Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

#1 New York Times bestseller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco at the hands of a massive leveraged buyout from investment firm KKR.

A book that stormed both the bestseller list and the public imagination, a book that created a genre of its own, and a book that gets at the heart of 1980s Wall Street and the culture it helped define, Barbarians at the Gate is a modern classic—a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a rollicking true story of corporate derring-do and financial swordsmanship.

The fight to control RJR Nabisco during October and November of 1988 was more than just the largest corporate takeover in Wall Street history. Marked by brazen displays of ego not seen in American business for decades, it became the high point of a new gilded age and its repercussions are still being felt. The tale remains the ultimate story of greed and glory—a real-life corporate drama and a cast of characters that determined the course of global business and redefined how deals would be done and fortunes made in the decades to come.

Barbarians at the Gate is the gripping account of these two frenzied months, of powerful deal makers and publicity flaks, of an old-line industrial powerhouse (home of such familiar products as Oreos and Camels) that became the victim of the ruthless and rapacious style of high-stakes finance in the 1980s. As reporters for The Wall Street Journal, Burrough and Helyar had extensive access to all the characters in this M&A drama. They take the reader behind the scenes at strategy meetings and society dinners, into boardrooms and bedrooms, providing an unprecedentedly detailed look at how financial operations at the highest levels are conducted but also a richly textured social history of wealth at the twilight of the Reagan era.

At the center of the huge power struggle is RJR Nabisco's president, the high-living Ross Johnson. It's his secret plan to buy out the company that sets the frenzy in motion, attracting the country's leading takeover players: Henry Kravis, the legendary leveraged-buyout king of investment firm KKR, whose entry into the fray sets off an acquisitive commotion; Peter Cohen, CEO of Shearson Lehman Hutton and Johnson's partner, who needs a victory to propel his company to an unchallenged leadership in the lucrative mergers and acquisitions field; the fiercely independent Ted Forstmann, motivated as much by honor as by his rage at the corruption he sees taking over the business he cherishes; Jim Maher and his ragtag team, struggling to regain credibility for the decimated ranks at First Boston; and an army of desperate bankers, lawyers, and accountants, all drawn inexorably to the greatest prize of their careers—and one of the greatest prizes in the history of corporate finance.

Written with the bravado of a novel and researched with the diligence of a sweeping cultural history, Barbarians at the Gate is present at the front line of every battle of the campaign. Here is the unforgettable story of that corporate takeover in all its brutality. In a new afterword specially commissioned for the story's 20th anniversary, Burrough and Helyar return to visit the heroes and villains of this epic business saga, tracing the fallout of the deal, charting the subsequent success and failure of those involved, and addressing the incredible impact this story—and the book itself—made on the world.

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of five books.

John Helyar is a columnist for Bloomberg News. He previously wrote for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and ESPN, and is the author of Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball.