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company and his influence, he would not sit back and let his new business be wrecked by a competitor. No one who knew the history of ADM or its iron-fisted chairman could expect that.
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    The modern era of ADM was set in motion on October 21, 1947, when Shreve M. Archer sat down for a meal of cooked chicken. The fifty-nine-year-old ADM chairman and descendant of its cofounder was enjoying his meal in the company’s hometown of Minneapolis when he abruptly stood, gasping for air. A bone had caught in his throat. Archer turned blue, then grimaced in pain as he swallowed the bone. He was rushed to nearby Miller Hospital, but it was too late. Twenty days later, he died of complications from the incident.
    The sudden, disturbing death of Archer left a void at the company he had directed since 1924. In his years at the helm, Shreve Archer had in many ways become ADM. He had pushed the company to acquire competitors, providing a diversified product line that helped it weather the darkest days of the Great Depression. Most important, he had made an open-ended commitment to the promise of the soybean, a farm staple that had gained prominence only since World War I. Archer pushed ADM into the budding industry, building a giant soybean-processing plant in Decatur. That decision, and countless others like it, had helped transform ADM from a single Midwestern plant at the dawn of the twentieth century into one of the nation’s big grain processors. Succeeding Archer would have been hard for anyone; with no one groomed as a successor at the time of his death, the task seemed all but impossible.
    The man chosen for the job was Thomas Daniels, a descendant of the company’s other cofounder. Daniels had an unlikely background for the position; he had planned on a career in the foreign service and was probably the first head of a grain-processing company who had taken his own polo ponies to college at Yale. But as Daniels took over, ADM was on the verge of a descent into disarray, one that would end almost two decades later in a desperate search for a savior.
    In the same year as Archer’s death, across town at rival Cargill Inc., a twenty-nine-year-old vice president named Dwayne Andreas was rising to power. He had joined Cargill two years before, when it had purchased his family’s business, Honey Mead Products Company of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Now Andreas, the fourth son of a Mennonite farm family, was a millionaire and Cargill’s youngest senior executive. At first glance, he seemed unimposing, standing five feet four inches and weighing just 137 pounds. But his bosses marveled at his intelligence and tenacity. He seemed destined for great things at Cargill.
    No one at that time could have imagined the unlikely pairing of this young, hard-charging executive with a midsized competitor on the verge of decline. For that to occur, Andreas and Cargill would have to part ways, an idea that surely seemed far-fetched. With Cargill’s high hopes for him, it seemed only Andreas himself could derail his career there.
    In the early 1950s, America was a place of paranoia and fear. The Soviet Union had obtained awesome nuclear weaponry. Communists had won control of China, the first major defeat of American interests in the nascent Cold War. In Washington, an array of demagogues stoked alarm with shouts of treason, destroying reputations often with little more than innuendo. Accusatory fingers pointed at Hollywood, industry, and government, creating the widespread impression of a wholesale national betrayal.
    At the height of the hysteria, in March 1952, Dwayne Andreas presented an audacious idea to his colleagues at Cargill: He planned to fly to Moscow the following month to attend a trade conference. He thought it was the perfect first step toward setting up a deal to market vegetable oil in the Soviet Union. Obtaining a visa would be no trouble; in his few years at the company, Andreas had won enough political allies in Washington to take care