Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (1989) by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar is regarded as one of the most important business histories based on investigative journalism. The book was born out of The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the 1988 leveraged buyout (LBO) of food-and-tobacco company RJR Nabisco—the largest deal of its kind in history at that time. Barbarians at the Gate features the biographies of key players, including F. Ross Johnson of RJR Nabisco, Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and Ted Forstmann of Forstmann Little, to highlight the power of individual corporate personalities and the clashes between them. This book is a story of corporate excess, manipulation, greed, and cutthroat rivalry. Barbarians at the Gate was so popular at the time of its release that it was made into a 1993 film with the same title.

This guide references the 2009 HarperCollins Kindle edition.

Summary

Barbarians at the Gate is a narrative history of the RJR Nabisco LBO based on an in-depth Wall Street Journal investigation and over 100 interviews conducted in 1989, the year after the LBO took place. The book focuses on both the corporate history of RJR Nabisco and the changes that took place on Wall Street more broadly in the 1970s and ‘80s.