Ted Turner has died, at 87. Much like our current president, Turner was one of those classic American characters, a tycoon who was larger than life and not easily constrained by rules or conventions. Cable news, baseball, movies, yachting, world peace, Jane Fonda — his enthusiasms and ideas crisscrossed the landscape of America between the 1970s and the 2000s. He was a textbook example of the guy who walks into every meeting with 19 insane ideas and one stroke of genius, and his ups and downs often depended upon how well the people around him succeeded at talking him out of the insane ones.
Turner gave us CNN, which for all of its descent in the past decade was a visionary idea at the time (a 24/7 news channel with increasingly global coverage by the 1990s, accompanied by its more condensed Headline News partner). He built the foundation for the Atlanta Braves as a great organization with a then-novel plan for national telecasts of their games — a long-term success story after years of his mismanagement of the franchise. After a stunt in which Turner put himself in the dugout as manager for a day, baseball banned owner-managers, an overreaction that interred more than a century of tradition (Connie Mack both owned and managed the A’s for 50 years). Like many such figures, he flirted with a presidential campaign, but ultimately spared us his daffy politics except from outside of the system.
Turner spoke at my law school graduation. He was either off his meds or perhaps on something too strong; among other things, he went on a rant about how we should never have split the atom (“those are dangerous little buggers”). But then, the university commencement speech was unmemorable pabulum by an obscure National Institutes of Health bureaucrat, and my college commencement speech was unmemorable pabulum by a different obscure National Institutes of Health bureaucrat. Nobody ever came away from an encounter with Ted Turner and found him unmemorable. R.I.P.