Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar

exotic locales. Sticht was determined to wrench some of the provincialism out of Reynolds.
    It was a dream-come-true for an ambitious man: one day an out-of-work retailer, the next a captain of industry. Sticht loved rubbing shoulders with the corporate elite at the Business Round Table in New York and U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. He loved dropping the names of the people he hobnobbed with. Some muttered that he was more interested in the trappings of business than doing business.
    For all his whirl of motion, Sticht procrastinated terribly on decisions and tried to sidestep executive-suite conflicts. He preferred to come off as being above the fray: part statesman, part Dutch uncle. His voice was soft, his manner reserved. He remembered chauffeurs’ names and asked after pilots’ wives. In his courtly style and worldly ways, Sticht in some ways was a perfect bridge from the old, parochial Reynolds to the modern world.
    But as an outsider, he was never well received by Winston-Salem’s old guard. Sticht, a nonsmoker, would occasionally light up a pipe, but it seemed more for effect than pleasure. On weekends a Reynolds jet would fly him to his Palm Beach home in winter and his New Hampshire home in summer. His wife, Ferne, was rarely seen in Winston-Salem. It was something of an insult to people who expected Reynolds top brass to be at the center of the town’s civic and social life. Sticht wasn’t at first admitted to the upper-crust Old Town Club, and was relegated instead to the new-money crowd at Bermuda Run.
    Dominating Colin Stokes, Sticht navigated Reynolds through the tumultuous 1970s, a period that would transform the company from a family-dominated business into something approaching a modern conglomerate. He consolidated his power by ousting three top executives in a Watergate-era scandal involving illegal political contributions. Sticht took control of that mess and another that broke on its heels—$19 million in illegal rebates paid by Sea-Land overseas—and in the process cemented his control over the company.
    There was a terrible foreboding, among some, that the fall of the company’s good Moravian standards and the rise of Paul Sticht meant ruinous change. “You watch,” warned Stewart Robertson, a local stockbroker. “We’re going to have a bunch of Yankee carpetbaggers come in here. They’ll have never seen this much money, and they won’t know what to do with it.”
    The next thing anyone knew, Reynolds was overrun with Yankees. The company had been under growing pressure during the seventies from its chief rival Philip Morris, whose Marlboro brand was growing in leaps and bounds, and Sticht was convinced that more sophisticated marketers could beat back the challenge. For the first time, he brought a slew of outsiders to Winston-Salem, including Jim Peterson, the former president of Pillsbury, to head the domestic tobacco business; Morgan Hunter, a senior vice president of American Cyanamid, to be president of Reynolds Tobacco; Bob Anderson, a Lever Brothers executive, to head tobacco marketing; and J. Tylee Wilson, a Chesebrough-Pond vice president, to run first the food businesses and later the company’s long-overdue entry into overseas markets.
    The newcomers, Northerners almost to a man, stood out painfully at Reynolds. “It’s not the end of the earth,” they joked of Winston-Salem, “but you can see it from here.” They mistook gentility for weakness, slowness of pace for lack of acumen, and Southern accents for dimwittedness. “They would treat brilliant people as backwater rubes,” recalled Larry Wassong, the ad executive.
    For all their self-assuredness, the New Guard proved astoundingly inept at selling cigarettes. When cigarette ads were banned from the airwaves in 1971, Reynolds had to scrap its catchy jingle, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” For years Sticht’s new hires flailed about to find a proper substitute, torturously reworking the