Malcolm Forbes - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that August 19 is the anniversary of the birth of American entrepreneur Malcolm Stevenson Forbes most prominently known as the publisher of Forbes magazine, founded by his father B. C. Forbes.
Rest in peace Malcolm Stevenson Forbes

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"Forbes, Malcolm Stevensonfree
(19 August 1919–24 February 1990)
Ellis W. Hawley
Published in print: 1999Published online: February 2000
Malcolm Stevenson Forbes.
Platinum print, 1985, by Thomas John Shillea.

Forbes, Malcolm Stevenson (19 August 1919–24 February 1990), publisher, was born in New York City, the son of Bertie Charles Forbes, a newspaper columnist and and Adelaide Stevenson. Reared in a comfortable, upper-middle-class home in Englewood, New Jersey, Forbes attended private schools in Tarrytown, New York, and Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He graduated from Princeton University with a major in political science in 1941, and with the support of his father, the founder of Forbes magazine, he became the owner and publisher of two local weeklies, the Fairfield Times and the Lancaster Tribune, in Lancaster, Ohio. He had hoped to build on his experience as founder of the Nassau Sovereign while at Princeton, but the papers ceased operations after he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942. While in service, he rose to the rank of staff sergeant in a heavy machine gun section, was wounded while fighting in Germany in 1944, and spent the final months of World War II recuperating in an army hospital. In 1946 he joined the Forbes staff as an assistant publisher, became an associate publisher in 1947, and for a time, in 1948 and 1949, was also publisher of Nation’s Heritage, an expensive bimonthly that failed after issuing only six numbers. In 1946 he married Roberta Remsen Laidlaw, with whom he had four sons and a daughter. The couple divorced in 1985.

From 1947 through 1957 Forbes combined his publishing activities with a strong interest in a political career. At Forbes he helped to launch a system for rating corporations, and after his father’s death in 1954 he took over the journal’s editorial side while his brother Bruce handled the business side. He was also instrumental in helping to convert the magazine from a financial emphasis to a broader business one, and he played a leading role in founding and directing the affiliated Investors Advisory Institute, which published Forbes Investor. Yet his real passion during the period was politics, in which he had hopes of rising to the highest level. In 1949 he was elected to the borough council of Bernardsville, New Jersey, and in 1951 he was successful in securing the Republican nomination for New Jersey state senator and winning election. He served as senator for six years (1952–1958) and became noted for his quarrels with the Republican Old Guard leadership. In 1952 he was an early supporter of Dwight D. Eisenhower for president and subsequently became chair of the New Jersey Ike-Nixon Clubs. The next year he was unsuccessful in a bid for the New Jersey Republican gubernatorial nomination, but in 1957 he mounted an unorthodox, door-to-door campaign that made his second bid for the nomination a success and gave him national prominence as the articulate challenger of Democratic governor Robert Meyner’s fiscal and welfare policies. Commentators believed that he had a chance of upsetting Meyner. But he lost by a wide margin—“nosed out,” he said, “by a landslide”—and after the defeat gave up his political ambitions and devoted himself to business and personal projects.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Forbes helped to turn the enterprise he had inherited into an increasingly prosperous magazine directed especially to executives and investors who needed information about corporate worth. The real transformation, however, would come after his brother Bruce’s death from cancer in 1964. Taking over as president of Forbes, Inc., Malcolm quickly became sole owner of the company and embarked upon a campaign of daring initiatives that in effect would recreate the magazine, this time as what Forbes biographer Arthur Jones called “a punchy, highly profitable, easy-to-read, mass-circulation business magazine devoted to money, wealth and success.” One aspect of its new image was Forbes as a “capitalist tool” that businesspeople could use to find out how other businesses were run. Another was Forbes as an authoritative ranker, putting together a “Forbes 500” plus a 400-person ranking of the world’s wealthiest individuals; and still another was Forbes as “interpreter of the corporate world” through a free-wheeling journalism that combined aggressive exposés with a breezy style, opinionated commentary, and entertaining accounts of life among the rich and famous. From 1964 to 1975 Forbes’s circulation grew from 400,000 to 625,000, and by the end of the period its advertising revenues had overtaken those of its long-standing rivals, Fortune and Business Week.

In what turned out to be an effective way of promoting the magazine, Forbes also made himself a media personality increasingly celebrated as a lavish party giver and consummate world traveler, an ingenious public relations wizard, the last of the “fun millionaires,” and an unabashed, insouciant, and exuberant reveler in the exotic consumer pleasures available to those at the top of an acquisitive society. The entertainment of corporate chieftains on the company’s yacht or at its New York townhouse became legendary for its lavishness and the exquisiteness of the cuisine. The display of corporate and family collections, which had come to include fabulous assortments of Old Masters, Fabergé eggs, valuable historical documents, and toy boats and soldiers, made the company’s New York headquarters a well-known landmark and generated publicity that could be turned into greater circulation and larger advertising revenues. And special events like the magazine’s fiftieth anniversary party in 1967, held in huge tents on Forbes’s New Jersey estate with Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the guest of honor, added to the fanfare. Some commentators saw Forbes’s lifestyle as a throwback to the plutocratic excesses and “conspicuous consumption” of the Gilded Age. But for others it represented a deserved reward for American-style entrepreneurial success or an entertaining spectacle to be vicariously enjoyed.

By the 1970s Forbes’s promotional display of the good life was also leading to investments that eventually created a diverse business empire deriving only about two-thirds of its revenue from the magazine. In 1969 Forbes purchased a 260-square-mile ranch in Colorado and, after being blocked from turning it into a commercial hunting preserve for rich patrons, proceeded to develop a portion of it into lots for vacation and retirement homes. Subsequently, he also acquired other real-estate holdings, among them a development in the Ozarks, ranches in Montana and Wyoming, a palace in Tangier, a château in France, an island plantation in the Fijis, and a fishing camp in Tahiti. In addition, he moved into other publishing ventures, including acquisition of American Heritage, purchase of a string of New Jersey weeklies, publication for a short period of a Forbes restaurant guide, and the launching in early 1990 of the magazine Egg as a guide to opulent living. He made sizable investments in art treasures and other collectibles and created for a time a special company for dealing in antiques. And in conjunction with his involvement in motorcycling and hot-air ballooning, he acquired a motorcycle dealership (Slegers-Forbes, Inc.) and had his company establish a balloon ascension division. Most of these new ventures, moreover, turned out to be moneymakers, leading Newsweek to describe Forbes as a “Walter Mitty dreamer with a solid Midas touch.” By the 1980s his assets were conservatively estimated to be something in excess of $600 million.

During the 1970s Forbes also built up a considerable reputation as an international sportsman interested particularly in the promotion of motorcycling, yachting, and hot-air ballooning. His motorcycle feats and yachting trips were often in the news, and in 1973 he broke six ballooning records and became the first person to cross the United States from coast to coast in a single balloon. In 1974 and early 1975 his preparations for a transatlantic flight also became a major news story, but the project was finally abandoned after he nearly lost his life in an aborted takeoff. In 1975 he received the Harmon Trophy for his ballooning achievements and later received much publicity for his “friendship tours,” with motorcycles and balloons, of Egypt, Russia, Thailand, Pakistan, Spain, and China. In China in 1982, he defied restrictions imposed on him by communist officials, cut his balloon loose, and became the first person to fly over Beijing in a free-flight balloon.

In the 1980s Forbes continued to stage numerous media events, the “splashiest” being his seventieth birthday party cohosted with the actress Elizabeth Taylor at his palace in Morocco. For the occasion he spent a reported $2 million on lavish entertainment, media spectacles, and “fly-ins” of illustrious guests. Articles about his private jet The Capitalist Tool, his yacht The Highlander, and the museums housing his fabled collections, especially the Museum of Military Miniatures in Tangier, also became media staples. And in more dignified settings, he continued to be honored with business and publishing awards and kept adding to a long list of honorary college degrees. In addition, he received some unwanted publicity, especially about his alleged involvement with young male homosexuals.

In his later years, Forbes published a number of books. Since the 1950s he had written a Forbes column, “Fact and Comment,” which became noted for its sprightly style, outrageous opinions and puns, quotable epigrams, and a punchy humor that led Hubert Humphrey to label its author “the Bob Hope of business publications.” In 1974 Forbes published the best of these columns in a book titled Fact and Comment, and when it succeeded he offered more of the same kind of commentary in The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm (1978) and The Further Sayings of Chairman Malcolm (1986). He also wrote two books about his personal exploits and interests—Around the World on Hot Air and Two Wheels (1985) and More than I Dreamed (1989)—and two odd books of popular biography, They Went That-a-Way: How the Famous, the Infamous, and the Great Died (1988) and What Happened to Their Kids? Children of the Rich and Famous (1990). In Forbes’s view, these recovered history that had “slipped through the cracks,” and at the time of his death he was working on a third such work, subsequently published as Women Who Made a Difference (1990).

In his personal relations with others, Forbes could be difficult. His critics found him arrogant and opinionated, excessively demanding, too inclined to treat his employees as family retainers, and loath to listen to anyone but himself. Yet at the same time he could be a man of considerable charm, geniality, and personal magnetism, able to put others at ease, artful as a host and raconteur, knowledgeable in worldly affairs and the social graces, and fascinating in his role of a “sparkling, naughty boy.” Ruggedly handsome, with a solid build, ruddy face, energetic bearing, and jaunty air of venturesomeness, he became a memorable figure in the circles in which he moved. And despite practices that some employees found demeaning, he encouraged the rise of journalistic “stars” and succeeded in building an organization that benefited from the talents of some remarkably able editors, writers, and merchandisers. Of particular importance, his biographers have thought, was his elevation of and reliance on editor James Michaels in his remaking of the magazine.

For public consumption, Forbes often downplayed his business skills, saying that he got where he was “through sheer ability (spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e).” But the skills and judgment that he brought to bear on business problems proved themselves at the bottom line; his transformation of the magazine he had inherited was a major achievement affecting business journalism as a whole; and his public relations artistry worked for the purposes intended and influenced what others undertook. In important ways, moreover, he became an inspiration to and model for a new generation of business leaders. Ahead of his time in the 1960s and 1970s, he became a mainstream symbol of the flamboyant consumerism, worship of moneymaking, and upbeat fantasizing that pervaded much of America’s business and political culture in the 1980s, and during that decade he not only showed others how to spend their money but also became an even more outspoken defender of the capitalist system, minimal government and taxes, and entrepreneurial virtue. He died at his home in Far Hills, New Jersey, and was eulogized by President George Bush as “a giant of American business.”

Bibliography
The best biography, written by a former employee but generally well balanced, is Arthur Jones, Malcolm Forbes: Peripatetic Millionaire (1977). Another book-length treatment is the sensationalistic and gossipy Christopher Winans, Malcolm Forbes: The Man Who Had Everything (1990), focusing on Forbes’s high living and alleged homosexual dalliances. Other biographical material can be found in Forbes’s own writings (noted above), in periodic interviews published in Forbes Magazine, and in such articles as “Walter Mitty as King Midas,” Newsweek, 20 Jan. 1975, pp. 70–71; Arthur Lubow, “Malcolm Forbes,” People Weekly, 19 July 1982, pp. 48–59; Elizabeth Peer, “The High Life of Malcolm the Audacious,” New York, 30 Jan. 1984, pp. 30–37; Ira Wolfman, “Just Another Thursday with Malcolm Forbes,” 50 Plus, Nov. 1988, pp. 52–59; and Harold Holzer, “Collecting’s First Family,” Americana, Mar.–Apr. 1983, pp. 41–47. An obituary is in the New York Times, 26 Feb. 1990."

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Do Capitalists Go Too Far?
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Maj Marty Hogan always great to read a good read/share. Thanks for the informative read.

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Maj Marty Hogan
Steve Forbes is very interesting to listen to regarding politics. I hear him on Fox News occasionally.