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In the process, ITT's lobbyists and public relations men have been charged with an excess of zeal. Several reporters accused the company of trying to manipulate the news—and this was especially damaging since a main Justice Department complaint is that ITT's worldwide business interests might encourage the company to influence ABC's public-affairs programming. Justice's other key objections are that the merger would result in a cash drain away from already-strapped ABC (both companies insist that, on the contrary, ITT would be supplying the network with fresh capital) and that it would restrain competition.
The precedents on the latter question are scanty at best. In more than two years as Assistant Attorney General in charge of antitrust, Donald F.
Turner has challenged few previous conglomerate-type mergers, and the courts have issued nothing in the way of clear-cut guidelines even in those cases. Turner, who once took a go-soft line on conglomerate get-togethers, now seems to be stiffening up. Said he last March:
"In those instances where larger size will indeed carry with it greater efficiency, such efficiency will sooner or later be achieved by internal growth."
"Not for Long." Harold Geneen is keeping his fingers crossed on the ABC deal (first hearings are scheduled in Washington's U.S. Court of Appeals in October), since a network tie-in would go a long way toward making his company as well known as he feels it deserves to be. Whatever the outcome, he promises to continue going "where the opportunities are," and in the case of a conglomerate—or a "unified-manage-ment, multiproduct company"—that could be just about anywhere. What drives the man so relentlessly? Keeping those profits doubling, for one thing.
But that, of course, mainly benefits the company and the stockholders. As for himself, Geneen confided last week:
"You work for money to begin with—but not for long. After that you work for pride."
* The word is derived from the Latin con-glomerare, meaning "to roll together." In geology, a conglomerate is a number of stone fragments heaped together in a mass.