Robert Stuart Jr., 98, Quaker Oats Chief and War Foe in 1940

Robert D. Stuart Jr., whose long career as a top executive for the family business, Quaker Oats, was preceded by his founding, with a handful of fellow Yale law students, of the America First Committee, the catalyst for a potent and polarizing movement opposing the nation’s entry into World War II, died on May 8. He was 98.

His son Sandy said he died of heart failure on an airplane en route to the United States from France with his wife, Lillan. He lived in Lake Forest, Ill.

A scion of the founders of the Quaker Oats Company, Mr. Stuart was its chief executive from 1966 to 1981. During that time the company introduced flavored instant oatmeal and chewy granola bars and expanded into the toy business, acquiring the Fisher-Price Toy Company.

When Mr. Stuart stepped down as chairman in 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed him ambassador to Norway, where he served until 1989.

He had been politically active most of his life. In September 1940, as a 24-year-old law student, he became the founding national director of America First, a grass-roots group that until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sought to keep the United States from being drawn into another world war in Europe. The group grew to more than 800,000 members, placing it among the largest antiwar organizations in American history.

His fellow founders, all law students, included a future president, Gerald R. Ford; a future Supreme Court justice, Potter Stewart; the future first director of the Peace Corps, R. Sargent Shriver; and a future president of Yale, Kingman Brewster.

Edgar M. Bronfman, Who Built a Bigger, More Elegant Seagram

As president of the World Jewish Congress, from 1981 until 2007, Mr. Bronfman turned a loose, cautious federation of Jewish groups in 66 countries into a more focused, confrontational organization. Under his leadership, the Congress pressed the Soviet Union to improve conditions for Jews living within its borders and to allow freer emigration. Spurred by Mr. Bronfman, the Congress led efforts to expose the hidden Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations who became president of Austria. And it campaigned successfully to force Swiss banks to make restitutions of more than a billion dollars to the relatives of German death camp victims who deposited their savings in Switzerland before World War II. 

Mr. Bronfman shrugged off criticism from those who feared that his aggressive tactics were risking an anti-Semitic backlash. “The answer isn’t to say, ‘Don’t make trouble,’ and hide our heads in the sand,” he wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Good Spirits: The Making of a Businessman.” “We may not earn the friendship of others, but we will demand their respect.”

Paul Reichmann, Who Helped Develop the World Financial Center

“I think that what I did in those years was a greater achievement than what I’ve done since,” he was quoted as saying in a 1996 biography of his family, “The Reichmanns,” by Anthony Bianco. Paul Reichmann was born in Vienna on Sept. 27, 1930, the fifth of six siblings. His parents, Samuel and Rene, were Orthodox Jews who had moved from rural Hungary to Vienna, where they owned a prosperous egg export business. But Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 forced the family to flee to Paris.

Two years later, when the Nazis overran France, the Reichmanns fled to Tangier, Morocco, where Samuel Reichmann became a successful currency trader.

The Reichmanns filed for bankruptcy protection in London, Toronto and New York simultaneously.

Only three years later, Mr. Reichmann regained the helm at Canary Wharf, which finally gained nearly full occupancy in 2000 thanks to a booming real estate market in London. By 2000, the Reichmann family’s net worth reached $1 billion. But in an interview with Institutional Investor that year, Mr. Reichmann said his business accomplishments had never given him the sense of fulfillment he experienced as a youthful religious social worker and teacher in North Africa. But “what could have been is a silly way to look at things,” he said. “You are what you are.”

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WWII ace and Watergate figure

First saw a Twitter link to this story. I barely remember his name, but his connection to Watergate is clear.

As the Midwest finance chairman of President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, Dahlberg was pulled into the Watergate scandal even though he didn't engage in any wrongdoing. He became linked to the scandal after a check he delivered to the Nixon campaign turned up in a Watergate burglar's bank account, tying Nixon to the break-in.

But how is this for anonymity?

At one point, as the White House tapes later revealed, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman mentioned Dahlberg's role to Nixon, to which the president responded, "Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?

Standardized barcodes

Barcodes, also known as universal price codes, were invented in 1949 by Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who had the idea of vertically extending the dots and dashes of Morse code and using it to encode product data. They secured a patent in 1952, but because scanning technology was in its infancy, their invention went largely unused.

In the early 1970s Haberman, executive vice president of First National Stores in Boston, convened a committee to choose a standard symbol that could be used across America.

Despite resistance from conspiracy theorists, who considered barcodes to be intrusive surveillance technology, and from some Christians who thought the codes hid the number 666, more than five billion of the codes are now scanned in shops worldwide every day; the technology has yielded savings running into the trillions of dollars.

The devil is in the barcode? Oy.

a Modest Billionaire

This Wall Street Journal obit rues the passing of the "good old times" when people made fortunes by making tangible goods, and rues their replacement with loud-mouth wealth — Trump, The Real Housewives, Mark Cuban– the story of William Cook is worth remembering.

It quotes a Times obituary that explains Cook invented a catheter and other Cook products “supported the many innovative new minimally invasive therapies that have profoundly revolutionized medicine,” the Society of Interventional Radiology said last week.

Fittingly, accompanying the Times obit is a picture of one of the most loud mouth celebrities of the contemporary day:Critic's Notebook: Jennifer Lopez 

The WSJ writers end his remembrance wistfully: Maybe Americans wouldn’t resent the rich so much if more of them were like Mr. Cook.

Mr. Cook fit no obvious category. He sometimes drove the bus that took his friend, the singer John Mellencamp, on tour.

Built DEC into a power

A pioneer in computing, but short-sighted when it came to personal computers.


Ken Olsen helped reshape the computer industry as a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the world’s second-largest computer company ... built Digital on $70,000 in seed money, founding it with a partner in 1957 in the small Boston suburb of Maynard, Mass. With Mr. Olsen as its chief executive, it grew to employ more than 120,000 people at operations in more than 95 countries, surpassed in size only by I.B.M. At its peak, in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales and ranked among the most profitable companies in the nation. But its fortunes soon declined after Digital began missing out on some critical market shifts, particularly toward the personal computer. Mr. Olsen was criticized as autocratic and resistant to new trends. “The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business,” he said at one point

Promoted Arab-Jewish Ties

Alan B. Slifka, a New York investment manager who used his fortune to promote harmony among Israeli Arabs and Jews and to give the Big Apple Circus its start, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81 and also had a home in Manhattan.

Seven years after starting the company, Mr. Slifka visited friends in Israel and could not understand why so few of them were friendly with Arab-Israeli citizens. “He toured Arab villages,” Ms. Ritvo-Slifka said, “and was troubled at the discrepancies in how they lived.” With $500,000, Mr. Slifka started the Abraham Fund Initiatives, named for the biblical patriarch of both Arabs and Jews. Since its establishment, the fund has provided more than $10 million in grants for a range of educational programs to dispel stereotypes and to foster Jewish-Arab cooperation in health, social services and women’s rights. Among many projects, it has supported an Arab-Jewish theater workshop, touring chamber music quartets and a karate program for Jewish and Arab youngsters.

Mr. Slifka also donated more than $20 million to the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan, and in 2003 gave $5 million to Brandeis University to create a master’s degree program in coexistence studies. 

Harvard Business School profile in 2001.

Shrewd and combative investor

Mr. Deane ... had a reputation as a shrewd and combative investor, kept a stuffed white Alaskan timber wolf in his office as “a reminder,” he once said, “that you should always keep your organization lean and hungry.” A wolf also adorned the letterhead of his company, Corporate Property Investors, symbolizing both his lone wolf approach to investing and the dog-eat-dog world in which he operated.

One can imagine how it would be to work for him.

John W. Kluge

John W. Kluge, who parlayed a small fortune from a Fritos franchise into a multibillion-dollar communications empire that made him one of the richest men in America, died on Tuesday night at a family home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 95. The John W. Kluge Foundation confirmed his death. Mr. Kluge was the creator of Metromedia, the nation’s first major independent broadcasting entity, a conglomerate that grew to include seven television stations, 14 radio stations, outdoor advertising, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Ice Capades, radio paging and mobile telephones.

Channel 5 in NYC, now, alas, part of Murdoch's empire, was a Metromedia station.

An immigrant from Germany, Mr. Kluge (pronounced KLOOG-ee) came to the United States in 1922 and took his first job at the age of 10 as a payroll clerk for his stepfather in Detroit. He made his first million by the time he was 37.

Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press-Mr. Kluge in 2007, at the announcement of his $400 million gift to Columbia University.


He made his first billion — it was actually almost two billion — in 1984, when he took Metromedia private in a $1.1 billion leveraged buyout and then liquidated the company, more than tripling his take. He sold the television stations, including WNEW in New York, for more than $2 billion to Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his communications empire. Mr. Kluge’s sale of 11 radio stations brought close to $290 million. The outdoor advertising business went for $710 million. The Harlem Globetrotters and the Ice Capades, which together cost the company $6 million, brought $30 million.

Critics complained that he had reaped the bonanza after having paid Metromedia’s stockholders too little when he took the company private. But Mr. Kluge maintained that the value of the company shot up afterward, when the Federal Communications Commission increased the number of television stations a company could own from seven to 12 and ruled that only two cellular telephone systems could operate in a given city.

“That changed the price of poker,” he said.

Associated Press-John Beckett, left, Transamerica’s president, with Mr. Kluge in 1968 at the announcement of a merger that was later called off. 


In 1986, Forbes magazine listed Mr. Kluge as the second-richest man in America (after Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart Stores). By this year, after a bankruptcy of the Bennigan’s and Steak and Ale restaurant chains in 2008, Mr. Kluge had dropped to 109th on the Forbes list with a fortune of $6.5 billion. Mr. Kluge savored the chance to move into new areas of high technology. He had no patience for those he called “self-important corporation types cut out of the same cookie cutter” who tended to stick to what was safe. He often took Wall Street by surprise, but as the financial analyst Allen J. Gottesman said in 1986: “Whatever he does works out real well. You always assume there was a good reason, and you usually find out later that it was a good move.” Not everything he touched turned to gold. In 1965 he bought Diplomat magazine in Washington and tried to change it from a society sheet into a serious publication of world affairs. “I lost a million dollars before I ever knew I lost it,” he said. Three years later he negotiated a proposed $300 million merger of Metromedia with Transamerica only to join in calling off the deal “by mutual consent” in a two-paragraph statement months later, saying a merger would “adversely effect” the growth plans of both companies.

But he never lost his zest for developing new businesses or his taste for complex financial deals. “I love the work because it taxes your mind,” he said in an interview for this obituary, one of the few he ever gave, after he turned 72. “Years ago, I could have taken a few million dollars and joined the country club and gotten into this pattern of complaining about the world and about the tax law.” He was critical of corporation executives who put themselves in the limelight. There were no public relations officers on his payroll. He liked to do business behind an unmarked door. “I think a great deal of publicity becomes an obstacle,” he said. “I’d love to be in the woodwork all my life. I enjoy it when I know who the other people are and they don’t know who I am.”


But it was inevitable that people would come to know who he was, first in the business world as the man with the Midas touch and then as a generous contributor to schools and hospitals. In his later years his name appeared in the society columns as the host for charity parties that he and his third wife, Patricia, gave on their yacht, the Virginian, or as a guest at dinner dances. (He had taught dancing at an Arthur Murray studio when he was in college.) He grew flowers and collected paintings, African sculpture and Indian, Chinese, Greek and Egyptian objets d’art. But nothing gave him more pleasure than putting a deal together. And the creation of Metromedia, considered a triumph of financial structuring, may have been his greatest pleasure of all.


The most satisfying day in his life, he said, was the day Barney Balaban of Paramount told him, “Young man, you bring me $4 million and you’ll be able to have the Paramount stock in the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company.” With that $4 million, Mr. Kluge got into the television business as chief executive of Metropolitan, which consisted of two stations — WNEW and, in Washington, WTTG — and two radio stations. He renamed the company Metromedia in 1961 because he intended to expand it beyond broadcasting. Mr. Kluge held to a simple maxim: make money and minimize taxes. He made it his business to study the tax code. In 1981, for example, he received tax benefits when he bought buses and subway cars from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and leased them back to the authority for a tax savings of $50 million over five years. He also found a way to enhance the company’s revenue by marrying the profits of broadcasting to the depreciation that came with billboard advertising.

“I sold the banks the idea that the Ford Motor Company that advertises on radio and television would also advertise on billboards,” he recalled. “From a financial orientation, if you took the pretax profits of radio and television and the depreciation of outdoor advertising, you increase the cash flow. I impressed the bank so much that I borrowed $14 million and got our money back in 27 months.”


John Werner Kluge was born Sept. 21, 1914, in Chemnitz, Germany. His father died in World War I. After his mother remarried, John was brought to America by his German-American stepfather to live in Detroit. The stepfather, Oswald Leitert, put him to work as a boy in the family contracting business. Mr. Kluge said he left home when he was 14 to live in the house of a schoolteacher. “I was driven to have an education.”

He worked hard, and successfully, to lose his foreign accent and to get the grades he needed in high school to win a scholarship to college. He first attended Detroit City College, which was later renamed Wayne State University, and transferred to Columbia University when he was offered a full scholarship and living expenses. At college he distributed Communist literature. “I was never an official member of the Communist Party, but I was quite liberal,” he said many years later. But what got him in trouble was his card playing. At one point the dean called him in to warn that he was in danger of losing his scholarship.


“I told him, ‘Dean, you will never catch me gambling again,’ ” he later recalled, “and it was then that I realized the dean of Columbia University didn’t understand the English language. I had told him he’d never catch me gambling again.”


Mr. Kluge later channeled his fondness for gambling into high-stakes finance. “I don’t really get comfortable when I haven’t got something at risk,” he said. Even as a billionaire twice over, he borrowed money to leverage his next ventures. Mr. Kluge graduated from Columbia in 1937 and went to work for a small paper company in Detroit. Within three years he went from shipping clerk to vice president and part owner. After serving in Army intelligence in World War II, he turned to broadcasting and, with a partner, created the radio station WGAY in Silver Spring, Md., in 1946. “It cost us $90,000,” he recalled. “I went up and down the street on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring to get investors.”


In the 1950s he acquired radio stations in St. Louis, Dallas, Fort Worth, Buffalo, Tulsa, Nashville, Pittsburgh and Orlando, Fla. Meanwhile, he invested in real estate and expanded the New England Fritos corporation, which he had founded in 1947 to distribute Fritos and Cheetos in the Northeast, adding Fleischmann’s yeast, Blue Bonnet margarine and Wrigley’s chewing gum to his distribution network. In 1951 he formed a food brokerage company, expanding it in 1956 in a partnership with David Finkelstein, and augmented his fortune selling the products of companies like General Foods and Coca-Cola to supermarket chains.


Mr. Kluge served on the boards of numerous companies, including Occidental Petroleum, Orion Pictures, Conair and the Waldorf-Astoria Corporation, as well as many charitable groups, including United Cerebral Palsy. His philanthropy was prodigious. About a half-billion dollars went to Columbia alone, mainly for scholarships for needy and minority students. One gift, of $400 million, was to be given to the university by his estate when he died. Mr. Kluge also contributed to the restoration of Ellis Island and in 2000 gave $73 million to the Library of Congress, which established the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities.


Mr. Kluge and his third wife, the former Patricia Rose Gay, lived in a Georgian-style house on a 6,000-acre farm near Charlottesville called Albemarle House. He had another home in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Long Island Sound, and an apartment in Manhattan, where he kept much of his modern art collection, including works by Giacometti, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Fernando Botero. He traveled to his houses in his plane and helicopter. Mr. Kluge became acquainted with the woman who would become his third wife at parties when she was in her mid-20s and he was about 60. “At one party,” he said, “she cooked the dinner and then she did a belly dance on the table and I said to myself, ‘Where have I been all my life?’ ”


A small scandal erupted in 1985 when Mrs. Kluge was chairwoman of a charity ball in Palm Beach, Fla., attended by Charles and Diana, the prince and princess of Wales. The British press disclosed that a nude photograph of Mrs. Kluge had been published a decade before in a British magazine called Knave, which was owned by her first husband. To avoid embarrassment, the Kluges were traveling abroad on the night of the ball. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1991, and Mrs. Kluge received a big settlement as well as the Virginia estate. He married again, to Maria Tussi Kuttner, who survives him. Mr. Kluge is also survived by his son, John W. Kluge II; a daughter, Samantha Kluge, from his second marriage, to Yolanda Galardo Zucco; a stepson, Joseph Brad Kluge, whom he adopted; and a grandson. His first wife was Theodora Thomson Townsend. A convert to Roman Catholicism when he married his third wife, Mr. Kluge said he often went to church. He had planned to be buried in a crypt in a chapel he built on the grounds of Albemarle, but later changed his mind after the house was awarded to his third wife in the divorce.

Mr. Kluge acknowledged that he had been ruled by his ambitions and traced them to the struggles of his boyhood. He recalled a conversation he had with friends in college about their aspirations. “One fellow said he wanted to be a lawyer, another a doctor,” he said. “I said one thing — that the only reason I wanted money was that I was always afraid of being a charity case and of being a ward someplace. That’s what really drove me all my life.”


September 8, 2010
John W. Kluge, Founder of Metromedia, Dies at 95
By MARILYN BERGER

Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS

A former Navy nuclear engineer, Michael Jordan set new courses for two of the largest companies in the country. Mr. Jordan, who died Tuesday at age 73, was a top PepsiCo Inc. executive before he transformed Westinghouse Electric Corp. in the mid-1990s from a foundering industrial giant into a leading media company. He renamed it CBS Corp. after acquiring the Tiffany network. And coaxed from retirement in 2003, Mr. Jordan led a turnaround at Electronic Data Systems Inc., an information-technology giant. In each case, the company he had led was sold once he had reshaped it. CBS Corp. went to Viacom in a 2000 deal valued at $44 billion, and EDS to Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2008 for $13.9 billion.

"What I like about a crisis situation is you don't have to pussyfoot around," he told the Dallas Morning News in 2007, shortly before retiring from EDS. "When you step into a mess like this, you just start kicking a—, taking names, and changing things."

That's leadership; we could use some of it now, indeed.

The changes at Westinghouse were profound. When Mr. Jordan was brought in as chief executive in 1993, the venerable manufacturer of consumer goods and defense and nuclear-power equipment was experiencing record losses, largely weighed down by its financial-services subsidiary. Mr. Jordan sold off large parts of the company, then in 1995 surprised analysts when he doubled down on the company's media holdings by acquiring CBS for $5.4 billion in cash. A year later, he acquired Infinity Broadcasting, a national radio giant known for its shock jocks. The transformation of Westinghouse became complete in 1997. He changed its name to CBS and moved the headquarters to New York, ensconcing himself in the office last occupied by the network's builder, William Paley. It had sat empty since Mr. Paley's death in 1990. The office choice was a dramatic gesture for a man whom Fortune had once declared charisma-challenged.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Jordan attended Yale and studied chemical engineering at Princeton. He left before finishing his doctorate to run a soap factory for Procter & Gamble Co. Drafted into the Navy in 1959, he studied nuclear engineering and joined the staff of Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine program.

In 1964, Mr. Jordan joined McKinsey & Co., where his clients included Westinghouse. He joined PepsiCo in the mid-1970s and became CEO of the company's Frito-Lay division. After serving as chief of PepsiCo's overseas operations, Mr. Jordan seemed a possible candidate for chairman of the company, but retired in 1992 to run a private-equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He was lured to run Westinghouse a year later. After stabilizing the company and changing its name to CBS, he declared he would continue as CEO until 2001, when he would be 65. He changed his mind and retired in 1998, amid talk of fights between Mr. Jordan and Mel Karmazin, his deputy and the former CEO of Infinity.

Could use some of this refreshing candor, as well.

"We were not dancing the tango in my office every day," Mr. Jordan told The Wall Street Journal of the two executives' relationship. But he supported Mr. Karmazin for CEO when he told the CBS board of his decision to resign.

Mr. Jordan was renowned for a photographic memory, and liked to write mystery and historical novels in his spare time. None were published. He served on numerous corporate boards, and was chairman of the United Negro College Fund for a decade starting in 1994.

He once appeared in a public service announcement for the fund, alongside another Michael Jordan. The CEO missed shot after shot while the basketball star caught nothing but net.



MAY 27, 2010 - By STEPHEN MILLER
Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS
picture: Electronic Data Systems