Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,684
By This is the grave of Laurence Tisch.
Born in 1923 in Brooklyn, Tisch grew up in a Jewish family. By this time, it was his grandparents who had migrated; his father’s side from modern Ukraine and his mother’s from Poland. His father owned garment factories. Sure the labor conditions were fantastic in those things…….In any case, the family had money and were upwardly mobile. He and his brother Lawrence (more famous, but we will get to him soon) had to work at the summer camps their father bought in New Jersey. They were super cheap too. They moved every three years due to offers to get a few months of free rent due to offers from owners. So the kids went to a bunch of different schools. Among his brothers was Bob, who I have covered here (and am stealing some basic language from to save a little a time!)
Since his parents were stealing profits from labor, the kids got to go to college. Laurence went to NYU. To be fair, the kid was really smart and he graduated in 1941, only 18 years old. Of course there were plenty of sweatshop workers kids just as smart, but then they didn’t have such opportunities. He then went to the Wharton School at Penn for an MBA in industrial management, which he finished in 1943. I am not sure what Tisch did during the war, but he did not serve in the military. In 1946, he and Bob got their parents to buy a New Jersey hotel as an investment. They fancied it up and also tried a bunch of silly gimmicks, such as importing reindeer during Christmas for sleigh rides. It worked. They started going into hotels generally, especially in run down areas with potential, which included both Atlantic City and New York. They’d buy ratholes, fix them up, and give people a reason to stay there.
Tisch and his brother then started buying up old movie theaters, tearing them down, and building new apartments and new hotels on the spaces, as well as building new theaters when that made sense to them. This was through their acquisition of the Loews theater chain in 1968. They just started buying everything. They took that money and bought the Lorillard tobacco company, which you don’t probably recognize today, but you do recognize their brands Kent, Newport, and True. In 1974, they bought the CNA Financial Corporation and brought it back from the brink to be successful. They bought Bulova Watch, hell, they bought everything they could.
Amazingly, Tisch proved to be a less rapacious, less scumbag capitalist than a lot of the 1980s types, like Donald Trump, let’s say. This was of course the era of the hostile takeover. A lot of these vultures targeted CBS as a legacy company with a lot of valuable assets they could stripmine. Obviously, CBS did not want Ivan Boesky or Ted Turner to buy it. Plus CBS faced pressure from Jesse Helms, who had a bug up his old flabby ass that the network was dominated by liberals. Maybe he hated Dan Rather, probably did. Anyway, CBS was in trouble. So they asked Tisch to step in. They sold him nearly 25% of the company for $750 million. Bill Paley wholeheartedly approved.
Now what I remember about Tisch at CBS was the network losing the NFL to Fox, which was a shocker at the time in 1993. This in fact marks the beginning of the modern media frenzy over sports rights. But this was amazing at the time. CBS had showed the NFL since 1956. Who would swoop in and steal it? They were caught totally unawares by Fox’s bid. Fox continues to hold the NFC rights to the present, though later CBS went out and outbid NBC for the AFC rights (it doesn’t matter as much today, but those networks still generally show the games from their given conference). What I really remember is being like, wtf dude. Shortly after this, I was working my AV job at the University of Oregon and the Sports Business program or some such thing brought the head of CBS Sports out to campus and I had to run the AV for his talk. Not only did I not mess it up (amazing in itself!) but I was sitting there thinking, loser! You let Fox take the NFC?????? Of course it was probably Tisch being cheap. Anyway, that’s my exciting story.
In any case, Tisch at CBS acted more or less as any rapacious CEO would have. He cut costs left and right, laying off as many people as possible. Out of the 1,200 person news division, he cut 230 positions. CBS was a huge company of course back then, with holdings across media. He got rid of most of them, most notably CBS Music, which was a huge distributor of tunes, selling it to Sony for $2 billion. Then he finally sold CBS to Westinghouse in 1995 for $5.4 billion, of which $2 billion went into the accounts of he and his family’s Loews company. Tidy sum. Meanwhile, Tisch was pretty well slammed for his leadership of CBS from the very beginning, noting that he had no knowledge of the news or media industries, that he stupidly sold off the other parts of the company, and that rather than investing that money in new parts of the company, it became solely about the network. Also, CBS remained in last place among the networks for his entire time there.
Tisch was super rich and so did the philanthropy thing, ranging from building a children’s zoo in Central Park to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He in fact chaired the NYU Board of Trusteesw from 1978 to 1998. Oh, and then there’s the Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard–Niall Ferguson! Great…….He also engaged in one of the most annoying things some rich guys try to do, which is to be a political moderate who just brings both sides together to solve problems. You might say that this is better than Elon Musk because a slobbering slave of Donald Trump and maybe it is, but if you think bringing Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson together to have a conversation is solving anything at all except for Tisch’s ego to be massaged, you have another thing coming.
Later in life, Tisch managed to lose a tremendous amount of his own money consistently betting against the stock market boom of the late 90s. Overall, he lost $2 billion that way. Just play money I guess.
Tisch died of gastroesophageal cancer in 2003. Sounds tremendously horrible. He was 80 years old.
Laurence Tisch is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
If you would like this series to visit other late 20th century American capitalists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sadly, Donald Trump lives. Lee Iacocca is in Troy, Michigan and Steve Jobs is in Palo Alto, California. Previous posts are archived here and here.