by Wendy Walker
Felt saw those, the attorney general, former attorney general, the White House counsel, as we now know the president himself, all the key people in the White House, quite frankly, were involved in a criminal conspiracy. What do you do? Do you sit there on your ass and do nothing? A lot of people would say, well, yes, those are the rules. Well, sometimes you have to break the rules and this is somebody who was willing to step over the line and I think, given his training and position in the bureau and being there so many years, probably one of the hardest things a human being ever did, but he did it.
Everybody wanted to be in close proximity to these legends who were famous for keeping a secret while they broke open the Watergate scandal. But when Carl Bernstein also encouraged me to go to Ted Turner and said I could come back when I wanted to, the debate was over. Still, it was a very sad day when I walked out of ABC carrying my little brown box filled with the things from my desk, climbed into my Chevy Chevette, and drove away.
I knew very little about Ted Turner, the person, although he had definitely made his mark in business. A highly competitive and controversial figure, Ted was a unique entrepreneur who helped change the way the world interacts with the media, particularly the news. Both hated and loved for his flamboyant style, Ted (notorious for, among other things, marrying actress Jane Fonda, which ended in a high profile divorce) was a Southern businessman with a penchant for taking risks that helped him establish a corporate empire with holdings in every area of the entertainment industry.
An accomplished sailor, Ted took part in sailing competitions from the time he was eleven years old at the Savannah Yacht Club in Georgia. He so excelled in this field, he competed in the Olympic trials in 1964 and successfully defended the America’s Cup for the United States as skipper of the yacht Courageous. In the 1979 Fastnet race, in a deadly storm that killed several participants, he skippered his craft Tenacious to victory.
Sailing, however, was not the only arena in which Ted Turner competed and won. In 1970, he purchased an Atlanta UHF television station which, along with CNN, became the Turner Broadcasting System (WTBS). No one knows what he foresaw when he dreamed up Cable News Network and started implementing it. But he must have had an inkling of its extraordinary potential for success, or why else would he have risked so much time and so much of his own money?
It was an uphill battle to get the network launched and make it relevant. Today, however, CNN has revolutionized the news media, arguably making its name in January 28, 1986, when we were the only network to have live coverage of the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded just seventy-three seconds after liftoff. Seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, were killed in the disaster and CNN became a household word. Since I had interviewed Christa McAuliffe on the White House lawn when she visited President Reagan, I felt the loss personally as well as collectively.
President Reagan consoled the nation from the Oval Office with heartrending words written by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who borrowed an image from John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight” to describe the disaster: “We will never forget them [the crew], nor the last time we saw them this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye, and slipped the surly bonds of earth, to touch the face of God.”
Some years later, CNN’s coverage of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 clinched our standing as the essential news network. Today, everyone knows about CNN, both in and out of the United States. Our kids have grown up with it, and like computers and cell phones, they can’t imagine life without twenty-four-hour news channels, whether or not they watch them. Before we were known worldwide, however, all we could do was scurry around to find employees for this revolutionary undertaking. Katie joined us as an assignment editor and Bernie Shaw, a highly respected reporter who was in Iraq during the hostage crisis, came on board as anchor.
March 11, 1980, was my first day with Cable News Network, which was about three months before its launch. Without a clear job description and no one to tell me what to do, I bought myself a Rolodex and began to gather names and numbers. I really didn’t know how to begin, and there was no one to ask. So my first order of business, I decided, was to cold-call the Washington agencies and various news organizations, telling them that Cable News Network existed and we were entitled to receive their press releases. I also contacted Capitol Hill and the National Art Gallery, asking them to send us their press releases, too, like they would any other news organization. No matter that we were being ridiculed and called the McNetwork and a lot of other names such as Chicken Noodle News.
Our first Washington newsroom was on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, and our employees had all come from some kind of news experience. Local news people and veterans from ABC arrived at Cable News Network with their unique set of skills and did whatever they could. In the meantime, a ton of résumés were pouring in along with audition tapes from reporters. I viewed them all and used my gut to make decisions. I often found myself in the position of having to trust my intuition since I had no solid idea of what I should do and no one who came before me to show me the ropes. I simply had to mentor myself, so that was exactly what I did.
I thought about what ABC used to do as I gathered some good people together for George, and he generally listened to me as to whom we should hire, like a young man named Sandy Kenyon, who eventually became Bernie Shaw’s producer. There was a fair amount of naïveté at the time among our fledgling staff as we grabbed local news anchors who were big deals and various other reporters from here or there. We simply had to move forward as if our network was a done deal, but it was mostly trial and error. We ended up with some really inefficient people, some really good people, some terrible reporters who didn’t belong on the air, and some solid ones who were sophisticated and deserved to be on the air. I chalked it all up to growing pains, and we tried to stay positive as we raced against the clock to launch Ted Turner’s dream. Now it had become our dream, too.
When the furniture arrived to fit out our brand-new newsroom, we laughed at the grungy spotted chairs and old desks that Ted had sent us from one of his offices in Atlanta. The sofa for the bureau chief’s office had such horrible stains on the cushions, we really didn’t want to imagine where they came from. No one could ever have predicted the high-tech, wealthy, global communications center that we would become one day. For now, we were happy to have torn, stained chairs and broken-down desks so we could sit and work in between scrambling around. We had three months to prepare for the first day of twenty-four-hour news and we worked our butts off, but we were pathetically underequipped. I remember bringing in Ajax and old rags, trying to get spots off the old metal desks before our staff saw them.
We had inadequate answering machines back then, there was no call-waiting, and we had one big old fax machine that was such a dinosaur, we could barely lift it. Was it ever an old clunker! You’d put a piece of paper in the paper feed, push a button, and a lever would start making a cha-chonging noise. It took about a minute and a half to send a simple fax, groaning and chugging all the while, on paper that curled up at the edges, and it took about the same amount of time and noise to receive one. But at least we had our very own fax machine.
In fact, that was about all we had because with next to no money, we needed to justify every little purchase we made. We were computerized, attached to a system, but we couldn’t take a computer on the road or to any of our homes. There were no portable computers back then, and there were no hard drives, so you could save a few things along the way but there was no storage for data. You may be thinking, But Ted Turner was loaded. Why did you have to scrimp and save every penny? Was he cheap?
No, he wasn’t. Just keep in mind that starting a news network is a huge undertaking. In fact, it’s astronomical, since it has to include various newsrooms throughout the nation and Europe. To create CNN, Ted had to upgrade his original newsroom in Atlanta, create another in New York, one in London, one in Los Angeles, and of course, a bureau
in Washington. Ted was funding this venture personally, and as we put together the Washington bureau, he was the only one who was certain it would work. Everyone chuckled under their breaths that this was a shot in the dark, that it would never work, so why was Ted bothering?
He clearly didn’t care or pay any attention to the naysayers. A revolutionary thinker and inventor, he just kept moving forward, building up the center in Atlanta and setting up all the others. Ted once said to me with a big smile and a long drawl, “There are going to be a lot of ladies working here because I can pay them less.” As chauvinistic as that sounds, it was true. Women earned less than men, and hiring them could and did help him save money. But with so many women on staff, his suggestion that we needed to use less toilet paper was laughable. A group of women skimping on toilet paper? I don’t think so.
In the spirit of saving every penny when we first began, along with directives to skimp on toilet paper, we were not allowed to buy Styrofoam or paper cups. How would we drink coffee, the mainstay for weary reporters and workers who often missed sleep when the news cycle got heavy? I had received a gift of six cups for my college graduation so I brought them in to the bureau.
As we labored to create this revolutionary concept, I met Ted Turner for the first time with George in a restaurant that was part of the Hilton, which would eventually come to be known as the Hinckley Hilton because of the assassination attempt. At first, I judged this forty-three-year-old man. Ted was handsome, sure, but he was old. Actually, at twenty-six, I thought I was old, too. Ted had a deep drawl when he spoke, and even though I had lived in Virginia when I attended Hollins University and had heard plenty of Southern accents, Ted’s drawl was so thick, it was almost cartoonish. One of the first things I heard him say was, “Remember, George, I want a lot of happy news on this network. Happy news. We’re always faced with a lot of sad news, so I want just as much happy news.”
I was a little put off by that, but of course, I kept my mouth shut. Whenever I saw Ted, it was a big deal since he came around so seldom, and we were all on our best behavior. Even my friend Gail Evans, a former White House Civil Rights unit staffer who had assisted the special counsel to the president, said that when she first met Ted, she was filled with angst. Ted appeared on Larry’s show on May 14, 1991, and spoke about the beginnings of CNN.
KING: Let’s go back to the origins of this network… The concept of CNN—how did that begin?
TURNER: I was in the radio business before I got in television, and even though we only had small-market radio stations and none of them were big enough to support all-news operations, I was aware that there were formats in the major cities like New York that had all-news radio stations, and they worked. It just made sense to me that on cable, which was going to have lots of channels, that an all-news channel would be a benefit both to the cable systems and to the viewers.
KING: When people laughed at it, which they did when it started—did that bother you? That other networks said it wouldn’t last and—
TURNER: … you’ve got to remember, other networks were hoping it wouldn’t last… if it did work it was going to lead to the death knell of their news dominance that they’d had up until that time.
KING: Did anything turn the tide at CNN? One event or series—
TURNER: Not that I can think of. It was a good concept, it worked from the beginning, and it’s just gotten stronger as time went by and people learned about it and then learned how to use it.
KING: Well, I’m interested in what moguls think because you’re on a different plane than the rest of us.
TURNER: Well, I don’t consider myself a mogul. And one thing I don’t do is give advice publicly over the air to my competitors.
KING: All right, tell me what’s coming as you envision it—2000, what can we see at home? What is it going to be like?
TURNER: Well, right now, when you really think about it, a lot of cable systems have forty, fifty, or more channels and the video stores have unlimited viewing options there. We already have a bewildering array of choices in television, but I’m told now that technologically they are increasing the number of channels that they can get onto cable in fiber optics and that the number of channels may double or triple by the year 2000.
KING: So we’ll have a hundred and one choices?
TURNER: Sounds like it.
KING: So do you envision this as a less profitable business, or a more profitable business?
TURNER: Well, I think that the very smart will figure out a way to profit and prosper, but it’s going to be tough for a lot of people.
Ted was a man of the future, and he made an impression on everyone, not necessarily a good or bad one. He was just Ted, a largely invisible figure with clout and power reminiscent of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels who was known for remaining invisible while he ran things. In a similar way, Ted hovered in the background, he wanted it that way, and when he hired a president for the network, Reese Schonfeld, he told him, “Hey, Reese, I’m giving this to you. I’m not into micromanaging. Just do it your way.” I was lucky that Reese, the first president of Cable News Network, and I got along.
When Sunday, June 1, 1980, came around and it was time to go on the air, it felt like we were cranking up a three-ring circus. We were poorly coordinated (how could it have been otherwise?) and we were hideously unsophisticated. But it was official. We were going on the air.
At 5 p.m. EST, Cable News Network was launched with no mentors in sight. First on the air was an introduction by Ted Turner saying, “We won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event… and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ before we sign off.”
At the time, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and the United States was reeling from a protracted hostage drama in Iran. That was covered in our first newscast, anchored by husband and wife team David Walker and Lois Hart. Moneyline, a financial show that survived in its original format for over twenty years, premiered in 1980. Over time, the show moved more toward general news along with economic and political commentary, and it was renamed Lou Dobbs Moneyline and later Lou Dobbs Tonight. This program remained on the air until the end of 2009, when Lou Dobbs did his last show for CNN. Evans and Novak, a weekly Saturday interview program, was also created in 1980, hosted by conservative syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times. And still, we were the laughingstock of the news world.
I was surprised when I found out that my friend Gail Evans, who lived in Atlanta and was tapped by Ted as an editorial assistant, was having a very different experience than I was. It seemed that the Atlanta news bureau was getting as much encouragement as we were being ridiculed. In the Atlanta headquarters of Turner Broadcasting, Cable News Network was located in the basement. Originally a Jewish tennis and swim club, Ted had converted it to offices. He installed satellite dishes adjacent to the old swimming pool, and Gail’s office used to be a locker room, believe it or not. The Georgians, particularly those living in Atlanta, knew all about Ted and they were excited about his latest idea. In fact, they expected it to work, which was a shot in the arm to the people there who were putting it together.
In Washington, however, a city that was jaded and competitive as hell, we had to fight the odds every single day. We were ridiculed regularly and maybe the strangest part of all was that, as yet, Cable News Network was not being televised in Washington, even though we were broadcasting from there.
The 1980 Republican National Convention, like all conventions, separated the relevant from the irrelevant news agencies, and our brand-new network was struggling against the tide of the cooler and well-established agencies. George Watson, Bernie Shaw, and I were sitting in our makeshift anchor booth in Detroit, feeling inadequate and staring with envy at ABC, CBS, and NBC in their large, well-equipped booths, the reporters wearing their bush jackets (all the rage at the time) with stopwatches around
their necks. And there we were, in our pathetic excuse for a booth as we scurried out on the floor, scouting and begging for interviews. Bernie Shaw’s producer, Sandy Kenyon, and I would ask different people, “Can you come be interviewed on Cable News Network? Please?” And then we had to explain what it was.
We had to escort each delegate to our modest booth that was poorly soundproofed. I wistfully looked at the lavish setups of food at the other network booths and then back to us, where we had a pathetic cheese platter with cheese cubes so old, they had turned shiny. I got so hungry after a long day and evening, I remember picking up a cheese cube and tossing it in my mouth. Then, when I absentmindedly brushed my hand against Bernie Shaw’s leg, it left a greasy mark on his pants. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both started laughing out loud. Bernie was the highest person on the totem pole of CNN and I was the lowest. Imagine how he felt, having left ABC with a huge soundproof booth and catering that would make your mouth water, to join CNN that could boast only greasy cheese cubes. Thank God we both had a sense of humor, because we could have been working at that big ABC booth but we had chosen to be where we were.
In June 1982, a political debate show on late night television, Crossfire, was launched on CNN, hosted by liberal Tom Braden and conservative Pat Buchanan. These two men had debated on a daily radio show since 1978 and they were so popular, the show was elevated to prime time. When Pat Buchanan left in 1985 to become communications director for the Reagan White House, conservative columnist Robert Novak took his place. He was already the host of a talk show on our network as well as a regular contributor on The McLaughlin Group.
Today, our network has thirty-six bureaus (ten domestic, twenty-six international), more than nine hundred affiliated local stations, and several regional and foreign-language networks around the world. But from July 14 to July 17, 1980, when we attended the thirty-second Republican National Convention at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, Michigan, we were beginners in a field of die-hard veterans. Former California governor Ronald Reagan was being nominated for president, with former Texan congressman and CIA director George H. W. Bush as his vice president, running on the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
