auditors had found. Weigl concluded by proposing a two-year extension of his contract.
    As his cronies wandered Central Park, Johnson was ushered in to address the board. He admitted to minor expense-account violations, but said he wasn’t going to fight Weigl any longer; the man was impossible to work for. “Gentlemen,” he said, “all I can tell you is I’m resigning.” What other executives would do, only they could say. Then he offered up the bleak analysis of Standard Brands that he and his pals had prepared. “The shit is going to hit the fan within twenty-four months,” he predicted.
    Johnson left the room while the board caucused, and when he returned, Weigl was no longer in the chairman’s spot at the head of the table. Instead he was sitting partway down it, white as a ghost. “Ross, here’s what we’re planning to do,” a board member said. “Henry will continue as chairman and chief executive officer, and you will be made the presidentand chief executive in another year, when he retires.”
    Johnson should have been thrilled. Instead, he said, “That won’t fly.” He stepped out, then returned to a new offer: Weigl would remain chairman until his retirement, and Johnson would become chief executive immediately. Johnson approved, “with one provision: that Henry’s office won’t be in the headquarters building.”
    That bit of hardball brought Johnson command of a New York Stock Exchange company. Afterward he and the Merry Men toasted their victory with martinis late into the night. It had, they agreed, been a splendid coup. It wouldn’t be their last.
    Henry Weigl ultimately exacted a small measure of revenge. Some time later Johnson, looking for a Florida vacation home, bought a splashy yellow villa in the exclusive Lost Tree community in Palm Beach. Life at Lost Tree revolved around its country club, but by the time Johnson