Ted Turner once confided that he wanted to "set the all-time greatest personal-achievement record," beating out Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great. And besides that, he aimed to become "the richest man in the country" and "president of the United States." Regular doses of lithium tempered those ambitions, but Robert Edward Turner III has nonetheless succeeded to an astonishing degree. He owns a large share in seven American cable networks, two major-league sports teams, the entire MGM film library, the Hanna-Barbera animation studios, two movie studios, and a television production company, plus unimagined amounts of real estate including 768,000 acres in Montana and New Mexico. His personal fortune is mounting toward $3 billion. All that, and Jane Fonda. Napoleon was dead at fifty-one, but Ted Turner -- sportsman, entrepreneur, high roller, Time's Man of the Year and all around wild man of American business -- is going strong at fifty-six, still yearning to buy a major broadcast network like CBS or NBC. A former president of NBC says Turner is the third most important figure in the history of television, after David Sarnoff and William Paley.

I've read biographies of Sarnoff and Paley but they never exhausted me like this tale of crazed single-mindedness and superhuman energy about a southern Goth who sees himself, quite consciously, as part Rhett Butler and part Charles Foster Kane (he named a son Rhett and has seen Citizen Kane dozens of times). Here is a Ted Turner -- as described by the father-son writing team of Robert and Gerald Jay Goldberg -- who drove himself and his co-workers mercilessly to build an empire from the shards of his father's outdoor advertising business; who segued into broadcasting with the purchase in 1968 of an obscure Chattanooga radio station; and who went on to found television's first satellite-delivered "superstation" and the world's first all-news, twenty-four-hour cable network. But working alongside him at the height of his nuttiness and compulsiveness -- before the soothing effects of global fame, financial solvency, a celebrity wife, and mood-altering prescription drugs -- clearly was like having grapefruit juice squirted continually in one's eye.

The essential facts have all been told before: by Porter Bibb in It Ain't As Easy As It Looks; by Christian Williams in Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way; by Hank Whittemore in CNN: The Inside Story; and by Roger Vaughan in Ted Turner: The Man Behind the Mouth, all of which the Goldbergs acknowledge in their elaborate and welcome research notes. A missing source in the Goldberg variation is Turner himself, who not only declined interview requests but who reportedly discouraged his friends from cooperating. Nonetheless, the authors persisted and over three years won important interviews with Robert Wussler (a top Turner executive), Reese Schonfeld (who designed CNN), Turner's first wife (out of three), and his stepmother, along with a clutch of ladyfriends, lieutenants, and teachers. The resulting text is more up-close and personal than earlier biographies, although one wonders if the public record is significantly enriched by tales of Turner's drinking, womanizing, foul manners, and general boorishness -- like the time at a New York party when Turner, lubricated by vodka, grabbed the crotch of CNN vice-president Mary Alice Williams and was summarily decked by a nifty six-inch punch she landed on his jaw. Turner -- and Fonda -- we are told, both gave up drinking in 12.

A watershed moment in Turner's life -- and indeed in the history of American television -- came in the mid-1970s when he learned that his feeble little UHF station in Atlanta, WTCG (later renamed WTBS) could reach the entire nation if he bounced its signal off a satellite and let cable systems retransmit it. HBO had beaten him to the punch a year earlier, but it was Turner who became Mr. Cable Television, the roving, logorrheic ambassador for the miraculous new paradigm that made feasible scores of new national networks -- ESPN, C-SPAN, Lifetime, A&E, Discovery -- and stole viewers by the millions from the Big Three, ABC, CBS, and NBC. (The three-network prime-time audience share dwindled from roughly 90 percent in 1980 to its current 57 percent.)

That pleased Turner immensely because bashing the old-line networks had long been his favorite sport, right after sailboat racing. His hatred of them was over the top, bordering on the irrational. They were "the worst enemies that the United States ever faced," including the Nazis and the Japanese, he told one interviewer. To others, he railed that the "bunch of pinkos" running the networks "have polluted our minds and our children's minds. I think they're almost guilty of manslaughter. . . .What those networks are doing is making Hitler Youth out of the American people -- lazy, drug addicts, homosexuals, sex maniacs, materialists . . . . It's bad. Bad, bad, bad! They ought to be tried for treason; they're the worst enemies America's ever had." As Jack Benny used to say: "Well!"

Turner's second big epiphany -- and the one that changed the texture of electronic journalism -- was that an all-news cable network was a viable notion. Ironically, up to that time Turner had shown zero interest in news, boasting that his Atlanta station ran "the FCC minimum" -- usually a jokey rip-and-read 3 a.m. program that gave short shrift to the day's events. All his best time slots went to reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, and Petticoat Junction, along with The Three Stooges and The Mickey Mouse Club. "We're essentially an escapist station," he said proudly.

Like St. Paul on the road to Damascus, however, Turner experienced a metanoia around 1978 and instantly became a true believer in the sacral importance of news. Whence the conversion? It appears to have been a pure business judgment, based on his growing fluency in the supply-demand niceties of cable TV. The television medium offered only four categories of diversion, he concluded: movies, sports, regular series, and news. HBO, ESPN, and the old-line broadcasters had the first three tied up. "All that's left is news," he told Reese Schonfeld, "and I've got to get there before anybody else does."

 Two years later, on Sunday, June 1, 1980 -- after an almost comical, Keystone Kops mad dash that the TV world observed with amused, cocked-eyebrow curiosity mounting to contempt -- the Cable News Network went on the air. Actually, it lurched onto the air. Since Georgia was a right-to-work state, Schonfeld hired cheap nonunion labor, including many kids with little experience. It was a newsroom "built on the backs of slave labor, people just out of school," recalled one of the first anchors. Murphy's Law was operative: whatever could go wrong did go wrong. A lightbulb exploded during a live report by Daniel Schorr, setting his clothes on fire. A cleaning woman walked onto the set as Bernard Shaw was delivering the news and emptied his wastebasket on live television. At the Atlanta zoo, CNN inadvertently aired pictures of a monkey masturbating. One estimate put Turner's losses at more than $2 million a month.

But the rest you know. Over the last fifteen years, CNN has prospered both journalistically and financially, eventually delivering profits in the tens of millions and putting to shame the Big Three, each of which changed ownership during that time -- all of them to interests with no track record in or documented enthusiasm for national network news. While ABC, CBS, and NBC were whacking news budgets and closing bureaus, Turner was putting his money where his loud mouth was, expanding internationally and becoming (for better or worse) a player in world events as well as an observer. The network won credibility during the Falklands war, the Challenger disaster, the TWA hijacking, the San Francisco earthquake, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Tiananmen Square uprising as well as offering respectable coverage of presidential election year events, congressional hearings and (well, yes) the O.J. Simpson trial. It's also given us Crossfire, The Capital Gang, Reliable Sources -- and Larry King Live, which over ten years has become the platform of choice for presidential aspirants, heads of state, and showbiz superstars hawking their latest melodrama.

 If there's a single lacuna in the Goldbergs' rendition of Turner's story it's their tossing off in a bare few pages the Persian Gulf war, which more than any other story made CNN (and Ted Turner) an international force, boosting its global audience (although only briefly) to 75 million and giving the public for the first time in history live pictures of a war in progress -- from behind enemy lines. For those of us in the press posted to Dhahran in the spring of 1991, the daily routine differed markedly from coverage of any previous conflict: switch on CNN International in one's hotel upon first awakening for an update on events during the night, then hurry to the press center to catch Peter Arnett's latest report from inside Iraq and the briefings from Riyadh and the Pentagon -- with the unsettling knowledge that Saddam Hussein in his Baghdad bunker was watching CNN right along with us. As were world leaders everywhere, including George Bush in the White House. A day after the Iraqi occupiers fled northward tord home, a Kuwait City survivor standing outside his bullet-pocked villa told me that one of the first acts of the invaders had been to uproot or otherwise disable the many satellite dishes atop residents' homes---thereby isolating them from CNN's coverage of the war's progress. The Iraqis, like everybody else, had become media-smart in the new age of CNN war reporting.

 Citizen Turner is an admirable job of research and organization. It obviates any further such bulky tomes, at least until Ted Turner -- still youngish and vigorous -- makes more splashy news, personal and professional, as he surely will. Indeed, since the book went to press, he has announced plans to launch a business news channel in January.

 Early in the 1980s, Turner traveled to Cuba after Fidel Castro wrote him a fan letter: "I just wanted to let you know that I think CNN is the most objective source of news," the Maximum Leader had volunteered. "And if you ever want to come down to Cuba . . ." Turner accepted the invitation, and upon returning to the U.S. told friends: "Castro's not a communist. He's like me -- a dictator."

As was, of course, Napoleon.

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