J. Richard Munro Dies: CEO Who Led The Creation Of Time Warner & HBO Was 93
J. Richard Munro, the former chairman and CEO of Time Inc. who led the storied publisher’s 1989 merger with Warner Communications and was a driving force in the early success of HBO, has died. He was 93.
His son, Mac, told The New York Times that Munro died August 11 in Naples, FL.
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As Chairman and CEO, Munro is best known for crafting the merger with Warner Communications, creating what at the time was the world’s largest media and entertainment company. In the go-go M&A environment of the late ’80s, it took Munro and his team — which included future Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin — two years to find the right partner. All the while, they were under pressure from shareholders to fend off competition from foreign conglomerates such as Bertelsmann AG and News Corp.
Even when they found the right match, the deal almost was scuttled by a hostile bid from Paramount and objections to then-Warner CEO Steven Ross’ huge paycheck. But Munro saw it through, running the company with Ross as co-CEOs and co-chairmen for a year after the agreement was consummated. Munro retired in 1990. He considered the deal his major legacy at the company.
Munro was born on January 26, 1931, in Syracuse, NY, where he grew up. After high school, he joined the Marines and was wounded three times during the Korean War.
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“My feet were badly hurt,” Munro recalled in a 1990 interview. “They were injured by a grenade that went off at my feet. I spent about a year in a Navy hospital. I was discharged, I think, in 1953, and went back to college.” He graduated in 1957 and went to work for Time Inc. that very summer.
“My first real job was at Sports Illustrated in 1960,” he later said. “I went over to that magazine to become its assistant business manager, which basically meant I did the budgeting and kept track of the dollars and all of that. I spent a whole decade at Sports Illustrated … worked there from 1960 to sometime around ’70. Eventually, rose to become the publisher of that magazine, and was there just as it was beginning to turn a profit after a long string of losses.”
In the early ’70s, Munro left the publishing side of Time and got involved in what were then the company’s fledgling video efforts.
“I was being asked to come in and take over something that was, I think, at best a rather confused lot of business. HBO was then just a gleam in our eye and we had Manhattan Cable Television which was then Sterling Cable which was a huge drain on us. It was kind of a disaster. Then we had a cable television operation which we weren’t terribly pleased with, I mean a broadcast operation where we owned a number of broadcast stations and that was something we weren’t terribly happy with. So, I got thrown into something I knew very little about, and I was thoroughly confused for at least the first several months of that assignment, maybe the first year.”
It was not long thereafter that Munro, Levin and soon-to-be cable magnate Chuck Dolan began to create what would become HBO.
“I credit Chuck with having had the dream and the concept,” Munro said. “But I credit my colleagues at Time Inc., particularly Jerry Levin, with the wherewithal and the stamina and the energy to take a dream and make it a reality which is what Time Inc. did with HBO. I remember those days rather vividly. … I think a lot of people really never fully appreciated the magnitude of what could happen.”
Key to the fledgling network’s success was the pioneering step of providing HBO’s pay-for-view content to cable companies by satellite, replacing microwave and telephone line delivery.
“Of course, it started off as a terrestrial microwave network, going along telephone lines. It was Jerry Levin, I think, who was primarily responsible for putting HBO on the satellite,” Munro recalled. “Of course, that was the revolutionary step that put HBO on the map, as well as everyone else on the map. We were the pioneer in terms of satellite transmission. I think of all the things that HBO stood for, and all of its success, that obviously was far and above anything else HBO has done to put them on the map.”
Along with son Mac, Munro’s survivors, include Carol, his wife of 61 years; sons Mac, John and Doug; six grandchildren; and his brother, Bill; The Times reported.
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