In 1986, Laurence Tisch, a fabled Wall Street investor, took control of CBS, often considered the crown jewel of American broadcasting. Tisch ran the CBS network, its owned and operated television stations, and other corporate properties until 1995. Throughout the decade he was in charge, he manipulated and modified CBS, looking to cash in with an eventual sale of the property. In 1995 the deal came through. Westinghouse offered $5 billion for CBS; Tisch personally made an estimated $2 billion.

     In the view of many television critics and media industry observers, Tisch badly mismanaged the former "Tiffany network" with policies that caused ratings to drop, earnings to fall, and affiliates to defect. In a stunning pair of 1994 deals, fellow mogul Rupert Murdoch contracted broadcasting rights for the National Football League (NFL) and tempted a number of CBS affiliates to switch to the FOX Broadcasting Company. CBS was further embarrassed when Tisch demoted Connie Chung from her position as co-anchor with Dan Rather of the CBS Evening News. Media pundits lambasted Tisch for CBS's decision to offer golf coverage on a Sunday afternoon in May 1995, while ABC and NBC carried President Bill Clinton's address  to the mourners of the Oklahoma City bombing. CBS opted to stay with the golf tournament to save $1 million in advertising.

     Andy Rooney, long a fixture on CBS's highest-rated show, 60 Minutes, stated openly what many in the industry felt about Tisch's negative impact on CBS's long-fabled news division. On rival network ABC's Primetime Live, Rooney castigated Tisch for allowing CBS to slip: "We need a hero in the business. I don't see why someone like Larry Tisch ...  doesn't say, 'I've got all this money, why don't I just make the best news division in the world."'

     Tisch's relations with CBS had not begun on such a rancorous note. During the mid- 1980s, when Ted Turner tried to make a hostile bid for CBS, longtime CBS chief William S. Paley looked for a "white knight" to save his beloved company. In October 1985 Paley and his hand-chosen corporate directors asked Tisch to join the CBS board and thwart Turner. Before his takeover, Tisch had simply been another anonymous New York City multimillionaire, making money in tobacco, insurance, and hotels. His rescue of CBS made him a media celebrity.

     After serving in the U.S. Army's intelligence office during World War II, Tisch joined forces with his younger brother, Bob, and began his rise to corporate power and profit with the 1949 purchase of Laurel-in­ the-Pines, a New Jersey hotel. For the next decade, the brothers bought and sold hotels, particularly in Miami Beach, Florida, and Atlantic City, New Jersey. In 1959 the Tisch brothers bought the Loews theater chain from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and changed the name of their company to Loews Corporation.

     From this base they continued to expand their investment efforts and by the mid-1980s, Loews Corporation ranked as a multibillion-dollar conglomerate success story. Loews was built by acquiring other companies through tender offers, beginning with the takeover of Lorillard, a tobacco products company, in 1968. In early 1974 Loews announced it had acquired just over 5 percent of an insurance subsidiary, CNA Financial, then an independent company. Before the end of that year, Loews had successfully completed a hostile tender offer for the company's stock, and CNA became the principal source of Loews' income. In the case of both Lorillard and CNA, the Tisch brothers reversed the fortunes of ailing companies and made millions in the process.

     Privately, Laurence Tisch then began to undertake philanthropic causes. He managed the investments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided endowment and buildings for New York University, and led fund­ raising for the United Jewish Appeal.

     In 1986, Paley stepped aside and Tisch became not only CBS's major stockholder but also its chief executive officer. To no-one's surprise, Tisch restructured the company into a "lean and mean" operation. Within months he had launched the biggest single staff and budget reduction in network TV history. When the dust had settled, hundreds had lost their long-secure jobs. news bureaus had been shuttered, and CBS was a shell of its former self.

     On a larger corporate scale, Tisch systematically began to sell every CBS property not connected to televi-sion. First sold was CBS's educational and professional publishing, which included Holt, Rinehart and Winston, one of the United States' leading publishers of textbooks; and W.B. Saunders, a major publisher of medical books. CBS picked up $500 million in the deal.

     That sum proved to be small change when compared to the $2 billion paid by Sony Corporation of Japan for the CBS Music Group. One of the world's dominant record and compact disc companies, CBS Music boasted a stable of stars that then included Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Cindy Lauper, Paul McCartney, and James Taylor. This single 1987 sale enabled the new CBS to earn a substantial profit that year.

     With the layoffs, budget cuts, and sales of CBS properties completed, Tisch faced the need to improve TV programming. This proved difficult, and speculation began about precisely when Tisch would cash in his CBS stock. Potential buyers for the network included MCA/Universal Pictures, Disney, Viacom, and QVC, a television home-shopping company. Throughout the early 1990s, Tisch quietly engineered stock repurchases by CBS, and, by selling much of his own stock back to the corporation, he covered his original investment. Whatever he would receive for his remaining 18 percent of the company would be pure profit. Thus, the 1995 Westinghouse deal moved Tisch from the status of a multimillionaire to a multibillionaire. In television history, however, Laurence Tisch will be remembered for first rescuing, and then decimating, the once-dominant television network.