Call Me Ted (35 page)
I’m proud of the work we’ve done to preserve and protect the properties and I’ve tried to do everything I can to make sure that they’re maintained after I’m gone. With my passing the properties will be protected by conservation easements. In certain parts of the country, my rancher neighbors have grown suspicious of me and created theories about ulterior motives I might have, going so far as to speculate that I might be trying to tie up and control water rights for entire regions. None of this is true. As long as the conservation laws of the United States remain in place, the land will be protected from development in perpetuity (and we’ve taken similar measures with the Argentine properties).
I’m often reminded of Scarlett O’Hara’s father in
Gone With the Wind
, who told her, “Why, land’s the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” I’ve realized this to be true, and I’m proud to know that I’ve done what I can to make sure that my land is protected.
The Gulf War
S
ometime around the middle of 1990 I realized that CNN needed some new leadership. Burt Reinhardt had done a terrific job since taking over after Reese Schonfeld’s departure (Reese and I had differences over his management style and we parted company in 1982), but by this time Burt was well past retirement age. I learned that Tom Johnson, who was a respected career journalist, was available due to a restructuring at the Times Mirror Company. We met and he agreed to join us as president and CEO of CNN.
A TED STORY
“He’s Still Got the Job if He Wants It!”
—Tom Johnson
(TOM JOHNSON WAS CEO OF CNN FROM AUGUST 1990 TO JUNE 2001.)
When I heard that Turner was looking to hire someone new to run CNN, I asked my friend Jerry Lindauer if he thought Ted might consider me. Jerry was chairman of Prime Cable and had known Ted for years. He said he didn’t know but would give Ted a call and put in a good word. After having been president and publisher of the
L.A. Times
I’d recently been “elevated” to the position of vice chairman of the parent company, Times Mirror, and I was looking for a change. Ted told Jerry he’d be interested in a meeting and on his next trip to Los Angeles I met with him at his office in Century City. The meeting was on a Thursday at 10:00 in the morning and I figured it would run about two hours or so. Instead, it lasted about seventeen minutes and was interrupted four times by phone calls. I think two of those were from Jane Fonda.
At one point Ted said, “Tom, would you take the job as president of CNN?”
I said, “Ted, you need to know more about me and I need to know more about the job and about you.”
And he said, “Well, can you let me know by Monday?” If you take out the time for the phone calls, the amount of actual conversation time with Ted was about three minutes, and now he was asking me to let him know Monday morning if I would take the job.
When I got back to my office at the
L.A. Times,
I got a call from Bill Shaw, who worked for Turner. “Did Ted offer you the job and did you accept?”
I said, “Mr. Shaw, I’m not sure.”
Then Bill said, “Let me tell you a story. Ted once offered a baseball player a contract for a million dollars and told him he needed to know right away if he would accept. A few days passed and when Ted was told the guy hadn’t made up his mind yet, Ted said, ‘Tell that goddamn guy if he can’t make up his mind he has no place in our organization!’ and he withdrew the offer.” Bill followed that story by telling me he looked forward to working with me. I told him I still had to do some due diligence on the opportunity and suggested they do some on me, too.
Over the next few days, I called a number of people to get their thoughts on Ted, CNN, and the opportunity I had before me. From President Carter to Roberto Goizueta at Coca-Cola to Bill Moyers and Walter Cronkite—everyone I spoke to was enthusiastic. But the one quote I’ll never forget came from Jane Fonda, whom I had recently gotten to know. “Tom,” she said, “he’s the most remarkable man I’ve ever met.”
To seal the deal completely, my wife, Edwina, and I offered to have dinner with Ted and Jane Fonda at a restaurant out on the Pacific Coast Highway, up in the Santa Monica hills. We met at Jane’s house and Edwina drove the four of us to the restaurant in her white Jaguar. The first mistake I made was when I suggested that Ted sit in the front passenger seat next to Edwina and I would sit in the back with Jane. It was a mistake for two reasons. First, Ted sure as hell didn’t want to be seated anywhere except next to Jane Fonda—he looked at me like I was crazy—but he did it anyway. The second problem was that I tend to get carsick when I don’t ride in the front. Riding in the back with Jane, by the time we got to the restaurant, I was feeling pretty awful.
So we get to the restaurant and the purpose of the meal was really to talk about the job, what kind of working relationship we were going to have, and those sorts of things. But throughout the dinner, Ted could not keep his hands off Jane and she couldn’t keep her hands off him. Edwina and I felt like we were watching a couple of teenagers! For my part, I don’t know if it was nerves or the car ride or both, but I got progressively sicker through the dinner and had to go to the bathroom to throw up three different times. Needless to say, we didn’t talk much about the job before it was time to head home.
For the return trip back to Jane’s house I got in the front seat and let Ted and Jane take the back. I told Edwina, “If I say ‘pull over,’ please pull over because I am really sick.” A few minutes later, I did just that, and we pulled over on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway and I got out and was dry heaving by the side of the road. I told her to take Ted and Jane home and come back to get me. From the back seat window, Ted said, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to leave you here, pal!” but I insisted—I was so sick I didn’t want anyone to see me. There I was, on a concrete slab next to the PCH, and as Edwina pulled away, I could hear Ted yell out to her in that loud voice of his, “Tell him he’s still got the job if he wants it!”
Tom Johnson’s first day at CNN was August 1, 1990. On August 2, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. It was trial by fire but fortunately for Tom, CNN had, by this time, a very solid infrastructure. Even through the years when the network was losing money, we continued to invest in our newsgathering capabilities and worked hard to develop strong relationships around the world.
As we expanded CNN, many governments hesitated at the idea of bringing “American” news into their country. So, to demonstrate that we were open to a wide range of views, in 1987 we started a program called
World Report
. We set aside time on CNN for news reports produced from around the world and aired them just as they would run on their own stations. It was a unique approach that demonstrated to our global partners that we operated with a spirit of fairness and openness and it gave viewers in the United States the opportunity to see how other countries viewed world events. We also held an annual
World Report
conference in Atlanta that was attended by representatives of each of the participating countries and networks. It was a great opportunity for these people to get together, to share ideas, and to get to know one another.
Among the participants was a delegation from Iraq, including Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam’s closest lieutenants. The relationships we developed within Iraq’s communications infrastructure would prove to be helpful later. As the Kuwait standoff continued and war looked increasingly likely, journalists began to pour into that region. Largely due to the trust and personal relationships that we had developed, CNN crews continued to gain access to key decision makers and physical locations in Iraq that were off limits to our competitors.
As the fall of 1990 progressed, we sensed that Operation Desert Storm could be a defining moment for CNN. We had set out to be the world’s news leader and covering this war would be our opportunity to prove it. Televising an international story of this scope would not be inexpensive, and even though our ratings were sure to grow, our advertising revenue would not. It’s very difficult to interrupt war coverage with commercials and even if we did, most advertisers wouldn’t want their products associated with armed conflict.
Still, we welcomed the opportunity. If we did our jobs right, the long-term value to CNN would be immeasurable and I wasn’t going to let short-term financial concerns distract us. (That said, I did pitch the cable operators on our board the idea of a “war tax,” in which they’d increase the subscription fees they paid to CNN by 5 cents a month to offset our costs. I thought this could be positioned as a public service since our coverage would be so unique and important. They didn’t go for it.)
Tom Johnson had been thrown into the deep end but he was a capable manager and he inherited a terrific team, from more senior journalists like Ed Turner (no relation to me), who was his number two, to very talented younger people like Eason Jordan, who was in charge of our international newsgathering. As they prepared a range of plans to ramp up coverage, Tom and this team presented me with various scenarios of spending increases, from $5 million up to $35 million in incremental expenses.
When they were finished, Tom said, “Ted, what am I authorized to spend?”
These expenses would all fall straight to the bottom line, but it was still an easy call for me. “You spend whatever it takes, pal,” and that was the end of our meeting. Tom looked surprised—I don’t think he was used to this kind of quick approval of major expenditures from his years in the newspaper business—but with a green light to spend $35 million, CNN rushed to improve existing facilities and establish new ones throughout the Gulf region, including Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia, Cairo, and Amman, Jordan.
Tensions grew in that region as Saddam continued to ignore deadlines for withdrawing his troops from Kuwait. In October Bernard Shaw scored a coup when Saddam Hussein sat down for an interview. People around the world watched, hoping that Saddam might offer some words to de-escalate the situation. He didn’t, and we took a lot of flak from officials in Washington, who accused us of letting Saddam use CNN as his “mouthpiece,” but I held to the view that it was our job to deliver the news from all sides and if the leader of a country with whom we were about to go to war wanted to give an interview, we couldn’t turn him down.
Wars usually start when the talking stops. We weren’t in any way endorsing Iraq’s position; we were simply providing an opportunity for the airing of positions from all sides of the conflict. It was in this spirit that in January, with war tensions reaching new heights, CNN received a request from Saddam’s officials for another interview, and they specifically asked that it once again be with Bernnie Shaw. Bernie was a terrific journalist but for many years he had been an anchor, not a reporter, and now he was being asked to leave his desk in Washington to fly to the most dangerous place in the world.
Given the safety concerns, this couldn’t have been an easy decision for Bernie, but he decided to go. Many again hoped that Saddam would use this interview to announce a plan for withdrawal from Kuwait and de-escalate the conflict. Instead, after Bernie had made the trip to Baghdad, Iraqi officials now told CNN that Saddam Hussein had changed his mind and would not be doing the interview. His decision to cancel was seen by many as a “last straw” and it was no longer a question of if the coalition would strike, but more of a matter of when and where. Having flown all that way for an interview, Bernie now found himself staying at the Al-Rashid hotel in the heart of Baghdad, a city on the brink of war.
Tom Johnson had excellent contacts in Washington and several of these, including White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, CIA Director William Webster, National Security Council Adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell, called to ask him to move our people out of Iraq. Eventually, Tom even got a very serious call from President George H. W. Bush. The president expressed his appreciation for our thorough reporting but also voiced concerns that Saddam was using CNN to get his message out. Bush also made it clear that war was imminent and, according to Tom, he said, “Tell Bernie not to stay in Baghdad.”
During his tenure at the L.A.
Times,
Tom had lost two journalists—one was killed in Iran when the Shah was overthrown and the other died covering the war in Nicaragua. Tom seriously considered ordering our people to leave Baghdad, but he knew this was something he’d have to run by me. He presented me with three options. One was to move all CNN personnel out of Iraq and back to Amman. The second was to relocate them to the outskirts of Baghdad, and the third was to have them stay in place at the Al-Rashid.
Tom’s personal recommendation was to get out of Iraq, and then try to move our people back in once the initial attacks were over. To me, these people were war journalists and I felt strongly that we had to leave the decision up to them. I said that those who wanted to stay could stay and those who wanted to leave could leave. I also made it clear to Tom that if anyone was killed or injured, I and I alone would take full responsibility. Peter Arnett, Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and the crew, led by producer Robert Weiner, all decided to stay.
Hostilities began on the evening of January 16, 1991. I was in Los Angeles watching CNN at Jane Fonda’s house and I’ll never forget it. Bernie, Peter Arnett, and John Holliman delivered gripping coverage as the bombs began to fall. For the first time in history, a war was being televised live from behind the lines. I grabbed the remote. While CNN’s team provided riveting coverage and our lead anchor compared being in Baghdad to experiencing “the center of hell,” CBS’s Dan Rather was sitting at his desk in New York talking about the attack. When I flipped to ABC, Peter Jennings was also behind a desk, talking. NBC and Tom Brokaw? Same thing.
Turning back to our live coverage, I smiled. CNN scored the journalistic scoop of the century.