Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [130]
After a few moments I looked up to find King Fahd staring at me with a puzzled look. He had noticed I wasn’t drinking my tea, and like a good Middle Eastern host wanted to make sure it was to my liking. He thought I might want a sweetener.
“Canderel!” he called out, his arms thrust upward, accentuating his exuberance. My worlds collided.
Canderel was the European brand name for Equal, the tabletop sweetener produced by Searle that seemed like it had consumed much of the last five years of my life. Searle had waited for close to a decade for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be able to market it. Now I was being offered it in a royal palace many thousands of miles from Searle headquarters in Skokie, Illinois.
Prince Saud, the young, Princeton-educated member of the royal family who was the new foreign minister, rose from his chair and walked over with a small dispenser of our company’s new product.
I suspect King Fahd had no idea of my connection to the sweetener. But with a smile on his face, he said that his wife had him use it in his tea. The king, a large, joyful man, proclaimed proudly that he had slimmed down by several kilos as a result. His still sizable presence shook as he said it.
I don’t recall what I said in response, but I certainly remember what I thought. I would have given anything for a video of the scene to use as a commercial. It would have been an award winner.
G.D. Searle was again becoming a healthy presence in the industry, thanks in part to the no-calorie sweetener in Equal and Canderel that over time became broadly known as NutraSweet. But it had only happened after a long period of legal uncertainty, as well as a revised business strategy. We restructured the company to position Searle back on an upward path. When I arrived there in the spring of 1977, the company’s future was anything but bright.
CHAPTER 18
Searle’s Sweet Success
G. D. Searle & Co. began in 1888, when a Civil War veteran and pharmacist, Gideon Daniel Searle, started a small company with a chemist in Chicago. Nine decades later, the business had become a global conglomerate. It had developed an impressive number of products: Dramamine, Metamucil, and Aldactone, as well as Enovid, the first mass-market oral contraceptive that would become known simply as the Pill. The company’s rise into a major conglomerate had proved challenging. By 1977 the company had experienced weak earnings for eight straight quarters. Its stock price had fallen sharply, hitting a low of $10.75 per share, about half of its price a year earlier. Analysts wondered if its future was a long, downward slide. That concern had a way of getting shareholders’ attention.1
So too did the choice of a new chief executive officer that year. Of all the people that the Searle board of directors could have selected to come in as the first non-family CEO, they chose a relatively young former public official with no background in the corporate world, let alone pharmaceuticals.
At the company’s annual meeting where I was introduced to the shareholders as the future CEO, a middle-aged woman stood up.
“My name is Ethel Shapiro; I am a shareholder,” she said. She noted that commentators were observing that little in my past experience made me a likely savior for the struggling pharmaceutical company.
“Mr. Rumsfeld,” she asked bluntly, “why are you worth the $250,000 annual salary you will be receiving as CEO?” The amount was significant, to be sure. It was, in fact, four times what I had made as secretary of defense.
It was a fair question, and I suspected other shareholders might have been wondering the same thing.
“That sounds a lot like my mother,” I replied, and many in the room laughed. As it happened, my mother was surprised by my decision to accept the Searle position. She believed I had established myself in government and wondered why I would want to get involved