We're back now with a special edition of Meet the Press with a very special guest, one of the most familiar figures in American life, Ted Turner, of course, champion sailor, founder of CNN, environmentalist, and also restaurateur these days. He's out with a new book called Call Me Ted about his life story. He has just turned 70. This is a more familiar figure for me, the one on the back, because Ted, it's no secret we see each other across the Great Plains and across the Western United States. It is Thanksgiving weekend. What are you most thankful for? Besides the fact that at age 70, you're still standing vertical.
Be healthy and be alive and that my family's healthy.
And what about you personally in terms of your own goals now at this age? You're not going to go off to some kind of a rest home, but you have some big plans in mind.
Well, I'm still working with the UN Foundation, the Turner Foundation, a nuclear threat initiative to get rid of nuclear weapons. Change over our energy system to a clean, renewable, locally produced energy system and phase out fossil fuels. Eliminate poverty and disease. Make sure everybody gets an education. No, no, I'm talking about the whole world too, which we all these things we can do if we put our mind to it.
That's not a very short shopping list, but let's talk about the current conditions in this country. America is in economic turmoil, to use a phrase from your old profession of a professional racer. We're sailing through some very stormy seas. This is what you often say about your life. Don't worry about the wind. Adjust the sails. We're going to have to be pretty good adjusting the sails, aren't we, to get through all of this?
Well, what happened, I think the way I see it is we spent more money than we could afford for years and years and years. And you can do that for a while, but eventually it catches up with you and it's time to pay the piper.
But Ted, for a long time, CNN was on the ragged edge of going into bankruptcy or having to be sold because you were skating so close to that ragged edge financially.
That's true. But I made it and I did it without any federal bailout too. And I was trying to build a viable financial enterprise which I did and while we had a lot of debt at the time, it was debt that we could support, not debt that we couldn't support.
Did you think at some point during those early days of CNN that it was really a fool's mission that you couldn't pull this off?
No, before I started CNN, I knew I didn't have enough money to see it through. And I didn't know how much it was going to take. I was kind of like Columbus when he set out to discover the new world. He didn't know where he was going when he left. He didn't know where he was when he got there. And he didn't know where he'd been when he got back. But I had thought it through very carefully for several years and went over all the things that could go wrong because even before I started CNN, I knew what the greatest threat to it would be and that was a right-wing news network and in fact Fox came along and was the greatest threat and I had a solution to that and that was Headline News. I could have when I first heard that Fox was going to get started, I could have taken Headline News and transferred it over to a right-wing network and hired Rush Limbaugh and let it be the right-wing network and preempted Fox. By the time we were so successful, by the time that Fox announced that they were going to start a news network that I just couldn't do it because I'm not really a hard right winger.
And that was also at a time though when you were really at war with Rupert Murdoch.
You know, I was at war with him for a long time, many years. I'm glad that we have it behind us, I think.
And why do you have it behind you?
Well, when he announced that he was going green, I sent him a congratulatory note because I do that with everybody that goes green that's of consequence. And he wrote me back and said, 'Why don't we have lunch?' So, I invited him to the lunch and he was the only person I really didn't like. And it hurts you when you don't like somebody. It doesn't really hurt them. And so I don't know. I guess I just had the Christmas spirit. It was before the economy turned south too, I might add. So we decided to bury the hatchet. After all, he's in his mid-70s now, and I don't think he's nearly the threat that he was when he was younger.
You're not very sympathetic to what's going on in Detroit.
Well, I am really. I don't like to see anybody not doing well, but I'm afraid I saw it coming years ago that Detroit was headed for a crash. And it's amazing to me that they didn't see it either, you know, and didn't start building smaller cars, more fuel efficient cars a long time ago because anybody with half a brain could see we were going to have, you know, big disruptions in the fossil fuel business.
Let me read to you what you had to say about it recently. If we give the big three automakers a $25 billion bailout, they're going to blow through it by the 1st of March. They won't know what to do with it. Let them go bankrupt and get Toyota to buy them out. There are a lot of jobs that are connected to the American automobile industry. Do you think that the government ought not to have any role in trying to put them back together?
I really don't know. But I feel like that it would be a lot better if the United States government's going to put money in anything, why not put it into clean renewable energy and create jobs for the future instead of trying to keep alive a smokestack industry of the past whose days, the days of big automobiles are over. The days of fossil fuel are over.
Let me ask you about your personal life. You had a difficult childhood. I read your book. I've heard a lot of the stories from you personally, but I was surprised by how difficult it was when you were a youngster growing up. You were in boarding school at the age of four. You had a demanding and alcoholic father that you love very much. He cut you off when you went to college when you didn't perform the way that he hoped that you would. It made you work hard because he made you work hard. You also wanted to earn his respect and affection. What was the lasting effect of all that on you? First positively and then negatively.
Well, I think it made me a better person overall. I approached it that way too. I've always tried to look at the positive side of things and move forward rather than look at the negative side and just stay put.
You were at Brown and you wanted to be a classics major. You remain to this day someone who's deeply interested in history, classics, and books. And when you announced that to your dad, he wrote you a long detailed letter.
Well, he really wanted me to go to business school. He was very practical and Brown was a liberal arts college and he knew that when I went there even the economics courses I took were economic theory. They weren't how to balance books and this sort of thing. I would have gotten if I'd have gone to say Wharton or to a business school but that's where he decided later on where I ought to be. But I was already at Brown. It was really an attack on a liberal arts education. And there are reasons why I had a liberal arts education and I was extremely successful in business. And I think I would not have been as successful if it had not been for my classical background because I learned about Alexander the Great and Pericles and Aristotle and I think it made me a better businessman.
Your father was in the billboard business.
You like to say early to bed, early to rise.
Actually, that came from a friend of mine who was a radio salesman. Work like hell and advertise. It was just a joke.
But throughout the course of your career, you have been known by a variety of nicknames. The Mouth of the South.
I don't like that one particularly.
How much of that, however, is a true expression of what you're feeling at the time? And how much of that is a kind of a marketing device to draw attention to Ted Turner and all of his enterprises?
I never use those terms to describe myself. They just, you know, sometimes you get hung with that sort of thing. It's hard to shake.
Is that part of your past now?
I would like to think so.
The other thing that I read in the book that I thought was very touching in a lot of ways was that very difficult time, that tragic time in your life when your father took his own life when you were a young man, 24 years old I think at the time, and as you reflected on it he had really achieved everything that he set out to.
He told me that he set his goals too low and he suggested to me that I don't do that, that set goals high enough so they can't be achieved in your lifetime and then you'll always be motivated to keep working and keep engaged. And I'll never retire. I read in a book somewhere that the average man dies within 24 months of retirement, no matter when he retires.
When you met Barack Obama, I guess maybe for the only time that you met him, you met him for a few minutes in Atlanta. Describe for me that exchange.
