Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

by Bryan Burrough

“An accountant,” Johnson would say during his bookkeeping days, “is a man who puts his head in the past and backs his ass into the future.”

That steady-as-she-goes ethos was fine for men scarred by the 1930s and scared to make waves. But Johnson, like many of his peers, hadn’t lived through a Depression, hadn’t fought a world war, and wasn’t about to acknowledge limits. He was no old-style team player but a Broadway Joe or Reggie Jax, an iconoclastic superstar, a cool, television-age man loyal to little but his own whims.

“A few million dollars,” he always said, “are lost in the sands of time.”

“Last night we were brilliant,” a brooding Chaz Phillips said. “Now all of a sudden we’re stupid assholes.”