My Remarkable Journey (20 page)

Imagine what it’s like to be innocent and locked up in jail as your execution day approaches. The Pitts and Lee case in Florida
is a classic example. Two black men were accused of murdering two white gas station attendants in the Florida Panhandle. This
was back in the early ’60s. There was no gun found. No evidence at all. Pitts was a twenty-seven-year-old guy in the service.
Lee was a nineteen-year-old cook. Police beat the two of them until they confessed to committing the crime. For nine years,
they were on death row. Then a white man admitted he’d done the killing, and passed a lie-detector test to prove it. Even
then, Pitts and Lee were convicted in a retrial because the judge wouldn’t allow the jury to hear the white man’s confession.
Only after a Pulitzer Prize–winning book was written about the case were Pitts and Lee pardoned by the governor.

The problem with capital punishment is that you can’t write a law that says if you’re identified as the murderer by fourteen
people, then you should be given the death penalty. The only person I would capitally punish is someone who asked for it.

But I always look for ways to see the other side. If I had a guest on my show who was against the death penalty, I might ask,
“What about Hitler? What if Hitler was captured and jailed in 1940? Wouldn’t you have given Hitler the death penalty knowing
that if he escaped or was somehow freed he could get back in charge and kill millions?”

By the late ’80s, CNN had become
the
place to watch issues like these debated. Now you hit your clicker and see pundits and politicians arguing on channel after
channel. But Rupert Murdoch didn’t get Fox News up and running until 1996. MSNBC started the same year. Until then, CNN was
the only game in town. The exchanges on
Crossfire
led straight into my show. Everything really started to click for
Larry King Live
in the late ’80s. We were being beamed around the world and people started calling in from as far off as Greenland and Australia
to ask questions. That may not sound like a big deal now. But back then, there was no toll-free 800 number. People in Greenland
had to pay for the opportunity… and there were long waits on the phone lines to get on the air.

Every time a huge news event hit, more and more people turned to CNN. When I returned from the hospital after the heart attack,
it was the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker televangelist scandal. If ever there was a tabloid story made for television, this was
it. Jim and Tammy Faye looked like an adorable couple who had met in grammar school and were joined at the hip. He was a salesman
and she was a show. They started the Praise the Lord Club and went on television pitching memberships in a Christian hotel
and theme park. They collected millions and lavished it on themselves, going as far as building an air-conditioned doghouse.
In the meantime, Jim was having sex with his pretty secretary, Jessica Hahn, and paying her a couple of hundred grand to keep
quiet.

We had Jim and Tammy Faye on many times, and Jessica Hahn, too. She was really sexy. I’ll never forget. I was single at the
time. We were riding in a cab back to her hotel and she was very flirtatious. She lifted her foot toward my crotch and was
starting to play around. I held myself back. Sometimes in life I haven’t been able to sense those uh-oh moments. But that
time I could.

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were incredible TV because new revelations and accusations were constantly emerging. Hahn accused
Bakker of drugging and raping her. The preacher Jimmy Swaggart came on my show and called Bakker a cancer on the body of Christ.
A short time later, Swaggart was discovered in a Louisiana hotel with a prostitute. More than a hundred thousand former supporters
of the PTL filed a class-action suit to try to get back their money. Jerry Falwell came running to the rescue and tried to
take over the organization. After one successful fund-raising drive, he plunged down the waterslide at the theme park with
his clothes on. Tammy Faye didn’t like Falwell, but she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, so she never let on. Nobody ever
blamed Tammy Faye. But Jim was convicted of fraud and dragged off to jail crying, kicking, and screaming.

Tammy Faye stood by him at first. She couldn’t get through a show without mascara streaming down her tearful face. But while
Jim was in jail, Tammy Faye divorced him. She went on to march in Gay Pride parades and became a favorite of the gay community.
I got to be friendly with her. Tammy Faye got colon cancer, then inoperable lung cancer. She came on my show the night before
she died. She must have weighed about sixty-five pounds. It was like looking at death. I actually thought she might die during
the show. She could hardly talk, but she wanted to say goodbye. The announcement of her death was held until my show the next
evening. I spoke at her memorial service.

It was a soap opera, all right, but it was hard to turn away. I remember asking Ted Koppel, “How do we achieve a balance between
tabloid and news on our shows?” Ted said, “I report on Jim Bakker for them. They let me report on the Middle East.” It was
similar to my situation. Only Ted Turner gave me the end of the Cold War and everything that followed.

I don’t know if Ted could have predicted the Bakker scandal when he started CNN. But he certainly wanted to see the end of
the Cold War. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were not good when CNN was launched. The Soviets had
invaded Afghanistan in 1979. As punishment, President Carter refused to allow Americans to go to the Moscow Olympics in 1980.
The Soviets returned the favor four years later. They boycotted the Los Angeles games and held back much of the Communist
bloc.

Ted got the idea to bring the Soviet Union, the United States, and the rest of the world together. He called it the Goodwill
Games. His timing was just right. Mikhail Gorbachev became premier of the Soviet Union in 1985, and brought with him a feeling
of openness. A year later, thousands of athletes from around the world showed up in Moscow for the first Goodwill Games. Ted
met Gorbachev. A Soviet band played the American national anthem. Rowers for the Soviet Union and the United States exchanged
places in each other’s boats. It was so simple to Ted. He came back and said, “Communists eat like we do. They walk like we
do. They’ve got two eyes like we do. You can talk to them. You don’t have to agree with them. But you can talk to them.” How
could anyone disagree with that? A year later, Ronald Reagan was in Berlin asking Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” CNN
viewers would watch as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. That was less than ten years after Ted started to bring people together
through satellite broadcasting.

I was never more important to CNN than in 1989. My ratings were going through the roof. I had the world to myself at nine
o’clock, and my show was getting a lot of press. Coincidentally, a window in my contract opened. The window gave me thirty
days to make a deal with any other station. I had to tell Ted within those thirty days if I was going to leave, and then give
him three months’ notice.

Bob Woolf negotiated all over the place during this window. He got two great offers. One was from Roone Arledge at ABC. Roone’s
idea was that I would follow
Nightline
. Ted Koppel would be on until midnight, and I would be on from midnight to one.

The other offer was from the brothers who ran King World—the same guys who started
The Oprah Winfrey Show
and do a lot of quiz shows. They were really nice guys, crazy guys. Their concept was for a show called “Larry King Wired.”
We were going to have two jet planes with reporters who’d fly to the big story of the day and set me up to tackle the story
from there.

I was making about eight hundred thousand dollars a year from CNN at the time. Each of the other offers would have nearly
doubled my salary. There was a little more prestige to ABC. But King World’s offer also included a percentage of profits from
the syndicated show.

Bob and I discussed the two options over and over. But we couldn’t decide which one to take. I was really nervous as the window
began to close. This was heady stuff. I flew out to California. I was seeing Angie Dickinson at the time and she met me at
the airport. It was raining. As we drove to the hotel, I told her the whole situation.

I can still see her gorgeous face looking over at me with the rain pelting down outside the car window. “Are you unhappy?”
she asked.

“No.”

“If you’re not unhappy, then why are you leaving?”

“Well, it’s more money.”

“You’ve got to have a second reason.”

We got to the hotel and fooled around a little. But afterward, I couldn’t go to sleep. Bob would be meeting with Ted in the
morning in Atlanta to tell him I’d be leaving for one of the two offers. I lay in bed all night thinking about what Angie
had said. It was complicated. It’s very hard for me to leave a place that feels like home. But it was also nice to be courted.
Plus, Bob had worked really hard lining up the two offers. He wouldn’t make a penny more if I stayed at CNN. But he’d make
a lot more if I left.

At six in the morning, the phone rang.

“Larry, it’s Ted. I’m on a speakerphone. Bob is right here, and he tells me you’re leaving.”

I heard Bob yelling, “This is unethical. It’s unethical!”

“The hell with ethics,” Ted said. “This has nothing to do with ethics! Larry, listen to me. Here’s what I want you to do.
It’s simple. Just say, ‘Goodbye, Ted.’ You say ‘Goodbye Ted,’ and we’re friends. You start your new job in three months—whatever
job you take—and nobody’s angry. The reason I’m calling is, I want you to say it to me. ‘Goodbye, Ted.’ I want to hear you
say goodbye.”

I stood there in my underwear with the telephone at my ear. Nothing would come out of my mouth.

Ted waited and waited and waited. The room filled with silence.

“You can’t say it!” Ted said. “You
can’t
say it!”

I could hear Bob in the background, screaming, “This is crazy!”

But there was no stopping Ted. “Here’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “Because you’re loyal to me, I’m going to give you
the same money you’d get from ABC one year from today. I don’t pay anyone that kind of money. I’m expanding right now and
I don’t have the money to give you today. But I’m going to pay you $1.5 million one year from today. Write the date down.
You’re stayin’ with me.”

Afterward, when things calmed down, Ted said something I’ll never forget—a little wisdom that I’m happy to pass on. “Never
go someplace else if it’s just for money. Because if it’s just for money, the first day you’re unhappy, you’re going to be
upset with everyone who told you to go.”

Ted had reinvented television, and soon he would be able to afford my raise. Even when people were sleeping, they were paying
to watch CNN through their monthly cable bills. ABC didn’t have that same revenue coming in. It was dependent on advertising.
The viewer doesn’t pay ABC anything. Ted was also bringing in money from advertising. The power of CNN became even more evident
when the next big news event hit: the Gulf War.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, people wanted to know how the world would respond. Developments could break on CNN at
any minute. The news division at CBS couldn’t compete with that. CBS would be in upheaval.
Cancel the show? What about the advertisers?
To make a preemptive decision at a regular broadcast network, you’ve got to move mountains. Ted and his network made decisions
in the blink of an eye.

One of the CNN anchors, Bernard Shaw, was over in Baghdad to interview Saddam. He was talking to me on the air when Iraqi
authorities moved in. Bernie said, “I think they’re going to shut—” and the screen went blank. This was not happening on other
networks. I don’t think there was ever a time before this when a war was broadcast live from behind enemy lines. Peter Arnett,
Bernie Shaw and John Holliman reported courageously for countless hours. The three of them were ducking for cover when bombs
dropped on Baghdad, and no one was calling CNN the Chicken Noodle News any longer. There were days when more people were watching
news on cable than they were on any one of the three major networks.

The whole nature of politics and television was changing. I saw the shift right on my show. We became part of the political
scene when Ross Perot came on during the 1992 presidential campaign. Perot was a wealthy Texan, and he had a lot to say about
budget issues. He’d opposed the Gulf War and he had solid reasons even though the conflict ended in a hundred days and worked
out well for the United States. The topic on my show that night was the difficult economy. But a friend of mine had put a
thought in my head beforehand: “Ask Ross if he’d run for president.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I was with him at a party and I just got the feeling he would.”

At the beginning of the show, I asked if he’d run.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I really wouldn’t be interested.”

We talked about a lot of things. Then an instinct took over. I said, “I don’t like to revisit things, but are you sure you
wouldn’t run for president? Is it absolute?”

He said, “Yeah.”

Just before the end of the show, I couldn’t help but come back to it again. “Under what circumstances would you run?”

He said, “Well, I’ll tell you. If the people put me on the ballot as an independent in all fifty states, I’ll run.”

It didn’t strike me as a big deal when the show ended and we said goodbye. It didn’t hit me until my Mutual radio show later
that night. The first caller asked, “How do I help Ross Perot?” A flood of calls about Perot followed. I later learned that
when Ross got back to the hotel after the show, he found a ten-dollar contribution to his campaign. It had been left by a
bellhop. Soon Dan Rather was reporting the story. A week later, we realized how monumental the show had been.

George Bush, the incumbent, couldn’t understand. “What does Ross have against me?” he once asked me. “We’re fellow Texans.
I thought he liked me.”