'Meet the Press' transcript for Nov. 30, 2008

MR. BROKAW: We're back now with a special edition of MEET THE PRESS with a very special guest, one of the most familiar figures in American life, Ted Turner, of course; champion sailor, founder of CNN, environmentalist and also restaurateur these days. He's out with a new book called "Call Me Ted," about his life story. He has just turned 70. This is a more familiar figure for me, the one on the back.

Because, Ted, it's no secret we see each other across the Great Plains and across the western United States. It is Thanksgiving weekend. What are you most thankful for, besides the fact that at age 70 you're still standing vertical?

MR. TED TURNER: Be healthy and be alive and that my family's healthy.

MR. BROKAW: And what about you personally in terms of your own goals now at this age? You're not going to go off to some kind of a rest home, but do you have some big plans in mind?

MR. TURNER: Well, I'm still working with the U.N. Foundation, the Turner Foundation and the Nuclear Threat Initiative to get rid of nuclear weapons; change over our energy system to a clean, renewable, locally produced energy system and phase out fossil fuels; eliminate poverty and disease; make sure everybody gets an education. And I'm talking about the whole world, too, which we--all these things we can do if we put our mind to it.

MR. BROKAW: That's not a very short shopping list. But let's talk about the current conditions in this country. America is in economic turmoil. To use a phrase from your old profession of a professional racer, we're sailing through some very stormy seas. This is what you often say about your life: "Don't worry about the wind; adjust the sails." We're going to have to be pretty good adjusting the sails, aren't we, to get through all of this?

MR. TURNER: Well, what happened, I, I think, the way I see it, is we spent more money than we could afford for years and years and years. And you could do that for a while, but eventually it catches up with you and it's time to pay the piper.

MR. BROKAW: But, Ted, for a long time CNN was on the ragged edge of going into bankruptcy or having to be sold, because you were skating so close to that ragged edge financially.

MR. TURNER: That's true. But, but I made it, and I did it without any federal bailout, too. And I was trying to build a viable financial enterprise, which I did. And while we had a lot of debt at the time, it was debt that we could, that we could support, not debt that we couldn't support.

MR. BROKAW: Did you think at some point during those early days of CNN that it was really a fool's mission, that you couldn't pull this off?

MR. TURNER: No. I--before I started CNN, I knew I didn't have enough money to see it through and I didn't know how much it was going to, going to take. I was kind of like Columbus when he set out to discover the new world. He didn't know where he was going when he left, he didn't know where he was when he got there and he didn't know where he'd been when he got back. But I had it--but I thought it through very carefully for several years and went over all the things that could go wrong, because even before, even before I started CNN, I knew what the greatest threat to it would be and that was a right-wing news network. And in fact, Fox came along and was the greatest threat. And I had, I had a solution to that, and that was Headline News. I could've--when I first heard that Fox was going to get started, I could've taken Headline News and transferred it over to a right-wing network and hired Rush Limbaugh and let it be the right-wing network and pre-empted Fox. But by the time we were so successful by the time that Fox announced that they were going to start a news network that I just couldn't do it because I'm not really a hard right-winger.

MR. BROKAW: And that was also the time, though, when you were really at war with Rupert Murdoch.

MR. TURNER: Yeah. Well, I was at war with him for a long time, many years. I'm glad that we have it behind us, I think.

MR. BROKAW: And why do you have it behind you?

MR. TURNER: Well, he--when he announced that he was going green, I sent him a congratulatory note because I do that with everybody that goes green that's of consequence. And he wrote me back and said, "Why don't we have lunch?" So I invited him, invited him to lunch and he was the only person I really didn't like, and it hurt, it hurts you when you don't like somebody. It doesn't really hurt them. And so I don't know, I guess I was just--had the Christmas spirit. It was before the economy turned south, too, I might add. So I just--we decided to bury the hatchet. After all, he's in his mid-70s now and I don't think he's nearly the threat that he was when he was younger.

MR. BROKAW: You're not very sympathetic to what's going on in Detroit. Let's share...

MR. TURNER: Well, I am. Really, I don't like to see anybody do--not doing well, but I'm afraid--I saw it coming years ago, Detroit was going--headed for a crash, and it's amazing to me that they didn't see it, either, you know, and start building smaller cars, more fuel efficient cars a long time ago. Because anybody, anybody with half a brain could see we're going to have, you know, big disruptions in the fossil fuel business.

MR. BROKAW: Let me read you what you had to say about it recently. "If we give the Big Three automakers a $25 billion bailout, they're going to blow through it by the first of March. They won't know what to do with it. Let them go bankrupt and get Toyota to buy them out." A lot of jobs are connected to the American automobile industry. Do you think that the government ought not to have any role in trying to put them back together?

MR. TURNER: I don't, I really don't know, but I feel like that it would be a lot better if we're going to put--if the United States government's going to put money in anything, why not put it into clean, renewable energy and create jobs for the future instead of trying to keep alive a smoke stack industry of the past whose days--the days of big automobiles are over. The days of fossil fuel are over.

MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you about your personal life. You had a difficult childhood. I read your book. I've heard a lot of the stories from you personally, but I was surprised by how difficult it was when you were a youngster growing up. You were in boarding school at the age of four. You had a demanding and alcoholic father that you loved very much. He cut you off when you went to college, when you didn't perform the way that he hoped that you would. It made you work hard because he made you work hard. You also wanted to earn his respect and affection. What was the lasting effect of all of that on you? First positively and then negatively?

MR. TURNER: Well, I think it made me a better, made me a better person overall. I approached it that way, too. I've always tried to look at the positive side of things and move forward rather than look at the negative side and just stay put.

MR. BROKAW: You were at Brown and you wanted to be a classics major. You were--you remain to this day someone who's deeply interested in history, classics and books. And when you announced that to your dad, he wrote you a long, detailed letter.

MR. TURNER: Well, he, he, he really wanted me to go to business school. He was very practical. And--but Brown was a liberal arts college, and he knew that when I went there. Even the economics courses I took were economic theory. They weren't how to balance, balance books and the sort of thing I would have gotten if I'd have gone to, say, Wharton or, or to a business school. That--but that's where he decided later on, where, where I ought to be. But I was already at Brown. It was really an attack on a liberal, liberal arts education. And there are reasons why, there are reasons why I, I had a liberal arts education, and I was extremely successful in business. And I think I would have not been as successful if it had not been for my classical background, because I learned about Alexander the Great and Pericles and Aristotle, and I think it made me a better businessman.

MR. BROKAW: Your father was in the billboard business.

MR. TURNER: That's right.

MR. BROKAW: You like to say, "Early to bed, early to rise."

MR. TURNER: Actually, that came from a friend of mine who was a radio salesman.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah?

MR. TURNER: Work like hell and advertise. It was just a joke.

MR. BROKAW: But throughout the course of your career you have been known by a variety of nicknames: "The Mouth of the South."

MR. TURNER: I don't like that one particularly.

MR. BROKAW: "Captain Outrageous."

MR. TURNER: I don't mind that one.

MR. BROKAW: How much of that, however, is a true expression of what you're feeling at the time, and how much of that is a kind of a marketing device to draw attention to Ted Turner and all of his enterprises?

MR. TURNER: No. I, I, I never use those terms to describe myself, they just--you know, sometimes you get hung with that sort of thing.

MR. BROKAW: Is that part of your...

MR. TURNER: It's hard to shake.

MR. BROKAW: Is that part of your past now?

MR. TURNER: I would like to think so.

MR. BROKAW: The other thing that I read in the book that I thought was very touching in a lot of ways was that very, very difficult time, that tragic time in your life when your father took his own life when you were a young man, 24 years old, I think, at the time. And as you reflected on it, he had really achieved everything that he set out to do.

MR. TURNER: Well, he told me that. He had--he set his goals too low and he suggested to me that I don't do that, to set goals high, high enough to--so they can't be achieved in your lifetime, and then you'll always be motivated to keep working and keep engaged. And I'll never retire. I read in a book somewhere that the average man dies within 24 months of retirement, no matter when he retires.

MR. BROKAW: When you met Barack Obama, I guess maybe for only--the only time that you've met him...

MR. TURNER: A few minutes.

MR. BROKAW: You met him for a few minutes in Atlanta. Describe for me that exchange.

MR. TURNER: Well, we had a, we had a very, very cordial meeting. I told him that I was really excited about meeting him. I'd wanted to meet him for a long time. And he said, "I wanted to meet you for a long time, too." And I offered to help in any way I could, and said I don't want anything in return. He said, "You don't need anything." This is true, I don't need any bailout from the government. I, I once gave the government $32 million to make up the shortfall for the dues. The government was a little short, so I had to bail them out.

MR. BROKAW: Among other things, however, you were lobbying for getting rid of nuclear weapons in the world.

MR. TURNER: Well, I, I think I did, but he's already written papers where he's said he's for doing that.

MR. BROKAW: You're very close to Sam Nunn, the former senator from Georgia who is one of the co-chairs of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which is backed by Richard Lugar of Indiana and Warren Buffett, among others. Do you think there's the realistic possibility, given the time that you've spent in Russia over the years and the United States now, that we can rid the world of nuclear weapons if the United States and Russia were to take the lead?

MR. TURNER: Absolutely, no question in my mind. It--I--there--it's a big if, but I really believe it could be done because we did the Goodwill Games with the Russians, and if you approach them properly they are very reasonable, pragmatic, practical people.

MR. BROKAW: You met Vladimir Putin when he was just an aide to the mayor of St. Petersburg. He picked up you and Jane Fonda, to whom you were married at the time. But as you have watched him since then, most people see not in his eyes a soulful person, but the eyes--three letters, as someone has put it: KGB. That he is...

MR. TURNER: Well, he had that background. But you know, we have an FBI and, and, and, and, and we're not prejudice against somebody who's worked at the FBI. It's an honorable place to work. And the KGB, I think, was an honorable place to work. And it, it gave people in the former Soviet Union, a communist country, an opportunity to do something important and worthwhile.

MR. BROKAW: But in the meantime, it appears that he's very much more interested in just causing difficulty for the United States, getting in our face in a manner of speaking.

MR. TURNER: Well, wait. We're the ones--in my opinion, we're the ones that started that. We're the ones that started by putting the Star Wars system in Czechoslovakia and Poland when they wanted to be part of it. We've said that that system is only to protect us from Iran or protect Europe from Iranian missiles. So why didn't we cooperate with the Russians? Why have we constantly been pushing--we've been pushing on the Russians all the time.

MR. BROKAW: Your friend, Jimmy Carter, tried to be friendly with Leonid Brezhnev, and for his friendliness what did Brezhnev do?

MR. TURNER: Hell, I don't remember. It was before I...

MR. BROKAW: He invaded Afghan...

MR. TURNER: ...got involved.

MR. BROKAW: He invaded Afghanistan.

MR. TURNER: Well, we invaded Afghanistan, too, and it's a lot further--at least it's on the border of the Soviet Union or the former Soviet Union or Russia. A lot of these countries have changed names several times.

MR. BROKAW: But, Ted, don't try to go there in terms of justifying that. I mean, it is--the fact is that the Russians--it was a naked...

MR. TURNER: Why can't I try and justify it?

MR. BROKAW: It was naked aggression on the part of the Russians at the time.

MR. TURNER: Well, going into Iraq was naked aggression on the part of the United States.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah, but big power politics and changing big power politics requires everyone to come to the table, and that includes the Russians, not just the United States.

MR. TURNER: They'll come if we invite them, I'm sure.

MR. BROKAW: And what about Fidel Castro, who's your old friend? And he's no longer, it appears, in day-to-day power in Cuba?

MR. TURNER: It appears that he's quite ill. I'm sure that's the case. He wouldn't have disappeared if he wasn't real ill.

MR. BROKAW: Do you think the United States should normalize relations with Cuba?

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