My Life So Far (85 page)

Were it not for Ted, I wouldn’t have been at such gatherings. They gave me indigestion. But because they involved Ted’s businesses I never felt I could say, “But people have been really harmed by those policies you are praising. Don’t you see that?” Afterward I would often tell Ted about my discomfort, but he would never fully engage. There’s a Horatio Alger side to Ted:
Anyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps
(making those who don’t feel that it’s their own fault). I think it pains him too deeply to countenance the possibility that while there are Horatio Alger–type successes in the United States, they aren’t frequent enough to matter. Structural inequities are too ingrained and too invisible.

While traveling the world with Ted, I realized the historic importance of what he had done, how his revolutionary vision for twenty-four-hour news had transformed the planet into Marshall McLuhan’s global village and changed news reporting forever—rather remarkable for a man who hadn’t liked watching the news because he found it depressing. I learned that all the big news companies had researched whether or not a twenty-four-hour news channel would work. Their research said it wouldn’t. As usual, Ted plunged ahead, sans polls or research, relying only on instinct.

It amazed me how in America people bemoaned television as a passive medium for so long, yet when a swashbuckler from Atlanta—a romantic renegade with a global vision—turned the passive medium into a more democratic and empowering one, people had difficulty with it. We forget how it was at the beginning with CNN. Maybe it was easier for audiences when news was predigested and all the seeds and stems were disposed of; maybe having news as raw material made them work too hard.

It’s strangely analogous to what I had seen happening in Eastern Europe in 1990 when I visited there right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Under the Communist system, people had had everything decided for them by the government- and by state-run institutions, and when the possibility of democracy came along, forcing them to participate and make choices, they didn’t have such an easy time adjusting. I remember meeting a lyricist in Prague who said to me, “I’ve spent my life writing words for people who have grown adept at reading between the lines. Now we can write clearly and I’m not sure I know how.”

W
hen Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, began in 1991, Ted’s dreams for world peace received a blow. He got physically sick. Like so many Americans, both of us had hoped that the winding down of the cold war would see a commensurate cutting of the military budget, freeing up funds for domestic and peacetime needs. It was a sad time, yet it was exciting to watch Ted’s responses to crises.

Tom Johnson, former publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
had just become president of CNN. The second day he was on the job, we were at the Flying D when Tom phoned from Atlanta to say that he had just gotten three calls—from President George H. W. Bush, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell, and press secretary Marlin Fitzwater—asking him to order the CNN reporters out of Baghdad “immediately.” It was clear, Tom went on, that Operation Desert Storm was about to begin. From what he had been told, Tom was convinced that Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Peter Arnett were in imminent danger, and he wanted them out. He explained what he knew to Ted, who replied, “Tom, those who want to stay [in Baghdad] will stay. Those who want to come out can come out.” Then, shouting into the phone, he said, “Tom, you will not overturn me on this, pal. You understand me? I will take complete responsibility for this decision. If they die, it will be on my conscience, not yours.” Ted and Tom had to resist very strong pressure from Washington, but if Peter Arnett had not stayed in Baghdad, the alternate (and real) view of the war—which represented a total revolution in TV war coverage and was certainly the defining moment for CNN—would never have occurred.

This gave me a bird’s-eye view of how good Ted is in tough times. He has an easy, confident feel for when and how much to risk. It’s not that he’s unafraid. The bravest soldiers aren’t unafraid, but they’re the ones who are able to harness their fear on behalf of courage. In the years that I was with him, I saw numerous circumstances when Ted was able to mobilize courage, weigh priorities, and then make the winning decision. He’s often played it close to the edge. I guess it’s similar to sailing close to the wind. I wasn’t with Ted when he sailed competitively, but I’m told that whenever he’d take the helm he’d find a way to go just a little faster, cut it a little closer, although his competitors were hours (or even days) behind him.

“H
ope for the best and prepare for the worst” is a homily very much at the center of how Ted lives his life. It’s why he would have made a great general. His troops would have followed him into any battle, as his sailing crews did, because they would know that no
foolish
risks would be taken; everything would have been thought through, every option weighed, and he would never ask his men to do something that he himself wasn’t willing to do. I think that it was his studies of the classics, which teach clear, strategic thinking; his familiarity with the major battles of history; and his competitive sailing that honed these skills so finely. Ted was a sailor of large boats. This is important. Smaller boats require brawn. Big boats require brains: knowing how to build a winning team and how to empower them; how to envision all the things that could happen and to be prepared for any eventuality.

When his company merged with Time Warner in 1995, I watched Ted begin to create an alternate life for himself. He had already started down that path, but now he was far more intentional about building his bison herd, increasing his landholdings and his philanthropy, and not wanting his future to be totally circumscribed by Turner Broadcasting in the event that his new boss, Gerald Levin, decided to drive him out of his own company. When his worst fears materialized, everything was already in place for him to be a full-time rancher, philanthropist, and restaurateur. Ted’s Montana Grill, where his bison meat is the star attraction, is providing this entrepreneur with a whole new arena in which to work his magic.

What I
didn’t
anticipate was how Ted’s “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” dictum could apply to our marriage. That would come later. Seven years later, to be exact.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A CALLING

—J
OSEPH
C
AMPBELL,
Hero with a Thousand Faces

—R
OBIN
M
ORGAN,
The Burning Time

I
T STARTED BECAUSE
I wanted to be a responsible trustee of Ted’s family foundation. It resulted in my discovering my calling.

I had been with Ted only a short time when he decided to create the Turner Foundation and focus its grant making on protecting the environment and reducing population growth: Growing numbers of people on a small planet with finite resources spells trouble, not just for the environment but for the human species as well, since a healthy environment is our life support system.

While I understood environmental issues, the population part was a little fuzzy—not the
reason
it is a problem, but what to
do
about it. Whenever he spoke publicly (and privately), Ted hammered away relentlessly about how population growth was the central problem of our time. He would recite statistics: 840 million people go hungry every night and 2 billion are chronically malnourished; 1 billion people try to live on less than $1 a day and another billion on less than $2; more than 2 billion people lack basic sanitation; 1 billion do not have access to clean water, adequate housing, or rudimentary health care. This was his mantra.

Often, when I had pounded away about an issue, the press would label me strident and shrill. “Nag, Nag, Nag” was the title of one
Life
magazine article about me. Ted, it seemed, was simply considered “passionate.” He was, and is, and his passion led me to study the issue of population in earnest to try to figure out a strategy. As I delved deeper I saw that population growth was a more complicated and divisive issue than I had realized: On the one extreme were those who thought the problem was not the number of human beings but inequitable distribution of resources; there were those who believed that technological breakthroughs would mitigate against growth in population; there were those who were concerned because they foresaw a world where people of color would dominate white people; and there were those who approached the issue solely from an environmental standpoint and favored setting quotas. I was confused by the argument from feminist groups that the population problem was, at its core, a gender issue. To be honest, in my heart of hearts I still saw gender issues as a distraction. All this was about to change.

It was 1994. I was asked to be a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and to speak at the upcoming Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt. The challenge gave me an impetus for studying harder. I had never participated in a United Nations conference before, although two years before, I had gone to the Earth Summit in Rio with Ted. There I saw that women attendees had been relegated to the beachfront, where all the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were holding a separate People’s Forum far away from the official conference (where the “real work” was being done). Apparently women, like NGOs, were viewed as a “special interest group” with no real place at the table. Within the year I would come to believe that women are not factions, afterthoughts, or an ancillary issue to be addressed after everything else is taken care of. Women
are
the issue—the
core
issue. They are the majority of humanity, whose rights are
human rights.
An attempt to solve
any
problem—poverty, peace, sustainable development, environment, health—by making an end run around women will fail.

Bella Abzug was there on the beach in Rio and under her phenomenal leadership women had begun to study how the UN works, where the institutional cracks and crevices are and how we might widen them and next time get inside, where we belong.

“Next time” was the Cairo conference at which I was speaking, and its purpose was to figure out how to stabilize population growth to enable sustainable development (economic progress that doesn’t destroy the ecosystem). The previous population conferences (they take place every ten years) had resulted in plans of action written mostly by men and had focused on contraception (or the
withholding
of it—then, as now, ideology took precedence over evidence) and setting quotas. This time would be different.

Bill Clinton was president; Bella was on the official delegation, not simply at the NGO forum. Thanks in large part to Bella, former Colorado senator Tim Wirth (now president of Ted’s United Nations Foundation), and other powerful organizers and advocates, the United States had a strong and determined contingent. This time women were
at
the table, actually drafting the plan of action. For them, population growth was not just a demographic issue or simply a health issue. These were frontline workers, experiential experts (as women usually are). No one knew better than they why the number of humans was climbing, and what to do about it.

The conference halls were filled to overflowing with women from around the world, striking and proud in their colorful robes, saris, and tunics. They were Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Muslim, black, brown, red, yellow, white. This was my first time on my own at one of these international gatherings, and I felt both exhilarated and intimidated.

But as I went from workshop to workshop and listened to the speakers, a new understanding washed over me. Gender was not the “distracting feminist issue” I had thought. It was the very crux of the matter. It was, in fact, the conceptual framework of the entire conference. Here, essentially, is what I was discovering: If you want to eradicate poverty, stabilize population growth, and create sustainable development, you—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Agency for International Development, and all other governmental and nongovernmental agencies—have to view everything through a gender lens. Does your project help women and girls? Does it make their lives easier? Does it empower them? Is your structural adjustment scheme going to make it harder for women to get loans to start their own businesses? Is your proposed dam going to make it harder for girls to fetch water for their families? Because everywhere in the so-called developing world, also known as the Global South, it is women and girls who plant the seeds, till the land, harvest the crops, fetch the water, cook the food, tend the livestock, bear the children, take charge of the family’s health, find money for school fees, and spend whatever pennies they can scrape up on the family’s well-being. They are already stretched to their human limits and beyond. Make it worse for them and
everything
gets worse. Make it easier for them and virtually everything important in the family environment—education, income, community stability, and health—gets better.