William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst (Apr. 29, 1863 - Aug. 14, 1951), publisher, was born at the Stevenson House, a hotel in San Francisco. His father, George Hearst, a self-taught geologist, built a mining fortune before turning to politics in his last years. His mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, became a philanthropist and was a regent of the University of California. Their only child was named William for his paternal grandfather and Randolph for his maternal grandfather. As the son of a well-to-do family, Hearst was largely shielded from the frontier roughness of San Francisco. With his father absent on mining trips, his upbringing was left largely to his mother. When he was ten years old, she took him to Europe for tutelage in art and antiquities; there he began to show a bent for collecting. Hearst's mother decided that he should have the benefits of an elite education and in 1879 sent him to St. Paul's preparatory school in New Hampshire. He left abruptly two years later. After being tutored at home, he entered Harvard University in 1882. He was not an outstanding student. Instead he devoted most of his energies to improving the financial condition of the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine, which he put on a profit-making basis. The rest of the time he used his generous allowance for theatergoing, roistering, and playing practical jokes. In 1884, he was suspended from the university for staging a too-noisy celebration of Cleveland's election. He was allowed to return only to be expelled because of a crude prank that involved sending chamber pots to professors.

Although Hearst appeared frivolous he actually had begun to prepare himself for his life's work. While at Harvard he had not only studied newspapers and printing but had also started to make plans for the newspaper he wanted to operate. Since 1880 his father had run the San Francisco Examiner as a money-losing political organ. At the end of his college career, Hearst tried to persuade his father to turn the Examiner over to him. In the meantime, he served an apprenticeship on Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, the paper he had adopted as his model. In 1887, George Hearst, who had been appointed to the United States Senate in 1886 and who was subsequently elected to a full term, reluctantly let his son become proprietor of the Examiner.

On Mar. 4, 1887, the Examiner published its first issue under William Randolph Hearst. Almost at once he reorganized the newspaper so that it reflected his ideas about journalism. His first objective was to win circulation by paying well for talent, equipment, and attention-getting exploits. Every aspect of the Examiner became an advertisement for itself: its news achievements, its editorial policy, and even its circulation gains were trumpeted. The paper tried to create an air of excitement, to make the reader experience, as one Hearst editor wrote, a "gee-whiz emotion." The methods worked; the Examiner overtook the other local papers in circulation, and eventually, despite its high overhead, it began to yield a profit.

Hearst's objectives were not purely commercial, however, because he also sought to wield political power. Although the Examiner remained ostensibly a voice of Senator Hearst, in fact the new publisher did not hesitate to oppose either political party or, on occasion, both. His most extended crusade was against the Southern Pacific Railroad, a dominant influence in California and western politics. The cutting edge of Hearst's campaign was supplied by the acidulous Ambrose Bierce, who attacked the railroad fiercely in the Examiner. The Examiner's most conclusive success was the blocking in 1896 of the road's effort to avoid repaying federal loans. There were charges later that the railroad had bribed the Examiner into softening its campaign, but recent Hearst biographers give little credence to the accusation.

It was all but inevitable that Hearst would come to New York, hub of the nation's journalism, to test himself against Pulitzer. For a time, however, he lacked the resources because his father had been reluctant to put more money into newspapers. When George Hearst died in 1891 he left his wife as his chief beneficiary. In 1895 Phoebe Hearst sold her interest in the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for $7.5 million and turned the money over to her son. Hearst soon closed a bargain for the Morning Journal, a feeble sheet founded by Pulitzer's brother Albert and acquired in 1894 by John R. McLean. McLean sold the Journal on Sept. 25, 1895, for $180,000.

Hearst threw his resources into the Journal in an attempt to repeat his San Francisco success more swiftly and on a grander scale. First he reduced the paper's price to one cent, a step that Pulitzer had to follow. Hearst also brought the stars of his San Francisco staff to New York and raided other New York newspapers for more talent. In January 1896 he began a series of forays against the World by hiring away Morrill Goddard, genius of the World's lurid Sunday edition. He also took R. F. Outcault, creator of the first popular comic-strip character, the Yellow Kid. Later in the year, Hearst hired away a man who became a close, long-term associate: Arthur Brisbane accepted a proposal that geared his salary to circulation increases and eventually earned him as much as $275,000 a year. Brisbane was initially placed in charge of the Evening Journal, created on Sept. 28, 1896, to oppose Pulitzer's Evening World. Almost as important as the acquisition of Brisbane was Hearst's capture of the World's business manager, S. S. Carvalho, who supplied much of the organizational skill that Hearst lacked.

The Hearst-Pulitzer contest was conducted with increasing shrillness. Although Hearst called his innovations the "new journalism," Ervin Wardman's phrase "yellow journalism" has clung to the genre. Its crudity and theatricality were admirably suited for winning newspapers a new mass audience in the growing city, notably among immigrants who had not previously read English. Moreover, its stands against political and corporate exploitation won it readers' loyalty. At the same time, yellow journalism degraded standards of accuracy and balance by inflating, manufacturing, or even faking news. Its appeal to cheap emotions and its constant search for angles in the news colored and trivialized much American journalism. Hearst became the acknowledged master of yellow journalism, and before 1900 Pulitzer abandoned the field to him.

Yellow journalism reached its greatest notoriety in its exploitation of the Cuban revolt against Spain and the Spanish-American War. Hearst had early favored American intervention on behalf of the revolution; at the same time, he sensed in the struggle a running story ideally suited for his test against Pulitzer. Not only did he draw, as did other publishers, on propagandistic news supplied by rebel headquarters in New York, but he dispatched numerous correspondents to Cuba. One of these, the artist Frederic Remington, complained to Hearst that the situation was quiet. Hearst is alleged to have replied (although no substantiation exists outside one memoir), "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

In any case, Hearst's Journal exploited sympathy for the Cubans to the utmost. Most notable was its campaign for the release of Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, who had been imprisoned after trying to aid the escape of her father, a revolutionary. A Journal writer filed a story asserting that she had been jailed for defending her chastity. The paper embarked on an immense publicity campaign and capped it by engineering her release and her welcome in New York as a Cuban Joan of Arc. On Feb. 15, 1898, when the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, the Journal immediately concluded that the Spanish were responsible (a contention never proved) and demanded war.

The long-running campaign was rewarded with McKinley's war message on Apr. 11, 1898. Historians have since wrestled with the question of how responsible Hearst and the rest of the yellow press were for bringing about hostilities. Hearst himself had no reluctance to claim credit, for his paper referred to "the Journal's war." His most recent biographer, W. A. Swanberg, asserts that had it not been for Hearst's efforts, "there would have been no war." Other recent scholars have pointed out that yellow journalism's jingoism fell on the ears of a receptive public, but it is hard to imagine that war would have broken out so swiftly, especially considering the concessions that Spain was willing to make, had not Hearst and others stimulated war fever and put pressure on reluctant politicians.

During the brief hostilities, Hearst walked a narrow line between observer and participant. He proposed to a correspondent, James Creelman, that Creelman scuttle a ship in the Suez Canal so as to block passage of a Spanish fleet to the Far East; fortunately for international relations, the fleet turned back. In June 1898 Hearst chartered a steamship and, with a group of correspondents, sailed to Cuba. On June 29 the Evening Journal carried his first war dispatch, on the siege of Santiago. After the American naval victory there on July 3, Hearst helped round up a group of Spanish prisoners. Later in the year he claimed for his two New York papers "the largest circulation in the world"--more than 1.25 million copies a day.

With the turn of the century, Hearst became personally involved in politics. In May 1900 he was named president of the National Association of Democratic Clubs. As part of an apparent bargain, he started a newspaper in Chicago designed to give the Democrats a strong new voice in the Midwest. By dint of furious effort, the first issue of the Chicago American was published in time for delivery to the opening of the Democratic national convention in Kansas City on July 4. Hearst had been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential candidate, but his name was not placed in nomination. Instead, he worked to build the Democratic clubs and to overcome his handicaps as a politician--a high-pitched voice, a lack of platform presence, and a shyness that contrasted with the boldness of his newspapers.

At this point he suffered a reverse that would have driven a less resilient man out of politics. On Sept. 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz and died eight days later. For five years McKinley had been mercilessly attacked in the Hearst press. After the assassination Hearst's competitors dredged up a quatrain Bierce had written in 1900 after the killing of a Kentucky official, prophesying that the bullet was "speeding here to stretch McKinley on his bier." Hearst became a target of obloquy; he was hanged in effigy and mobs burned bundles of his newspapers; clubs and libraries boycotted his publications. Hearst retaliated in kind, attributing the attacks to "the incompetent, the failures of journalism, the kept organs of plutocracy. . . ." He made the single concession of adding American to the name of the Journal.

By 1902 it appeared that the worst had passed, and Hearst continued to pursue his political ambitions. He sought to run for governor of New York but settled for the nomination in Manhattan's safely Democratic Eleventh Congressional District, a slot he obtained by arrangement with Charles F. Murphy, New York Democratic leader. Hearst ran an unnecessarily gaudy campaign and won easily. On election night he sponsored a celebration in Madison Square at which a fireworks explosion killed twelve persons. Lawsuits rising from this incident dogged Hearst for decades afterward.

Before he took his seat in Congress in November 1903, Hearst made changes in his personal life. He gave up his flashy way of dressing and adopted more somber attire. More important, he married. As a young man, he had had a continuing relationship with Tessie Powers, whom he had met in Cambridge and with whom he had lived in San Francisco; his mother had eventually broken up the arrangement. In 1897, Hearst had become acquainted with Millicent and Anita Willson, sisters who were appearing as dancers on Broadway. He selected Millicent as his bride, and they were married at Grace Church, New York, on Apr. 28, 1903, a day before Hearst turned forty. Their first child, George, was born on Apr. 10, 1904; they had four other sons over the next twelve years.

Hearst served two terms in Congress, neither of which was notable for legislative achievement or for attendance. He did, however, offer bills that anticipated much progressive reform: control of trusts, public ownership of utilities, and popular election of United States senators. But he was not accepted as an ally by most progressives of either party and was able to achieve little toward enacting these measures beyond publicizing them in his papers.

In 1904, Hearst made a determined bid for the presidency. Despite his mediocre record in Congress and the distrust he inspired among conservative Democrats, his campaign gained considerable momentum. Hearst's chief ally was organized labor, which his newspapers had supported strongly, and he had gathered delegates through assiduous work in state conventions. At the national convention in St. Louis, he had 200 votes pledged and hoped that William Jennings Bryan, whom he had supported in 1896 and 1900, would assist him. But Bryan shied away, and Hearst could not get beyond a peak of 263 votes. Judge Alton B. Parker won and was beaten easily by Theodore Roosevelt.

Hearst's next candidacy was in New York City. In 1905 he and Samuel Seabury, a young judge, helped form a Municipal Ownership League that became in effect a third party when its effort to run a fusion candidate for mayor with the Republicans failed. Late in the campaign the league nominated Hearst to run against the incumbent, George B. McClellan, who was endorsed by the Democrats' Tammany organization. Hearst conducted a brief, furious campaign that came close to success. The count showed that he had lost by only 3,472 votes of 453,322 cast for him and McClellan. Hearst charged that Tammany had destroyed many ballots, but the count stood.

Despite the loss, Hearst now appeared to be a formidable candidate. Only a year later, he won the Democratic nomination for governor of New York through a temporary, unacknowledged alliance with Tammany. His opponent, Charles Evans Hughes, had won national attention in the state's inquiry into the insurance business. President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Secretary of State, Elihu Root, to try to block Hearst's possible election. On November 1 Root asserted at Syracuse that he spoke with the president's authority in saying that Roosevelt believed that Hearst must share the blame for McKinley's death. In the voting the rest of the Democrats won, but Hearst lost, by fewer than 60,000 votes.

The run for governor was Hearst's last major candidacy. In 1908 he turned to a different role--that of attempting to discredit both major parties. His personal third party, the Independence League, floated a token ticket, for which Hearst spoke. On September 17 in Columbus, Ohio, he created a sensation by reading letters connecting Senator Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio, a Republican, with payments from the Standard Oil Company; later he implicated Democrats as well. The letters, it was subsequently learned, had been filched from the files of John D. Archbold, a Standard vice-president, and sold to the Hearst press. The disclosure ended Foraker's political career, but it did little for Hearst's independent ticket, which won fewer than 100,000 votes. In 1912 Hearst produced more Archbold letters, but these proved to be of doubtful authenticity.

In these same years of intense political activity, Hearst continued to expand his publishing enterprises. Before World War I he had started to build an international communications empire. To his newspapers in San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, he added dailies in Boston (1904), Los Angeles (1904), Atlanta (1912), and San Francisco (1913). In Chicago his newspaper and the Tribune fought for circulation dominance by pitting gangs of thugs against one another. Hearst created nationwide services for supplying news and features, including King Features Syndicate and the International News Service (founded in 1910), which was haled into court by the Associated Press and ordered to stop pilfering news. Almost casually, he moved as well into the magazine field, first by founding Motor (1903) and then acquiring Cosmopolitan (1905) and converting it into a muckraking organ, which printed an attack on the United States Senate that aroused the ire of President Theodore Roosevelt. Later acquisitions were the British Nash's Magazine (1910), Good Housekeeping (1911), and Harper's Bazaar (1912). In 1913 he entered films with the Hearst-Selig Weekly, a pioneer newsreel.

Hearst took his most obdurately unpopular position during World War I. In a country that was leaning toward the Allies, Hearst's newspapers maintained positions that were mildly pro-German and bitterly anti-English. Editorials predicted victory for the Central Powers, and one Hearst correspondent proved to be, although unknown to Hearst, on the payroll of the German government. In October 1916 the British and French barred Hearst's organization from using their cables and mails; Canada outlawed distribution of his newspapers. After America entered the war Hearst softened his stand lightly and dressed the papers in red, white, and blue and little American flags. At the war's end he threw his resources into opposing American entry into the League of Nations and later was instrumental in blocking United States participation in the World Court.

Meanwhile, he continued to try to play a boss's role in New York politics. In 1909 Hearst had unwillingly run again for mayor and had finished third, behind the Republican, and the winning Democrat, William Gaynor. After feuding with Gaynor for four years, Hearst supported, then broke with, his successor, John Purroy Mitchel. In 1917, Hearst found in John F. Hylan a Tammany candidate willing to accept his guidance; Hylan won, and Hearst exerted great influence in the city government for eight years. On the state level, however, he had a fateful encounter with Alfred E. Smith, a Democrat who had narrowly won the governorship in 1918. In 1919 Hearst's papers attacked Smith for a milk producers' strike and a subsequent price rise over which the governor had no control. Smith in response denounced Hearst as a "pestilence." In 1922 Tammany wanted to run Smith and Hearst on the same ticket; Smith flatly refused and with one stroke ended Hearst's influence in the state Democratic party.

In 1917 Hearst had met a woman, more than thirty years his junior, who was to become his closest companion through the final third of his life. She was Marion Davies (formerly Douras), a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies. Starting in June 1918 Hearst's film companies produced a series of starring vehicles for her, which were relentlessly praised in the Hearst newspapers. In 1924 Davies and the Hearst film enterprises transferred to Hollywood, but Hearst continued to choose her roles and oversee production. In the early 1920's, he sought to marry Davies, but his wife refused to grant a divorce. Instead, she and Hearst eventually arrived at an agreement that preserved the outward forms of their marriage, while in fact he was living with Davies.

Hearst's empire reached its greatest extent in the 1920's. The death of his mother on Apr. 13, 1919, placed in his hands the bulk of the family's lands and mines, which centered on the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota and the Cerro de Pasco Copper Company of Peru. From 1917 he invested heavily in Manhattan real estate. He continued as well to add newspapers to his chain, which reached a total of more than twenty, and several new magazines. On a hilltop at San Simeon, the family's 375-square-mile ranch on the California coast, he began to build an elaborate estate to house his still expanding collections of art and antiquities. He also bought a castle in Wales, St. Donat's. All in all, he was the country's freest spender, disposing of as much as $15 million a year. When caught short, he raided the tills of his newspapers.

As he passed sixty, Hearst became an awesome, increasingly remote figure in his organization. He had too many employees to be able to maintain wide personal contact, and he tried to compensate for this by reading his newspapers thoroughly and issuing numerous, arbitrary instructions to the editors. In handling subordinates, the "Chief," as he was called, could be cruelly manipulative; his offices became notorious for sudden transfers and humiliating demotions. Outwardly polite and genial, his public statements became increasingly bitter. He started worrying more about his income taxes than about reform; his political heroes in the 1920's were Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon. Some of the least attractive aspects of Hearst and his journalism emerged in 1927 when his newspapers printed documents purporting to show that the Mexican government had plotted to bribe United States senators--this at a time when Hearst's Mexican land holdings were threatened by expropriation. A congressional investigation showed that the documents had been forged; Hearst maintained that, even so, they contained correct facts, although he could not prove it.

Long after his political hopes had passed, Hearst almost accidentally had a chance to name a president. Never a warm supporter of President Hoover, he settled on the Democratic Speaker of the House, John Nance Garner of Texas, as a likely candidate in 1932. His newspapers boosted Garner to success in the California primary; nonetheless, the Speaker came to the Chicago convention far behind the front runner, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York. After three ballots Roosevelt had failed to approach the necessary two-thirds majority, and his managers tried to acquire the Garner bloc through Hearst. Hearst asked Garner to release his delegates; Garner did so, and Roosevelt became the nominee, with Garner as his running mate.

In 1933 Hearst joined the rest of the American press in cheering Roosevelt's first steps to pull the country out of the Great Depression. But the new president's regulation of business through the National Recovery Administration and his later tax legislation led Hearst into opposition; by 1935 his writers were instructed to call the New Deal the "Raw Deal." This alienation was symbolic of Hearst's drift to the right. Once a supporter of trade unions, he bitterly opposed the entry of the American Newspaper Guild into his shops, and his aide John Francis Neylan helped engineer suppression of the San Francisco general strike in 1934. On a tour of Europe in that year, Hearst seemed to be conducting a flirtation with Nazism. At home, he sent reporters on a hunt for communists in college faculties and stirred up a hornets' nest of opposition among educators.

The depression had a devastating impact on Hearst's properties. His enormous personal spending had left his enterprises with scanty reserves. As early as 1924, he had started to raise capital by bond issues and had shuffled his corporations to permit stock issues and to create tax advantages. Eventually, the more than ninety Hearst enterprises were placed under a company called American Newspapers, Inc. Hearst owned its 10,000 shares, and in 1935 it was worth perhaps $197 million. But the long slump had cut deeply into newspaper and magazine revenues; many of his publications had started to lose money. Hearst declined to sell them or to cut back beyond general salary reductions. By mid-1937 the Hearst enterprises faced a crisis that threatened their existence.

In June of that year Hearst abruptly surrendered control over his properties. Clarence Shearn, a long-time Hearst legal adviser and now also a representative of one of the debtor banks, became sole voting trustee of Hearst's stock in American Newspapers. Shearn cut back at once: he incorporated the New York American into the Evening Journal: he sold or closed other newspapers in Rochester, Omaha, and Pittsburgh, terminated Universal Service (a supplementary news wire), sold seven radio stations, and closed a magazine, Pictorial Review. Soon afterward he liquidated parts of Hearst's real estate, severed ties with his film enterprises, and halted construction at San Simeon. Many art objects Hearst had stored went on sale at Gimbel's store in New York. Of his former near-absolute powers, Hearst retained only a degree of editorial control over his newspapers. So hard pressed was he that he accepted a loan of $1 million from Marion Davies. Not until wartime prosperity and considerable corporate reorganizing had taken effect did the Hearst empire become stabilized again. By 1945 Hearst was able to resume a share of his old power over a domain that, while reduced, was still the most substantial publishing conglomerate in the United States.

In 1947, at the age of eighty-three, Hearst suffered a heart seizure that made him an invalid. He had to abandon San Simeon for a house he shared with Davies in Los Angeles, where he died. Increasingly bedridden, to the last he perused his papers and issued directives.

Hearst's death touched off a brief, intense struggle for control of his organization. His will, disposing of a personal estate of $59.5 million, created trusts for his wife, for the five Hearst sons, and for philanthropy. There was no bequest for Marion Davies, but a trust fund dated nine months earlier gave her the income from Hearst corporation stock. Her lawyers also brought forth a signed agreement giving her, through a pooling arrangement, sole voting power in the Hearst Corporation, which now stood at the top of the corporate pyramid. Hasty negotiations produced an agreement by which Davies relinquished power to Hearst's sons.

Hearst's immense holdings continued to erode after his death. Many of his newspapers disappeared in closings and mergers. Moreover, the Hearst style in journalism went out of fashion. The surviving Hearst newspapers, facing more sophisticated readership, became less sensational.

Hearst's career evidenced a genius of sorts--an intuitive sense of the shortest routes to seizing public attention. Although Hearst expanded journalism's audience, he lay outside journalism to a degree. Swanberg came close to the mark in writing that, for Hearst, "truth in news was never of great importance" and that he "was essentially a showman and propagandist, not a newsman."

But even with his grasp of the popular mind, Hearst was unable to promote himself, through his newspapers, into a major public office. He was not made of the stuff from which Americans select popular politicians. In early biographies and in Orson Welles's quasi-fictional film Citizen Kane (1941), Hearst was seen as a kind of fabulous, amoral robber baron, the type of gaudy, imperial wastrel who could rise only in an age of quick and easy fortunes. American journalism and politics are richer in legend and poorer in practice for Hearst's existence.

CHRONOLOGY

1893 - Pulitzer bought a new Hoe four-color rotary press for his New York World Sunday supplement, and was able to reproduce all colors adequately except yellow.

1895 - On May 5, Pulitzer's New York World Sunday edition launched the first successful newspaper comic series with a quarter-page panel entitled "At the Circus in Hogan's Alley" drawn by Richard Outcault, showing street performers, barefoot children hanging from fire escapes, and a sign warning "Don't Guy [tease] the Performers." The Yellow Kid is standing in his dirty nightshirt, but no words are yet written on it.

1896 - On Feb. 16, the Yellow Kid made his first appearance in a yellow nightshirt after Pulitzer's engraving foreman invented a new drying process for the color press at the New York World.

1897 - Rudolph Dirks began drawing the Katzenjammer Kids. According to Jerry Robinson's 1974 history of comic art, Outcault and Dirks began "an indigenous American art form that is now read by more than 200,000,000 people every day, nearly 75 billion a year, making its authors and graphic artists the most widely read and seen in the world."

1917 - Hearst began to use the word "marijuana" rather than hemp in his newspapers, according Jack Herer's 1995 book, describing it as the "killer weed from Mexico" causing violent crime in America, and sought to influence immigration restriction and hemp restriction to favor his timber and paper mill interests.

1994 - The UCLA Film and Television Archive began a three-year project to preserve the original footage from the 1930-39 decade of Hearst Metrotone newsreels. The UCLA archive is the nation's second largest publicly held collection of Film and television materials, after the Library of Congress, and is a repository of twenty-seven million feet (5000 hours) of Hearst Metrotone newsreel footage from 1919 to 1968. The decade of the 1930s represents 5 million feet of unstable nitrate film stock. Newsreels became an important medium of communication in 1930's and 1940s, and were seen by a weekly audience of 80 million Americans, over half the total population.

1999 - The heirs of Hearst increased his holdings from 15 dailies and a couple magazines in 1951, to an empire in 1999 that included 12 daily newspapers including the controversial purchase of the San Francisco Chronicle from the the descendants of M.H. de Young who founded the newspaper with his brother in 1865 (newspaper holdings also include the Houston Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Midland Texas Reporter-Telegram), 26 television and radio licenses, 17 magazines (including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Smart-Money, The Oprah Magazine and O), the King Features Syndicate, Internet holdings including drugstore.com, genealogy.com, and 30% of iVillage.com, 20 business services and databases, and 3 cable networks. Forbes estimates the 1999 revenues of Hearst Corp. at $4.4 billion that is shared by 61 grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the family-owned business. In his 1951 will, William Randolph Hearst placed ownership of the company in a trust managed by a 13-member Board, of which only 5 members could come from the family, and mandated the management of the company in the hands of non-family professionals

2002 - Frank A. Bennack Jr., retired after 24 years as CEO of Hearst Corp. and was succeeded by Victor F. Ganzi; the company donated a $1 million chair in Bennack's name at the journalism school at the University of Texas. Bennack had increased the revenues of Hearst Corp. 600% since 1979, to $5.2 billion (small compared to the $38 billion of AOL Time-Warner), and diversified the holdings to include part-ownership with Disney of the Lifetime, A&E and ESPN cable networks, 27 TV stations in partnership with Argyle Television, and began planning a 42-story tower on the company's mid-town Manhattan 6-story headquarters.

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