Ted Turner passed away today, at the age of 87. He had been out of the public eye for several years now, first retiring from corporate responsibility in 2006 and finally conceding to the inevitable toll of a publicly announced diagnosis of Lewy’s body dementia in 2018. And although my colleague Dan McLaughlin did a fine job of summarizing his whirlwind life, in truth we were all left catching our breath with Hurricane Ted, a man of countless eccentricities, vices, follies . . . and not a few brilliant ideas as well.
I’ll miss a man of his massive public stature, and his slightly madcap and megalomaniacal impulses. We have fewer and fewer of them these days, and (outside of Donald Trump) most are boring tech magnates.
Turner was instead a media magnate — of the sort that Trump himself recognized in his Truth Social eulogy — from an era when the mainstream media’s power was only just fully coming into its own. It was Turner’s idea for a 24-hour cable news channel — CNN, initially scoffed at, eventually imitated — that would define the horizons of the media world up through 2008 or so.
But of course Turner was so much more than that in his ’80s and ’90s heyday. He was practically my generation’s Howard Hughes: the cranky, larger-than-life billionaire who regularly threw his money around for any cause he thought worthy, or even just vaguely amusing: I can well remember that era of my youth and adolescence when Turner was — in turn — a self-promoting cable news lunatic, desecrator of classic films (this is the man who colorized Casablanca), Atlanta Braves owner, and public fondler of Jane Fonda. (To Ted’s eternal credit, he even used to make Hanoi Jane do the Tomahawk Chop).
R.I.P. Ted. I’ll never quite forgive you for traumatizing an entire generation of Xennials with Captain Planet, but I’m not about to hold it against you right now. Especially because you gave us Gettysburg.