TAKING ON THE WORLD

How did a CNN outsider—and newspaperman— like Tom Johnson become the unsung power at Ted Turner s network?

PETER J. BOYER

Broadcast

Well before he turned thirty, Tom Johnson was a made Washington insider, seasoned in the edgy situation rooms of Lyndon Johnson's White House. He'd been through the qualmish moments of Tet and the.SixDay War, and it was young Tom Johnson, as special assistant to L.B.J., who handed the president the note informing him that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, and who gave him the news about Bobby Kennedy two months later. After Washington, he became editor of the Dallas Times Herald by the time he was thirty-three, its publisher by thirty-five, and publisher of the Los Angeles Times three years after that.

But none of this was necessarily apt preparation for the gamble he was weighing in the early days of last summer, in the guest room of a borrowed house on Martha's Vineyard. After seventeen years in the velvet embrace of the Times Mirror Company, where he'd become vice-chairman, he was about to leave for a business he knew almost nothing about, to work for a man he barely knew; he was going to surrender the chauffeured car and lavish perks of one of America's most generous media companies, a place of muted tones where the executive dining space was actually called the Picasso Room after the collection hung there, for a company whose principal ethic was doing business on the cheap, and whose owner once said, "Picasso doesn't do squat for me. I wouldn't put a Picasso in my birdcage.'' At forty-eight, Johnson was about to trade Establishment for upstart, print for television, Los Angeles for Atlanta; he was about to go to work for Ted Turner, as president of CNN.

First, though, there was this last, brief retreat to the Vineyard, where he'd gone to finally decide. Johnson and his wife, Edwina, were the guests of J^ady Bird Johnson, who'd been lent the place by her friend Charles Guggenheim, and the setting could not have been more fitting to the moment. Where better to mull one's extrication from a lifetime's burrowing into the heart of the media elite? Walter and Betsy Cronkite were there, and Johnson solicited the old anchorman's wisdom, and there were contemplative walks down the Vineyard's main road with Art Buchwald, another longtime friend. Johnson polled his circle— he even called Jimmy Carter for advice—and some of them flatly counseled against joining Turner, that boor who'd made a pastime of thumbing his nose at the likes of them. But Bill Moyers, his old and dear colleague, said something that stuck. "The future of journalism is broadcasting," Moyers said, "and the future of broadcasting is CNN."

So Johnson phoned Turner at his Montana ranch and told him that his answer was yes, and it was done.

A month later, on August 1, Johnson, a tall, still-boyish Georgian, walked into CNN Center in Atlanta for his first day on the job. And in his open and genial manner, he announced that he had a lot to learn—he didn't know an uplink from a downlink. In the technophiliac culture of CNN, this was something like confessing an especially perverse character disorder. Worse, Johnson was the outsider that Ted Turner had vowed he would never impose upon the CNN staff. After ten years, Turner's global news network was in a way an extraordinarily insular place, populated mostly by homegrown videoists bonded by the shared experience of institutionalized penury, professional disrespect, quirky ownership, and, at last, a hard-earned measure of triumph.

With its commanding coverage of the big events of the last two years—the San Francisco earthquake, Tiananmen Square, Eastern Europe—CNN had fully come of age, so fully that it had spawned competing factions vying to control the institution's future, and shape its vision.

It was to these people that Turner had seemed to be speaking when he said a year ago that the next president of CNN "will almost certainly be someone who is at CNN now. I mean, I'm not going to go out and hire... a newspaperman to run my news networks." And it was to these people that, six months later, newspaperman Tom Johnson presented himself as Ted Turner's new hire as CNN's president, innocent in the ways of satellite-delivered video news. "It was taken," says one CNN producer, "as an unbelievable offense." And that night Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

4It's good eatin', but it's not easy eatlin'," says the president of Cable I News Network, gripping a barbecuedchicken sandwich with both hands. "You gotta get under it." Tom Johnson is becoming something of a regular at the Chick-fil-A, not because the eating is actually all that good, but because it is just an escalator ride down from the CNN newsroom. Since January, Johnson hasn't been away from the newsroom very often, and when he is, his cellular phone is always in his hand. In a way, the war eased and hastened his initiation; he can now talk "flyaway uplinks" with passing fluency.

It has helped, too, that CNN scored such a spectacular edge in covering the story. Praise can do much to mute discontent, and the validation that CNN enjoyed in the first weeks of the war had no precedent. It sometimes seemed the world was focused not so much on the war itself as on CNN covering the war. Such cable-news toilers as Wolf Blitzer, Charles Jaco, and John Holliman, once obscure to all but hardened news junkies, became household names, and a deserved spotlight befell the quiet legend of Peter Arnett. Even the CNN technology—"four-wires' ' and ' 'INMARSAT telephones" and "flyaway uplinks"—became famous. Anchor Bernard Shaw was plain "Bemie" in flattering references at Pentagon briefings, which were, of course, carried live by CNN. President Bush was said to have learned

led Turner's hiring of Johnson "was taken," says one CNN producer, "as an unbelievable offense." that bombing had actually commenced by seeing it on CNN, with the rest of the world. And was it an accident that the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was left standing after the rain of allied bombs, or was it spared because of the blue-and-white CNN downlink dish perched on its roof, the dish that brought the news channel to Saddam Hussein?

"I deserve little to no credit for what is happening," Johnson says as he returns to the newsroom, and he is right. CNN won the coverage war because of what it is—the only network with global reach —and because of the preparation bom of the experience of filling a twenty-four-hour news hole every day for eleven years.

"You built this reputation as the world's most respected person, now you gotta live with it. Don't give me any of this crap, Cronkite!" Johnson is back in his office, on the phone with Walter Cronkite, wheedling and cajoling his old friend into appearing on a CNN special program about the press coverage of the war. When Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, Cronkite was the first person to get a call from Tom Johnson, giving a scoop to the CBS Evening News. "Please call me back and say that you will do it," Johnson says now, and Cronkite does. This has been part of Johnson's contribution to the CNN effort: working the phones, collecting favors from old friends, facilitating.

His desk drawers are stuffed with the mementos of a lifetime of power networking: old photos of Johnson and King Hussein, Johnson with Bob and Liddy Dole, Johnson and President Bush. Each has come in handy since his arrival at CNN.

In the middle drawer is a memento of more recent vintage, a scrap of paper on which, in Johnson's neat hand, is written the message "The President has asked me to call you. Serious danger. Risk. Control of coverage. Don't know when we're going to do it and how." Those are the notes from a conversation with Marlin Fitzwater, President Bush's spokesman and a longtime friend of Johnson's, spoken in urgent tones in the hours before the first allied raid on Baghdad on January 16. It was the second such warning that Johnson had received from the White House, the first having been a plea from Bush himself. When Johnson told the president that Bemie Shaw was going to Baghdad to try to interview Saddam Hussein, Bush said, "Then get him in and out of there."

It was by far the weightiest call Johnson has had to make in his brief tenure at CNN, and his first instinct was to get his people out of Baghdad. Every other American news organization responded to White House warnings by ordering their people to leave, but Johnson had a personal reason for doing so, or rather two of them: Joe Alex Morris, an L.A. Times reporter who was killed-in Teheran, and Dial Torgerson, a Times reporter who was killed in Honduras. For a brief time, it had looked as if the Times might not be able to get Morris's body out of Iran, until Johnson sent $25,000 in currency to smooth the way, and he was there at L.A. International to help unload Torgerson's body bag from the chartered plane bearing it home from Honduras.

"The dark shadows of Dial Torgerson and Joe Alex Morris played a major, major role in my psyche as I sat there with those guys on the line," Johnson says. "Having got that note, and the note didn't say 'If we go in,' the note said 'When we go in,' if you notice. It didn't say 'If.' And the president of the United States had said to me, 'You'd better get Bemie in and out of there, Tom.' "

Correspondent Peter Arnett, who'd spent thirteen years in Vietnam and a lifetime as a war correspondent, was determined to stay in Baghdad, as was Robert Wiener, CNN's Berlin bureau chief, who'd been in and out of the Iraqi capital since August, and they tried to convince Johnson to change his decision. Then, according to people at CNN, Ted Turner stepped in. "We have a global job to do, and we ought to do it," Turner said from his Montana ranch. "We have people there that want to do it, and, by God, I'd better not be overturned." And that was that.

Turner was proved right, of course. CNN's live coverage of the January 16 bombing of Baghdad became the Murrow-on-the-London-rooftops signature image that would make the story theirs.

A week or so later, a bit of good news is being delivered to Johnson: CNN is being allowed to take a portable uplink into Baghdad so that it can transmit video live. Johnson helps to arrange a shopping list for Arnett: shirts, water, two new generators, flashlights, and Handi Wipes.

Someone calls from Turner Home Entertainment; there's apparently a gathering demand for videotapes of CNN's first week of coverage of the war. "Put it into the hot, hot get-it-out fashion," Johnson instructs. What about profits? Should they be donated to charity? "Because we're a global network, I think that giving any kind of proceeds to anybody is not a good idea," Johnson answers. "Even if you gave it to the American Red Cross, it would make us look like we're trying to take sides."

When Johnson told the president that Bernie Shaw was going to Baghdad, Bush said, "Then get him in and out of there."

It is clear that Johnson is finding his element in the rush of CNN, a quickening after the subdued years at Times Mirror. "Now I'm living in a conference room that the week before I got here was split in half," he says with a smile, "and this is all rented furniture. I had a car and driver in Los Angeles, and now I drive a Jeep to work here. I don't have a pension plan here. There's no pension plan. But let me tell you, this is the future. As of this moment, the signal goes into 103 countries. It's like being in the epicenter."

One evening early last summer, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda gave a cozy little dinner party for a few friends— as cozy as you can get, anyway, on a replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, one of Turner's prizes from his 1986 purchase of MGM. Gregory Peck and his wife were there, and the Peter Fondas, and among the other couples were one of Jane's biographers, Robert Scheer, and his wife, Narda Zacchino, both of whom had worked for Johnson at the L. A. Times. As he talked with Scheer and Zacchino, Turner kept steering the conversation to the subject of Tom Johnson.

What kind of boss was he? How did his staff like him? "Obviously, we both knew Tom and were quite flattering about him, in terms of what Ted Turner was interested in, which was somebody who would be a good people type, and boost morale, and make people feel good about working where they worked," recalls Scheer.

"That thing with morale," adds Zacchino, "that was the thing that Ted was homing in on, that Tom was a real morale builder."

It happened that Turner had offered Johnson the CNN presidency earlier that day, and it also happened that he was exactly right to be worried about morale, a fact that was borne out a few days later when Turner convened the news network's senior executive staff to announce the hiring of Johnson.

Turner gathered his executives and Johnson in his hotel suite in Seattle, where Turner's Goodwill Games were being held, but it was not at all the sort of meeting he had hoped for. Word about Johnson's appointment had leaked, and one of the men who'd hoped to be tapped for the job, financial-news vice president Lou Dobbs, was so incensed that he not only refused to attend the meeting, he also submitted his resignation from CNN (which he soon withdrew). The network's executive vice president for programming, thirty-sixyear-old Paul Amos, another disappointed candidate, was openly hostile toward the new president, questioning his qualifications for the job and asking, "If you're so good, why are Times Mirror's television stations so lousy?" Johnson, who'd come prepared with a rally-thetroops speech, muttered something about not having much to do with the television stations as publisher of the

Los Angeles Times, but the signal was clear: resentment and anger ran deep.

What Turner knew, and what Johnson would soon discover, was that the rancor was only partly related to Johnson's arrival. Few outside of CNN realized that, just as the network was achieving its dreamedof recognition as a truly important global news organization, it was in fact a deeply factionalized institution, seething with intramural rivalries and feuds.

Long before Johnson arrived on the scene, Dobbs, who, as anchor of the respected (and profitable) nightly Moneyline report, wielded considerable clout, had been at war with Amos, who had earned Ted Turner's confidence by successfully starting up the CNN Headline News channel. The dispute reflected personal ambitions, of course, but it also reflected a deepening rift inside CNN over journalistic values. Amos was a program guy who thought the network's best chance for sustained success was in developing stars from within its anchor ranks and in new programs, which he was more than willing to devise; Dobbs envisioned an ever expanding global presence, with a tilt toward finance; Ed Turner, the executive vice president for news, who'd served as the journalistic conscience of the organization almost since its founding (and who had himself been a candidate for president), thought that CNN should stay with what got it there—hard, straight news.

Each view had a constituency, and the divisions reflected other, more deeply felt discontents—those of the overworked and underpaid. From the beginning, the ethic of CNN—its genius, in a way—was its utter rejection of the premise embraced by the networks that broadcast journalism demanded skills so rare as to require show-business-size salaries to sustain them. At CNN, the news was the star, the rationale went, and the unspoken pact was that its employees would "work for dirt," as one puts it, and, in exchange, they would get to be in television. Indeed, CNN could have succeeded no other way. That was fine in the early years, when CNNers got by on camaraderie and a sense of mission. But by 1990, CNN was bigger than the "big" network news divisions, and richer too. Last year its operating profit was $134.5 million, compared to a net loss for the entire CBS network. Yet it still churned out multiples of the amount of news that ABC, NBC, and CBS together produced, with a considerably smaller budget than any one of them.

If it was the world's pre-eminent news organization, why did its journalists still have to work under survival-mode conditions? The starting salary in the newsroom is $15,000, and that's for those who get paid. There are dozens of eager and talented young people who work at CNN as unpaid interns, sometimes for months at a time. Even the higher-ups work under contracts that would make a Manhattan talent agent spin in his loafers. A by-product of such conditions is chronic turnover, and, as Shaw and Holliman arrived home to job offers and talk of a "Boys of Baghdad" movie, CNN executives mixed their welcomes with nervous jokes about anticipated demands for raises. "I'm not discouraging you," Johnson told Shaw soon after the anchor's return, "but if you continue to talk about the salary issue, and we all recognize it's an issue, what I want you to know is, ABC's got a 17 [percentage of viewing audience], and on an average night I've got a 1. Now, I'm going to push that issue as hard as I know how to push it... .[But] I'd like to make it a quiet campaign. I'm usually more successful with quiet campaigns."

Piqued over infighting among his managers, Turner decided to go outside for the person who would guide CNN into the next phase.

Ed Turner is more direct: "We're not going to get into a bidding war. I mean, there are an awful lot of good journalists out there." That philosophy has cost CNN some talented people over the years, but that was when some defections to the big leagues—ABC, NBC, CBS—were an expected, almost validating occurrence. Now it could hinder the network's ability to live up to its global influence.

The fundamental principle of CNN always was, and is, getting the most for the least, and everything else about the enterprise reflects that—the journalistic process, the journalistic product, the journalists themselves. Time is the enemy in the CNN psychology: every hour holds sixty potentially lethal minutes, minutes that must be filled by something. Live picture is the most efficient killer of time, whacking away whole chunks of minutes with a minimum of process involved. That's why at CNN the valued journalists are the picture facilitators; it is not very important to know the influence of Babylonia on Western culture, but it is imperative to know whether you can bounce a signal from Baghdad off of Arabsat and then down to a dish in the U.S.

The ideal CNN story materialized in 1987 when little Jessica McClure fell into an abandoned well in Texas and the nation was held rapt by the drama of her rescue. It was the definitive CNN event because it required the transmission of a live picture and little else, for hours and hours. Ted Turner joked at the time that maybe "we ought to go out and put candy bars out at the edges of all the old wells." Air-plane crashes are similarly well suited, and a war is perfect—lots of real-time minute killers in all those briefings and Scud attacks.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the traditional journalistic process: a reporter probes the whole landscape of a story, gathering up new raw information along with background and context, conflict and perspective, and then whittles away at it until what is left is a fully rendered story. This is the least efficient weapon in CNN's ceaseless war against time, a mere peashooter in the battle to kill minutes, because process doesn't go on the air.

But two years ago Turner decreed that CNN would have the finest investigative-journalism unit in broadcasting, and he hired Pam Hill, a respected long-form producer from ABC, at the pricey salary of about $250,000—movie-star money in the culture of CNN. "Clearly what Ted Turner's been building over the last several years, piece by piece by piece, is a stronger and stronger news organization, journalistically, in traditional terms," says Bill Kovach, head of the Nieman fellowship program at Harvard University, and a charter member of the Establishment media fraternity.

Predictably, the creation of the Hill unit at CNN—"Special Assignment"— was greeted by institutional rejection. Hill is a news whittler of the most egregious sort, producing in-depth pieces that require days, even weeks, to produce, and that don't kill very many minutes at all. She and the team of whittlers she recruited, high-salaried hands from NBC, The New York Times, CBS, and other alien places, represented a naked assault on CNN's fundamental principles. "Of the people who are brought on to be news gatherers, like 'Special Assignment,' there is massive resentment by the enterprise," says one producer. "And, frankly, it's no surprise. They get money, resources, time"—luxuries denied to most in the CNN culture. So the outcry came, and it heightened the pitch of the general discontent.

Turner heard this grumbling, and was particularly piqued over the infighting among his managers, enough to call a meeting and demand that the hostilities cease. It was then that he decided to look on the outside for the person who would guide CNN into its next phase.

For his part, Turner, too, had grown up. The unlikely creation of an allnews network in 1980 was the all-ornothing bet of someone who'd been addicted to risk since childhood, when he earned the first of his many nicknames—"Turnover Turner"—by regularly pressing his sailboat to the point of capsizing. In college, he once chugged a bottle of Chivas Regal on a bet. He was tossed out of Kappa Sigma at Brown for setting fire to a homecoming float, and was suspended from school when it was discovered that his girlfriend was living in his room.

Two tragedies in his youth impressed upon him the ephemeral nature of life, and accelerated his live-for-today zeal. When he was twenty, his only sister died a painful death from lupus. And four years later his father, a depressed, disapproving man whom Ted considered the measure of his own life, killed himself.

So Ted drank hard and raced well. In 1977 he won the America's Cup and showed up knee-walking drunk at the awards ceremony—a spectacle that has given him lasting satisfaction when viewed on videotape replays through the years. He married twice and divorced twice, and was seldom seen without the company of a beautiful young woman.

"See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money," he explained a few years ago. "Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it. You just want to see if you can do it, period. There's no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction."

That was the Ted Turner who started CNN, and at one time or another jousted with all three networks. And then he changed.

In the mid-1980s, Turner directed his interest away from his own satisfaction to a rather more formidable pursuit— saving the world. He'd gotten to know Jacques Cousteau intimately, and he became convinced that the world was on a course toward self-destruction. "I knew about the arms race, and I knew about the weapons, and I'm a student of history—I knew it was very dangerous," he said in an interview in Atlanta last spring. ''But before CNN, I didn't think there was anything I could do about it, so I just, kinda like most people, I just turned the other way.

Turner began to retreat, away from the public eye, away from Atlanta, it's not my company anymore," he said.

"But when I started CNN, and I realized that it was going to make it, I felt like I had a responsibility to really find out what was going on in the world.... I looked at the arms race, nuclear arms, and started reading and re-educating myself on these issues. It was: I'd better personally know; I can't just delegate that, because in the final analysis I'm going to be the one to set the tone and policy of this network, and I'd better be damned sure that it's right. Particularly if it's going all over the world."

Turner founded the Better World Society, and in his travels over the globe selling CNN, he came to fully realize that he had a status he'd only suspected. He dined with foreign ministers, and got to know Mikhail Gorbachev as a friend.

Another development in the mideighties, a setback, served to accelerate the Turner transformation. After Ted overleveraged himself in the $1 billion purchase of the MGM library in 1986, he was forced to surrender partial control of Turner Broadcasting to a consortium of cable operators—including Time Inc. and the giant Tele-Communications, Inc.—who helped to bail him out. The cable people gained seven of fifteen seats on the board, and veto power over any precipitous Turner moves involving big money.

"Well, I try to change their mind sometimes, and sometimes I don't succeed," he said. "But they own as much of the company as I do. It's not my company anymore."

And so he began to retreat, away from the public eye, away from Atlanta. "I remember a time—a happy time—when most of the world didn't know or care who I was," he said wistfully last spring. He began to spend more and more time on his 125,000-acre ranch in Montana, and then he met Jane, and the transformation was complete.

Asked if the relationship with Fonda is a reflection of the new Ted Turner, he said, "Partly, yes. We certainly have a community of interests. She's certainly been working on these issues longer than I have, but I've been working on them very hard in the past decade."

One old friend of Turner's put it this way: "Ted has really calmed down. Since he met Jane, he's a different person."

How? "Well, he's got a steady girlfriend. You don't have to be embarrassed of him. " And on some level the new Ted Turner has shown that he wants CNN's quality of journalism to live up to the influence he'd dreamed of, and has achieved, for his network.

I think Ted, as we all ought to know by now, he's flamboyant, but he's a very sharp operator," says Walter Cronkite. "He's got in Ed Turner and everybody, a damned good top staff, and they put together a good network operation before Tom arrived, as Tom is the first to say. What Ted really needed was that kind of executive from the outside world who already had an established reputation."

"I'd use the word 'maturity,' " says NBC executive Gordon Manning, a contemporary of Cronkite's. "He's bringing maturity."

"Tom brings a sophistication here of helping to shape the editorial product that I really welcome," says CNN vice president Ed Turner, one of the founding executives of the organization. "He knows people in high places to get help from on stories like this that we haven't had before, and now is the time when we can really use it. He can call the White House and Marlin Fitzwater, because they've known each other for twenty years, and get guidance on or help with a story. Bush and he can speak. Colin Powell and he are old friends, and on and on and on. Just friendships he's made as a publisher of a major West Coast paper, a major southern paper in Dallas, his time in the White House. That's an old fraternity, I guess, that never goes away."

Ed Turner remembers the gathering of wagons in New York's media circles when Ted Turner, the infidel from the South, made a pass at CBS. ' 'It was probably doomed from the beginning, but you could also see the Establishment pulling together in favor of Paley et al. As it turned out, everything that Ted said would happen did happen, and they'd probably have been better off selling to him. And so Johnson brings some of that Establishment here, which is fine."

Many of the people praising Ted Turner's new hire composed the Greek chorus that stood wringing its hands as the networks dismantled their news divisions; now CNN, of all places, is seeking their wisdom.

Johnson has openly called for advice from a broad circle of journalism's elite. "Fortunately, I work in a place where people welcome this," Johnson says. He knows that one of CNN's most desperate needs in its coverage, journalistically, is perspective, and thought. He hears it all the time from his friends in the mainstream, and it's his own instinct as well. And so he has been trying almost from the moment he arrived to somehow get his old friend Bill Moyers on the air.

The task has proved challenging in the extreme, not only because Moyers had to be convinced but also because the idea ran head-on into an ironclad "Tedism": There will be no commentary from CNN. Putting aside the question of whether it is a good idea to ban opinion on an all-news network, what is interesting about the rule is its arbitrariness, and how it came about.

In the beginning, opinion was welcome at CNN—after all, it did kill time. Turner himself, in a famous incident, once took to the air and delivered a blast against Columbia Pictures for producing the movie Taxi Driver, which, in Turner's opinion, was partially responsible for the attempt on President Reagan's life. Even CNN weatherman Flip Spiceland regularly delivered commentaries— "The Flip Side"—and it was that practice that led to the ban.

One afternoon, Spiceland's commentary offended a viewer as being sexist, and she wrote in to complain. But instead of writing to CNN, in which case her complaint would likely have had no result, she wrote directly to Ted Turner. He read her letter, watched a tape of the Spiceland segment, and agreed—it was sexist. Turner was upset, and reasonably so; perhaps the weatherman shouldn't give sexist commentary. But in his reflexive manner, he issued a decree banning all commentary, all the time, from all CNN employees, a policy which, among other things, necessitated the departure of Linda Ellerbee, who'd been hired solely to provide commentary.

So Johnson and his staff tried to figure out a way to bring Moyers, who has precisely the intellect and piercing insight that CNN needs, to the CNN air, and at last they came up with a couple of ways of doing it. Moyers could host a program in which others give their opin-

"Tom knows people in high places. Bush and he can speak. Colin Powell and he are old friends, and on and on and on."

ions, or he could be a guest commentator whose views would be immediately countered by someone of differing opinion. Both methods were tried, but even then there was a glitch: the CNN press department, understandably excited by the coup of landing Moyers, let the word out that he was coming to work for CNN. Johnson, recognizing the looming disaster in that, went ballistic, and the press department worked overtime trying to devise a construct that would accommodate both the Turner dictum and the very real fact of Bill Moyers's presence. "The only thing we don't have on the air is a full-time, CNN staff person presenting unrebutted commentary," says CNN P.R. man Steve Haworth, with the pride of achievement in his tone. "Moyers is not that."

What Johnson was learning, as everyone at CNN does, is that there is a certain Queen of Hearts aspect to the place, the very real and ever present prospect of some new ' 'off with their heads" proclamation from Ted.

CNN is in many ways rather like a tiny monarchy on the southern edge of downtown Atlanta. Although Turner is no longer as physically present as he once was—he used to sleep on a pulldown bed in his office, and the early shift would sometimes find him in his pajamas in the newsroom cafeteria, the Hard News Cafe—his spiritual presence is everywhere. The Kingdom of Ted includes the Omni complex, home of the basketball Hawks (owned by Ted); the Omni Hotel (owned by Ted); and CNN Center, where the network is located. The center's atrium includes a few restaurants, a souvenir shop peddling items for the baseball Braves (owned by Ted), and the headquarters of World Championship Wrestling (owned by Ted).

A visitor can unwind in Reggie's British Pub with a Turner's Triumph (creme de bananes, rum, lime, and orange juice), or relax in the atrium lounge and watch one of the several television monitors set out there (all tuned to CNN).

"There hasn't been a Ted sighting in a million years," one CNN staffer said in the second week of the war, but the next day Turner showed up, walking through the newsroom and offering his congratulations. Even when he is on the ranch with Jane and the buffalo, there is no forgetting who is the ultimate boss at CNN—in the expensive and high-stakes war coverage, Johnson consults with him on almost every major decision.

"I tell ya, there's no doubt that Ted Turner runs this—don't make any mistake about it," says Johnson. "There's no doubt to me now who runs CNN. It's the owner."

There is, for example, the matter of foreign coverage. From the very start, when he planted a U.N. flag outside the old mansion where CNN began operations, Turner's vision was premised on the prospect of a global network. But such an enterprise could not have a national point of view, even one so basic as the notion of Saddam Hussein as the enemy. As Eason Jordan, the clever young man in charge of all of CNN's overseas coverage, puts it, "I'm not here to represent a national network; I'm here on behalf of a global network, and we report the news. We don't report it from a U.S. perspective. Just because I have a U.S. passport in my pocket doesn't mean I have to think only about U.S. citizens. We think about everybody. People are watching us in Iraq, people are watching us in Jordan, people are watching us all over the world with different viewpoints."

That is the CNN line, and to enforce it, Turner has banned the use of the word "foreign." Reference to any place outside of the United States is to employ the word "international." The policy is strictly policed, and slipups are punished by a $100 fine. In one of his early reports from Baghdad, Peter Arnett, the quintessential war correspondent, referred to his experience of thirty years "as a foreign correspondent." Surely they wouldn't fine Arnett, would they? "It pisses Ted off," Johnson says, "and he has told me—and he is right—in the definition of 'foreign,' in other languages, it means 'alien,' it means 'strange being.' It is banned, people are fined for it, and, uh, he means it! If you don't think he means it, talk to some of those who've been fined."

But even Johnson could barely suppress a chuckle of wonderment over some of the personnel requirements for new employees. Fat people and smokers, for instance, are banned, period. (It is a decree laid down by Turner, perhaps because, as he once said, his father "was fat, and he smoked like a chimney.") Smokers who worked at CNN before the mandate have been grandfathered, and they furtively gather in precious "smoke-safe" zones, such as the office of nicotine addict Ed Turner.

The overall effect of these fiats is to heighten the sense of insularity at CNN, instilling in its people a shared understanding of certain customs and rituals which might seem strange or even extreme to outsiders, but which are intuitively accepted in the sovereign Kingdom of Ted. If they all show up to work one day wearing yellow socks and a derby, they'll know why.

One of the memorable images of CNN's coverage of the war was its live coverage of the first Scud attack on Israel, not least because CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief, Larry Register, unaccustomed to on-air reporting, was noticeably unnerved amid the mad scramble for gas masks in front of a camera. It counted as an embarrassment in the War Reporters' Code of Bravado, but the next day Register managed to carry on through a second missile warning, even conducting an interview with Israeli deputy foreign minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with both interviewer and subject wearing gas masks. It was very vivid stuff, but back in the control booth in Atlanta the supervising producer got on the intercom and screamed at the nettled newsman for going on so long.

The next day, Register happened to call Tom Johnson on another matter, and was greeted like a war hero.

"In all that incoming the other night, certainly the scenes of you guys getting on your masks and trying to file copy at the same time is something that'll be etched in my head forever," Johnson said, seeming to mean it. "A lotta courage out there, and a lotta hard work. It's interesting that it hit at a moment when a lot of you were at the end of your string. Tell everybody how much I appreciate how much you're doing, really, you're just a bunch of world-class folks. Is there anything I can do for you?"

Continued on page 114

Continued from page 106

Bouquet dispensing is a Johnson specialty, one to which CNN staffers are warily growing accustomed. When Bernie Shaw arrived back home from Baghdad, Johnson, who'd gone two days without sleep himself, flew to Washington to greet him. When John Holliman came through Atlanta, Johnson had the reporter and his wife over for a chili supper and put them up for the night. And when a top staff member's father was ailing in Florida, Johnson flew down there to help locate the best specialists.

After six months, the jury may still be out on Johnson as a TV news executive, but he is winning the hearts and minds of CNN one staffer at a time. "Tom has got the soul and the heart to lead this company," says Robert Wiener, a tenyear CNN veteran.

Johnson was held in rare regard by the rank and file at the Los Angeles Times, where, on his last day, he walked into the employees' cafeteria and received a standing ovation—he started crying and dashed away. That same day, all the secretaries in the executive wing of Times Mirror wore black to the office.

Corny, yes, but com is a central component of the Johnson style, a kind of Boy Scout honor code that has survived not only a long newspaper career but four years in the Johnson White House. It is a code rooted in a personal history of deeply felt remorse, and gratitude.

Johnson grew up in Macon, Georgia, where his mother was a grocery clerk and his father sold watermelons off the back of a red International truck. In the winter, Johnson Sr., who had a thirdgrade education, would get the rejects from a wood-handle factory, cut them up, and sell them by the bucket for firewood. Tommy, an only child, grew up ashamed of his father.

"What I resented was, my dad never did hold a regular job, and my mother always seemed to be carrying the whole load. My dad was an embarrassment to me.... One of the great regrets of my life is that I never did get my relationship with my dad straightened out before he died.' '

When he was fourteen, Tommy Johnson went to work as a copyboy in the sports department of The Macon Telegraph, where he came under the wing of the publisher, Peyton Anderson. Anderson paid the boy's way through the University of Georgia, and when Johnson told him that he wanted to be a publisher just like him, Anderson sent him to Harvard Business School. Anderson, who had no son of his own, was the first in a series of devoted mentors—"champions," Johnson calls them—who charmed Johnson's path through life.

After Harvard, Johnson was accepted into the White House fellowship program, again assisted by Anderson, where he was plucked from the crowd by Bill Moyers to join the president's special-assistant staff. When Moyers left the White House, deeply wounding L.B.J., Tom Johnson stepped into his place. He stayed with Lyndon Johnson through four years at the White House, and was one of the loyalists who returned with him and Lady Bird to the ranch. He ran the Johnsons' television station until his next "champion,'' Otis Chandler, discovered him and named him editor and then publisher of Times Mirror's Dallas Times Herald, ultimately bringing him to Los Angeles, where he was the first non-family member ever named publisher.

"Maybe I've been in search of a relationship with a father I didn't have," Johnson says. "But I've always been intensely loyal. I've always enjoyed having a champion, which Peyton was, and which Bill was, L.B.J. was, and Otis was. Now I'll try to build a good relationship with Ted. I believe in a strong bonding."

For a boy who wanted to be the publisher of The Macon Telegraph, the L.A. Times job was a fantasy fulfilled, and the paper thrived under Johnson's hand, becoming the largest daily in the country. But when Otis Chandler retired as chairman of Times Minor, Johnson lost his protector. In 1989 he was moved out of the publisher's job into a corporate vice-chairmanship. The usual window dressing of "promotion" was applied, but to Johnson there was no disguising what amounted to a firing; the new management team said the paper needed a more "change-oriented" publisher, and the talk had Johnson being blamed for the readership and advertising losses to a suburban competitor in Orange County.

"The world fell apart," Johnson says of that time, eighteen months ago. "I was flattened of spirit, and I had a tough time getting myself back up off the mat." For months the chronically buoyant Johnson couldn't shake the despair; he seemed to have actually physically shrunk under it. But soon the job offers started coming in, including, word had it, an offer to become publisher of the International Herald Tribune, which Johnson was said to be on the verge of accepting. Then Ted Turner called.

Burt Reinhardt, the seventy-year-old president of CNN, was retiring, and Turner had firmly decided against any of the insiders at CNN. ''I think he felt he wanted somebody who had a good sense of news, and integrity, and was not from the old organization," Bob Scheer recalls, "and that maybe they were moving to a higher level."

Turner didn't know Johnson, they'd met only once, briefly, but a mutual friend named Jerry Lindauer read in Newsweek that the top CNN job was coming open and immediately thought of Johnson. He suggested it to Turner, who called Johnson for a meeting.

The meeting was scheduled for a Friday morning at 8:30. Johnson arrived at Turner's Century City office prepared for at least two hours' parrying. "Jerry tells me you might be interested in the job of president of CNN," Turner said.

"I'm sure interested in talking to you about it, Ted," Johnson answered.

"Well," Turner came back, "will you take the job?' '

Johnson said that he'd need some time, that the two of them should get to know each other, and Turner replied, "Well, how about Monday?" And that was it, the meeting was over.

"I said, 'Ted, what is it exactly that you expect of me?' " Johnson remembers. "He said, 'I want the best news network in the world.' I said, 'Well, tell me more about that.' That's all he would tell me, I swear." Johnson felt the urge to stay on, perhaps to bond a little more, but it was clear that he was keeping Turner from his next appointment.

Johnson flew to Atlanta for a personnel meeting, and on to New York for some due-diligence work of his own— calling everyone he knew who knew Turner, even Jane Fonda. "She said, 'I believe he's the most remarkable man I've ever met,' " Johnson recalls.

He then returned to Los Angeles for what was to have been the deal dinner: Jane and Ted, Tom and Edwina. But he got off the plane from New York feeling slightly ill, and by the time they all met up at Jane's house, his nausea was quite pronounced.

They drove to a restaurant in the Santa Monica mountains, Tom and Jane in the back, Ted and Edwina up front, and as soon as they arrived at the restaurant Johnson excused himself, went to the bathroom, and threw up. All through dinner—his deal dinner—he was quite green, and had to excuse himself three or four more times. It was the first time he'd ever been with Ted and Jane together, and Edwina, a pretty, effervescent blonde from Georgia, was basically left to carry on.

Dinner finally ended, but Johnson's condition did not.

"We got to the Pacific Coast Highway, and I said, 'Edwina, you've got to pullover. I can't make it. I've got to throw up again.' So she stopped the car and I went over to the side of the road and started the dry heaves. Ted came back and I said, 'Ted, have you ever been so sick that you didn't wanna see somebody?' And he said, 'Yes, I sure have,' in his way. I said, 'I want Edwina to drive you and Jane on to the house and for her to come back and get me.' And I lay on a concrete slab beside the Pacific Coast Highway for about forty minutes.

"And I figured, God Almighty, how can you make a worse impression on any prospective employer than by getting sick, throwing up at dinner, and then having him leave you on the side of the road? The last thing I remember was Ted saying to Edwina, 'Tell him he's still got the job if he wants it.' "

But the bonding would have to wait.

When Johnson made that decision back on Martha's Vineyard to go to work for Ted Turner, it was with some hesitation. "There was a magic to Ted," he says, "but also an unpredictability. I mean, it was with great enthusiasm, but also a considerable amount of trepidation and uncertainty about it."

Seven months later, he still doesn't know Turner very well, and he doesn't yet know how free a hand he'll have in shaping CNN's future. "I do like him. [But] only time will tell if this will work out. I do not have a contract—I didn't want one. Ted should be able to fire me whenever he's ready to, without being concerned about it, and I should be free to go and do something else if it doesn't work out."

Can Ted Turner's designated nice guy possibly last?

"Tom has worked for L.B.J.," Bill Moyers says, "and after you've worked with L.B.J., you can work with the Devil."