Authors: Scott Bartz
With a growing list of disappointing new product launches, “General” Robert Wood Johnson II soon summoned Burke into his office. Burke thought he was in trouble for his latest failure - A combination nose drops and spray for children, aptly called “Johnson & Johnson’s Nose Drops and Spray.” The bottle could be opened from the top or bottom. A dropper attached to the top cover could be used to drop the medicine into a child’s nose, and when the bottom cover was removed, the medicine could be sprayed out by squeezing the bottle.
At the scheduled time, Burke entered Johnson’s office, expecting the worst. “I was full of bravado,” said Burke. But he also said, “I thought I was going to get fired.”
Johnson, who was seated behind his desk, tossed out a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s Nose Drops and Spray. “Are you the man who launched this thing?” asked “General” Johnson. Burke nervously replied that he was. Johnson then stood up and grasped Burke’s hand. “I want to congratulate you,” Johnson said. “Business is about taking risk. Keep doing it. Don’t ever make these mistakes again,” warned Johnson, “but please make many other mistakes. That’s what we’re paying you for.”
Burke moved up in the company, initially focusing on marketing and advertising. In 1961, Johnson & Johnson formed a new division called the Robert Wood Johnson Company. Burke was put in charge of this new division, which handled the marketing of Johnson & Johnson’s baby products and many of its proprietary products, including Tylenol.
Burke began running Tylenol ads on television in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he suggested to senior J&J executives that Tylenol, originally available only from physicians and hospitals, should be sold as a consumer product. At that time, Tylenol was tremendously successful in the hospital setting, but that success had not translated to the OTC market, primarily because the product was more expensive than other OTC analgesics.
In 1975, while Burke was President of Johnson & Johnson, he got his chance to take Tylenol into the mass market with the full backing of Johnson & Johnson’s vast resources. Bristol Myers had just introduced
Datril
with a series of advertisements promoting that drug as being much less expensive than Tylenol while having the same ingredients. Burke convinced J&J Chairman, Richard
Sellars
, that they should meet the new competition head-on. Burke then began aggressively marketing Tylenol directly to consumers. A large annual Tylenol advertising budget, which grew to $85 million by 1982, helped the company increase its share of the OTC pain-reliever market from 4% in 1976 to 37% in 1982.
In 1976, Burke was appointed the chief executive officer (CEO) of Johnson & Johnson and chairman of the company’s Board of Directors, positions he held until his retirement in 1989. Six years into Burke’s tenure as CEO, the Tylenol crisis erupted, spawning his legacy as the master of crisis management. Tylenol was bringing in $450 million in annual revenue at the time, and the brand accounted for 15% to 20% of Johnson & Johnson’s profits. No other J&J product generated anywhere near the revenue and profit that Tylenol did. Following Donoghue’s Thursday morning news conference at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago; J&J executives acted quickly to protect that revenue stream. Within hours of learning about the Tylenol poisonings, James Burke already had his men in place at the scene of the crime.
5
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While J&J executives put a crisis management team in place at corporate headquarters in New Jersey on Thursday morning, police cruisers in Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village roamed the streets with loudspeakers blaring warnings of unexplained deaths possibly attributed to Tylenol. Some Chicago-based grocers had already removed Tylenol products from their shelves. Jewel Companies ordered their stores to pull the products on Thursday morning. Walgreens ordered its stores in the Midwest to remove Tylenol from their shelves at 9:15 a.m. and expanded the order nationwide at 11:15 a.m. Most retailers nationwide stopped selling only the Tylenol from Lot MC2880, which was the lot number on both the Janus and Kellerman Tylenol bottles, the only ones known to contain cyanide at the time.
Initially, Johnson & Johnson did not recall any Tylenol capsules. Instead, the company faxed mailgrams to retailers and wholesalers, assuring them that the problem rested in Chicago and was limited to Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from just one lot. By noon Thursday, J&J had faxed nearly half-a-million of these mailgrams to physicians, hospitals and wholesalers.
Buddy Willis, the owner of a distribution business in Virginia that sold about $35,000 to $40,000 worth of Tylenol products per year received one of the mailgrams from McNeil, stating that only Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area from Lot MC2880 were affected. The mailgram read in part, “We currently have no evidence that any other Extra Strength Tylenol capsule product or any other Tylenol product was similarly contaminated.”
Burke immediately focused his efforts on getting the right men in place at the scene of the crime and at J&J and McNeil headquarters. During the hastily organized meeting held in Burke’s office on Thursday morning, Burke named six senior executives to an Emergency Strategy Group. The team would meet twice daily to make decisions on how the evolving Tylenol situation should be handled. The group included J&J President, David Clare; International Company Group Chairman, Wayne Nelson; Company Group Chairman, Arthur Quilty; Company Group Chairman, David Collins; Corporate Public Relations, Vice President, Lawrence “Larry” Foster; and J&J General Counsel, George Frazza. The group met at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day for close to six weeks. Many times, according to Foster, the morning meeting was still in session when the evening meeting was scheduled to begin.
Burke told David Collins on Thursday morning to take a lawyer, a public relations aide, and a security expert and fly out to McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington to handle the crisis from there. Burke commanded Collins to “Take charge.” Ninety minutes later, the corporate helicopter touched down at McNeil, 60 miles west of J&J’s New Brunswick headquarters. Collins’s first question to McNeil executives was to ask if any cyanide was used on the premises. Once inside the building, Collins made a phone call to attorney Paul Noland, a childhood friend and college roommate from his days at Notre Dame University. Noland was a partner in the law firm of Rooks, Pitts, and Poust, with offices in Chicago and Wheaton, Illinois. Noland had previously handled product liability cases in the Chicago area for Johnson & Johnson.
Collins asked Noland to go down to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, find out as much as he could, and then call him back at McNeil. “I needed my own eyes and ears on the scene,” he said later. Collins also called another attorney pal, Francis “Mike” Heroux, to help him manage the crisis. Heroux, like Noland, was a partner at Rooks, Pitts, and Poust, in the firm’s Wheaton office in DuPage County.
Collins had many longtime friends living right there in the middle of the Tylenol murders crime scene. He had grown up in Oak Park, Illinois, just seven miles east of Jewel’s headquarters in Melrose Park, and nine miles west of Chicago. Oak Park is known for its expansive homes. The largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed residential properties in the world is in Oak Park. The town is also known for its excellent school system, which includes two public high schools, Oak Park High School and River Forest High School, and one private high school, Fenwick. David Collins, Paul Noland, and Mike Heroux all graduated from Fenwick High School in 1952.
In 2003, Collins was inducted into the Fenwick High School Hall of Fame. When addressing the Fenwick students and alumni attending the induction ceremony, Collins said Fenwick is “a place to build strong friendships that can help you through many situations – and a place to think about the values you will take with you through life.” In the fall of 1982, with the Tylenol brand in big trouble, Collins needed all the help he could get from his many friends still living near Fenwick High School.
After Collins got his lawyers in place in Illinois, he turned his attention to the hectic situation at McNeil headquarters. Thirty-three telephones were set up to handle the incoming calls. McNeil President, Joseph Chiesa, received continuous updates from harried managers as new reports came in of fatalities and other supposed poisonings, the vast majority of which were not actually Tylenol poisonings.
McNeil executives used a felt-tip marker to write down each bit of information on drawing paper attached to a big easel. As the reports accumulated, the sheets were ripped from the easel and pinned on the walls in a large conference room. Soon the walls were covered with dozens of sheets of paper, each containing disparate bits of information with arrows drawn between them: victims, causes of deaths, lot numbers on the poisoned Tylenol bottles, the outlets where they’d been purchased, dates when they’d been manufactured, and the route they’d taken through the distribution system. The data on those sheets of paper were never disclosed to the public, and the secrets they held never left the McNeil conference room.
A two-way video conference link was established between J&J headquarters in New Brunswick and McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington to facilitate face-to-face meetings between the executives at the two sites. Chicago-area sales reps from numerous J&J operating companies were put on alert to make sure that Extra Strength Tylenol capsules had been moved from the shelves to the stockrooms of the local retail stores and pharmacies. Twenty-five public relations employees from other J&J operating companies were recruited to assist the public relations staff of fifteen at J&J headquarters.
Public relations personnel from both McNeil and J&J quickly coordinated a media response to minimize any suspicion that the company was at fault. Larry Foster took care of the media for Johnson & Johnson. J&J Public Relations Director, Robert Kniffin, went to Fort Washington to handle the calls that came in to McNeil headquarters. Robert Andrews, the assistant director of public relations for J&J, was put in charge of handling the media in Chicago.
Andrews, along with security and public relations personnel and 30 toxicologists were immediately dispatched by corporate jet to Chicago to work with the authorities there and to establish their own lab. Upon their arrival at O’Hare International Airport, Andrews and two other J&J executives drove to Elk Grove Village and met for an hour-and-a-half on Thursday afternoon with Elk Grove Village detectives and evidence technicians. On Thursday evening, Andrews told reporters in Chicago that his firm was “collectively shocked.” He said Johnson & Johnson had launched an investigation that morning to track down the capsules from Lot MC2880.
Regarding the possibility that the cyanide had been put into the Tylenol at the manufacturing plant, McNeil Communications Director, Elsie Behmer, proclaimed, “We were clean.” Behmer said some of the bulk Tylenol powder from the recalled MC2880 batch still at the plant had been tested, and it was uncontaminated. She further stated that the company did not work with cyanide, and Tylenol was the only product produced at the plant. Much of that work was done by machine she said, thus lessening the possibility of employee sabotage. Larry Foster also assured reporters that cyanide was not stored at the Tylenol manufacturing plant or used in the production of Tylenol.
“Whenever the poisoner is caught,” said Foster, “the problem will remain; how to protect the public against deranged people who might follow his ghastly example.”
On Thursday afternoon, before officials linked the deaths of Mary McFarland or Lynn Reiner to cyanide-laced Tylenol, James Burke decided to recall Tylenol capsules from Lot MC2880, which had been linked that morning to the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules that had killed Mary Kellerman and the Januses. The recalled lot consisted of 93,000 bottles with 50 Extra Strength Tylenol capsules each, representing 0.85 percent of the 11 million bottles of Tylenol capsules in the company’s distribution channel, either in retail stores or in distribution centers.
Illinois Governor, “Big” Jim Thompson, put Tyrone Fahner in charge of the investigative team, now dubbed the Tylenol task force, which quickly grew to 140 local, state, and federal investigators. Thompson had handed the job of top Illinois lawyer-lawman to Tyrone Fahner in July 1980 when the immensely popular, long-time Attorney General, William J. Scott, was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 11 months in prison. Having never run for office, Fahner was a political neophyte when Thompson appointed him Illinois Attorney General. Fahner had been a virtual unknown 26 days ago, even to the residents of his home state. That anonymity had changed instantly when he became the official spokesperson for the task force charged with solving the Tylenol murders.
Fahner was in the midst of a seemingly hopeless campaign to be elected to the Attorney General position he’d been handed about two years earlier. A
Chicago Tribune
Poll released on October 2, 1982, showed Fahner trailing former Lieutenant Governor, Neil F. Hartigan, by 20 percentage points. After Fahner became the official spokesperson of the Tylenol task force, he was seen on television every day and his standing in the polls steadily improved.
One of Fahner’s first official acts as head of the Tylenol task force was to recommend that Illinois residents gather up all of their Tylenol capsules and flush them down the toilet. Chicago police officers were also advised on Thursday, September 30
th
, to ask Chicago area residents to destroy all of their Tylenol products. On Thursday night, NBC’s Chicago affiliate, WMAQ-TV, aired a video clip of a Chicago police dispatcher announcing over the police radio that Tylenol products “may be contaminated with cyanide, and should be destroyed.” Fahner’s recommendation that local residents flush their Tylenol capsules down the toilet was the first of his many miscues. Some of the destroyed capsules surely contained cyanide and could have helped investigators track down the Tylenol killer.