DAVID SARNOFF WALKED THROUGH THE LUNCHTIME CROWDS enjoying the unseasonably warm winter afternoon. Five blocks up Fifth Avenue from RCA’s Rockefeller Center offices, he and the two aides who trailed him arrived at their destination. Above them, the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church’s Gothic spire rose into the cloudy February sky. General Sarnoff turned up the red marble steps and led the way in to Edwin Armstrong’s funeral.
Two nights ago, the sixty-three-year-old inventor had shocked everyone who knew him by leaping from his thirteenth-floor apartment in River House. The following morning a maintenance worker spotted his shattered body, dressed in a warm winter coat, scarf, and gloves at the base of the building. Today’s newpapers carried stories blaring the news of the famous inventor’s mysterious suicide. His funeral was set to begin at 1 P.M.
The news that his old friend had jumped from his apartment had stunned Sarnoff, not least because he had never known the Major to quit a fight. Many of his fellow mourners, Sarnoff knew, had remained close to the inventor and were undoubtedly familiar with the accusations that Armstrong had leveled at him in recent years. Many, no doubt, believed that Sarnoff himself had driven Major Armstrong to take his own life.
Major Armstrong’s mysterious suicide had thrown his long, tortured relationship with David Sarnoff into the public eye. In the previous decade, Armstrong’s myriad and unrelenting attacks on Sarnoff, RCA, and NBC—including his lawsuit and the congressional investigations he had spurred—never managed to seriously damage Sarnoff’s authority or reputation. Even Alfred McCormack and the sixteen other lawyers Armstrong had hired to prosecute his lawsuit, now about to enter its sixth year in federal court, had yet to prove David Sarnoff guilty of anything other than being a hard-nosed businessman.
Inside, the cavernous church felt nearly empty. Roughly 150 mourners clustered near the front of a space built to seat a dozen times as many. Across the ocean of empty pews, Sarnoff could see his former secretary, the newly widowed Marion Armstrong. She sat with the rest of Armstrong’s family in the first few rows, below an unusual pulpit that jutted out over them like a ship’s prow. Trailed by his two aides, Sarnoff walked down one of the two aisles into the Presbyterian Sanctuary, as the church’s main hall was known. Not wanting to call attention to himself and risk an ugly scene, he slid into an empty pew, out of sight of the family.
Sarnoff’s attention moved to the unusual pulpit as the preacher from Armstrong’s childhood home of Yonkers, New York, Thornton Penfield, walked up the carpeted steps and began to lead the assembled in prayer. The minister started off in standard fashion, reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer, and then began a pointed eulogy.
“To these strengthening and undergirding words from the Bible, I add some words which seem particularly appropriate for our thought here,” he continued, his voice booming across the empty pews. “We thank Thee for men of great integrity, men who are unpurchaseable,” the preacher declared. “His mind was brilliant and creative, but he kept his genuineness, his integrity of spirit. He was not for sale.”
As Penfield continued, there was nothing for David Sarnoff to do but listen in awkward silence. He never called out David Sarnoff by name, but otherwise making little effort to disguise the identity of the man he believed had tried to buy off the noble inventor.
THE YOUNG IMMIGRANT with the endless store of self-confidence had grown into a corporate mogul known for taking a keen, almost obsessive interest in his public image. Several RCA executives in the press department now spent their days chronicling his accomplishments, which already filled over a dozen volumes of RCA history. Other staff members spent their time hunting down honorary degrees or other awards for which Sarnoff might qualify. Despite the General’s fame and power, he seemed to covet even the most trivial honors. Recently, after reading about an award a friend had won from a local advertising council, Sarnoff forwarded it to his staff with a note: “Is that something for me? Whom can we explore it with?”
Larger honors became the subjects of elaborate lobbying campaigns. Even the title of General turned out not to be enough. Lately Sarnoff had become fixated on persuading the Pentagon to award him a second star and promote him from brigadier to major general. So far, this had proven an impossible sell. Even with his old boss, Dwight Eisenhower, now sitting in the White House, the military tradition against promoting officers not on active duty had thwarted his ambitions.
Catty members of New York’s media elite mocked Sarnoff’s constant quest for status. Others considered it part of an understandable need to prove he belonged—not an easy feat for a Jew in the WASPy world of corporate America or a Russian immigrant in Joe McCarthy’s America. A top Sarnoff aide put it this way: “His appetite for praise was never sated, either verbally or in print. This was the assurance he seemed to need of the reality of his transformation from immigrant to industrial nonpareil.” The General, observed David Lilienthal, a close friend and the former head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, “doted on publicity as much as anyone I have ever known.” Rivals such as Time magazine’s Henry Luce made a sport of tweaking the General for his “vast pride.”
Yet the portrait of a vain and power-obsessed Sarnoff missed the essential philosophy that had always driven him. For the past forty years, ever since that fateful night of January 31, 1914, when Edwin Armstrong demonstrated his new amplifier for Sarnoff at an antenna site in Belmar, New Jersey, Sarnoff had maintained his faith in the growing power of the airwaves and a demonstrated reverence for the inventors who could build new tools to control it. In their long fight, no matter how blistering were Armstrong’s personal attacks against Sarnoff, the General never retaliated. Instead, he stuck to the position he had taken when Alfred McCormack asked him about it a year earlier: “We were close friends. I hope we still are.”
In contrast to the Presbyterian preacher now thundering on, David Sarnoff traced Armstrong’s troubles to a different source: his own obstinacy. A quarter century earlier, when Armstrong launched the fight against Lee de Forest that would become the longest patent lawsuit in U.S. history, Sarnoff had sent him a note composed around a lighthearted anecdote about a stubborn horse standing on the train tracks staring down an onrushing locomotive. Sarnoff took the side of the farmer in the parable, who observed of his doomed horse: “I admire his courage, but damned if I admire his judgment.”
It was one of Sarnoff’s many good-natured attempts to prod his friend into accepting a reasonable compromise. Again and again over the years, Sarnoff had urged the inventor to spend less of his time fighting legal and political wars over past inventions and more time discovering new ones. As his friend’s habit of fighting idealistic and doomed battles continued, Sarnoff’s gentle prodding had turned to straighter talk. In 1934, after Armstrong showed him his FM discovery, Sarnoff tried again in his letter encouraging his friend to focus on his future inventions instead of battling in court over proper credit for the past.
Sarnoff had always credited Armstrong with teaching him about the invisible waves, insights that had sparked his own success. “I probably learned more about the technical operation of receivers and radio from Armstrong than I did from anybody else,” was the way he’d put it to McCormack under questioning. Undoubtedly, the biggest lesson he absorbed from Armstrong was something closer to a philosophy, or even a religious faith: Always trust in the untapped potential of the airwaves and in the ingenuity of human beings to reveal new ways to use the waves in order to connect mankind.
As Sarnoff saw it, Armstrong’s fatal mistake was abandoning that optimism, trading his focus on the future for a life of recriminations, victimhood, and isolation.
Armstrong’s perception of David Sarnoff after his first FM demonstration—a businessman intent on protecting his empire by throttling the superior technology—was the opposite of Sarnoff’s image of himself. Just two weeks after the fateful demonstration in 1934, he delivered a speech in which he celebrated obsolescence and pledged his devotion to the technologies of the future: “The total of the world’s inventive enterprise and scientific resourcefulness has not eliminated one frontier of knowledge. It has merely pressed those frontiers forward a little more into the mists of the unknown, a territory still larger than the limited area of our knowledge,” he said. “We have broken our earthly bonds and have started to hammer at a new frontier, vaster beyond all imagination than any within human experience.”
No matter the existing industries a new invention might threaten, he told his audience, trying to delay the pace of progress was a mug’s game. Tomorrow’s wireless applications were certain to be more powerful and valuable than yesterday’s. Only a pessimist or a fool would defend the past rather than rush headlong into the future, and David Sarnoff was neither: “Any attempt to freeze society and industry at a given time or point will be as ineffectual as undertaking to hold back the onward rush of time.”
To David Sarnoff, it was one of the enduring mysteries of Edwin Armstrong’s mind: Had he really believed that Sarnoff had been faking it all along? Sarnoff could understand why Armstrong believed that the Federal Communications Commission had rigged the game against him. A mountain of circumstantial evidence now supported that case. But Armstrong’s antitrust case against RCA had stalled for the same reasons his congressional hearings had collapsed—because of all the evidence that directly contradicted the inventor’s allegation that “you will find the hand of the management of RCA working in the background” to thwart FM radio.
In 1940, Sarnoff’s company had backed Armstrong’s application with the FCC to allow FM on the air. In 1945, the engineer in charge of RCA Laboratories had been one of Armstrong’s staunchest allies in the fight to expose Kenneth Norton. When CBS backed Norton’s plan to move FM radio to shorter waves, RCA and NBC publicly opposed it. The FCC’s decision to weaken FM radio range through its “single-market plan” had been proposed by CBS and opposed by NBC. Yet none of that ever seemed to shake the inventor’s conviction that the man who had crushed the FM radio industry had orchestrated the conspiracy from his office on the 53rd floor of Rockefeller Center.
Nor had Armstrong bothered to examine the market he claimed David Sarnoff had conspired to monopolize. True, the General had refused to make the declining fortunes of NBC’s radio network the centerpiece of his defense, but anyone who read the trades, spoke to industry experts, or simply looked at the FCC’s annual data could have understood how the AM radio industry had changed since the FCC’s regulations designed to aid local radio stations went into effect a decade earlier. The NBC radio network was set to post another loss in 1954, yet Edwin Armstrong never stopped to question the wisdom of accusing a money-losing business of running an illegal monopoly.
FROM THE PROW-SHAPED PULPIT, Reverend Penfield began to wrap up his eulogy. He veered away from his thinly veiled indictment of Sarnoff to celebrate Armstrong’s unflagging obstinacy—precisely the part of Armstrong’s character that Sarnoff had always found so troubling. “We thank thee for characters of strength who dare to carry on when there is little hope of fulfillment,” the reverend proclaimed, launching into a lofty simile that painted the inventor as a brave mountain climber who fights to conquer “unconquerable obstacles.”
“The saints,” the minister concluded, “are only ordinary people who carried on.”
As the choir launched into a hymn and the mourners filed out of the church, Sarnoff and his RCA colleagues slipped out quietly, drawing looks from a few newspaper reporters but avoiding the notice of Armstrong’s relatives.
It was a shame that Major Armstrong had given up the fight when he did, especially because RCA scientists had started work on a new invention that Sarnoff believed would finally make it possible to launch an effective attack on both the phone monopoly and the local broadcasters’ cartel. If only Major Armstrong had heeded his advice and shown more care and patience in the fights he picked, perhaps the two of them could have teamed up to win one more grand victory.
For forty years David Sarnoff had remained true to the faith he and Edwin Armstrong had once shared, a belief in the unstoppable expansion of the airwaves’ power to connect the planet. Yes, there were powerful forces dedicated to holding back the future, and yes, those forces would sometimes succeed—but only for a while. The key, as Sarnoff saw it, was keeping his focus on the future, compromising when necessary and attacking only when the moment was right.
As for blithely trying to “conquer the unconquerable”?
That was David Sarnoff’s definition of stupidity, not sainthood.