by Lisa Napoli
Soon it would be discovered that, despite what they’d been confidently reporting, the president was not okay. This stark fact hastened the networks back on the air, though they were still scrambling for details. Over the next hours, confusion reigned at all four newsrooms on display for viewers, echo chambers all. The unfolding drama of the news was as riveting as the shooting itself. With a blank slate of airtime to fill, video of the heinous act replayed again and again, in real-time, in slow-mo, examined, dissected, frame by frame, as reporters stitched together their facts and the confusion morphed into a complete story.
At CNN, Daniel Schorr joined Shaw on set and bantered to fill the time, sharing that he just returned from medical leave in the same hospital where the president of the United States was now being treated by the same surgeon who’d recently treated him.
Senator Howard Baker, having announced to Congress the turn of events, called his daughter Cissy, the CNN assignment editor, to deliver a grim scoop: He’d been told that Press Secretary Brady was dead. She, in turn, passed along the information to Sandy Kenyon, who quickly crafted a script for Shaw—who refused to read it. The other networks began to report the news: James Brady had succumbed to gunshot wounds. Dan Rather even called for a moment of silence in his honor. Around the CNN newsroom, watching competition report the news, the anxious staff confronted Kenyon. Why won’t Bernie say it? We had it first.
Since it wasn’t clear how Baker had received his information, and since it seemed that he hadn’t witnessed Brady’s demise himself, Shaw deemed the senator’s information unreliable. Despite his instincts, the anchor capitulated: CNN had learned from a “top-level congressional source,” he told viewers, that James Brady had died. Quickly, he hedged his bets: “We are not sure, we have no official confirmation. This is just one report. Brady, in fact, may be alive.”
Not long after came word that, in fact, he was—and the three mighty networks were in the awkward position of having to retract the story. But the mistake was less of a reminder about rushing to be first than it was one of the first post-CNN examples of how television journalism would be redefined. For “news” no longer meant reporting an event in its aftermath. Forevermore, news would mean following an endless shower of unfolding details, right before your very eyes. News, in other words, had become sports.
On this day, side by side, as newbie CNN resembled the big three networks, and the networks looked and sounded like CNN, media critics decried that the shooting of the president was evidence that television news had collectively sunk to a new low.
Who cared, syndicated columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote, if a reporter had been in the same hospital as the president and attended by the same doctor? Rumor, gossip, hearsay, and tongue-wagging: “While a worried nation sought information,” he lamented of the coverage, “it got incompetent, if ardent hysterics.”
* * *
Every start-up organization in history, if it is lucky to survive its mewling infancy, emerges into its next phase in a series of defining, chrysalis moments—the corporate equivalent of puberty. The first such moment for CNN was that day in March.
Soon after came another milestone in its coming-of-age: the announcement of a rival. Westinghouse and ABC had partnered to create an all-news headline service, built on the premise of a wheel format similar to what Ted had wished CNN to follow. It would debut sometime in 1982, based in the non-union bastion of Connecticut. Imitation might be flattery, but to Ted this was a declaration of war. Without missing a beat, he announced a counterattack. CNN would launch a similar venture to start earlier, on January 1, 1982. Chosen as mastermind of this headline news service was the king of the fast-paced newscast, Ted Kavanau.
Helfrich’s team got to work expanding the old country club, entombing the fallow vegetable garden in the old pools with a new structure to accommodate CNN2. It all happened so quickly that after proudly showing off the construction site out back live on the air, the network got busted for not pulling city permits. For its part, Westinghouse brazenly set up a recruiting operation in an Atlanta hotel room, hoping to lure overworked, underpaid CNN employees to join them. Some did.
The next chrysalis moment served a collective punch to the staff’s solar plexus. Alec Nagle, age thirty-six, was found dead from a heart attack in CNN’s hotel suite in New Orleans, where he’d traveled with colleagues to represent CNN at the annual meeting of the Radio Television News Directors Association. There had been a cocktail party in the room the night before.
As if discovering his body wasn’t awful enough, Jane Maxwell had to convey the terrible news to a stunned Kavanau. Stricken by grief, he corralled seventy of the conference attendees for donations to hire an eight-piece jazz band for a traditional Dixieland funeral march. After convincing the morgue to let him borrow Nagle’s driver’s license, he managed to get the photo blown up onto poster board. Hoisting high the picture of his departed colleague, Kavanau somberly lead several hundred mourners through the streets of the Big Easy, in the traditional New Orleans style. He couldn’t bear to see the remains of his dear friend travel unaccompanied back home, so he hopped a plane to ride with them.
As employees arrived for their shifts and learned what had happened, an unrelenting pall shrouded the headquarters. The newsroom computer system finally worked more reliably, and distressed employees took to their terminals to type out their messages of grief. Forced by their jobs to remain composed and soldier on, newscasters read loving on-air tributes to their departed senior producer, including words composed by Kavanau:
Lord, you have need of a great television producer to help spread your good news to the world, so you took Alec Nagle. Lord, we loved his humor and his gentleness and his toughness and his great feel for offbeat lead stories. Lord, we commend the soul of our colleague Alec Nagle to you.7
Since the frenzied beginning, the pioneering reverie that had bonded the originals had been slipping away with each passing day, as originals moved on to new jobs, newcomers without the shared history arrived, and office politics and jockeying for power polluted the founding spirit. Nagle’s death irretrievably swept that spirit right out behind the building, past the construction site, over the pools, and into that satellite dish farm, up into the heavens, but a memory.
* * *
Mike Boettcher had been pinching himself for a year now. Just before that, he’d been a wannabe foreign correspondent chasing stories at channel 9 around his native Oklahoma. The journalism bug had bit while he watched CBS News each night during the Vietnam War, desperately hoping to get a glimpse of his beloved older brother, a serviceman. Now, after making his way into local television from radio and print, he was living the dream, trouncing around the world as part of Ted Turner’s news army. It was all a testament to fate and connections. When Reese had relented and hired Ed “No Relation” Turner, that opened a hiring pipeline for Okies. When Boettcher got the call, he didn’t hesitate to load his pickup truck and hit the road, where he would be the first and for some time the only field reporter based in Atlanta.
That maiden hour of CNN had portended his fate. For $5,000 a month, the network was entitled to five days’ use of an ad-hoc mobile satellite unit. The contraption was an improvement over the microwave trucks becoming common in local TV news, which could only beam a signal to the local area. For the momentous first day, Reese struggled with where to send the hulking beast. While the recent eruption of Mount St. Helens was high on the list of timely possible stories, it hadn’t been clear that the crude, eighty-foot flatbed rig that lugged a five-meter dish could make it from Atlanta all the way west to Washington State.
Instead, Boettcher and crew found themselves routed south to Florida, where they reported live from a beach in Miami on a massive “freedom flotilla” of Cuban refugees landing on America’s shores. The exodus was part of a political play by Fidel Castro, who’d granted dissenting citizens the green light to leave. Marielitos, they were called, for the harbor through which they left. Since it was impossib
le for producers in Atlanta to talk directly to Boettcher as he stood by to deliver his report, he put one of the fresh arrivals to work holding the nearby pay phone so he could cue him when it was time to go live.
By 1981, Boettcher had reported several times from inside Cuba, always under tightly controlled circumstances, as tensions flared between Castro and the Reagan administration. Invited to cover May Day festivities, Boettcher had been told by his omnipresent handlers that their president wished to meet his.
The president of Cuban TV wants to meet Ted Turner? the young reporter asked. No, they corrected, the president of Cuba.
Back at headquarters in Atlanta, Boettcher stood outside Ted’s office on the third floor, holding the formal invitation he’d promised to hand-deliver from Havana. Though Ted had retired from yacht racing, he was still often away from headquarters—and yet, when he was on the premises, he frequently literally slept in the Murphy bed in his office suite. Clad in a white terrycloth bathrobe, he’d wander around in the middle of the night on the fringes of the newsroom in a fit of sleeplessness, searching for coffee and conversation, amusing the staff. They didn’t want to ignore the boss’s entreaty to catch him up on the news of the day, but their never-ending deadlines beckoned. Occasionally, Ted meandered with a companion. An early employee noted one night that alongside a grinning robe-clad Ted was spotted another white bathrobe, worn by actress Raquel Welch.
Fresh from Cuba, Boettcher exclaimed the news to his colorful boss. This was about as far from city council meetings back home as he could imagine.
“Ted, you’re not going to believe this. Fidel Castro is inviting you to visit him.” Castro—the same man US officials feared was angling inexorably toward confrontation with the United States.
Thanks to the flow of US mail, Ted’s executives were clued into the fact that the signals of both channel 17 and CNN could be received beyond US borders by inventive television watchers. Orders streamed in for merchandise from as far away as Martinique. A viewer from Yukon Territory in Canada sent in his personal movie requests. Once, even, a letter had arrived from a scold in Belize who feared Leave It to Beaver and its ilk were ruining the minds of his fellow citizens. Didn’t Ted Turner, he wondered, worry about that, too? Since both channels were transmitted unscrambled—just like much of satellite television at the time—an enterprising person who built an antenna and strung a wire through the trees could capture the signals. It wasn’t only Americans who complained about not having enough to watch, it seemed.
Among the curious viewers pirating CNN was the avowed enemy of the United States—who didn’t seem to hold that fact against the news channel’s owner.
“I just wanted to let you know that I think CNN is the most objective source of news,” Fidel’s invitation read, “and if you ever want to come down to Cuba . . .”
From a master media manipulator who controlled every word of the news his citizens could read, hear, and see, this was particularly immense praise.
Conservative Ted had been taught by his capitalist father to despise communism. “The commies,” Ed had told him, would invade the United States and shoot anyone who carried more than fifty dollars. For years, Ted had carried only forty-nine dollars in his wallet. Fiercely patriotic, he decried conscientious objectors who refused to serve their country. Since his military school days, he’d had an unending fascination with power, war, combat history—and Hitler. And here a modern dictator was flattering him and the new creation that had proved so vexing to launch and, once it had, proved financially vexing to sustain. In all his worldly sailing adventures, Ted had never visited a Communist country. As far as he knew, he’d never even met a Communist before.
Aspirations of political power still danced in Ted’s brain. Some said he’d established residency in South Carolina, where he owned both a 5,000-acre plantation and a 4,600-acre private island, in order to make a bid for Senate. (Though he waffled, when he imagined serving in higher office, about the spoils of political power versus the comforts enterprise had afforded him. Combined, his own properties, he observed, were far bigger than Camp David.) His concern about the inevitable collapse of the nation and the deterioration of the world had deepened. He wished to visit every country that would let him in, meet with the leaders, and find out what they were thinking. Maybe he could help broker peace.
Castro had a long history of bamboozling the US media. Just before the Batista dictatorship fell in 1959 and the young revolutionary was being celebrated as the great hope for Cuban democracy, he stood in the dark of night in a remote location with Ed Sullivan, the most famous television personality in North America. A vision: the starched, powerful TV tastemaker, outfitted in his usual dapper businessman’s suit, surrounded by machine gun–toting supporters in fatigues, right beside the towering Fidel. Sullivan deigned to ask the man if he was a Communist.
“We are all Catholics,” Fidel responded coyly, pointing to the religious medal around his neck. “How would we be Communists?” Batista will be the last dictator, he assured Sullivan and fifty million rapt citizens of the United States.
Similar softball appearances with other TV royalty like Jack Paar and Edward R. Murrow preceded Fidel’s “charm offensive” victory lap around the United States, orchestrated by a stateside public relations firm. Standing before the American Society of News Editors, he opined about his hope for a free press for Cuba, and at the National Press Club, he declared in broken English, “Only real public opinion is when men and women can hear, can speak, and can write.” Days later, he strengthened ties with the Soviet Union. The relationship between Cuba and the United States tensed to boiling. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion gave way to the Cuban Missile Crisis and numerous attempts by the CIA to assassinate El Jefe. (Back when he was employed by CBS, none other than Daniel Schorr had revealed this.)
Most recently, a trade embargo and travel ban had been reinstated by the Reagan administration. Was Castro now trying to use Ted and his news channel to trick the nation again? Perhaps, Ted rationalized, coming face-to-face with a “commie dictator” might be somehow educational. Maybe, Reese supposed, he could even bring home an interview with the embattled leader—as long as Boettcher went along and did the quizzing, not Ted. Perhaps this invitation meant CNN could become the first American network to win accreditation for a bureau there. Ted wondered what he and CNN might have to lose in accepting. Was this an elaborate ploy to kidnap him? Maybe then, Ted joked, finally he could get some rest.
As Boettcher stood in the doorway of his office, Ted commanded, “Set it up.”
* * *
And so, in February 1982, Captain Outrageous kissed his wife and children goodbye, unsure what would become of him when he arrived in Havana. On the commercial charter jet that ferried him there, he carried gifts for his host—a Braves baseball cap and fishing gear—and a small entourage: a cameraman, a sound man, Boettcher, and Ted’s lady friend, Liz Wickersham, who’d appeared on the cover of Playboy in April 1981.8 After performing a successful screen test for a bug-spray commercial, she’d just joined WTBS as co-host of a new comedic spin on the news, featuring Bill Tush. Soon, the program would be recast to highlight what Ted felt was so lacking on the tube: good news. (Wickersham had both brass and a sense of humor. She’d commissioned a sweatshirt to wear to work with lettering that spelled out “The Other Woman.”) In her suitcase, she carried a Nikon FM camera, a Polaroid Instamatic, and a leopard-print bathing suit. Castro had never seen the instant camera before, but he appeared equally tantalized by her swimwear.
Along with an eye for beautiful women not their wives, the two men, it turned out, had a lot more in common. Each feared Armageddon and felt the world was currently on the verge of catastrophe. Each voraciously consumed the stories of famous military leaders and battles, and each was particularly fascinated by, even obsessed with, Alexander the Great—Fidel, so much so that he’d named three of his five sons variations of “Alex.”
Like Ted, Fidel could talk like a radio for ho
urs, nonstop, and each man possessed an ego as wide as the sky. And each, to varying degrees, had airbrushed his personal life: to offset his wealth, Ted drove that beat-up car that made him feel like Mr. Everyman, espousing family values while being seen in the company of a parade of other women; Fidel by concealing from his citizenry the very existence of his wife, children, and fortune in order to keep up the fiction that he was an ordinary comrade.
The two also reveled in the outdoors and nature—in particular, hunting for ducks. Ted was about to embark on a priceless experience—setting foot on his host’s magnificent Cayo Piedra in the Bay of Pigs. Only a handful of outsiders had ever been permitted to see this sparkling private island paradise, among them the ABC television journalist Barbara Walters.9
While CNN’s crew would not be permitted to roll tape for most of the trip, Fidel’s official photographer documented the visit—and so did the beautiful Liz. Though some of her film was confiscated one night by his team, she’d managed to safely store the best.
Snapshots: Ted and Fidel enjoying a nighttime baseball game. Ted instructing Fidel, a spear fisherman, how to work his gift of a rod and reel. Heavily armed men in flat-bottomed boats with guns guarding the men as they searched for prey. Ted gripping a twelve-gauge shotgun. (Later, he confessed to wondering what the CIA would pay to be that close to Castro with a gun.) Fidel casually dressed, barefoot, a rare sighting of El Comandante sin trademark military fatigues. The aftermath of the hunt: 153 neatly stacked fresh-killed ducks. For Ted’s hunting prowess, the Cuban president awarded him with honors for deftly shooting more ducks than any other visitor.
