On Sunday, May 13, 2018, Leslie Moonves, the chairman and chief executive of CBS, faced a difficult decision, perhaps the most agonizing of his long and celebrated media career: whether to pull the trigger on a coup against the Redstone family, which controlled CBS.“This is NUCLEAR,” Mr. Moonves wrote that afternoon to Bruce S. Gordon, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P. and a close confidant on the network’s board.The philandering and increasingly infirm 94-year-old Sumner Redstone, the patriarch who assembled CBS, the Paramount film studio and a bevy of cable networks under the Viacom umbrella into a multibillion-dollar media and entertainment empire, had let Mr. Moonves run CBS as he saw fit.But now Shari Redstone, Mr. Redstone’s …
