Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet

by Todd Wilkinson

  The same kind of impact Turner credits to Cousteau, he also extends to chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall; the twin brothers, John and Frank Craighead, who studied Yellowstone grizzly bears; American wolf man L. David Mech; and late gorilla researcher Dian Fossey.

  In 1970, Turner bought an obscure VHF television station in Atlanta and ingeniously linked it to satellites, creating the SuperStation, earning accolades as an important technology disruptor of the modern age. During the first half of the 1970s, as sailing took precedence over media, he walked a thin line of financial solvency. Not until the end of the decade, after he had triumphed as a consummate underdog in the 1977 America’s Cup, was Turner ready to enter his second phase, this time as a businessman, free of recreational distraction.

  Turner’s antics as a self-promoter and marketer extraordinaire are legendary. The lengths he went to try and generate public interest in his media properties and put fans in the stands to watch the Atlanta Braves and Hawks were innovative and embarrassing. Many people who never forgot that side of Turner would be understandably hard pressed to believe that a different self-effacing, disciplined, magnanimous version could exist. The dual Turner is not a diametric pole in a Jekyll and Hyde character; it is the inner person he aspires to be when he is free of the anxiety that besets him when he feels overwhelmed. My observation: Turner the extrovert is a role he plays; I believe he is, at heart, an introvert who does a lot of living in his head. Empathizing with the causes of environmentalism and humanitarianism isn’t something he learned; the paradox is that he knew he could only save himself by helping others. He sees his own desperate self in others’ plight.

  Photojournalist Barbara Pyle met Turner at Bannister’s Wharf along the waterfront of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1980. She was then working for Time magazine, covering the anticipated showdown between reigning America’s Cup champion—Turner—and his former shipmate-turned-archrival, Dennis Conner.

  Running into Turner on the docks as preparations were being made for Courageous’s defense against Conner’s state-of-the-art Freedom, Pyle thought it odd that Turner deflected her inquiries about racing and instead bombarded her with questions about the protocol of news gathering at NBC, where she had worked briefly in the news division.

  The reason soon became clear: On June 1, 1980—as the America’s Cup challenge races were playing out in Newport, a Turner invention, his second noted expression of technology disruption, the Cable News Network [CNN] went live in Atlanta.

  “In the mornings at Bannister’s Wharf, Ted was on the phone with his business partner Robert Wussler, right up to the minute that he had to launch the boat. Then he sailed the race, but without his trademark intensity. At the time, he was considered the best sailor in the world but his head was someplace else,” Pyle told me.

  Even before Courageous lost its bid to repeat, Turner revealed to Pyle that he planned to retire from sailing. She was puzzled; this was supposed to be his glorious prime. But his focus in the future was going to be on taking the continental reach of TBS and extending it to CNN.

  Turner says he had always thought that sailing at the highest level would leave him fulfilled. But a year earlier, he and his crew on board another craft, Tenacious (a crew that included his son Teddy), had prevailed in the 605-mile Fastnet race off the British coast. A victory for Turner, yes, but this 1979 competition is remembered today as a notorious disaster. Fifteen competing sailors perished when the equivalent of a hurricane swept across the North Atlantic. Sixty-nine boats did not finish. What should have been a nautical triumph for Turner was overshadowed by a pall of mourning. I asked him about it, particularly the fact that the fate greeting his competitors could easily have happened to him. Some had accused him of being reckless and he seemed willing to risk the potential demise of his own son.

  As a younger man, he was deceived by his own hubris, he says. That is not a man that he still relates to. It’s tough for him to confront those parts of his life that happened and cannot be changed. When I asked him if he was trying to deflect questions away from painful episodes, he says that’s not it. Just because he doesn’t wish to analyze them publicly in print doesn’t mean he doesn’t think about them. He regards Fastnet as a race when he let go of his adolescence to seek other kinds of meaning, including deciding how he could be a different father from the mold handed to him.

  “It was a humbling moment. The seas were rough. I had been driving pretty hard. I was going for the trophy and the glory but, given the conditions, the biggest prize in hindsight was that something bad didn’t happen to the crew, which included my own son.”

  Critics of Turner have accused him of being unable to engage in introspection. It’s true that he doesn’t dwell on how things might have been different in the past, though his sometimes strained relationships with his children and loved ones have, in these later years, caused him to reflect. In hindsight, and to appropriate a sailing metaphor, Turner’s life is defined by a series of sharp tacks turned against heavy seas, each new angle punctuated by epiphanies that take time to become fully illuminated.

  Twenty-four hour news was never, for Turner, a gimmick, but looking back he says the concept was so obvious as to be inevitable. He thought it could make people smarter, less insular in how they conceptualized the world. He believed that news delivered in half-hour increments at dinnertime was too anemic. But his initial efforts, CNN’s inaugural days in Atlanta, were (to put it mildly) fitful, laughed off as amateurish by the three major network giants. His beloved CNN was lampooned as “the Chicken Noodle Network.” Nevertheless, launched with a shoestring budget of $30 million (one-tenth the amount that major networks spent on news gathering), CNN managed to generate ten times the volume of programming. And it would eventually net a lot of money.

  At the same time, Turner was continuing to expand the breadth of his TBS SuperStation. And he realized that while expensive to generate, original content (combined with quality reruns of old television shows) was critical if he were to attract ad dollars and stay afloat. “He hustled his ass off,” remembers John Malone, the CEO of Liberty Media who worked tirelessly with Turner to elevate the credibility of cable TV and eventually would surpass Turner as America’s largest landowner, admitting that it was Turner who inspired him. In the early 1980s, Turner was living out of a suitcase. He flew economy class, rented subcompact cars, stayed in budget motels, and had his family at home on a tight regimen of turning off lights, using fans instead of an air conditioner in the hot southern summers, and putting on sweaters inside during the winter. He leveraged everything he owned.

  Meantime, to maintain his sanity against the pressure of meeting payroll and staying on the air, he had squirreled away enough cash and credit to purchase Hope Plantation south of Charleston, South Carolina, and St. Phillips, a barrier island north of Hilton Head. Today, Turner is mindful of the mixed message and the contradictions. He was unconsciously still adhering to the imprint of his tough-love father, unaware of how it was affecting his own children. “Was I hard on my kids? I’m aware. They’ve made me aware.”

  Whatever money he saved through his austerity measures he was funneling back into keeping his companies viable and making investments in what he still believes are the most conservative and self-rewarding assets: land. Successful people have land, though Turner never saw his initial purchases of Hope Plantation or St. Phillips Island as real estate plays. He put some of the first conservation easements in the country on each piece.

  The late Robert Wussler, a key figure in the world of broadcasting, had been wooed to Atlanta after being the youngest executive at CBS and having transformed CBS Sports into a powerhouse brand. About the early days of CNN, Wussler said in a phone interview, “Those were scary and exhilarating times. It was touch and go. I won’t kid you, I had doubts sometimes with whether we’d be able to pull off CNN, and Ted was trying to acquire content to put on the channels. For Ted, thank God, he h
ad those properties to get away to. I always thought that if Ted hadn’t been involved in media, he might have been a scientist or an explorer. It made perfect sense to me when he became fast friends with Jacques Cousteau, who, of course, had more star power than anything else we could put on the air.”

  While Turner’s progression as a media executive adheres to a linear chronology, his evolution as an eco-capitalist does not conform to an exact timeline, but rather a convergence of different stimuli, people entering his life, and a burgeoning world view. As Turner was in Newport preparing to defend his America’s Cup crown, and even as he was dealing with the logistics of launching the world’s first twenty-four-hour news channel, he had in his possession a lengthy document called The Global 2000 Report to the President.

  “When the president of the United States gives you a document and says you should read it, most people would be honored,” Turner says. “I was.”

  Commissioned by President Jimmy Carter in May of 1977, and released by the US State Department and the Council on Environmental Quality, this was a document that connected the dots between rising human population, expanding poverty, famine and depleted natural resources, loss of biological diversity, and lack of regulation and serious impacts on environmental and human health.

  The report stated unequivocally: “The available evidence leaves no doubt that the world—including this nation—faces enormous, urgent, and complex problems in the decades immediately ahead. Prompt and vigorous changes in public policy around the world are needed to avoid or minimize these problems before they become unmanageable. Long lead times are required for effective action. If decisions are delayed until the problems become worse, options for effective action will be severely reduced.”

  Turner felt chastened as he read the litany of serious converging challenges. “I think it drove home the point to me, for the first time in my life, that, as a business person, the decisions I make can either contribute to making problems for the Earth worse, or they can help advance a solution,” he says.

  Reflecting on his former devotion to Ayn Rand and the way she equated avarice with moral goodness, he had an awakening: “This is where Ayn Rand was wrong. If pursuing self-interest means that you are unfairly foisting the cost of doing business on other people, including taxpayers and future generations, then you’re not thinking about the betterment of society. You’re no better than a robber baron.”

  Turner handed Barbara Pyle a copy of the Global 2000 Report. Her impression of Turner had been shaped by his reputation for being adolescently fun-loving, impolitic, and everything that led to the moniker “Captain Outrageous.” She saw another side.

  “You take this stuff pretty seriously, don’t you, Ted?” Pyle said.

  “Don’t you think it is important?”

  “It’s too bad a person can’t make a living trying to fix the problems,” she said.

  Whimsically, Turner invited Pyle to come work for the fledgling CNN in Atlanta. Her new job would be overseeing the station’s first environmental news division comprised of a staff of one: her. Her assignment? Telling personal stories of people affected by the issues raised in the Global 2000 document.

  A decade after the first Earth Day in 1970, it was Turner who began giving the environment regular media coverage. Pyle’s nascent environmental bureau would grow to become the largest in television.

  Turner and Jimmy Carter were friends, even though Turner identified as a Republican verging upon aligning himself as an Independent. He had gotten to know Carter when he served as governor of Georgia, and then marveled at Carter’s ability to mount a folksy, populist campaign for the White House in 1976. Turner backed him.

  Almost forty years later, Turner is still unrestrained in his admiration of Carter. He does not stand behind people based upon whether they are popular. For advocating conservation and alternative energy to shake US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, for his courage, for being decades ahead in his thinking, Turner says that Carter deserves praise. “I don’t care what people say about President Carter, he was right about a lot of things . . . he spoke his mind honestly . . . he called for more private and public sector investments in solar, synthetic fuel, conservation and energy efficiency in cars and homes, as well as wisely using the resources we have at home. He had the guts to say what citizens needed to hear, but didn’t want to hear. He got beaten up for it and it probably caused him to lose his reelection.”

  Within the larger landscape of Turner’s evolving sensibility as an environmentalist, second perhaps only to Cousteau in influence is Carter. And when Carter delivered his so-called Malaise Speech, it had enough of an impact on Turner that he remembers certain resonant pullouts. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns,” Carter said. “But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

  Carter presciently added on that night: “Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny. In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof . . . This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation.”

  “By not listening to what Jimmy Carter said, by behaving like children who do not want to have discipline, either imposed upon them or embraced voluntarily, we fell behind when we could have been ahead,” Turner says.

  “Unfortunately, we live in a world that punishes people who are ahead of their time. It happened with Galileo, with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and with President Carter. He wanted us to take a long hard look at ourselves in the mirror, as a nation. It was tough medicine. He had as his model the kind of shared sacrifice that brought us together and made America stronger during the Depression and World War II. The words conservation and conservative originate in the same place.”

  Carter impressed Turner more as a conservationist cut from the cloth of Republican Theodore Roosevelt. Under his tenure, Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act into law, bringing more public real estate—79.5 million acres—into strict natural resource protection than under any previous administration. Yet it was another achievement, less recognized, that became a mile marker in Turner’s environmental thinking. This was the document Turner later handed to Barbara Pyle.

  “Read this,” Carter had told Turner then, smiling, “you might learn something.”

  And, in 2008, Carter told me, “It surprised me a little how receptive to it Ted was. But Ted’s entire career has been about surprising a lot of people.”

  Another surprise is Turner’s knack for foreshadowing. On the first of June in 1980 when he formally inaugurated CNN, Turner stood in front of its small digs in Atlanta—a renovated golf course clubhouse—and declared playfully (unaware of how ominous his words would sound decades later): “We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. When the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer, My God, To Thee’ before we sign off.”

  Except for the fact that the names of their aquatic vessels, Calypso and Courageous, had become emblems, Captains Cousteau and Turner seemed like an odd pairing.

  Cousteau would often invite friends to hang out on Calypso, the mothballed World War II minesweeper used by the British Navy that he had converted into a research ship. One of the regular guests was John Denver, the folk singer who had composed a song about Cousteau’s boat and dedicated the profits to advancing ocean cons
ervation.

  Denver and Turner, as they eventually found out, were mutual admirers. Turner enjoyed Denver’s down-home ballads and played his albums on 8-track tape players in the yachts he raced. The singer’s burgeoning activities as an eco-philanthropist left Turner intrigued. Denver had formed the Windstar Foundation to aid fledgling conservation efforts, including the launching of Project Lighthawk, which provided free aerial flyovers to give activists, policy makers, and journalists a bird’s-eye view of threatened landscapes.

  “I held John in high esteem. Like Bob Redford and Paul Newman and a short list of others, he was out there promoting environmental protection without worrying about the consequences it might have on his career,” Turner says. “It was gutsy. He did it because it was right. I’ve always felt the same way. If you let intimidation and fear of retaliation stop you, you’re destined to be silent. And then what good are you?”

  Cousteau became a point of triangulation. Widely beloved, his mercurial moods, insecurities, and large ego could also make him a difficult personality to manage. It alienated him from some of the decision-makers in television. He had pitched ideas for new series, but none of them were green-lighted. His oldest son, Jean-Michel, remembers the frustration of rejection, and how John Denver provided their next step. “John said to my father, ‘Captain, maybe you should contact Ted Turner.’ And my dad asked, ‘Ted Turner. Who iz zis man?’”

  Denver described him as the fellow who had won the America’s Cup and just founded CNN.

  “Then the light went on in my dad’s head,” Jean-Michel explains. “And he said, ‘Oh heem, zat guy who started the Suuper Station, ze American with ze loud personality?’”

  Jean-Michel asked Denver: “But how do you know he will see us or have any interest in our proposal?” They wanted to start a new series on the threats facing marine ecosystems.