Ted Turner died on Tuesday, at eighty-seven, and the news sent me looking for a tape I had not thought about in forty-five years.
The tape is from late 1980. I am the Publisher and co-founder (with my brother and my mother) of Washington Dossier, a glossy society magazine I had started one month out of college, at twenty-one, with a conviction that the soft-power capital deserved a chronicle of its own. I am sitting on the set of Take Two, the two-hour midday show on CNN. The network has been on the air since the first of June. The studio is barely months old. The format is barely months old. Chris Curle and Don Farmer, husband and wife, are the anchor team. They ask questions and wait for the answers. The whole thing moves at the speed of thought.
For most of you reading this newsletter, Washington Dossier is a name without a referent. Before BizBash, before the events industry had a trade press of its own, this was what I did. The Carter White House was serving the last suppers of its single term. Reagan was just about to win the November election. The hostages were still in Tehran. Washington, in those months, was a city in transition, with one foot still in the Georgetown drawing room and the other in the new conservative ascendancy that was about to redraw the social map. Dossier covered all of it. The dinners, the embassies, the receptions, the salons. The room.
Watching the tape now, what comes back first is not the politics. It is the rhythm. The lighting, the easy sit-down posture, the assumption that an interview is a conversation and a conversation takes time. There was no chyron screaming for attention. There was no countdown clock. Quaint, in 1980, was not yet a problem.
I learned more about gathering in those years than I knew at the time.
The Senators and their spouses who sat for our profiles wanted, often enough, to talk about how their last state dinner had gone, what had worked and what had not. Ambassadors treated the seating chart for a residence reception with the strategic seriousness most executives reserve for board agendas. And more than once, a Cabinet Secretary returned my call to argue, politely but with intensity, about which night of the week was right for a particular kind of working dinner. None of them called what they were doing event organizing. None of them would have. But they were practicing it at a level of sophistication I had to grow into to recognize.
That city ran on rooms. A bill moved because the right four people had dinner together on a Tuesday in a townhouse in Kalorama. An alliance held because someone’s chief of staff knew someone else’s chief of staff and the seating at the embassy reception placed them three across instead of facing each other across the room. A cabinet secretary who could not host was a cabinet secretary who could not govern. The politicians, the diplomats, and the senior staffers I covered turned out to be the most underrated event organizers I would ever meet. None of them learned it in school. Most of them would have been insulted if you called them event professionals. But the discipline was the same one I would later spend twenty years documenting at BizBash, and the stakes, when they got it wrong, were higher than most of what we cover in this industry. Toasts were an art form and were taken seriously.
Turner was making his own bet in Atlanta while Washington was doing what Washington does. He had wagered his fortune on the radical proposition that the world wanted news around the clock, and most of the television establishment was certain he had lost his mind. That a young magazine publisher from a Washington society sheet ended up on his network in its first months means almost nothing in the larger story of CNN. But it means a great deal to me. He gave us the room before there was a room. He gave us the studio before the format had settled. He let the two-hour midday show breathe long enough for Chris Curle to actually ask a question, and for me, at twenty-six, to actually answer it.
The thread from that tape to this newsletter runs straighter than it looks. The beat has always been the same. Who is convening whom, in what room, with what intent, and why does it matter. The vocabulary keeps changing. “Soft power” became “experiential” became “the gathering economy.” The dinner became the conference became the hybrid activation. But the underlying question, why people in rooms together actually move history, has not changed at all.
Rest easy, Ted. And Don Farmer. And to Chris Curle, still writing in Naples, thank you for the question, forty-five years ago, that I am, in some sense, still answering.
GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.
Bonus- I turned many of the photos of that era in to songs. Here is the YouTube Play List.
