Robert Wood Johnson died in 1968, and for the last ten years of his life I assisted him from time to time with various civic, political, and philanthropic projects. A restless spirit and an incurable idealist, he was an intriguing individual. Still, he was pragmatic in his ways, and his thinking thrust him far ahead of his times.

Johnson's life was like a mosaic, a collection of many and varied parts that, when pieced together, form a larger and more meaningful whole. Close scrutiny reveals imperfections, but the man's flaws add to his humanness. He worked hard at being different from others, and his spirited wit and love of adventure enhance the enjoyment of tracing his footsteps through life. This biography, the only book ever written about this extraordinary man, portrays his character, the sum of his accomplishments, and the importance of his legacy, so that others may judge his merits. I will not forget our first meeting. The year was 1957, and I had recently left as night editor of the Newark News, then New Jersey's largest newspaper, to join Johnson & Johnson to help form its first public relations department. The company was still relatively small, with annual sales under $300 million. Shortly before noon that day, a call came from the office of George Smith, the company president, summoning me to meet him promptly in the office of "The General," as he was known. (I later learned that such calls were treated with the same degree of concern as fire alarms.) Unfortunately, however, I was not in the office, having taken an early lunch hour to rummage through a local auto junkyard in search of a part for my aging car.

When I returned to the office quite a while later, I was told to report immediately to the General's office. I arrived there about the same time as a very agitated George Smith, and for the first time took the long walk from the entrance to Johnson's office to his circular desk in the corner of the room. Smith introduced me with a brand of gallows humor I had last heard from a very annoyed city editor.

"General, this is Larry Foster. When he was with the newspaper, he took a half-hour for lunch. Now it seems he takes an hour and a half."

Johnson rose, shook my hand, and without a hint of a smile, said, "Well, young man, I'm glad to see that you are growing in your job."

I knew right then that I would like him.

As I came to know this remarkable person - the range of his accomplishments and the adventures that made up his life - the idea of writing this biography was born. The prospects of writing the book helped feed the journalistic fire that still burned within me. Quietly, I started what ultimately became a vast amount of research on his life's work. In later years, after he died, I interviewed scores of people who knew him, including many members of his family. Along the way, I concluded that in order to maintain independent thought, the book about his life would have to wait until I retired from the company so that my objectivity would not be compromised. Over the years several authors had approached Johnson about writing his life story, but he always brushed them aside, saying, "I'm not old enough yet." Late in 1967 I wrote him in Florida and asked if we could sit down and, in the interest of recording the company's history, talk about his recollections. That appealed to him.

He wrote back that at present he wasn't feeling well and planned to enter a New York hospital for treatment, but that later we would get together. He died in the hospital, and I was asked to write the eulogy delivered at his funeral. Later I wrote a company-sponsored book on the history of Johnson & Johnson, titled A Company That Cares.

When Johnson was sixteen years old, his father died suddenly. A year later he finished prep school, and over the objections of his family he decided to forgo college and go to work at Johnson & Johnson with the dream of someday taking his father's place. From an early age he learned from his father the philosophy behind managing the family business. For that reason, this story begins with the first Robert Wood Johnson, at the time of the Civil War, and with his pioneering exploits in the early days of medicine. That period was filled with fascinating characters who were relevant for not only the father's life story but also the son's.

After a sometimes errant youth, Johnson settled down. Within fifteen years he worked his way up to become company president, and under his leadership Johnson & Johnson experienced phenomenal growth. Spurred by the success of Johnson's baby products - which became synonymous with motherhood - Johnson & Johnson became one of the world's most admired companies. Under his leadership, the company grew dramatically - from $11 million to $700 million in sales. But it wasn't sales and marketing success that brought Johnson wide acclaim as one of the twentieth century's most visionary business leaders. As early as the 1930s, he proclaimed that business had a moral purpose, indeed a moral imperative, to serve society and the public interest. Most of his fellow industrialists scoffed at this concept, but Johnson responded by writing a corporate "Credo" that would become the best-known and most widely emulated statement of the responsibility that business has to serve the public interest. He set a standard that much of American business followed.

Most of all, Johnson was a man of ideas and ideals, which he pursued with the zeal of a crusader. He had a vast range of interests - business, health care, politics, government, the military, mass transportation, architecture, writing, aviation, yachting, and philanthropy - and he relentlessly searched for new and better ways to do things. Always a student of better management techniques, he saw that the nation's hospitals were not being run effectively, so he helped form the first school of hospital management. He wandered through hospitals all over the world seeking new ways to improve patient care. His formula for better care was simple. He put the patient first, with this pledge: "We have always been, are now, and always will be dedicated to the patient first."

Years before others, he built some of America's most attractive industrial plants, placing them in suburban settings on acres of handsomely landscaped land. It was right after the Depression, and his "Factories Can Be Beautiful" concept set a standard for industry, brought him national recognition, and helped to dispel the impression that industrial architecture had to be ugly. He constructed the nation's first complete textile mill town, with homes, schools, and churches for his workers and their families. He was an innovator who always had a larger purpose. "We build not only structures in which men and women of the future will work, but also the patterns of society in which they will work," he said. "We are building not only frameworks of stone and steel, but frameworks of ideas and ideals."

Two generations before others took up the cry, he was advocating a larger role for women in politics and championing environmental concerns. He had a passion for cleanliness in the workplace - in part because his company made sterile surgical products. He had the corners of manufacturing areas, including the stairwells, painted white so dust and dirt could be easily detected. Once, he shut a plant down for an entire week because of careless housekeeping and told workers and management to get busy cleaning it up. He was a character, and not always a lovable one. But his employees revered and respected him.

He never forgot his early years as a young factory worker, and the old-timers from the mill were the only ones who still called him by his first name. He spoke and wrote about his conviction that the term "common man" was disrespectful. Every individual, he insisted, was entitled to be judged on his or her own merits. "A man's character," he said, "should not be gauged by what he earns." He was once described as being "splendidly Baronial," but few of that ilk ever had a more common touch.

He enjoyed his wealth and the pleasures it brought him. But the creation of wealth, he felt, must have a greater goal than merely acquiring money. Long after his death, his sense of personal responsibility toward society is expressed imperishably in the disposition of his immense fortune - more than $1 billion - which he left to The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to improve health care in America. The Foundation's remarkable work is described in the Postlude of this book. He loved a good battle, and engaged in many, including one memorable period in wartime Washington when President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a high government post. He served as a one-star general for all of sixty days before losing out in a confrontation with the Pentagon brass. On his retreat from the capital, he snidely remarked to columnist Walter Winchell that Washington was "a mecca for mediocrity," one of the scores of quotable comments that endeared him to journalists. Wry humor was his constant companion. His politics swung wildly from conservative to liberal, depending on the issue, and made him unpredictable. He was the only one in the history of New Jersey's turbulent politics to be offered the nomination for U.S. Senate by both the Republican and Democratic parties in the same election year.

Fiercely patriotic, he had a profound sense of duty and spoke openly of love of country. Once, when he felt that democracy was being threatened by communism, he declared: "It is our responsibility to do something every day of our lives, however inconsequential, to support the American Constitutional principles." His allegiance to his country glowed in his widely acclaimed book Or Forfeit Freedom. He left his mark in other ways too. In mid-century, when employee relations in the nation were at a low ebb, he rallied a group of national leaders and took the lead in writing a document titled "Human Relations in Modern Business," an action plan for bringing religious values to the workplace to restore harmony. Many companies and labor unions used the guidelines to settle disputes, and the concept gained wide acceptance. The Harvard Business Review described it as "a Magna Carta for management and worker."

Johnson was a study in contrasts. He could be fiery and combative or the essence of gentility. But despite all his strengths, his power, and his wealth, he had his share of human frailties, which brought him disappointment, despair, and loneliness. His bitter wrangling with his son was a low point in his life, and the relationship was only partially salvaged by a deathbed reconciliation. Still, during his final days his indomitable spirit and urge to achieve saw him sketching a design for a more comfortable hospital bed. He kept notes on his declining condition until he could no longer hold the pencil.

From beginning to end, Robert Wood Johnson pursued his dreams with unbridled energy and passion. As a colleague of his once remarked, "Unlike the Man of La Mancha, he would not accept the concept that the dream was impossible."

My goal in the following pages, as well as my hope for the reader, is to capture the essence of this remarkable man's life - and do it fairly and objectively and as dispassionately as possible. I make no apologies for being intrigued by the man. The reader will be too. Years ago, when I embarked on this book, a wise friend in publishing advised me to "tell it like a story." Now it is time to let the story begin.

Lawrence Gilmore Foster State College, Pennsylvania May 1999