Teddy Turner: Jane Fonda Turned My Dad Into a Liberal

Ted Turner was transformed from a staunch conservative into a bleeding-heart liberal by none other than one-time wife Jane Fonda, according to the media mogul’s outspoken son.

But when the senior Turner moved to the left and then expressed an interest in running for president, Fonda deep-sixed the idea by saying she’d dump him, Teddy Turner told Steve Malzberg on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.”

“I was raised in a different time at the Turner household … a very conservative household with capitalism and all of that kind of stuff,” Turner said. …

Fonda was never a 'liberal.' She was a hard-core Commie in the 60s and still is today.

I was going to say the exact same thing. Any American that would take it upon herself to visit Hanoi during the Vietnam War and make it obvious that her sympathies lay with North Vietnam is obviously a Commie. And I recall that Ted Turner did similarly some years later when he went to Havana to greet Castro.

One matter for son "Teddy" to explain here: IIRC, Ted Turner launched left-leaning CNN before he got involved with Fonda. So were there any other factors causing him to veer to the left earlier?

"I still wonder if it’s all she has left. A very lonely way to live isn’t it?"

I just recently re-read the excellent book The Politics of Bad Faith by David Horowitz. You probably know that he was a former leftist, whose parents were both members of CPUSA. Your comment brought to mind something he wrote describing a letter to a friend who was unhappy with him over his 'abandonment' of the Left. In the letter he describes a 'memorial' for his deceased father (who never gave up his radical beliefs) given in his mother's living room. I give you this small passage from it:

”My father was a man of modest achievements. His only real marks were the ones he made on the lives of the individuals he touched. The ones who were there now. The memories of the people who had gathered in my mother’s living room were practically the only traces of my father still left on this earth. But when they finally began to speak, what they said was this: Your father was a man who tried his best to make the world a better place…your father was a man who was a teacher to others…your father was a man who was socially conscious, progressive… who made a contribution.

And that was all they said. People who had known my father since before I was born, who had been his comrades and intimate friends, could not remember a particular fact about him. Could not really remember him. All that was memorable to them in the actual life my father had lived – all that was real – were the elements that conformed to their progressive Idea. My father’s life was invisible to the only people who had ever been close enough to see who he was.”

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