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Nine months after he got fired, Freston's travels took him back to Afghanistan for the first time in 30 years. At age 26, after a stint in advertising - working on Hasbro's GI Joe account at the height of the Vietnam war "was like something from a Joseph Heller novel," he says - Freston set off with $4,000, wandered around Europe and North Africa by himself for a year, ended up in Afghanistan, and "was mesmerized after just a couple of hours there."
This was 1972, and Freston was drawn, like many other foreigners, to Afghanistan's remoteness, its openness ("Sikhs, Jews, and Hindus living beside Muslims, and even women in miniskirts") - and to the opportunities presented by the dawn of the air-freight industry. He started a clothing export business, Hindu Kush, and ran it out of Kabul and Delhi until 1978, when the communist coup in Afghanistan crippled the operation.
Back in the U.S., in New York City, Freston was deep in debt and, he says, "professionally reincarnated." He read a Billboard story about a guy who wanted to start a cable TV network where the programming was music videos. It was an absurd idea, and Freston loved it. He called the fellow, John Lack, asked for a job interview, and got hired on the spot.
Freston joined a network with five people and no name. He was the director of marketing, blasting "I want my MTV" across the airwaves, but it was his borderless curiosity that propelled MTV's global growth. "He would sleep on planes that practically had holes in the fuselage," says MTV Networks CEO Judy McGrath, who worked with Freston from MTV's 1981 launch and remembers riding puddle-jumpers with him to remote corners of the world. "We'd land, and he'd be hyper-focused. He'd go out half the night with the most creative and craziest locals, and the next day he'd be funny, alert, and articulate."
"Tom was an extraordinary executive. He attracted amazing creative people and fostered an environment where they wanted to excel," says Mel Karmazin, who used to be Freston's boss at Viacom and is now CEO of Sirius XM Radio. But while Freston played the part of a Fortune 500 executive quite well, he never cared a lot about climbing the ladder. In 2004, after Viacom president Karmazin quit over clashes with Redstone, the chairman asked Freston, then MTV Networks chief, to step up to the bigger job. "I said I was flattered and honored but wanted to go home and discuss it with Kathy," recalls Freston, signaling ambivalence. The following day, Redstone told Freston he had decided to promote Les Moonves, who ran CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) for him, instead. "He told me, 'You didn't jump up and down and say you wanted it, so I gave it to Les.'"
Redstone ended up splitting the company "to make everyone happy," he told Vanity Fair, though wanting to goose his stock had more to do with the financial engineering. Freston supposedly got the better half, the cable networks and Paramount Pictures, while Moonves got CBS. But as CBS stock rose 12% in those first eight months after the split, Viacom fell 10%. After he fired Freston, Redstone cited those declining Viacom shares, Freston's "discomfort" with Wall Street, and also his failure to acquire MySpace.
"Rubbish," says News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) CEO Murdoch about the last point. Murdoch, who had defeated Viacom in the contest for MySpace the year before, believes, as many others do, that "Sumner's bureaucracy," as he puts it, botched Viacom's bid. Freston won't discuss the matter except to say that he didn't have the necessary authority over Viacom's M&A team, and his hands were tied. "The blame for that seemed Kafka-esque," he says.