Ralph Baruch

Rudolph Maximilian "Ralph" Baruch (August 5, 1923 – March 3, 2016) was a German-American CBS executive and the first president and chief executive of Viacom. Early life Baruch was born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923, but his family fled in the mid-1930s to Paris. His father returned to Germany, however, in 1938 to recruit spies for French counterintelligence services, and his name ended up on the Nazi most-wanted list. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped the family immigrate to New York City in 1940. Business career Baruch was hired in 1943 as an engineer at Empire Broadcasting, and later as an ad salesman at New York's DuMont Network affiliate and with the Los Angeles Times's Consolidated Television Film Sales in the eastern United States. In 1954, Baruch became an account executive for CBS Television Film Sales. He later became vice president of CBS and general manager of CBS Enterprises, the company's cable and television syndication division.