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

by Todd Wilkinson

Along the way, trouble began to brew. First, Blixseth came under scrutiny from state environmental regulators when his workers, in their haste to rapidly punch in a grid of roads and lots, had front-end loaders blaze a path right through a tributary steam leading ultimately into the blue-ribbon Gallatin River. He had to pay a seven-figure fine. Meanwhile, some real estate agents warned that the Yellowstone Club property was hyperinflated and that the club had overpromised what it was able to deliver to members of the gated community.

  Prominent Yellowstone Club members, including former Tour de France bicycling champion Greg LeMond, turned on Blixseth, accusing him of failing to honor the rising value of an equity stake LeMond had made before leveraged land values soared through the roof. LeMond’s attorney James Goetz said: “Mr. Blixseth thinks he’s king up there and can do what he wants.”

  As the real estate market started to crumble nationwide in advance of the financial market earthquake in 2008, Tim and Edra Blixseth announced they were splitting up. Within months, creditors started calling, and each of the Blixseths, freshly divorced, lawyered up, trying to pin liabilities on the other. Where were the hundreds of millions of dollars, people asked, that Blixseth had borrowed from Credit Suisse, and millions more he made through real estate speculation? It was later revealed that Mr. Blixseth, discreetly and without the knowledge of many of his Yellowstone Club members, had wired a few hundred million dollars into a personal holding company in California.

  His growing woes were compounded by the events in autumn 2008 when the implosion of Lehman Brothers caused many financial services companies to call their loans due. When Credit Suisse wanted its money, Blixseth said he didn’t have it, and pointed a finger at his ex-wife.

  Plans for “the Pinnacle,” his once-great monument to luxury, were abruptly abandoned, and the land where it was to be built sold. Blixseth also had to renege on delivering the amenity benefits he had promised to Yellowstone Club members. Cementing the downward spiral, Yellowstone Club World was cancelled for lack of interest. The castles, chateaus, and other high-flying holdings were scheduled for sale.

  The Yellowstone Club filed for bankruptcy, the second in Blixseth’s career. This time, a judge ordered the now-divorced couple to liquidate their assets. Property and home furnishings were seized, including the carved mahogany throne. Once upon a time, when the tempest of Montana real estate was spinning in cyclonic gyration, a bank president had said: “I think the whole expansion of the economy you could lay at the foot of the Yellowstone Club. They’ve done more to bring prosperity than any other entity. It’s created, I honestly believe, thousands of jobs.”

  Even with the sale of assets, it still didn’t cover millions of dollars in unpaid bills the Blixseths owed to laid-off employees and the local businesses who had provided goods and rendered services. New owners of the Yellowstone Club had to make them whole.

  Turner did not gloat. But he did reflect in an interview with reporter Gail Schontzler of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle: “I don’t really like to be mentioned in the same breath with him. We had a totally different attitude about life. I looked at the land as something to revere, to love and to care for. And he looked at it as something to make as much money as he possibly could. In Spanish, there’s a phrase, ‘Peso rapido.’ That’s a fast buck.” He added in a separate conversation: “As I’ve said before, the problem isn’t capitalism. The problem is how we practice capitalism.”

  Consider two data points to chew on: Once, the Montana Department of Commerce offered an estimate that construction in Big Sky, fueled by the Yellowstone Club, created 7,431 jobs. Yet a huge percentage of that workforce vanished with the arrival of the Great Recession and many say it wasn’t sustainable anyway—that it was no different than the copper mines of Butte. Hundreds of millions of dollars, on paper anyway, cycled through the Yellowstone Club and where has it gone?

  Here is another stat: In 1970, the year that he acquired his first cable television station in Atlanta, Turner had thirty-five employees on the payroll and generated $600,000 in business. A quarter century later, at the time of his merger with Time Warner, he had twelve thousand employees and generated $2.5 billion in income. Today, Turner Enterprises employs hundreds of people in locations across the country. He took his personal income and flowed it into buying land and growing bison, producing clean water, open space, and he’s investing in alternative energy. “I’m still here,” he says.

  These days, Blixseth has bailed out of Montana. In 2010, a federal court judge wrote a 135-page ruling for one case in which he excoriated Blixseth for committing “self-dealing” and “deception.” A new investor, CrossHarbor Capital Partners, has picked up the pieces of Blixseth’s empire, though in ongoing court proceedings Blixseth has appeared to blame anyone but himself. The Yellowstone Club, even with good people living in it, continues to be a sinkhole for wildlife.

  Kossler’s time in the sky has come to a close. He carves one more turn around the center of the Flying D. A former cowboy, he and Turner’s other ranch managers call themselves “bisonmen.” Kossler never imagined when he took classes in ranch management that his career trajectory would lead to this. “Not in a million years could I have predicted the Flying D would ever become what it has,” he says. “Ted shook a lot of people and a lot of things up.”

  Far below him, Ted Turner has stabled his horses and climbed instead behind the wheel of a white Land Rover. He and one of his guests drive down the public county road that wends through the Flying D.

  They stop next to a minivan from Iowa pulled over on the side of the road, a family with children who are watching a group of bison bulls sparring in rut. The bellows sound like roaring lions.

  Turner enjoys the expressions on the kids’ faces. “Pretty exciting, isn’t it? What do you think?”

  “This is sooo cool,” a preteen girl says. “Who owns these bison?”

  “Oh, they belong to Ted Turner,” the girl’s mother says, absorbed in the scene.

  She hasn’t made eye contact with the onlooker in the white Land Rover. She calls back without looking, “We ate lunch at the restaurant Turner owns in Bozeman. The waitress said Ted spends a lot of time out here in the summer. Do you ever see him?”

  “Yes, I know a little about him. He likes to spend time out here as much as he can,” Turner says in his familiar nasally voice. “I know that guy, Turner, because I am he.”

  The woman looks up, stunned.

  For five minutes, Turner shares a few of the nuances of bison behavior, explaining why bison wallow in the dirt, how the bulls jostle for the right to mate and how, next year in the spring, there will be a new crop of bison calves in the very same meadow. “Well, you folks enjoy the rest of the day. I know I will,” Turner says.

  Then he is gone.

  He doesn’t hear the young girl’s brother say this day has been the best part of their trip. Earlier, the clan had stayed in Yellowstone, their mother explains.

  “This is better than Yellowstone,” the boy declares. “You don’t have all the people.”

  In the summer of 2012, Turner instructed his ranch manager Danny Johnson to put a few dozen bison on the lower pastures of the Flying D along US Highway 191 near where it enters the Gallatin Canyon en route toward the Yellowstone Club. He wasn’t thinking of Blixseth when he made the decision.

  “People love bison. They equate bison with real Montana, the real Wild West,” he said “I want to give them something they’ll remember.”

  Joe Gutkoski made what could be his final ski not long ago up the backbone of the Madison Range. He went to the place where he shot his first elk in southwest Montana, and had once followed the tracks of a mountain lion, and stood on the crest of the Spanish Peaks spying a shoulder of snow above treeline where he found a wolverine den. He can’t make it up there anymore, and even if he could, he wouldn’t return to some hideaways because the transfor
mation would be too difficult to take. “My favorite place anymore,” he says, “is seeing Ted’s side of the mountain.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Save the Humans

  “ . . . Ted realized that someone, an American from outside government, needed to step up and validate the importance of the UN, to put the critics in check. He understood the value of the UN because his international bureaus at CNN had exposed him to its work. It was tangible and it touched him. He had standing because he was an emblem of the modern, successful entrepreneur and an avowed free market capitalist, reflecting the values of Theodore Roosevelt.”

  —THE LATE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT RICHARD HOLBROOKE

  What does it mean to be regarded as a person of good conscience? In retrospect, aspects of Ted Turner’s life and personality are explainable. Charted along a linear course with hindsight, they make perfect sense when traced backward from the present into his past. Turner fits the psychological profile of the stereotypical overachiever who seeks to overcome a shortage of self-esteem and prove his worth. But what has defined him more as a conscionable human being is his defiance of expectations by people who underestimate him.

  Who could have predicted—that this conservative son of an alcoholic, depressive father who took his own life; a young man who once embraced the me-first objectivist ideology of Ayn Rand; and a kid forced to withdraw from Brown—would become one of the fiercest defenders of an organization that gives right wingers fits: the United Nations.

  Today, Turner’s name is closely associated with the UN, owing to a record-setting gift he made to the international organization. The affiliation still leaves people scratching their heads. Why did he do it?

  If civilization is going to remain intact another one hundred or one thousand years, Turner steadfastly believes, there is nothing that can replace the vital, galvanizing role of the UN. Indeed, as he travels, he often hears antagonists daydreaming about facilitating the UN’s demise or having the United States pull out of its 193-nation assembly.

  Turner finds the notion to be utterly absurd, repugnant even, and when he is asked for a response, he becomes cantankerous.

  “What would the world be like if the UN did not exist?” he asks. “Look at what happened when the League of Nations fell apart after World War I. We suffered through the worst outbreak of violence and destruction in human history. Thank God, there wasn’t a widespread proliferation of nukes. Without the UN, we would have already fought World War III by now and we would be no more. I’m convinced that the world would be lost if the UN did not exist.”

  Turner says the United States and Soviet Union would not have navigated the Cold War without conflict erupting and warheads being exchanged. “Civilization as we know it would’ve been set back to the Stone Age. I know there are certain kinds of religious fanatics who fantasize about the end of the world coming, but I’m not one of them.”

  The late Richard Holbrooke, who served as President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me just a few months before he died in 2010 that he credits “Ted the global citizen” with standing up for the UN at a crucial time when few others would. “I’m smiling when I think back on it, and what the dividends of it continue to be. I’m chuckling,” Holbrooke said, “because I don’t really believe that Ted understood what his actions meant. I know that citizens of this country don’t.”

  Politicians who advocate for the United States pulling out of the UN, withholding its membership dues and going alone in the world “are idiots” in Turner’s mind. “That would be one of the dumbest things this country ever did,” he says. “As leaders of the free world, we need to stop contemplating how many dumb moves we can make and focus on being smarter. I think we should start a ‘Smart Movement’ and the top priority would be helping the UN be all that it can be—as those who crafted its mission at the end of World War II originally envisioned.”

  All the talk about the UN robbing the US of its sovereignty and power and influence in the world “is just moronic and it’s not true,” he says. “When I hear people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann holding forth on international policy, you have to laugh. For what the US invests in the UN as its largest supporter, let me tell you something: It’s a bargain. Few US citizens understand what we get in return. And how do you put a value on having a stable world?”

  In 1997, Turner announced his $1 billion gift in support of the UN and UN causes around the world. “It was historic,” Holbrooke said. Turner’s reasoning was twofold: Besides wanting to do something outlandish that would get the power elites of the world to pay attention, Turner says, “I did it because, at the time, the UN was in trouble and some people were saying they’d prefer that it disband and just go away. The other reason is that I wanted to put other people on notice, that making money is fun and good, but being motivated by greed is not. Hoarding money as a miser instead of using it to help billions of people in need and protect the environment is shameful.”

  Turner is a man whom his critics at his one-time rival cable TV channel, FOX, portray as being erratic and scatterbrained. But Turner shrugs off the criticism. He has a game he sometimes enjoys playing. Like a television quiz show host, he administers a test to some of the brighter minds he meets on the lecture circuit. Occasionally, he directs the same questions toward unsuspecting dinner guests who dare to rail against the UN.

  Politely, he will say, “Your opinions about the UN are fascinating. Could you please elaborate a little, maybe rattle off for us the top ten things the UN does and then explain in a sentence or two which ones you believe should be eliminated?”

  Turner derives particular enjoyment in engaging adults, self-confident college students, and journalists who disparage the UN and correspondingly suggest the United States should reject globalism or, conversely, pursue an aggressive doctrine of military-led interventionism by stationing troops around the world as a perpetual exercise in nation-building.

  “We could behave like England did during the height of the British Empire. That’s certainly an option. And we could behave like we did between World War I and World War II,” he says. Of course, he believes that neither option secures the United States a respected place in the world, and both leave America financially, intellectually, and strategically bankrupt—if not weaker and more vulnerable to terrorism. “This doesn’t even include the huge sacrifice that we ask Americans to make with their lives or coming home so traumatized they’ll never be the same,” he says.

  “Most people like to think they are pretty well-informed on world affairs, enough, at least, to feel comfortable expressing strong opinions, but I can’t tell you how often they are stumped whenever they are asked to explain the function of the UN in the twenty-first century. They read about the UN in their high school civics classes or hear about it on FOX, more often with negative connotations attached, but they have difficulty explaining what the UN does. Europeans can do it with ease but many Americans struggle. Hell, what do you expect? We have citizens who don’t even know what the state capital is in their own state.”

  So tonight, Turner is holding court over dinner at the Ladder Ranch in New Mexico. He begins by saying few Americans younger than seventy realize the UN charter was completed on American soil, in San Francisco, on October 24, 1945. It was born with the blessing of President Harry S Truman who said, “If we should pay merely lip service to inspiring ideals, and later do violence to simple justice, we would draw down upon us the bitter wrath of generations yet unborn.”

  Turner next quickly ticks off the entities and agreements that have grown out of the UN and its confederation of nations that today has 193 country members. He mentions the UN Peacekeeping force, the UN Environment Programme, the UN Fund for Family Planning; the Security Council, the World Health Organization, the World Court, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Food and Agricultu
re Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Human Rights Council, the World Food Programme, the Office of the High Commissioner on Refugees, and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), among others.

  He goes on and translates what the existence of those entities actually means for Americans. Every time a commercial jet airliner makes an international flight, it is the underpinnings of UN-brokered agreements that provide a foundation for air safety and efficient travel times. When deadly diseases such as Ebola or influenza break out, the UN plays an important role in containment to prevent them from becoming a pandemic. When rogue nations are suspected of amassing nuclear arsenals and weapons of mass destruction, it is the UN that helps rally the world to intervene, demand inspections, and help enforce them.

  The UN gives the United States and allies in the international community a means for confronting genocide, promoting food safety, responding to humanitarian crises caused by natural disasters, establishing ground rules for fair and open trade for US companies, and holding together a reliable, cohesive structure for banking, mail delivery, shipping, use of the high seas, and food production, he says. It also helps tighten a gauntlet around the trafficking of drugs, blood diamonds, child slaves, and endangered species.

  Although the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, outgrowths of the UN, have come under withering criticism from groups on the left for their loan-making policies to poor developing nations in the past—and which in some cases, hastened resource extraction that caused environment destruction—reforms have helped make both of those entities instruments for positive change. “Targeted investment is helping to lift billions out of poverty which, in turn, lessens the need for aid and improves environmental conditions,” he says.