Ralph Baruch

Ralph Baruch is an American media executive known for his leadership as the founding president and chief executive officer of Viacom, where he guided the company through its formative years and played a key role in expanding the cable television industry.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1923, Baruch fled Nazi persecution with his family in the mid-1930s, first to Paris, and immigrated to the United States in 1940, where he became a naturalized citizen. He began his career in broadcasting at CBS in the 1950s, eventually rising to vice president of CBS Enterprises, the division responsible for program syndication. When CBS spun off its syndication and cable operations to form Viacom in 1971, Baruch was appointed its first president and later CEO, positions he held until 1983.

Ralph Baruch was born Rudolph Maximilian Baruch on August 5, 1923, in Frankfurt, Germany, into a Jewish family during the height of the hyperinflation that plagued the Weimar Republic. His father, Bernard Baruch, was an internationally recognized attorney who specialized in international law and frequently appeared before the International Court in The Hague; he spoke nine languages in addition to Latin and Greek and had faced severe anti-Semitism before World War I, including fighting multiple saber and pistol duels over insults directed at Jewish students during his university years in Heidelberg. His mother, whose maiden name was Gunzenhauser, came from Munich, where her great-grandfather had risen from humble beginnings to own the Löwenbräu brewery.

Rising anti-Semitism affected the family even before Hitler's full ascent to power. In 1932, at age nine, Baruch was attacked by eight or ten Hitler Youth members on his way home from school and sustained a knife wound below the knee that left a lasting scar. That same year, his father, a Social Democrat, struck a Nazi defendant who insulted him with anti-Semitic remarks in court, leading to charges; on April 1, 1933, amid the nationwide Jewish boycott, the father was tried for attempted murder, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison but bribed his way out of jail that morning using judicial connections. Shortly after the Nazis took power in 1933, the Gestapo arrested Bernard Baruch in "protective custody" and severely beat him, knocking out teeth. Jewish students were expelled from regular schools, prompting Baruch and his brother to transfer to a Jewish school. The family fled Frankfurt in 1933.

In June 1963, Baruch remarried Jean Ursell de Mountford, whom he met while searching for a nursery school. She converted to Judaism.