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

by Todd Wilkinson

  Turner becomes overtly giddy when discussing just the latest campaign carried out with UN-friendly partners—to bring electricity and light into the homes of 1.4 billion people in the coming decade. Power won’t be passed along transmission lines from distant coal-burning plants, but from mini, cutting-edge solar panels the poor can mount on the rooftops of huts and metal shanties. He calls it “the next best evolution of Thomas Edison.” “Here we are in the twenty-first century, and a huge percentage of the world’s population doesn’t even have reliable electricity,” he says. “Think about the shame of that. We’re going to give them better lives by enabling them to go off the grid of dirty power and be able to see at night with clean, renewable energy. It chokes me up to think about all those kids who will be able to read.” Having this seemingly simple innovation in their lives, he says, will change the future of entire families and communities. “It’s the spark of hope.”

  Today, the UN is again under attack from American neo-con isolationists, Wirth says. And Turner realizes that it’s necessary to stand in defense, like Horatius.

  The UN Foundation is hailed worldwide for being one of the organizations making a difference. In 2010, twelve thousand people applied for fifty-eight full-time positions. To explain how and why it has succeeded, Wirth refers to Annan’s counsel that the Foundation needed to “move from projects to problems, especially problems without passports.”

  And it’s done that. It hasn’t been easy. Wirth points to the fact that on both ends of the Earth polar icecaps are melting. Soaring global financial debt is leading to unprecedented social unrest. Species have begun disappearing at an accelerating rate that ecologists say bears a resemblance to what happened during the last major extinction episode. Fisheries are collapsing. There are shortages of fresh water. Crops are failing. Millions are malnourished. Women are still enslaved by lack of education, chauvinism, and lack of opportunity. Meanwhile, the number of humans on our planet could rise from seven billion to ten billion later in this century, putting unprecedented strain on nature’s ability to deliver sustenance. Each of these issues happening simultaneously is a prescription for growing tension between nations, some of which possess weapons of mass destruction.

  Yet for Wirth and Turner, their interest is elemental. Wirth speaks about changing trajectories of human lives. Turner will deliver the last batch of his pledged funding to the UN Foundation in 2014. Wirth says that even during his days of traumatic financial turmoil, he never backed away from his commitment, and would have sold off his most beloved ranches before abandoning the UN. It is because of Turner’s involvement that the Foundation has invested more than $2 billion to date to mobilize global change by leveraging campaigns with other government and non-government partners. According to Wirth, it has placed “some big bets” on causes that have huge humanitarian impacts—augmenting what the UN could do on its own.

  Richard Holbrooke wanted to make clear, in an interview a few months before he tragically died, that Turner did not stop with his donation and launching of the UN Foundation. As a fiscal conservative, he wanted to have America clear its books. “This is a story that needs to be told because I think it illustrates, as much as any other, what kind of guy Ted is,” he said.

  With regard to his revulsion over the United States refusing to pay its UN dues, Turner had begun working backchannels on Capitol Hill with a fellow southerner, who had been both a friend and foe over the years, the late US senator Jesse Helms, an espoused Republican segregationist from North Carolina.

  Some years earlier, a younger Turner had left a positive impression on Helms when he said that programming on television needed to change, and the salacious degrading content cleaned up. Helms also bore a grudge against CBS and its program 60 Minutes because he believed it was biased and pandered to liberals. Helms had been intrigued when Turner made a bid to take over the Tiffany Network, even though it failed.

  Helms even lobbied the Reagan White House on behalf of Turner’s request to open a bureau in Havana because he believed that free-flowing information would hasten the downfall of Fidel Castro’s government.

  The two men, however, sparred over the UN. Helms had led the charge in Congress to withhold US dues until the UN engaged in a wholesale restructuring. Helms didn’t believe the UN should be involved with promoting family planning, abortion, and contraception to confront the global population crisis. Further, he thought the US dues, figured according to Gross National Product, were disproportionately high.

  Enter then US ambassador to the UN Holbrooke. A dear friend of then Delaware senator (and now vice president) Joe Biden, Holbrooke knew that Biden got along well with Helms. Biden carried forward a two-part proposition backed by Holbrooke and Turner: If the UN made an overt commitment to undertake reform and reduce American dues, would Helms lift the freeze?

  The so-called Biden-Helms accord, brokered with approval from the State Department in the final weeks of the Clinton presidency, brought an end to the controversy. Part of the overhauls that needed to occur, readily acknowledged by Annan, involved better coordinating of UN activities to avoid redundancy, to make its budget more efficient, and to instill a tougher code of accountability.

  This is precisely some of the terrain that would be addressed by the UN Foundation. But there was another sticking point: The new formula for calculating US membership dues and reducing them, as insisted upon by Helms, resulted in the UN still being left $34 million short in its budget for the following year.

  “Who got us out of this mess by coming to the rescue?” Holbrooke asks. “Who do you think?”

  The latter half of 2000 would be a traumatic one in American society. With division soon to deepen in the wake of the presidential election between Bush and Gore, it was uncertain what a new administration or Congress would make of the UN starting in red ink.

  Holbrooke, along with Wirth, Turner, and the rest of the UN Foundation board, had been meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York when Holbrooke relayed word of a sticking point involving resolution of the United States paying its dues to the UN.

  Getting the United States to pony up its dues had been a nasty struggle. Republicans had control of Capitol Hill and would soon control the White House. Wirth remembers how the events played out, largely without public knowledge of what was going on. Through his tortuous work with Helms and others, including one-on-one discussions with more than 170 UN ambassadors, Holbrooke had forged agreement on changing the formula for every country’s payment of dues to the UN, Wirth explains. But because of a technical problem related to fiscal versus calendar years, the multibillion-dollar agreement was coming up $31 million short. As 2000 drew to a close, it looked like the complicated deal might fall apart.

  Holbrooke and Wirth had known each other since the 1960s, and the ambassador had brought Wirth into the negotiations. Since he knew about the crucial “funding gap,” Wirth wanted to bring the UN Foundation board into the discussion. The fall of 2000 was an extremely hectic time for Holbrooke, Wirth remembers. The United States was going to chair the Security Council, Holbrooke was going to feature a precedent-setting focus on AIDS, and he also had to plan for the transition to a new US administration. Wirth knew that getting significant time on Holbrooke’s schedule would be very difficult, so he arranged that the UN Foundation would hold its board meeting in a conference room just down the hall from Holbrooke’s apartment (the US Mission) located in the Waldorf Hotel. “The thought was that maybe we could catch Holbrooke on the fly and bring him into the board meeting,” Wirth said.

  The strategy worked, and the rest is history. Holbrooke joined the board meeting, and sitting next to Turner, explained the complex negotiation, ending with a frustrated description of the pending and dangerous funding gap that could cause the entire deal about the United States making good on its dues to unravel.

  Wirth describes Turner’s reaction: “After listening to Holbr
ooke’s account, Ted said very simply, ‘I think I can figure out how to solve this. The Foundation can’t pay off a debt, but I can make a personal contribution to the US government to cover the difference! When else has a private citizen paid off an obligation of the government and kept a whole international operation operating? I’ll do it!’”

  The board was, as ever, delighted to be a part of Turner’s vision and generosity, Wirth notes. “And Holbrooke was absolutely ecstatic—a great big grin on his face, he hugged Ted and ran out of the room, on his way to the UN to seal a deal that had been in the works for years.”

  Wirth adds, “Ted’s personal gift was the final piece of a hugely complex international negotiation, returning the UN to sound fiscal balance, and solving the gnawing problems of the US arrears, which had stimulated Ted to start the Foundation in the first place.”

  Holbrooke says the gesture floored him. “I was frankly shocked by the generosity of it. The amount was significant, on top of the $1 billion pledge he had already made as well as his efforts to get the US out of arrears, and here was Ted willing to give again.”

  Turner told Holbrooke that he didn’t want any press releases issued or any to-do made of it.

  “Are you sure you want to do this Ted?” he asked, locking eyes with Turner. “Because you know, this has to come from you and not from me. Under law, as a civil servant representing the United States government, I cannot lobby a private entity. That would be illegal.”

  Turner grinned. Later, Wirth handed a check from Turner to John Negroponte, the new US ambassador to the UN under President George W. Bush in early 2001. The ceremony took place in Kofi Annan’s office and a photo today hangs prominently in the UN Foundation office in Washington.

  In the aftermath, Holbrooke broke a promise—“the only time I’ve ever broken a promise in my friendship with Ted”—by refusing to keep it quiet.

  He appeared as a guest on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer three days before Christmas 2000 to reflect on his tenure as UN ambassador. He used the air time to mention Turner’s deed of a few weeks earlier.

  Reporter Terrence Smith asked Holbrooke about the symbolism of a superpower, the most prominent member of the UN, having been unwilling to meet its commitment to the international organization, and that it came down to an individual citizen, more or less, bailing out the government.

  “What does it say?” Holbrook responded. “It says different things. It says that this is a great country where people can make great gestures. And this one is more than a normal bequest of a philanthropic nature. This is a highly leveraged, highly targeted and really visionary gift and it will make a huge difference. I think we should all be grateful to Ted Turner.”

  Smith asked, “Does it not reflect a very deep-seated skepticism on the part of the Congress, certainly about the United Nations and about paying its bills? Normally we would pay our bills through the government.”

  “Well, it is a very unusual arrangement. I don’t think there is any precedent at all,” Holbrooke said. “The United Nations is an indispensable but deeply flawed organization. It is valuable to the United States, and the United States is invaluable to it. We need to reform it. What you’re talking about now is just a tiny tip of the iceberg towards the reforms which are necessary.”

  A full decade has passed since Holbrooke made those remarks. He recalled them nostalgically while riding in a limousine bound for a meeting in Washington, DC, with President Obama, Vice President Biden, and their national security staff before embarking to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Holbrooke had hoped, at the dawn of the new millennium, that the UN would not have to deal with any more Sierra Leones, Rwandas, and Bosnias. “They happened again,” he said, “only under different names, and there will be more.”

  From Darfur in Sudan to Haiti, and with a trail of natural and human disasters strung out in between, including earthquakes, tsunamis, civil wars, and terrorists on the run, the world has not moved one inch closer toward the day when the UN is no longer needed, he said, only the opposite. The enduring lesson is that disaster, human- or nature-caused, always strikes the poorest hardest.

  Holbrooke says that Turner couldn’t have selected a better person than Wirth to serve at the helm, for he, like Turner, is not an individual who suffers fools gladly. He mentions the passing of Helms who died, at age eighty-six, on July 4, 2008. And he repeats a Turner observation that compassion is a pathogen that needs to reach pandemic levels and continue to spread. Indeed, it infected Helms and it became evident in the senator opening up his heart and becoming friends in the eleventh hour of his life with Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2.

  Bono convinced Helms that, just as the United States needed to support the multifaceted work of the UN, it had a moral obligation and a religious one to be more charitable. Helms threw his support behind a bill to send hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. Together with private efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation, and including the help of the UN Foundation, more medicines are being distributed and investments made in HIV/AIDS-related research than ever before. One night at a concert in Atlanta, Bono crooned happy birthday to Turner as a way of saying thanks. “I really admire Bono even more so for his activism than his music,” Turner says. The rock star has said that Turner has a remarkable ability to be relevant.

  A few years ago, Turner had a stack of orange bumper stickers made. They are fastened to each of his vehicles as well as those of his children. They state simply, “Save the Humans.” Annan says that after seeing them on Turner’s hybrid compact car in Atlanta, at Turner’s properties in the West, and in Argentina, he asked for a few himself. The more that he considers the double-entendre of the message, the more determined he is to spread it as a slogan.

  “Yes, in terms of biodiversity, we can think of saving all of the other species, but what we are really doing when we care for another creature, we are saving ourselves,” Annan says. “Have we realized that the path that we are on is one of destruction? This question will hang in the air and be asked until we realize we have to live in harmony with nature. Hopefully, it will not be too late. No higher life form is able to persist when it has a discordant relationship with its environment. Look at Easter Island or, more recently, Haiti. I don’t think the message has gotten home yet.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Flash Point

  (Preventing Nuclear Ground Zero)

  “The guy who brought down Communism wasn’t Ronald Reagan. It was Ted Turner. With CNN being available to TV viewers in the Eastern Bloc countries, people in Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union saw how we live in America. They caught glimpses of a free society and wanted one for themselves. I don’t know if Ted realized fully what he was doing, but it had a huge impact. Let’s see what he can do with nuclear weapons.”

  —T. BOONE PICKENS

  Snow tumbles in Boston a few weeks before Christmas. Meteorologists had earlier in the morning announced a 30 percent chance of flurries, and so, based on that hard evidence and probability, the good citizenry of greater Beantown prepared for a dump.

  Now, in mid-afternoon, the whiteout descends.

  Along the Charles River in Cambridge, Harvard University professor Graham Allison has been busy with another kind of prognostication. He believes there is a greater than 50 percent chance that over the next ten years a major American city will be attacked by terrorists detonating some kind of nuclear bomb. He isn’t reading a weather map; he’s an expert in deciphering other kinds of patterns.

  If Allison’s warning does not jar the senses, then consider another assessment from a different data cruncher, American financial investment guru Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha, known for his unflappability, believes the likelihood of an atomic assault may be even higher.

  Around the corner and
down the street from Allison’s campus office, another man sits in a room at the Charles Hotel. Lounging comfortably in stocking feet and undershirt, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is absorbed in thought, writing over a table lit by a dim lamp. He jots notes into a bound pocket-sized tablet with distillations on the root causes of factors influencing Allison’s and Buffett’s arithmetic.

  The previous evening, Mr. Gorbachev, once one of the most powerful men in the world, met with a business-tycoon-turned-citizen-activist who flew into town to hear him speak.

  Ted Turner said, “That’s what you do for your friends. You support them, stand by them, especially when they’re right.”

  The man in the hotel makes it clear that it was important having his droog (a colloquial word meaning “close friend” in Russian) present in the audience. Their association, a fact that surprises a lot of people, goes back a generation.