The story behind a struggle to survive

Nearly a year and a half ago, three Journal reporters went looking for the answer to this seemingly simple question: How did the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., which once dominated the cigarette industry, lose its way? Today, we begin telling the story with all the sweep and context that it deserves. ''Lost Empire: The Fall of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.'' will run each day during the next two months. The story will run in chapter form, as in a book.

Each day's installment will have a brief summary of previous installments, and readers will be able to read chapters they missed on the Journal's Web site, www.journalnow.com. Additional information will be posted on the Web site.

There is a common belief that RJR's slide is traced to two events: Philip Morris' luck with its Marlboro brand, and the arrival of F. Ross Johnson in 1985 when R.J. Reynolds Industries bought Nabisco Brands.

Neither event helped, but RJR's problems can be better attributed to a series of mistakes and missed opportunities at key times in the company's history. They can also be traced to the unrelenting attack on the cigarette industry for the past 50 years.

The first major turning point for the company and the industry would occur at an obscure university laboratory in 1953, when tumors started appearing on the backs of mice painted with the residue of cigarette smoke. At the time, RJR was on the attack, poised to become the country's largest cigarette company. It employed one of every five workers in Winston-Salem and was the lifeblood of this community.

The mice and the fallout from these experiments would change the rules of the cigarette business. How RJR and its competitors responded would lead to new winners and losers in the tobacco industry.

There were internal pressures on RJR as well. As the case against smoking strengthened, cracks were appearing in RJR's tradition-bound formula for success. The company's values were called into question and in some cases discarded.

To get at the inside story of RJR, the Journal's team interviewed more than 100 people, many of them current and former RJR executives, and examined thousands of pages of court documents, government reports, internal company memos and other documents. Some of these people had never been interviewed about their roles at the company, and some of these documents had never been written about.

The story will show that RJR executives put the fortunes of the company above all else and -- as the medical evidence against smoking mounted -- worked prodigiously over the years to reassure their customers, discredit their foes and limit government intrusion into their business. From their standpoint, they did nothing wrong. They were -- and still are -- selling a lawful product, and they maintain that the medical evidence is inconclusive.

No industry has been under more legal pressure than the tobacco industry. Reynolds alone has more than 600 lawsuits pending against it. Company attorneys always feared the crippling jury verdict that would set a precedent and invite more lawsuits. What they did not foresee was the irreparable damage done by the barrage of damning internal reports and memos that the lawsuits brought to light and which eventually forced them to the settlement table. When our story opens, RJR is a domestic tobacco company with virtually no international sales and no other businesses.

A global empire that extended to shipping, oil production, fruit and crackers was built and then dismantled until the company finally returned -- in a vastly diminished role -- to what it was at the beginning.

After Winston and Salem cigarettes were introduced in the 1950s, the joke around town was that RJR's next brand would be called ''hyphen.'' City and company were that close. They remain inexorably linked, by the economics of RJR's remaining operations and its 5,000-plus employees in Forsyth County, and by the lasting legacy of a remarkable man and the remarkable company he built. Though in many ways the city has moved on, it can still be said with a certain pride that as RJR goes, so goes Winston-Salem.