In my first week on the job, Eisner told me to fire Bob Iger. He thought Bob was stupid, or so he said. I thought he was being rash and said so: “Bob Iger knows ABC cold.” I later spent three hours over dinner with Iger—who’d heard of Eisner’s dissatisfaction—persuading him not to leave. I told him Eisner had a short attention span, and would soon be on to someone else. That was true: he promptly told me to fire Dennis Hightower, our head of television. Dennis was our only high-ranking African American executive, and I told Michael, “That’s a terrible idea for me or you.” Hightower stayed. In
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