Ted Turner Talks Politics, Fidel Castro and Jane Fonda With O'Reilly
Wednesday, December 10, 2008 
[excerpt]
O'REILLY: Fidel Castro, do you admire the man?
TURNER: Yes.
O'REILLY: Now he has murdered people. He's imprisoned people. There are political prisoners now. He won't let his people use the Internet. Nobody can use that. And you admire the guy?
TURNER: Well, I admire certain things about him. He's trained a lot of doctors, and they've got one of the best educational systems in the developing world. And you know, he's still popular with a lot of people down there. He's unpopular…
O'REILLY: But he's a killer. He's a killer. He's a guy who…
TURNER: But that has never, to my knowledge, that's never been proven. I mean…
O'REILLY: He's executed political prisoners. I mean, he enslaves people who don't see it the way he sees it. Come on. He's a dictatorship. If you admire him, then why wouldn't you admire Mussolini? I mean, what's the difference? Mussolini put people back to work. There was order. The educational system was fine. See, I'm not getting this. This is what I don't understand about it.
TURNER: Well, OK, well, if you don't see the difference between Castro and Mussolini, you know, then you know, I likened some aspects of FOX News to the Nazis, so, I mean, you know, it works both ways.
O'REILLY: But you just admitted to me that that wasn't a very good thing to do and wasn't accurate.
TURNER: Hey, listen, I didn't say I wanted to live in Cuba. And I didn't say that I was buddy buddies with Fidel Castro. I just said that I respected certain things that he's done.
O'REILLY: All right, well…
TURNER: What's wrong with that?
O'REILLY: Well, you said respect the man. And I just don't — I can't possibly see how you could do that, but…
TURNER: Of course not.
O'REILLY: Now I asked this question through one of my producers to Ms. Fonda. And I'm going to ask it to you because by reading your book, it struck me that the Vietnam experience changed you. I'm saying to myself, you know, Turner comes into the Vietnam era, conservative guy, pretty much traditional guy, it changes him.
TURNER: Yes.
O'REILLY: It changes him. And now he's a very liberal guy. So I asked Ms. Fonda, didn't it ever bother you that after all your activism and getting America out of Vietnam, which it subsequently did in the mid '70s, that 3 million human beings were slaughtered by the people that you were lionizing, the North Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge Communists who wouldn't have been slaughtered if we stayed. And their skulls were stacked on top of each other. And I never heard from you, Jane Fonda. And I never heard a word from Ted Turner about that. And that, to me, is a good question.
TURNER: You've got me. I didn't really think about it. You know, it didn't make the news very much.
O'REILLY: No, it didn't. And you had a vehicle that you could have had — the revisionist history is what I'm worried about here. I think America's a noble nation. I think we've made mistakes. I think we tried to have freedom in Vietnam for the South Vietnamese. Unfortunately, the government was corrupt. I don't think that was a venal, terrible thing to do. I think we were trying to protect people there.