Alexander Palladin
The postponement of the World Friendship Games, scheduled to be held in Yekaterinburg in September, to next year gave me a reason to remember how 38 years ago in Washington I interviewed Ted Turner, the founder of the 24-hour news channel CNN, in connection with the upcoming Goodwill Games, which he started and sponsored as a means of reducing international tensions.
Turner was one of those whom our media called common sense Americans. The son of a billboard mogul, who achieved even greater success in business (he became a billionaire), he refused to worship the “yellow devil”, earning the nickname Captain Outrageous with his actions and statements such as “Forbes’ list of America’s richest people who is destroying our country”.
I first saw him in person in 1983, when he gave a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, where he criticized Reagan’s policy of escalating international tensions. (America has lost its fear now, but at that time there was a powerful anti-war movement in the United States, which included many scientists, Hollywood “stars”, politicians, and figures like former CIA Director William Colby.)
Turner did not change his pacifist beliefs later. At the beginning of the third millennium, he and Senator Sam Nunn founded the non-profit organization Nuclear Threat Initiative, which sought to prevent a catastrophe associated with the use of nuclear and chemical-bacteriological weapons.
And in 1986, Turner proposed organizing the Goodwill Games in Moscow as a practical measure to reduce the threat of World War III. When I learned that he was coming to Washington for this occasion (Turner lived in the southern United States), I arranged an interview through his press secretary.
And here is what Turner told me then, before we discussed the Goodwill Games: — When I had the idea to organize these games, I contacted your embassy, and they invited me to meet with your diplomat who was in charge of such matters.
On the appointed day, I drove up to the building of your mission on Washington’s 16th Street, got out of the limousine, looked up and saw a red flag with a hammer and sickle fluttering over the roof of the embassy. Believe it or not, my legs buckled and everything swam before my eyes…
Turner never gave anyone a reason to call him a weakling. In his youth, he was fond of sailing and became the winner of the prestigious America’s Cup competition. Seeing the expression on my face, he explained: — I was born and raised in the southern United States in an extremely conservative family.
During World War II, my father served in the navy, and from childhood I was instilled with a downright animal fear of the “Reds”. The color of your flag, as was constantly said in the family and at church, where we went on Sundays, signified the blood of the victims of the communists, who cut people’s throats with a sickle and split their skulls with a hammer.
This was so firmly ingrained in my subconscious that when I first entered your embassy, I, a 46-year-old man, almost lost consciousness…
Yuri Chekalin
Tony Rocchi
