ANNENBERG, WALTER H.

ANNENBERG, WALTER H. (1908–2002), editor and diplomat; publisher of the oldest U.S. daily newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer; head of one of America's largest communications chains. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Walter was the son of Moses L. Annenberg (1878–1942), a newspaper publisher who had added the Inquirer to his chain in 1936. Walter became president of Triangle Publications Inc. in 1942. Subsequently he also acquired the holdings of another Philadelphia newspaper, the tabloid Daily News, six radio and television stations, and two mass circulation national magazines: Seventeen and TV Guide – which reached a circulation of 17 million per issue, making it a competitor with Reader's Digest as the magazine with the largest circulation. The horse racing daily, the Daily Racing Form, also came under his control. In 1969 he sold the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News to the Knight-Ridder chain, while the Triangle Publications communications empire was sold to Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch in 1988 for $3 billion. A public benefactor with a wide range of philanthropic and civic interests, Annenberg founded and became president of the M.L. Annenberg School of Communications at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. He also became president of the M.L. Annenberg Foundation and of the Annenberg Fund, charitable foundations devoted to supporting higher education, medical research, music, and community welfare. In 1969 he was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. In 1977 Annenberg underwent a hip replacement operation at Philadelphia's Pennsylvania Hospital. He was so pleased with the outcome of the surgery that he gave the institution $2 million to found a hip replacement institute, named after his physician Dr. Richard Rothman. Generous to many of his friends, Annenberg paid most of the bills to add a bowling lane in the White House during Richard Nixon's years and installed a swimming pool at Chequers, the English country home of the prime minister of Great Britain. Annenberg donated more than $17,500,000 to refurbish Philadelphia's Academy of Music, and an additional $10 million to endow the chair of Music Director Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. In 1981 Annenberg was elected trustee emeritus of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which he had joined in 1974. In 1991 he made the decision to bequeath his collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, valued at some $1 billion, to the Museum; this constituted the largest gift of its kind in some 50 years. His $50 million contribution to the United Negro College Fund in 1990 represented the largest single donation ever given to African-American higher education in the United States. In 1993 his foundation donated a total of $365 million – then the largest one-time gift ever given to private education in America – to the universities of Harvard, Southern California, and Pennsylvania, and to his prep school, the Peddie School in New Jersey. He also made a major donation to dropsie University (formerly Dropsie College), the center for Jewish learning in Philadelphia, which in 1986 became the Annenberg Research Institute. In 1986 Annenberg was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom. He also won the George   Foster Peabody Award in 1987. In 1992 he was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame. In 2001 the Annenberg Foundation gave $100 million each to the communications schools named after him at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. At the same time, the Annenberg Foundation gave the Philadelphia Art Museum a cash gift of $20 million, the largest gift in the institution's 125-year history. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: F. Lundberg, Imperial Hearst (1936), 151 ff.; W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (1961), 27. (Irving Rosenthal / Rohan Saxena and Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)