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The ABC Pattern. The packagers could never have risen to their present power were it not for the fact that, as Packager (Screen Gems) Harry Ackerman puts it, "the networks are run by businessmen, not showmen." Robert Edmonds Kintner, 50, has no quarrel with that situation. A Swarthmore graduate, he started out as a New York Herald Tribune Wall Street reporter in 1933. Son of a Stroudsburg (Pa.) schoolteacher, Cub Kintner, a lean, spectacled Hall-of-Ivy type at the time, at first "didn't even know where Wall Street was." But he learned quickly. Though an ardent New Dealer and F.D.R. favorite, able Newsman Kintner developed and retained a high regard for big "business. For five years in Washington, he wrote a column, "The Capital Parade," in partnership with doom-crying Columnist Joseph Alsop ("Joe tended to destroy the world every time I was out of town"). After a wartime career in Army intelligence and public relations, Bob Kintner became an assistant to Edward J. Noble, who had bought up RCA's second-string Blue Network in 1943, turned it into ABC. By 1949 brusque, hard-driving Bob Kintner had risen to president.
At ABC, Kintner established his reputation as a skillful and relentless peddler of air wares. He set up the kind of crassly commercial operation so successfully carried on by his successor, Oliver Treyz, after Kintner left in a quarrel with ABC Board Chairman Leonard Goldenson in 1956. Says Kintner now: "If I were still at ABC, I wouldn't have carried the pattern that far."
But while he was there, the pattern was clear: crowd-pleasing filmed series, westerns, cops, crime. Kintner feels that he had no alternative if he wanted to save ABC from being crushed by its two bigger competitors. During Kintner's presidency, ABC added 60 stations, boosted ratings. Kintner signed up Disneyland (for $2,000,000), built a good newscasting staff, including John Daly. He also turned down a chance to sign up The $64,000 Question: "It didn't seem to make sense—not, I hasten to add, because of moral grounds."
A Pattern Repeated. Within 48 hours after he quit ABC, Kintner had an offer to join NBC as executive vice president in charge of color coordination ("I didn't know a damn thing about color"), took charge of TV operations in February 1958. That July he was named president, with a ten-year sliding-scale contract that pays him upwards of $150,000 yearly. Kintner frankly admits that he applied his ABC formula: canned series, westerns, private eyes—plus quizzes. He knifed Wide Wide World, Omnibus, live dramatic shows (including Kraft Theater). Says he: "I had to catch up with front-running CBS." This year, Kintner can point to a more exciting NBC season, including 200 specials, a weekly drama show (Sunday Showcase), ambitious news coverage on Khrushchev's visit. (As he had at ABC, Kintner strengthened the NBC news team.) The feeling in the TV industry is that Kintner made his concessions to quality reluctantly, and largely because he was forced to by last year's torrent of criticism.