Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  At their feast that evening, Wickersham protested what she saw as a senseless massacre and refused to eat the fresh-killed fowl. Castro indulged her, heading back to the kitchen and personally bringing the blond beauty a steak.

  That night, the two men sat together like old drinking buddies, casually discussing world affairs. Emboldened by the alcohol, Ted deigned to ask his host whether news reports that Cuba was interfering in Angola and Central America were true.

  Yes, Castro responded, and so are you. “What makes you think that it’s okay for the US to interfere there but Cuba shouldn’t?”

  “Because we stand for freedom and capitalism, and you don’t,” said Ted, the righteous patriot.

  Castro’s retort: “So what makes you think you’re right and we’re wrong?”

  Sleep that night for Ted proved fitful. He was surprised by how much he liked Fidel, that he was hardly “some horrible person.” In reality, he was a “great guy.” The Cuban people, like all people, loved kids, and a drink, and a good cigar. Communists didn’t have horns, after all, or smoke coming out of their ears, as he half expected they might.

  People at their core were not so different, after all, he concluded—the difference was their politics. Perhaps his American nationalist point of view wasn’t the only way of thinking. For years, he’d believed a stronger military was essential. He began to consider that maybe he’d been wrong. Killing and the arms race—what was the point of the Charles Atlas theory of “bulking up” he’d long espoused? Dialogue and understanding seemed preferable to might.

  And news, he saw, could provide the bridge to understanding. If you could see only one side of the story, how could you possibly arrive at an informed decision? His conviction that an all-news channel allowed time to present varying points of view seemed to hold sway with at least one world leader. If a “commie dictator” like Fidel loved CNN, wouldn’t others? They needed to stay aware, too.

  Ted began to see he had created something that mattered. Castro’s approval convinced him he had an obligation to make sure the rest of the world could see CNN, too. His vision of a peaceful world might be within reach—thanks, precisely, to this creation.

  * * *

  Fortified by this new conviction, Ted and his entourage stopped in to say goodbye to their host. As souvenirs, they were presented with Cuban cigars, a fancy alligator purse for Liz, three expertly taxidermied ducks from their hunting expedition, and an agreement for CNN to broadcast live programming from Havana in the coming weeks.10

  While they said their goodbyes, Ted asked for the ultimate memento: Perhaps Fidel would agree to record a testimonial of his appreciation for CNN?

  “He can say it in Spanish,” Ted explained to the omnipresent translator, offering up an extemporaneous script. “‘It’s very important for me to keep up with what’s going on in the United States. And when there’s a crisis of some sort, or news I need to see, I watch Cable News Network.’”

  Why not, Castro shrugged amiably, toking on his cigar, as CNN’s midday program Take Two rattled on in the background from the antiquated television console.

  Ted beamed a shit-eating grin that Castro had consented. He reached over and turned down the sound, adding—as if Castro needed the publicity—“And we’ll put this on the television.”

  The Cuban leader might prohibit the free flow of news to his people. But about this new channel, he had nothing but praise. He thought for a moment and began to speak.

  “We may at any time watch and listen to a program by the CNN,” he said in Spanish, as his translator recited the words in English, “because the programs of the CNN stay for twenty-four hours and it’s very useful for us to have these programs when we need to know about news, about what’s going on in the United States and what happens in the world . . .”

  Castro smiled a bit as he continued, looking back and forth from the translator to the television as he mulled what to say next—Ted’s co-conspirator.

  “We receive an important, a very important service, by the CNN,” he said, “though we are clients, we are customers, we are not registered as such. Some has said we receive the news by smuggling them.”

  He stopped for a moment, as if to absolve his theft of the television signal.

  “One cannot smuggle news,” he said, looking straight at the camera. “Space is universal, and news is universal, too.”

  Ted entered the shot as the two men shook hands, a Chamber of Commerce grip-and-grin.

  “For the tremendous hospitality you have shown us, and the wonderful time we have spent in your beautiful and very progressive country,” Ted said, “it’s a pleasure to exchange the news and friendship with you.”

  He was dying to show this tape back in Atlanta, and then rush this most unorthodox endorsement to air. What would the naysaying networks say about this?

  Castro reached back over to the television and turned up the volume.

  1 Still acclimating to the power of live broadcasts across time zones, CNN aired a story about the massive frenzy around “Who shot J.R.?” in the blockbuster CBS series Dallas—spoiling the surprise for the West Coast audience. CNN original Tom Gaut says the newsroom was deluged with angry calls.

  2 The entire debate is online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEHGr4VuBYI.

  3 There’d been but one triumph at the Republican convention in Detroit, when Bernie Shaw alerted producers in Atlanta to take a live shot from their distant perch in the rafters of Cobo Hall. As a result, viewers got a glimpse of Governor Reagan rehearsing that night’s acceptance speech. It hadn’t dawned on political operatives that the newbie network might go live in the afternoon.

  4 CNN’s coverage of the shooting of the president can be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVKgoQEemM.

  5 To see ABC’s bulletin, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRTFyWb9fQU.

  6 The suit to gain access to the White House press pool was filed several months later.

  7 Nagle’s nephew posted the tributes online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmydKIliYKw.

  8 Though Ted and Liz Wickersham have both publicly discussed the trips they made to Cuba, each carefully omits mentioning that they were together.

  9 For a partial transcript of Walters’s 1977 interview with Castro, see http://foreignpolicy.com/1977/09/15/an-interview-with-fidel-castro/.

  10 CNN’s Take Two, with married co-hosts Don Farmer and Chris Curle, aired live for a week from Havana in April 1982. Among the crew on this historic broadcast was a young CNN producer and aspiring reporter, Katie Couric.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Little Girl in the Well, 1987

  It happened in an instant on a hot October morning in a yard in Midland, Texas, as the kids played and the world pulsed with dramas great and small. Cissy McClure had stepped inside the white frame house on Tanner Drive to answer the phone. When she returned, her eighteen-month-old daughter, Jessica, had vanished. The girl’s playmates gestured frantically near the opening to an eight-inch hole in the ground—the little girl had fallen into an abandoned well. “I was only gone for five minutes,” the incredulous mother said. “I was only gone for five minutes.”

  In Texas oil country, mobilizing a skilled rescue operation didn’t take long, but diamond-tipped pneumatic drill bits were no match for the fortress of hard rock surrounding Jessica. Digging a tunnel parallel to the well, and then across to it, would not be easy or quick, even once workmen unleashed a custom auger bit and the rathole rig they nicknamed “Green Machine.” From the sheer vibration of a backhoe, the trapped girl plummeted farther, from eight feet down to twenty-two.

  Local press arrived soon after. Kids didn’t fall into wells every day in Midland. The television cameraman from KMID lowered a microphone into the shaft that allowed Jessica’s parents to talk to their trapped child. One minute, the girl was crying. The next minute, she was sweetly singing nursery rhymes.

  “How does a kitten go?” one of the rescue workers asked.

 
; “Meow,” came the response. She was alive, and they were going to get her.

  Thanks to KMID’s new microwave truck, the only one in town, the station had an advantage over the other locals as the ordeal dragged on: Two reporters took turns filing live updates from the scene to the Midland audience fortified only by M&M’s. Soon, six satellite news-gathering trucks from bigger, better-funded television markets barreled into town. These more powerful beasts allowed reporters to trumpet news far beyond the region. The network of affiliates created by Jane Maxwell years earlier made it easy for CNN to pick up the phone and ask for the story.

  As word spread across the vast, interconnected, global village, a snarl of media from everywhere descended on West Texas. Dozens of photographers perched like hawks on ladders they’d brought or borrowed from the neighbors, angling for the money shot. Surely it was just a matter of time before Jessica was plucked from beneath the earth.

  Stock markets all over the globe were fumbling precipitously, and would crash just a few days later. The nation awaited a Senate vote on a polarizing conservative Supreme Court nominee. An Iranian missile struck a US tanker in Kuwait. Scandals roiled the next year’s presidential election, with candidates Gary Hart and Joe Biden bowing out after, respectively, a shameful discovery and a series of gaffes. First Lady Nancy Reagan, making headlines because of a breast cancer diagnosis, delayed a biopsy so she—like the rest of an anxious world—could track the story that trumped all other concerns: the fate of baby Jessica.

  In the year 1987, half of the United States was now wired for cable, with forty million sets equipped to receive CNN. Just as networks were beginning to scale back their international bureaus and rethinking the limo-and-Learjet mind-set that had long propelled them, the network formerly derided as Chicken Noodle News was expanding—from three hundred to fifteen hundred people, spread across eighteen bureaus around the world. The fact that CNN spent a third as much money to produce exponentially more hours of news was turning long-established news-gathering conventions upside down. Profits for the network had been on the rise—projected for this year to total more than $60 million.

  In Atlanta, CNN needed so much more space it had traded headquarters in the former Jewish country club in midtown for a failed indoor amusement park, featuring the world’s longest escalator, inside a tired high-rise hotel complex downtown. Bunky Helfrich’s crew retrofit the place to the tune of $30 million. There was even a movie theater, where Ted could play his jewel in the crown, the newly acquired film, his favorite, Gone with the Wind.

  This fortress-like building seemed more secure than the Tara on Techwood; here, Ted’s office had been wired with controls to operate the network should terrorists attack. Gone, though, were the two quaintest quirks of the old space: the overhead thuds of wrestling that startled newsroom employees during the weekend matches, and the chance to run into Ted in his bathrobe in the breakroom in the middle of the night.

  For anyone who didn’t know that he “was cable when cable wasn’t cool,” Ted commissioned a twangy country music song to trumpet the message. An accompanying music video was taped late one night. Those who’d been around for his ascent remembered that the Turner empire traced its roots back to billboards, onto which he also plastered this “cool” campaign.

  Ted could sing that he was cool to his heart’s content, but by 1987, his baby wasn’t entirely his any longer. Earlier in the year, he’d sold a 37 percent chunk of his empire to a group of cable companies in exchange for $560 million and their executives’ say in how Turner Broadcasting was run. It was that, or risk sinking under the nearly $2 billion in debt he’d acquired to finance the purchase of historic movie studio MGM. That deal had been universally regarded as bonkers, with Ted selling back the studio to its wily owner, Kirk Kerkorian, months later, while holding on to the blue-chip film library that later became the basis for Turner Network Television. After years of risky moves and deals where he’d managed, improbably, to emerge triumphant, this time he’d come perilously close to being crushed.

  Even when things didn’t work out for Ted, oh, how far he’d traveled from the days of the baseball nose push and the Super Bad Party Ring and groveling to viewers to please lend him a couple of bucks. Now he haggled with the titans of media. He’d risen, improbably, to titan status, too. Before MGM, there’d been his failed takeover of the “whorehouse,” CBS; after, a brief flirtation with the media mogul from Australia, Rupert Murdoch, who’d just planted a flag on the US television landscape with his purchase of seven independent stations and his own movie studio investment, 20th Century Fox. Gannett’s Al Neuharth had designs on the Turner empire, but Ted refused to sell, especially to the dinosaur newspaper business. Later, he deflected NBC’s parent company, GE, and Jack Welch.

  He’d even moved on in his personal life, finally, mercifully, divorcing Janie. For a while, he took up with his thirty-year old private pilot—titans need not fly coach, as Ted had bragged for years he loved to do—and eventually attracted the affections of the ultimate symbol of success: a movie star. Jane Fonda knew a thing or two about the spoils of early technology adoption. While Ted was conquering the cable landscape, she’d been raking in a fortune, early in the VCR revolution, by peddling exercise tapes.

  The win/loss column mostly balanced, even if Ted’s books didn’t. His Cable Music Channel failed after a month, and he sold out to MTV; not long after, he picked up Westinghouse’s Satellite News Channel, the competitor that inspired him to start Headline News. The Goodwill Games, his attempt to do the Olympics one better, had lost him $26 million, but he thoroughly believed it a worthy investment that underscored his personal involvement in hastening the end of the Cold War. (It also got him an in with the Russians.) You could almost believe Ted when he insisted his motivational force was not money. Bridging the divide was. Who else could claim friendship with archconservative Senator Jesse Helms and communist Fidel Castro—whom he and Liz had returned to visit again in 1983?1 (The promotional spot they’d taped with him back in 1982 had never made it to air, vetoed by Ted’s shocked employees, who refused to buckle to his insistence it air—but the stuffed ducks were still prominently displayed in his office, a totem to his globalist transformation.)

  Aside from the cast of characters and the theatrics, his most enduring legacy had been in upending the conventional order of the television universe and the news business.

  “They are watching us in Moscow right now, in Havana, in London,” Ted bragged as deal after intoxicating deal was signed to beam CNN around the globe—Canada, Australia, Japan, Mexico, China. (In more restrictive countries, of course, the channel was off-limits to all but its ruling elite, confined for the most part to their offices and tourist hotels.) “Within the next three years, virtually every leader in the world will be watching CNN with a satellite receiver.”

  Indeed, the same potent cocktail of satellites and cable television that had put Ted on the map was currently wreaking havoc on every corner of the planet. Governments accustomed to controlling television were yielding to commercial newcomers as well as the incursion of “cultural imperialists” like Ted. But it wasn’t American culture Ted was hoping to sell. It was some vast, ineffable promise to save the world.

  “I’m trying to get bigger, so I’ll have more influence. It’s almost like a religious fervor,” he said. He still muttered, from time to time, that he should run for president.2 “My main concern is to be a benefit to the world, to build up a global communications system that helps humanity come together, to control population, to stop the arms race, to preserve our environment. We’re steaming at thirty knots on the Titanic trying to break the transatlantic record on an iceberg-strewn sea. We’re out of control, we’ve got to get in control.”

  Could television help the world steady its course, to coalesce and transform? Or was it, indeed, a pernicious anesthetic, the Hitler of its time, a destructive force worse than cigarettes that, Ted believed, had turned the American populace “lazy, drugs, homosexuals, sex
maniacs, materialists, disrespectful?” Ted, the television magnate who despised television, couldn’t seem to make peace, after all these years, that the truth was it was a bit of both.

  * * *

  As the rescue of baby Jessica dragged on, the weary local crew kept vigil, afraid to duck out for bathroom or meal breaks lest they miss the money shot. Even though these stations typically signed off the air each night, there was no question they’d staff the switchboard and stay on the air all night for this.

  From the new news mission control in downtown Atlanta, CNN producers decided the story was big enough to merit sending their own crew to Midland, rather than continue piggybacking off affiliate feeds. CNN’s Dallas bureau chief, Tony Clark, found himself knocking on doors of surrounding homes, hoping to borrow both a phone and a ladder. Though technology had progressed far enough that images from Midland could be beamed live around the world, a hardline phone was still necessary to call back to the newsroom.

  A kid plus distress equaled timeless drama. Clark and many of his colleagues hadn’t worked at the network back in June 1981, when Reese picked up a satellite feed from Italy, where efforts had been under way to free a two-year-old boy trapped in a well near Rome.

  As for CNN’s founding president, he could only view this latest human-interest circus from a distance. He’d been gone from CNN for five years now, since May 1982.

  * * *

  Reese’s end had come swiftly, although his union with Ted had been dissolving, as is so often the case with breakups, bit by painful bit. The phone was ringing when Reese returned to his home in Atlanta from a much-needed vacation in Martinique. Ted asked him to come in—a request he’d not usually make on a weekend. There was something in the sound of his voice that Reese found unsettling.