My dear friend Leo Hindery has passed away after years of tough health struggles. Leo combined extraordinary genius in the media business with strong progressive values, an unusual combination that he showed makes complete sense. He even wrote a book that helped capture that kind of combination: It Takes A CEO: It’s Time To Lead With Integrity. In it, he argued that CEOs not only should stop resisting calls for more accountability and less greed, they should embrace those values and lead on those issues.
Leo was one of the early builders of the Cable TV industry – an industry I have never been fond of. When a staffer for Tom Daschle, to whom Leo was very close, went to work as a lobbyist for the Cable industry, I asked if she would be working much with Leo in the new job. She said “No, most cable execs think Leo is way too liberal.” But he was too much of a force in the industry to ignore. He was a key player in getting the rest of the industry to support and build C-Span, where he was Chair of the Executive Committee for a while, and the CEO of several of the biggest and most successful cable companies in the country.
Leo’s influence in the industry was demonstrated to me when I worked with him and Daschle in the early oughts to convince NBC and MSNBC that there was a potential audience for progressive-minded programming on cable. We showed them the evidence, made the argument that they were never going to be able to compete with Fox for conservative cable news viewers, and things started to change at MSNBC. Even with Daschle providing political clout, we never would have gotten in the door without Leo’s reputation.
Leo, like most Democratic donors, was a passionate supporter of LGBT and abortion rights, and of environmental causes, but he set himself apart with his work and passion on economic issues. He was the most pro-labor big business CEO in the country, working very closely with union presidents on a wide range of issues. He was one of the country’s leading voices for fair trade policies and against trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. He championed a massive investment in infrastructure through a National Infrastructure Bank.
When the Obama administration in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-9 chose to, in the words of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, smooth the runway for the banks who were crashing, Leo mourned the policies, saying “They are resuscitating Wall Street rather than restructuring the banks. That is a terrible mistake that will cost the economy and will cost the Democrats politically.” He proved 100% right, as the 2010 elections and the Trump victory in 2016 proved.
One of the things that I and several union presidents and Senators pushed the Biden administration to do was appoint Leo as Commerce Secretary. He would have been a visionary progressive in that role.
Another thing that I loved about Leo was that when I hired Lauren Windsor, fresh off the Occupy Wall Street movement, Leo quickly adopted her as part of our “family”. Most Democrats in DC I knew were a little scared of Lauren – she was brash and blunt and always wanted to shake things up. But Leo thought the world of Lauren’s work, and loved her brashness (Leo was a little brash himself). When Lauren broke her 2014 story with 8 hours of audio tape at a secretive Koch brothers donor retreat, Leo said it was one of the most important investigative journalism stories he had ever seen.
But most of all I remember him as a great friend and mentor. We were an odd couple – the Big Media CEO and this old lefty organizer. But we had so much fun together, laughing so hard at so many things. He taught me so much about politics and business. We need more business leaders like Leo Hindery, and more people like him in general. He will be sorely missed.