The day the attempted takeover of Goodyear Tire & Rubber ended, the day in 1986 when James Goldsmith agreed to take the company’s $94 million payout and go back to one of his five homes, Akron Mayor Tom Sawyer summed up Northeast Ohio’s battle against this dreaded corporate raider with one line.
“We sent the limey bastard home!” Sawyer barked on Nov. 20, 1986.
That slur against the British side of Goldsmith’s heritage wasn’t exactly from the script. Sawyer remembers it as a “top of the mind thing.”
Robert G. Mercer, whose father, Robert E., was then chairman of Goodyear, assisted the mayor’s staff with that speech. He recalls suggesting a crude send-off, “but something got lost in the translation.”
Sawyer, now a state senator, took some heat for his insensitivity to the Brits. Two days later, he slyly apologized for misspeaking — revealing, perhaps, Mercer’s true intent.
“I meant to say, ‘We sent the slimy bastard home,’ ” the mayor deadpanned.
Those fighting words were the final shots of a commando effort by young Mercer and others in the company’s public relations department to turn public sentiment against the man they termed “The Terrorist in a Three-Piece Suit.”
The younger Mercer, now 60 and senior director of public relations for DirecTV, regrets the politically incorrect epitaph. “Had I not been so caught up in the emotion, I might have said, ‘Tom, let’s pull that back.’ ”
But it was an emotional time for Akron and Northeast Ohio, facing the prospect of a foreigner taking over the Goodyear blimp and the rest of the nation’s 34th-largest company. On Sept. 19, 1986, Goldsmith, who had already slashed and burned three other U.S. companies, bought his first shares of Goodyear. Two months later, he came close to winning control of the world’s No. 1 tire-maker. But he met his match in Akron, thanks in part to a well-disguised PR plan.
The late William Newkirk, then Goodyear’s vice president of public relations, was the official voice of the company. His comments to the press were reasoned and factual, as the SEC demands.
However, Newkirk also enjoyed a good corporate brawl and didn’t let the company go down with its hands behind its back.
“I called him Thug,” says Gaylon White, then the elder Mercer’s speechwriter. “He was a pugilist. He pulled me aside one day and said, ‘Be disruptive.’
“I knew what he meant. And I also knew that he wasn’t to know about anything I did.”
White researched Goldsmith’s lascivious lifestyle and told the press that the foreigner shared time with his wife, his ex-wife and his mistress. “We knew he was a nasty character,” White says. Northeast Ohio media were glad to air the lurid laundry.
“There is no fast lane in Akron. The road repair crews make sure of that,” I wrote in an open letter to Goldsmith in my Akron Beacon Journal column. “This is the Bible Belt. Here, a gentleman doesn’t support an ex-wife in Paris, a wife in London and a girlfriend in New York City. We let the ex-wives fend for
themselves.”
I became a sieve for White’s dirty work, our meetings a secret from our bosses.
White led me to Rufus Johnson, a maintenance worker at the Goodyear Barbershop. When the CEO had come in for a haircut, Johnson had said, “Mr. Mercer, it’s Rambo time.” That became a company rallying cry.
And White pointed me to the book Goldenballs!, which detailed Goldsmith’s fear of rubber bands. The Wall Street Journal reported that millions of rubber bands were later sent his way, courtesy of a certain Akron columnist who published Goldsmith’s Manhattan address.
Did the mischief make a difference?
By mid-November, it appeared not. “Young Bob and I had offices near each other,” says White, who is telling this story for the first time. “I’ll never forget the night he came to me and said, ‘Dad says the company is [Goldsmith’s] if he wants it.’ ” (Mercer’s son confirms the story.)
Yet the fight wasn’t quite done.
On Nov. 18, Goldsmith testified before a Congressional committee and appeared shaken by the sight of all the raucous Goodyear employees who had paid their own way to Washington for the occasion. Leading the hearing was U.S. Rep. John Seiberling of Akron, whose grandfather, F.A. Seiberling, had founded Goodyear then lost it in a corporate takeover.
Goldsmith seemed especially unnerved when Seiberling challenged him with the loud refrain: “Who the hell are you?”
Two days later, Goldsmith agreed to accept the greenmail payment. He never took over another company. He died of a heart attack in 1997 at age 64.
Goodyear had to sell off assets, including the aerospace division and its famed blimp air dock, but it maintained its independence and is still headquartered in Akron.
“There’s no way to document this, but I think it all made a difference: Tom Sawyer’s defiant attitude, the community rallies, the confrontation in Washington,” says White, 65, a director for a chemical company. “I don’t think Goldsmith expected that kind of response. I think he was happy to walk away.”
Stuart Warner was the lead writer of “The Goodyear War,” which recounted James Goldsmith’s attempted takeover. It was part of the Akron Beacon Journal’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning entry for general news.