This Media Life

The Altar of Walter

But let me give another scenario—one that credits Walter with a little more Walterness.

Because he is someone with unlimited ambition, and because he is a corporate loyalist, he has always followed the ever-morphing identity of his company. If Time Inc. had somehow stayed Time Inc., Walter, I am sure, would have become, in fact, a greater Henry Grunwald than Henry Grunwald. But when the company adopted this other vision—platforms, pipes, technology—Walter was there. An ambitious person accepts the rules of the game—or, if not the rules, at least accepts the game. What’s more, this is Walter’s métier: a greater intellectual construct, more and more powerful people, ever-more complex systems of rationalizations. Why would he want to resist it?

He understood that the magazine business, journalism, and, in the end, even the thirty-fourth floor were limiting him.

So television—an unavoidable step.

In some sense, I think Walter knew he would fail, or at least not succeed, at the CNN job. I’m sure he understood that the reason he got the job was that everybody else knew there was almost no chance of success. That the job fell to him because the geniuses at AOL Time Warner had gotten rid of everyone at CNN who had theretofore made it a success.

That left Walter reporting to WB auteur Jamie Kellner (surely not Walter’s idea of a genius), working in Atlanta (even though there is no more Manhattan creature than New Orleans–born Walter), competing with Fox (as unseemly a competition as he has ever been in), and hiring Connie Chung (who Walter can’t have thought was anything other than ridiculous).

Still. If you understand, as Walter does, that the world—our world—has changed irrevocably (for better or worse), that journalism (or being a journalist) is a sidelined occupation, that, if you want to be a contender, you have to break through to the other side of the diversified media-and-entertainment business, you do what Walter did.

But Walter, unlike so many others he has had to suffer recently, is no fool. If he got out of new media because it was doomed, and got out of magazines because they were in trouble, and got out of journalism itself because it was so over with, he was, likewise, getting out of CNN now (and just before a war, at that) because it was hopeless, and, as the ultimate brush-off, out of AOL Time Warner because there was just no longer any advantage in being associated with it.

Trust me, if Walter is going, AOL Time Warner is gone.

On the one hand, you have the structure of the media business caving in, like colonial rule, or communism, or an aging monarchy. But on the other hand, you have the continuing career moves of some of the greatest careerists in history: The week Walter announced he was leaving CNN, his good friend and Bronxville neighbor Andy Lack announced he was leaving the presidency of NBC to run Sony Music.

So take note: Walter, by taking over the Aspen Institute (where, as it happens, Jerry Levin sits on the board), is getting out of the media business.

The well-endowed Aspen Institute, a think tank for liberal internationalists, which has been in minor eclipse, will now rise to great new prominence by virtue of Walter’s publicity talents.

It will provide Walter, in Washington and New York (rather than actually in Aspen, where the institute merely maintains a bucolic meeting place), with a platform from which to say startlingly reasonable and immensely intelligent things (I have been in many meetings with Walter, and he is somehow always the most reasonable and intelligent person in the meeting) about the unreasonable state of the world. And, of course, he will get great press.

He will host innumerable cocktail parties—which are, in many ways, his real medium.

He will find a solvable conflict and broker at the Aspen retreat a big peace in the world (in the meetings that Walter runs, everyone leaves agreeing with Walter—and believing he agrees with them).

And when the Democrats emerge from what are shaping up to be their long wilderness years, there will be, I promise you, one inevitable secretary of State.

Walter.