The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Sharing a life’s lessons
Character is king in celebration of former Hearst CEO’s memoir
Frank Bennack started working at age 8, growing up as an only child of Catholic Texas parents who some years could, and some years could not, afford to send him to the local parish school.
He rose to head a major American media and information company for 28 years, multiplying it across industries with acquisitions, rollouts and investments, more than one of which paid off in the billions.
He’s had meaningful words with every president since Eisenhower except one — John F. Kennedy.
At 86, a longtime resident of New Canaan, the former Hearst CEO and still executive vice chairman, remains a fixture in the New York nonprofit world, where he was chairman of the Lincoln Center and the New YorkPresbyterian hospital system boards.
“If ever someone was in the right place at the right time, I was that man.”
And If that sounds like the makings of an autobiography, it is. It’s a line from “Leave Something on the Table,” just published by Simon & Shuster.
But good fortune and timing is not the main storyline. That emerged in a gathering of Bennack’s fellow CEOs, philanthropists, arts and health care board members and media figures on the 44th floor of Hearst Tower in New York Monday night to celebrate the launch of the book.
They talked about a strain of American business and public culture based on values and character, for which Bennack is a flagbearer and the book is an anthem.
Cathie Black, who was publisher of USA Today and of Hearst magazines, quoted a former ABC president: “A handshake from Frank Bennack is better than any signature on a corporate contract.”
“He does what he says, and he does it with gusto,” said philanthropist and Lincoln Center board member Daisy Soros, sisterinlaw of George Soros, who lived in New Canaan for 50 years.
“I hate to use the word ‘oldfashioned’ but we have oldfashioned values,” said Samia Staehle, a fourthgeneration Hearst descendant who serves on the company’s board.
Reading this memoir and talking with Bennack and the people in the world he inhabits brings to life a culture that seems threatened by the politics and business shenanigans of our era.
Lately, though, that culture appears to be fighting back. Hearst CEO Steven R. Swartz noted that the Business Roundtable (large company CEOs including himself ) recently issued a statement that corporations should be run for the benefit of employees, customers and the community, not just shareholders. “Frank’s book is a testament to the fact that he’s always operated that way and thanks to his example, so have we,” Swartz said.
With all this homage to the high road in the air, Bennack, who had two stints as CEO starting in 1979, opened his remarks with the quip, “This beats the hell out of any memorial service.”
Some, including Bennack’s friend on the New York Philharmonic board, Peter Georgescu, also emerged from tough circumstances.
Georgescu spent a hefty chunk of his childhood as a political prisoner in Romania when the Iron Curtain descended after World War II. He came to America in 1954 at age 15 without speaking a word of English. He enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy and later earned degrees at Princeton and Stanford before ascending to CEO of Young & Rubicam — the large marketing and communications company that he guided through a crisis, brought public and expanded overseas.
Does he see a common bond in overcoming adversity? Not exactly, Georgescu said. “I see a common bond about values, not success. Success is success. How you do it is as important as success . ... The valuesdriven companies always in the end will win.”
Bennack drives home traditional values throughout the book, moving from loving and supportive parents to lighter stories of interactions with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Richard Nixon
“We live in a time of instant trends,” he read on Monday. “If a company becomes successful by running roughshod over the competition and flaunting its ability to operate outside government regulations, can it really reform itself ? ... Can a company that runs on algorithms ever acquire human values?”
He doesn’t name any offending companies. He also resists telling tawdry stories or criticizing anyone directly, instead heaping praise liberally, especially on members of the Hearst family. He describes them as functioning beautifully under a trust created by “the Gestator” — which leaves them as owners, but with mostly outside top executives.
That’s all part of the same picture of likability and leadership. But wasn’t there anyone who earned his scorn? “Happily, they were few and far between,” Bennack said.
As for the balance between claiming credit for rebuilding a corporate empire in the modern era and directing credit to other people, Bennack paints a picture of himself in the room, and we know he’s in charge. But he doesn’t talk about exerting power. In the chapter with tips on running a company, he insists it’s not necessary to fire people.
“There’s nothing worse than insincere humility, and yet I wanted to stay short of bragging about what I did,” he said, “and I hope I’ve walked that fine line.”
Attacks on large corporations are, of course, a major thread of political culture these days and Bennack’s network includes many of the key players who sculpted corporate media, not to mention some giant hospital mergers. Their legacies clearly reject the oversimplified idea that big is bad.
“He cuts a huge swath in everyday America,” John W. Madigan, who headed Tribune Co. when it acquired the old Times Mirror Co. in 2000, said of Bennack.
Bennack, who started his career as a teenage radio entertainer and newspaper ad salesman, would rather talk about people.
In the book, he recounts a story of the time he felt chest pains, exited a board meeting at another company and hopped a cab to the hospital — where he arrived in his doctor’s office at the same time as former President Richard Nixon.
They said hello. Nixon had a book with a Hearst publishing house at the time. “I didn’t want to say anything more because I’m having a heart attack,” Bennack said Monday night. “He starts this long harangue, and I’m dying, and I’m thinking this defrocked president is going to cost me my life. I’m going to stand here and die and he’s going to still be with us.”
It wasn’t a heart attack, and Bennack’s mischievous face and relentless optimism lived on.
In the big picture, the degradation of character and the clash between humanist values and hardnosed business is universal. “But it’s a bigger problem than it was in my early days,” he said. “More of us need to stand up and say ‘No, we’re going to do the right thing.’”