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

by Todd Wilkinson

  Many have asked what will happen to the UN Foundation? Wirth says Turner will not allow the positive gains for humanity to be ephemeral. “The board of the UN Foundation is now working to assure the organization’s long-term sustainability, beyond 2014 when Ted’s financial commitment will be completed,” Wirth says, noting that it doesn’t mark the end of Turner’s involvement. “He is constantly assessing the variables, plotting trajectories, thinking about where the planet and humans will be in 2038, which would be a century from his own birth, and in 2050, 2100—beyond the reach of his own life.”

  For Turner, metrics of success with his charity work and results accomplished through land stewardship are how he holds himself accountable and tries to reconcile his personal actions with his admittedly own romantic visions. The changes that he has helped usher forward on behalf of healthy living things—human and animal—are his trophies now.

  He doesn’t remember when he crossed the threshold from being the hunter of stags to becoming admirers of them solely through binoculars. It started to happen sometime in his late fifties when he lost interest in killing anything larger than a quail. He is contented listening to the stories that come instead from the lips of Beau.

  Turner has no control over how his children interpret the places that give him meaning—he knows that—but he hopes they will be able to feel his presence in them after he is gone. He wants his children to go looking to find them on the properties. Like the Enchanted Forest at the Flying D.

  “They won’t find my places; they’ll discover their own and when they do, I hope they choose to do something about it, get fired up and try to make a difference,” Turner says. “That’s all that any one of us can do, to go wandering and try to find ourselves.”

  David Getches, the late dean of the law school at the University of Colorado–Boulder, related an anecdote to me about a raft trip down the Yampa River with Turner, Tim Wirth, and a few other committed conservationists. The Yampa descent was a glorious float among friends.

  The river brimmed with snowmelt in late spring. A gorge in front of them pinched the roaring current tighter, revealing fins of whitecaps. There was a notorious stretch of challenging rapids awaiting them, amid a gauntlet of massive submerged rocks and dangerous undercurrents. At a spot upstream, the boat was guided to shore so that rafters could walk down and assess a patch that, over the years and by caprice of nature, had claimed the lives of capsized boaters.

  Some of the younger floaters bounded back to the craft, eager to let fate play its hand. Turner, who had survived Fastnet in 1979, thought about the run in the context of earlier escapes and the odds of maximizing his years during this last stretch of his life.

  “I’m going to pass,” he said, making his calculation. “I’m going to find a high spot and watch the rest of y’all go through.”

  He picked his way to promenade above the river and watched the boat crash through without flipping and then met his crew on the other side of the Class IV whitewater.

  “Why didn’t you want to run it, Ted?” Getches asked, knowing that he was speaking to America’s original Captain Courageous.

  For most of his life, Turner the intrepid one would never have hesitated. He, after all, had for years clung to the notion that dying during an adventure was the chisel that writes a noble epitaph for young men.

  He looked Getches in the eye. It was not a glance of fear, Getches said, but “sublime wisdom . . . he accepted his senescence.”

  “I want to see my grandchildren grow up,” Turner said. “I want to fight for the environment with them.”

  “I don’t know where he was in his thinking before, earlier in his life, but Ted’s obviously focused now on the things he still wants to accomplish, the risks that are worth taking,” Getches says. “He values the years he has ahead. He is curious about how all of this, the bigger picture, is going to turn out.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Parting Aspects

  “I think Ted is thinking more about his legacy and, like the rest of us, the finite number of years remaining and what he wants to do with them. He is far from finished, and he will always be one of the people I feel most privileged to have met. In our times together he never fails to make me laugh and make me think. A great novelist would be hard-challenged to have invented a character like him.”

  —NBC News anchorman emeritus, conservationist, and citizen Tom Brokaw

  So. Who. Is. Ted Turner?

  When pressed for an answer, I look to the different aspects of a Turner I have come to know. There’s the lesser-known Turner chronicled in these pages, the environmentalist and the philanthropist. There’s also the apocryphal character, the man whose name is regularly appropriated in the interests of telling an unflattering story. This is Turner as he’s perceived by his enemies and detractors. There’s the Turner fiercely devoted to his inner circle, the warm and generous eccentric who values his relationships above almost all else. This is Turner as he’s known to his friends and family. There’s the Turner who might have been, and there’s the Turner who will be, whose presence will be felt for years, perhaps generations, after he’s gone. In order to fully grasp such a complicated personality, you need to somehow keep all these aspects in mind at once.

  In considering the apocryphal Turner, I think about a conversation I had with his youngest son, Beau.

  “Has Dad been obnoxious and outrageous sometimes? All my life,” Beau said during a hike at Avalon Plantation in Florida. It was spring, just after the end of quail hunting season, and Beau was helping to ignite controlled fires, burning away the underbrush in order to spur new, more robust plant growth to keep the land rejuvenated. “What more do you need to know?” Beau asked. “Did he say things we wish he wouldn’t have sometimes? Absolutely. Goodness gracious, he once insulted Pope John Paul by making a Polack joke. How many people do you know who have had to make a personal apology to a pontiff?”

  There is a paradox involved here. How many people have the standing to make headlines by a slip of the tongue, and yet will, if circumstances demand, issue statements of contrition?

  “In a way, I suppose it’s kind of humorous. If he didn’t say things that some people find outlandish, he wouldn’t be who he is,” Beau explains. “Dad will make utterances sometimes just to get a reaction—to wake people up. And you know what? More often than not, when it comes to issues facing the world, his instincts are right. On the other hand, there are stories about things Dad did or said that simply aren’t true.”

  Turner has, for whatever reason, attracted more than his fair share of damaging apocrypha. In Montana, where I live, a story about how he was ejected from a local restaurant went viral on the Internet, was even repeated by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and was broadcast on the Rush Limbaugh radio show. It goes like this:

  During the early 1990s, Turner and Fonda were in Montana driving their Range Rover between the Bar None and Flying D ranches. It was summer, around dinnertime. En route they stopped at Sir Scott’s, a steakhouse located in the tiny farming community of Manhattan.

  Fonda and Turner were said to have strolled imperiously through the front door and informed the hostess they needed a table for two, pronto. The maître d’ let them know there was a forty-five-minute wait, and their name would be added to a list.

  Fonda glared at the waiter. “Do you know who we are?”

  “Yes. But you’re still going to have to wait forty-five minutes.”

  Fonda and Turner were so accustomed to getting the red carpet treatment that they demanded to talk with management.

  When restaurant-owner Scott Westphal appeared, he asked: “We’re obviously busy tonight. How may I help you?”

  “Do you know who we are?” Turner and Fonda demanded.

  “Yes, I do. But you’re still going to have to wait, just like everybody else.”

  Fonda and
Turner made a scene that riveted the attention of everyone in the establishment.

  Westphal, now irritated, could no longer maintain his politeness. “Do you know who I am? I am the owner and a Vietnam veteran. Not only will you not be able to get a table ahead of my dear friends and neighbors here, you will not be eating in my restaurant—not tonight or any other night. Now get the hell out of here and goodbye!” Westphal raised his arm and pointed toward the door.

  Fonda and Turner drove away, never to be seen again. As the legend goes, the entire restaurant erupted into cheers. Westphal was transformed into a folk hero for putting Hanoi Jane and her wealthy blowhard husband in their places.

  A satisfying story, particularly if you were already predisposed to dislike Turner. But here’s the thing: It never happened. I spoke with Scott Westphal, owner of Sir Scott’s Oasis.

  Westphal, a good and decent man (and too young to have served in Vietnam), chuckles when asked to describe what really happened. Fonda and Turner did show up at Sir Scott’s for dinner one fine summer evening—as they had done several times before. They kept returning because they liked the food, atmosphere, and being able to converse with real people who have no affectations. And that particular evening, there was indeed a lengthy backlog of diners. Turner and Fonda were polite and low-key, however, and when they heard about the wait, they simply mentioned to the hostess that they were sad but they couldn’t wait. They would return some other day.

  What does Westphal make of Turner, a fellow restaurateur with his Ted’s Montana Grill chain? “As a businessman, I respect everything he’s accomplished. He’s definitely an American success story. I know some of the ranchers don’t care for him, but whenever he and his wife came in, they were like anyone else.”

  The Sir Scott’s tale is one of several pure fabrications that involve Turner. Among some of the other doozies? That Turner is involved in an international conspiracy with the United Nations to undermine America’s sovereignty and impose a New World Order that would destroy private property rights. That he’s enlisted Kofi Annan and Belgian pilots in their blue UN helmets to secretly fly Canadian wolves to his ranches in New Mexico. That he’s opposed to the Second Amendment, and doesn’t support men and women in military uniform. That he’s secretly a Communist or Socialist, and doesn’t pay taxes. And on and on. Turner and his organization no longer try to refute these false assertions—they are prolific and tinged with schadenfreude—but like so much information on the Internet, the more that something goes viral, the more the masses believe it. Believing myths is inherent to modern tribal identity.

  The second aspect of Turner involves Turner the friend, the compatriot, the loyal supporter.

  “The most interesting things in life, and often the most important relationships in life, happen by accident,” asserts Mikhail Gorbachev.

  Gorbachev’s first introduction to Turner was in 1986, two years after CNN opened its Moscow Bureau, the first US media organization to win approval from the Soviets.

  Turner was in the Russian city to help promote the Goodwill Games. Turner remembers thinking, as he sat with Gorbachev, how many Americans had such a distorted, maligning view of the Soviet leader. “Here was this very gracious, very thoughtful man who loved his country and loved his wife and daughter, who valued pretty much the same things I did. He wasn’t happy about the nuclear tensions. He didn’t believe in Communism, not really. He wasn’t interested in blowing us up. He was an agent of change. I told him that Reagan was in a tough position, that he was unlikely to budge on reducing the number of nukes, but that if he [Gorbachev] took up the idea, it could happen.”

  A rising political star, Gorbachev had become general secretary of the Communist Party a year earlier. He remembers how strange it seemed to him and his colleagues in the Politburo that this young headstrong entrepreneur—Turner—at the height of escalating anxiety with the West, wished to extend a hand of friendship.

  KGB intelligence officials wondered about Turner’s motivation. He behaved so differently from the Americans they had encountered in Washington and at negotiating tables. Was he a secret CIA agent? Was he playing sophisticated psychological mind games?

  Chuckling, Gorbachev told me it took some studying of Turner before he realized, “Ted was simply being sincere. He was being who he is.”

  Despite enduring ridicule from some in the United States (who claimed regular reporting from Moscow would be a ruse for spreading Communist propaganda), Turner insisted that CNN tell stories about real life in the USSR. Not long afterward, the other three US networks followed suit.

  Turner sent his own son, Teddy, to help with the news gathering. The gesture moved Gorbachev. To him, it was “heartening.” No man would send a beloved child to a place he believed was the domain of an enemy.

  Gorbachev was also struck by the international flavor of CNN’s reporting, its lack of blatant, over the top American chest beating; it transcended what Gorbachev’s colleagues expected would be Yankee propaganda. Gorbachev himself became an avid watcher of CNN. Sizing Turner up in hindsight, he confesses: “I liked him from the start.”

  The pair met again and again. “He was a very likeable capitalist who showed what you can do in this country through hard work,” Gorbachev says, partially in jest. “And in addition to becoming rich, you can also speak your mind.” Turner, he realized, was an ambassador for the virtues of free speech.

  CNN was in Iceland when Gorbachev famously met with Reagan at the seminal moment when both sides of the Cold War were prepared to accept total elimination of nuclear weapons. It could have happened, Gorbachev notes, except that Reagan and US negotiators refused to give up the Star Wars Missile Defense program (which was ultimately abandoned after billions of US tax dollars were spent). Today, there are lingering tensions between the United States and Russia over a proposed missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

  Widely hailed outside his own country, Gorbachev would be the last general secretary of the Communist regime, a position dating back to Vladimir Lenin in 1922. For ending oppression, Gorbachev was cheered in the United States and Western Europe but vilified in his own country by Communist Party loyalists for going too far.

  Turner is puzzled, he says, by the way Gorbachev is viewed. Despite setting his society free, he is pilloried by old party hardliners, perhaps because freedom ended their autocratic authority.

  “I don’t think Americans ever fully realized how much Mikhail risked for himself, for his family, and the sacrifice he made to his own popularity by taking the courageous stands he did,” Turner says. “And he is a man today who has a rare perspective into one of the most important chapters of world history.”

  “Ted reminded us all, using CNN, that apart from politics, there are far more inspiring things that unite us,” Gorbachev said. “After I stepped down [following the breakup of the Soviet Union] and became a free man, my relationship with Ted blossomed. We found that both of us were linked by our enormous interest in nature and the environment. At that time, and with time, I came to understand the most important thing about Ted: He is a person who is not seeking personal gain, who is not trying to seek profit at every opportunity.”

  Gorbachev credits Turner with helping him realize how social instability increases wherever there is resource plundering that leaves landscapes and people impoverished.

  In the 1990s, Gorbachev had job offers from a number of multinational companies. And he could have easily enlarged his personal net worth simply by going on the lecture circuit full time, receiving six- and seven-figure amounts for speaking appearances. Instead of leaving his country, he committed himself to staying in Moscow and, in 1994, Gorbachev founded Green Cross International (known as Global Green in the United States), hoping to help ignite a global environmental movement among world leaders. He planned to base it in a proposed new building in Moscow that would also house the Gorbachev Foundation. He channe
led all of the money he received for winning the Nobel Peace Prize into the building and new organizations. Money for construction also was pledged by a few entities in Switzerland and Russia.

  Pat Mitchell, who today is CEO and president of the Paley Media Center in New York and who also served as CEO of PBS, was in those days working for Turner in Atlanta, heading up TBS/CNN’s award-winning documentary film division. As the Gorbachev Foundation was getting off the ground, Turner sent Mitchell to Moscow to lend organizational assistance.

  “When I visited him in Moscow, his office at the time was no bigger in size than a closet,” Mitchell says. “He had stacks of important historical documents in boxes and he said that mounds of other personal records had been confiscated by the Russian government and locked in the Kremlin. He wanted to create a repository, to have all of it collected together in one place, both as an act of transparency for the Russian people and for historians of the future to pore over. He wanted that repository to be in the Gorbachev Foundation.”

  Gorbachev himself persuaded Mitchell and her husband Scott Seydel to sit on the US board of Global Green that has offices in several American cities, including hurricane-devastated New Orleans, where Global Green has helped residents with construction of new homes.

  The battering of the emerging free market economy in Russia, however, took a toll on Gorbachev. He was too proud to solicit help from friends, and money pledged for the foundation building—an edifice that would become roughly parallel in its symbolism to constructing a US presidential library—did not materialize.

  Gorbachev felt isolated, abandoned, and betrayed. He refused to accept donations from shadowy business figures in his home country because of favors they might ask of him. He sunk into a personal depression, he says. A site and a building with only a roof and shell stood as a testament to his inability to realize its completion. It was personally humiliating.