Quizzard's Exit

If TV executives often rise with giddy speed to their high perches, teeter briefly, then disappear with the first rough wind, it is perhaps because they have little administrative and command background for the big job. And so some hang on, but many fall.

Sylvester ("Pat") Weaver, late of NBC, came to the network with credentials as program director for a West Coast radio chain, ad manager for the American Tobacco Co., and v.p. of a Madison Avenue ad agency; he was the network's president within four years, its ex-chairman three years later. When NBC's President Robert Kintner (TIME, Nov. 16) began his TV career by assuming high office at ABC, his fingers were still sore from five years as a Washington columnist. Louis George Cowan, until last week president of the CBS-TV network, seemed to fit the pattern. Although he was a highly successful independent TV packager, Cowan moved into the upper echelons of CBS-TV four years ago, largely because of the sudden success of a single, Cowan-made show: $64,000 Question.

As a sort of Quizzard of Oz, he had also developed Quiz Kids and Stop the Music. Thoughtful, well-read Lou Cowan ran CBS with due regard for public affairs programs (Ed Murrow) and serious drama (Playhouse go), but remained strongly identified in the trade with quiz shows. And the wind that blew him down last week stemmed clearly from the TV scandals. Cowan missed testifying before the Harris subcommittee last month when he developed a thrombophlebitic leg, but told investigators in his hospital room that he left his $64,000 packaging firm seven weeks after the show went on the air, had no knowledge of rigging. Nevertheless, in an angry letter of resignation last week, Cowan accused his boss, CBS Inc.'s President Frank Stanton, of trying to force him out. Wrote Cowan: "You do not want a man who has had an association with quiz shows, even though his association was honest and honorable."

Stanton shot back a reply: "It shocks me that you should attribute to me motives that have no basis." Reminding Cowan that he had agreed to quit anyway, Stanton said that in the "fast-moving situation" that now faces TV, strong leadership is needed, and "administration is not your forte." Pressed by reporters who asked if the quiz stigma was not the true reason for Cowan's departure, Stanton backed and filled, finally said: "No, sir. I'm not conducting a witch hunt."

Meanwhile, adding fresh green Ivy to the executive tradition, Stanton named a new president: 41-year-old James Aubrey Jr., a 1941 Princeton graduate (and football end) who worked on West Coast magazines (Street & Smith, Conde Nast) and a local CBS station before getting his first network job just three years ago.

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