Any list of the legends of American business would have to include the name Ted Turner. Bold and frequently controversial, Turner was very much a disruptor in his prime. But time and age have put him in a reflective mood, as senior contributor Ted Koppel found when he visited Turner at his Montana ranch.
You ever ride your whole property here?
No, but I've ridden quite a bit of it.
You need a wide lens on your camera to capture the many sides of Ted Turner, especially out here on his sprawling 113,000 acre ranch outside Bozeman, Montana.
You've always been a bit of a dreamer, haven't you?
Well, a lot of my dreams have come true.
Hey, Taylor, what did we... We were 15 and 38 yesterday.
60 Minutes has been covering the fulfillment of those dreams for almost 40 years.
He's just convinced he can do almost anything he sets out to do. And so far, he's been right.
Get the bullpen ready, Dodgers. When Harry Reasoner made that observation, Ted Turner had not yet created CNN, but he had bought the Atlanta Braves and the Atlanta Hawks. And by transmitting all those baseball and basketball games via satellite to cable stations around the country, Turner transformed his not very successful local Atlanta TV station...
Super family entertainment comes your way on Atlanta's WTBS.
...into his own creation which he dubbed a super station.
Programming. You know, we've got the best of any independent station.
Around the same time, Turner, a man of many parts, had already skippered the yacht Courageous to a four-nothing sweep of Australia in the America's Cup, arguably the world's most prestigious yachting race.
I'm a lot of different people if you don't know that by now. I'm a multifaceted person. I've got a lot of different personalities. You ought to see me at midnight on the full moon.
By the time Diane Sawyer got to Turner in 1986, CNN was well up and running.
We intend to cover all the news all the time. And Ted had his sights on acquiring CBS.
What happened to the man who said that CBS was a cheap whorehouse taken over by sleazebag artists?
I said that years ago. I was more of a crusader then than I am now. But I really felt that way at the time.
Ted Turner was a loud practitioner of political incorrectness years before Donald Trump rode that pony into the White House.
Italians. Italians. Imagine the Italians at war. I mean, what a joke. They didn't belong in the last war. They were sorry they were in it. They were glad to get out of it. You know, they'd rather be involved in crime and just making some wine and having a good time.
They called him the mouth from the south, Captain Outrageous. But when Turner sat down with Mike Wallace in 2003, CNN was already an international powerhouse, and Ted Turner had begun putting his money where his mouth had been.
I got a letter saying that I was going to be honored by the United Nations Association as their man of the year. And I thought, well, what am I going to say? Because I had to make a little speech. What am I going to say? Since money talks, money. Give him a lot of money. I said, 'How much you going to give him?' I said, 'He's got to, you know, he's got to get in the newspapers. It's got to be a big figure. How about a billion?' You know, I mean, and he did.
Turner fulfilled his pledge of $1 billion to the United Nations. He also contributed somewhere north of $250 million toward limiting the spread of nuclear weapons out of the former Soviet Union.
Oh, mama mia. That's a real nice fish.
As Morley Safer discovered in 2008, though, Turner sometimes got his numbers a little confused, as in this conversation about the disastrous merger between Time Warner, CNN, and AOL.
You were losing nearly $10 million a day for two and a half years.
A million a day for two and a half years.
Wait a minute. That'd be 700 million. You're right. 10 million a day. Listen, I get thousands, millions, and billions mixed up.
The confusion, the episodes of outrageous behavior, the euphoric highs and dark lows were initially diagnosed as symptoms of manic depression. Turner says that was a misdiagnosis, but he openly acknowledges having a progressive brain disorder called Lewy body dementia.
Can you tell us what that is?
It's a mild case of what people have as Alzheimer's. It's similar to that, but not nearly as bad. Alzheimer's is fatal. Thank goodness that I don't have that. But I also got... what's... I can't remember the name of it.
That's all right. Tell me what the...
It's dementia. I can't remember what my disease is.
It's an unpleasant thing to remember. So, just tell me what the symptoms are. I mean, one of the symptoms we're seeing right now. You can't remember what it was you wanted to tell me. But frankly, Ted, at our age, you know, not being able to remember things is pretty common.
Is pretty common. I know. I know that.
But it's more extreme with you.
Tired, exhausted. That's main symptoms. And forgetfulness.
