Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough, John Helyar Page B

two, Wilson was responsible for the company’s entire tobacco operation. He had initially gained Sticht’s notice shepherding Reynolds’s ragtag, money-losing food businesses, bringing them to heel and managing to turn a profit. As president, Wilson began pouring billions into the gargantuan task of revitalizing Reynolds’s aging factories.
    He soon rubbed the genteel Sticht the wrong way. Wilson was a cold tactician and technician, a straight-ahead tank of an administrator who rolled over everything between him and his current objective. As a young man, he had been an Army instructor, and he brought that blunt, Prussian style to the executive suite. Wilson had a humorless laugh and a knack for tortured syntax. A Wilson sentence might begin, “I would opine that…”
    Sticht’s succession, it was clear, would be a horse race. The second entry in that race was Edward A. Horrigan, Jr., president of Reynolds’s main tobacco business. Ed Horrigan, who would leave his own indelible mark on Reynolds, was a combative fireplug of a man who liked to brag he was “born in a three-point stance.” Horrigan was typical of the new-generation executive Sticht had brought in; he ran a tobacco business without ever having smoked in his life. He had made his career marketingliquor, joining Reynolds in the seventies and, unlike many of the New Guard, fitting in well in Winston-Salem.
    He was born in Brooklyn, the son of an accountant who was hard-pressed to find work during Horrigan’s Depression-era childhood. He got into the University of Connecticut on a football scholarship; although only five foot seven, by his own admission he “liked to hit people.” Horrigan got through UConn working summer construction jobs, then joined the army. In Korea, Horrigan led a platoon of 200 men at the battle of Old Baldy. The North Koreans were dug in on a hill, mowing down Americans as they tried to take it. But the young lieutenant kept regrouping and finally led his decimated unit on one final assault. Horrigan took out a machine-gun nest by himself, and his platoon took the hill. He won a Silver Star for valor, but his wounds knocked him out of combat for the duration.
    After Horrigan came home, he marched through a succession of marketing jobs, until being lured to Reynolds by Tylee Wilson after heading the Buckingham liquor unit of Chicago conglomerate Northwest Industries. At Reynolds the two old soldiers were natural allies, at least at first. Together they commiserated over drinks about Reynolds’s plodding ways. Horrigan chafed at Reynolds’s gentlemanly, Southern work ethic. “We need a stronger sense of urgency here,” he told his troops. Horrigan was brimming with pep talks for the troops: They were going to fight Philip Morris on the beaches, in the air, at the convenience-store racks, everywhere. When they began to make progress, Horrigan got a good measure of the credit. Subordinates didn’t question him without risking a tirade; behind his back, they called him “Little Caesar.” These were not the gentlemanly qualities Sticht preferred. Nonetheless, Horrigan was a contender.
    A third candidate for Sticht’s crown was Joe Abely, the suave chief financial officer recruited from General Foods. Abely most looked the part of a chief executive, with a distinguished silver mane. He also had the best pedigree, with law and business degrees from Harvard. He was on the Council of Foreign Relations, which appealed to the statesman side of Sticht. But Abely had a personality that made Wilson seem warm. While he didn’t meet the gentility test, Abely worked closely with Sticht on acquisitions and performed the useful task of bringing financial systems out of the dark ages. (Sea-Land’s accounting system, it was discovered, consisted of stuffing invoices in shoe boxes.)
    After a century of “one-for-all,” the Sticht succession scramble split Reynolds into warring camps. No longer did people pull together for the company. Now