Word: johnson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That bid, quickly dubbed a "Chicago submarine" because it would torpedo the competition, easily surpassed both rival offers. The Johnson team had bid $23 billion, or $100 a share, while KKR had proposed a package worth $21.6 billion, or $94 a share. Board members extended the deadline until Tuesday, Nov. 29, to take any counteroffers and allow time to study each proposal. If none is accepted, the directors could supervise an RJR restructuring themselves...
...Nabisco, the benefits of LBOs were hardly lost on Johnson. Born in Winnipeg, Man., he had parlayed a keen eye for a deal and the nerves of a gunslinger into the top job at three major corporations. He was president of Standard Brands, the producer of Planters nuts and Baby Ruth candy bars, when it merged with Nabisco in 1981. Four years later, as Nabisco's president, Johnson sold out to RJR Reynolds for $4.9 billion and soon became president of the merged company. After adding the title of chief executive officer in 1987, he swiftly moved RJR Nabisco headquarters...
Amid the brawl for his company, Johnson has remained aloof from most outsiders and workers at RJR Nabisco headquarters in the elegant Galleria complex north of Atlanta. "We don't know what is going on," says an employee. "Some of us are going to lose our jobs, but we don't know who, or where." Feelings of helplessness were hardly confined to the South. Said a 15-year employee at an RJR Nabisco cookie plant in Fair Lawn, N.J.: "When you're at the bottom of the ladder and you got money men at the top, you take...
...produces some big-time losers as well, particularly investors who owned a company's top-quality bonds when the same firm's junk bonds hit the market. Since the new IOUs would saddle the company with a riskier load of debt, the old bonds get clobbered. No sooner had Johnson disclosed that he wanted to buy RJR Nabisco, for example, than the company's $5 billion of outstanding bonds lost 20% of their value. Furious bondholders, including Metropolitan Life and ITT, immediately sued for damages. Declared Metropolitan Life chairman Creedon: "No one in his right mind wants to invest...
...YEARS, 1954-1963 by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster; $24.95). The first half of a two-volume biography as social history puts Martin Luther King Jr. at the center of the American revolution in race relations that began with sit-ins and Freedom Rides and ended with President Lyndon B. Johnson maneuvering a stalled civil rights bill through Congress...