As with so many turning points in Ted Turner’s swashbuckling life, it was a moment of spontaneous showmanship that sparked a nearly 50-year-long friendship with former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth.
A little history lesson is necessary here.
In 1980, the three major television networks called Ronald Reagan the winner of the presidential election before the polls closed on the West Coast and beyond. Voters, especially Democrats feeling their vote in the presidential race was a waste of time, didn’t bother to go to the polls, and as a result candidates in several down-ballot races lost.
One of them had been the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance, vaulting the much-less-senior Rep. Wirth, D-Colorado, into the leadership position.
“Suddenly I became chairman of this huge, sprawling committee,” he recalled, and it was that committee that held high-profile hearings on the impact the broadcasters had on the election outcome.
With TV cameras crowding the room, the network executives fulminated theatrically on their sacred commitment to the public and their obligation to report election returns as soon as they heard them, accepting no responsibility for the influence their early announcements had on the voters.
“Everyone was angry,” Wirth said.
Then the brash founder of CNN, which had been broadcasting for only about a year and had been dismissed by the network bigs as amateurish and inconsequential, took the microphone to testify.
“He tore up the pages of his prepared statement and drew a big dollar sign on the paper, then turned to the bank of cameras,” Wirth said.
“He was absolutely right about that.”
When Turner died last week, a brash, colorful light went out in Wirth’s life. But, oh, the memories still glow warm and bright.
Wirth left his political career behind in 1993 after six terms in the U.S. House and one as a U.S. senator, and in 1997 was recruited by Turner to lead the United Nations Foundation.
Turner, angry about the failure of the U.S. government to pay its U.N. dues (the Republican-led Congress was demanding concessions from the Clinton administration on funding family planning programs), announced he was giving $1 billion to the agency and creating a foundation to administer the funds.
“It all began at this little round table in New York,” Wirth said.
Turner outlined the issues he was particularly interested in, including population, climate change, women’s rights, “and he looked at me and said, ‘You take it from here.’ ”
He also used the occasion to turn up the heat on other billionaires.
“He decided to go after other people with lots of dough to get them to give large portions of their estates to philanthropy,” Wirth said.
He described a meeting of billionaires in an apartment in New York where “a lot of people were not comfortable with Ted telling them what to do with their money.”
Still, afterwards many of them, including Bill Gates, followed Turner’s advice.
In the ensuing years, Wirth, with the help of Turner’s powerful cult of personality, put the U.N. Foundation squarely in the middle of some of the most contentious battles around the world.
Early U.N. efforts to address climate change called for every country to reduce carbon emissions by the same percentages, rich countries and struggling countries in the developing world alike.
“That was not reasonable,” Wirth said.
The foundation was instrumental in developing the framework that resulted in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global temperature increases.
“Ted was responsible for driving that,” Wirth said.
The foundation also spearheaded the Clean Cookstoves Initiative, recruiting Hillary Clinton to chair the project to save the health of people — especially women — exposed to toxic fumes in their homes all over the developing world.
It launched an anti-smoking initiative and one on providing bed nets to protect people from mosquitoes carrying malaria.
It worked with the Red Cross and the World Health Organization to make measles vaccine available in cities and villages all over the world at little or no cost.
“Measles outbreaks dropped dramatically to the point that people thought it would be eradicated like smallpox. Nobody even thought about it anymore until we got this idiot ….
“What Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done is disgraceful,” Wirth said.
Turner’s career was not a straight line toward success, however.
“Everything was on such a grand scale with Ted,” Wirth said.
“We were with him the night he thought he’d bought CBS” in 1985, in a move the New York Times said was like “a mouse swallowing an elephant.”
“On Friday night he thought he had it, but by Sunday it was gone.”
At one point, Turner called on Wirth to help him map a run for president. He pulled together a plan and presented it to Ted and his then-wife, Jane Fonda.
“I put together a whole strategy,” Wirth said. “I immediately said it would cost $65 million to do this.
“Jane thought it was a terrible idea, and she said to think instead about what we could do politically with $65 million, how we could fund all kinds of programs and activities, environmental groups and women’s groups, tending to a whole lot of things he couldn’t do as president.”
He took her ideas to heart, abandoned his pursuit of the presidency and his profound impact on conservation is a part of that legacy.
“He ended up with 2 million acres,” Wirth said. “He restored the bison herds and was one of the original preservationists on wolves.”
It was this connection that Turner and Wirth shared most personally.
Two summers ago, Wirth and his wife, Wren, visited Turner on his ranch in Montana.
“He was moving one of the herds of bison to another pasture,” he recalled.
It was raining and the herd had to cross a road. They pulled to the side of the road in Turner’s vehicle and soon were surrounded by the herd.
“The bison were walking right by the vehicle, snorting, steam coming off their backs. We sat there for two hours watching. There were big ones and little ones with their mothers. We could hear them, smell them.
“It was the most moving naturalist experience I’ve ever had. Ted was almost crying as he was watching this happen. There was so much that he stood for all around us on that one afternoon.”
Wirth said he considers himself lucky to have met Turner all those decades ago.
“Wren and I, we were very fortunate. He had such remarkable vision and energy, always with the future in mind.
“I loved the guy,” he said.
Diane Carman is a Denver communications consultant.
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