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“Oh, yes, we do,” I said, ready to meet his attitude with my own.

“No, you don’t. You don’t have access to the tape,” he said adamantly.

“I just told you we do have access,” I repeated.

“What do you mean?” he exploded in a booming voice. He was enraged as he said, “That was pool tape. Pool tape is only shared
with the three networks. You know that, Wendy. We pool our resources together and that tape belongs to us.”

I nodded my head calmly, uncomfortable at his outburst. And yet, it felt satisfying to say, “Well, we got it.”

Sam would not let it go. He made a huge fuss, calling us every name under the sun. “This is the lowest thing I’ve ever seen
in the history of the news business,” he said. “How can CNN survive and hold its head up when it has shamed itself beyond
recognition?”

True, Sam had a penchant for drama, but maybe he felt ownership rights since he had been the first person to report the shooting.
He continued to question me, saying, “Now wait just a minute here. I want to know right now how you got that tape, because
you shouldn’t have it.”

“The pool gave it to us,” I said.

“No, that didn’t happen,” he said. “Nobody in the pool would ever give it to you.”

He continued to glare at me as I asked our waiter to bring a phone to the table so I could call Scott Willis at my network.
“Scott,” I said, “I’m here with Sam and he wants to know how we got the pool tape.”

Willis said something about the tape being given to us. When I repeated it to Sam, he stood up, outraged. “That did not happen,”
he repeated.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m not sure how we got the tape, but Sam, you’re going to get me fired if you keep going on like this.”

“It isn’t your fault, Wendy, but you should never have had
access to that tape. It’s a White House tape” (meaning that only he and the other two networks had the right to use it). In
the next moment Sam got up and left the restaurant abruptly, taking gigantic strides out the door and heading straight over
to the ABC bureau in Washington. He got on the phone to ABC in New York and demanded to speak to Roone Arledge, then chairman.

“Roone,” Sam said, “you might want to find out whose tape CNN used during the shooting coverage.”

Roone sent a telegram to Ted Turner, asking him if he had used the White House pool tape. But if he thought he might be successful
in intimidating Ted Turner, he was dead wrong. The response was typical Ted Turner as he wrote back, “Hell, yeah, we used
that tape. In fact, we’re suing the White House right now to be part of the pool. We asked and you said no, but we have every
right to the tape and to be part of the pool.”

We rolled that infamous tape in Atlanta and used it over and over again. I am proud to say that as much as Sam was fuming,
I was one of the people in a small group who prompted Ted Turner to sue the White House for CNN to become bona fide members
of the White House press corps and, therefore, a member of the pool. We won the suit, much to the despair of the other networks.
Ted had proven that he was not going away, so they might as well make room for us. From the day we won the lawsuit and joined
the pool, our access and ability to report the news in a timely fashion escalated, thanks to Ted who knew what he was about
and was not afraid to claim his place.

Now there would be four networks instead of three in the pool, and the rotation would give each network access every fourth
day instead of every third. No wonder Sam and the others were upset. They didn’t need any more competition, but we were here
to stay.

It took the president thirteen days in the hospital to recover
from the lung puncture as his medical team administered intravenous fluids, oxygen, tetanus toxoid, and chest tubes.

He later described that night on our show on January 10, 1991:

REAGAN:
I didn’t know I was shot. I heard a noise when we came out of the hotel and headed for the limousine, and I heard some noise,
and I thought it was firecrackers. And the next thing I knew, one of the Secret Service agents behind me just seized me here
by the waist and plunged me headfirst into the limo.

I landed on the seat, and the seat divider was down, and then he dived in on top of me, which is part of their procedure to
make sure that I’m covered. As it turned out later, the shot that got me careened off the side of the limousine and hit me
while I was diving into the car. And it hit me back here, under the arm, and then hit a rib, and that’s what caused extreme
pain, and then it tumbled and turned—instead of edgewise, it went tumbling down to within an inch of my heart.

But when I got in the car, I hadn’t felt anything. He landed on top of me, and then the pain, which now I know came from the
bullet hitting that rib, that terrific pain, and I said: “Jerry, get off, I think you have broken a rib of mine.” And he got
off very quickly. And just then, I coughed. And I had a handful of bright, red, frothy blood. So I said: “Evidently, the broken
rib has pierced the lung.” He simply turned and said, “George Washington Hospital,” and we were on our way.

When First Lady Nancy Reagan arrived in the emergency room after being informed that her husband had been shot, Reagan famously
remarked to her, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” He borrowed that line from boxer Jack Dempsey, who said
that to his wife when his opponent Gene Tunney knocked him out.

Jim Brady lived but was not as lucky as Reagan since he was permanently disabled. Hinckley was found “not guilty by reason
of insanity” and lives in a psychiatric facility, St. Elizabeths, to this day, while they are allowing him extended visits
with his mother.

As for Sam, he wrote a book some years later, in 1987, called
Hold On, Mr. President
, and I was surprised to see that he was still angry about the pool tape. The following is an excerpt:

I got to the Hilton in time to hear Reagan’s speech. We had two camera crews there, one set up on a tripod to photograph the
President head-on, a second to roam through the ballroom getting reaction shots to use in editing the report. The second cameraman
was Hank Brown, his partner carrying the videotape machine, Harry Weldon. I told Brown that when Reagan finished, I wanted
him to stay on until the President left the room. I told him I would go upstairs and save a spot for him on the rope line
outside to get Reagan’s departure from the hotel. “Get up there as fast as you can,” I said, “but I want the pictures of the
President leaving the room, and if you don’t make it outside in time, I’ll work around that.” Brown got outside and into place
on the rope line about thirty seconds before Reagan appeared.

I have often thought what might have happened to my career if he hadn’t made it. Later, when the furious postmortems would
have been conducted as to why ABC News had none of its own pictures of the assassination attempt, Brown would have to say
it was because I had told him to linger downstairs. Of course, Cable News Network had none of its own pictures that day (it
hadn’t scheduled a camera crew
outside), but it didn’t stop CNN; it just “lifted” ours off the air and used them as its own. No one at ABC knew it until
a week later when a CNN producer friend of mine, Wendy Walker, told me how nice she thought it was for ABC to give permission
for them to use our tape. Permission, hell. Walker wasn’t aware of it but it was pure theft.

Like it or not, we had become a permanent member of the pool and our status was rising steadily. All thanks to Ted, who thought
bigger than anyone else dared.

THINK BIGGER THAN BIG

When I come up with an idea and I need courage and inspiration, I think of Ted Turner as the archetype for thinking big. Imagine
the mind of someone who makes a determination that what the world needs most is a network that will provide the news twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. Ted thought so big, so outside the box, that today, none of us could begin to imagine a world
without being able to turn on the news at any time of night or day. And he didn’t care what anyone else thought. In fact,
Ted was ridiculed, marginalized, and made fun of constantly while he allowed his mind to create a network so large and all-encompassing,
it would become a household word.

This kind of man doesn’t care what anybody else thinks and is guided by his ability to think bigger than anyone else. And
so, it made perfect sense that once Ted had created his idea of CNN and actually
implemented it, he was fully prepared to sue the White House to be allowed in as part of the pool. While everyone was ridiculing
him, he was busy creating a massive empire, based solely on what he had envisioned, which existed nowhere else in the world.

Did you know that one of our most common household items, the Post-it, was invented twice? The first man who thought of it,
Spencer Silver, felt it was not useful because it didn’t have enough glue, and he let it go. Then, some years later, a forward-thinking
man named Art Fry found a way to utilize Silver’s invention to locate certain passages in his church hymnal. In the end, these
two mad scientists got together and became wealthy for creating something no one else believed in.

There are people all throughout history who took risks and thought bigger than big.

•   Think about Ronald Reagan, an actor who became president.

•   Computer genius and billionaire Bill Gates said, “The value of having everybody get the complete picture and trusting each
person with it far outweighs the risk involved.”

•   President Barack Obama said, “It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize
your true potential. And if we’re willing to share the risks and the rewards this new century offers, it will be a victory
for each of you, and for every American.”

•   Author T. S. Eliot said, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

W
hen it came to pulling off TV coverage of summits that involved hundreds of crew, producers, and reporters, no one person
could ever take credit for anything that happened. It was a group effort with so many twists, and so many fires that needed
be put out, that it took all of us to untangle the confusions and extinguish the proverbial flames. And when a summit was
over, I couldn’t believe we had gotten through it!

At the 1987 NATO summit in Berlin with the Soviets, for example, I recall the anticipation of waiting for Reagan’s speech
at the Berlin Wall. CNN White House correspondent Charles Bierbauer was in a prime stand-up position on June 12, where he
could see everything as it occurred. Charles, incidentally, was a perfect choice because he had lived in Germany for five
years, working for CNN. An avid student of the Cold War, he was on the platform in front of the Berlin Wall as the anticipation
for Reagan’s speech escalated.

Frank Sesno, also a CNN White House correspondent, was doing the pool and he and I were in the makeshift control
room. We had gotten an advance copy of Reagan’s speech and there was a line that made all of us cringe. “I don’t know about
him asking Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall,” Frank said. “It’s so in your face that it could be interpreted as a cynical
cheap shot. I don’t know how people are going to take this.”

We weren’t the only ones who felt that way. We didn’t know at the time that Reagan had just finished a raging debate with
the State Department and his aides who also advised him to take out the provocative line. In fact, they came as close to insisting
as they could manage, but Reagan would not budge.

That turned out to be a golden decision on his part since his appeal to the Soviet leader, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this
wall,” would eventually become the definitive signature line of his eight-year presidency. A signature line stays with a president
for better or worse, and some other presidents have not been so lucky. Think about George H. W. Bush, whose signature line
was, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Or Bill Clinton, whose unfortunate signature line was, “I did not have sex with that woman.”

We sat there in the control room on the fourth floor of a building that overlooked the Brandenburg Gate. It was really creepy
to peer over the wall from where we sat and gaze down at what looked like a prison camp. During the pre-advance trip, Gary
Foster, head of Reagan’s press advance office, and I had been standing at the gate, discussing the staging for the talk to
come, when I realized that Reagan would not be facing the wall. That meant his back would face East Berlin. Amid his Secret
Service detail who were milling around and working out security arrangements, I said a little too loudly to Gary, “Aren’t
they afraid he could get shot from East Berlin?”

Gary literally put his hand over my mouth. He was mortified that someone from security would make us leave.

Now, with his back to the gate, President Reagan delivered his highly dramatic appeal:

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can
only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance
dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!