I had not realized how fervently Toronto is a hockey city. The air here was electric with hope for the beloved, hapless Leafs. The dismay following their elimination from the playoffs was palpable. Lord Stanley’s cup will grace another city’s parade.
But time is a great (actually, the only) grief counsellor. So I guess it’s both safe and tactful, from my perch in this city of cruelly procrastinated dreams, to speak of Don Cherry, arbiter elegantiarum of Hockey Night in Canada, sage of Coach’s Corner and straight man for Ron MacLean. He is much in the news; there is talk that his days as the iconic resident of Coach’s Corner may be coming to an end. He is also, I gather, by some weird extension of the Canadian bilingualism statutes, under some sort of review. The Commissioner of Official Languages is offering her scrutiny to some of Mr. Cherry’s obiter dicta.
A strange thing, for a language commissioner to be analyzing the analyzer of Coach’s Corner. I’m not sure what business the nation’s bilingualism monitor has with the Plato of the playoffs. Whatever Don Cherry—or his faithful dog Blue, for that matter—may be doing, they are not unravelling the two-languages concept.
Parliament, even in its most liberated or unhinged deliberations, did not contemplate the commissioner’s office evolving into a freelance inquisition for the furious beadles of political correctness. If this nation is in jeopardy of fracturing, look not to Coach’s Corner. Try the sponsorship program.
But it is neither of these matters that has brought the familiar image of the natty, high-collared Homer of hockey onto the front pages and television screens of the country. It is, rather, an active courtship from the newly minted Conservative Party to enroll Mr. Cherry as one of its candidates. I would like to see him in Ottawa in a three-way faceoff against Richard Mahoney and the resuscitated Ed Broadbent. The inevitable candidates’ debate would earn higher ratings than the Olympics, and certainly more drama.
But it cannot be. First, because Mr. Cherry has been reported as saying that he has been too long with hockey—I’m paraphrasing here—to dwindle into politics. I agree with him. From Coach’s Corner to Question Period would be a subtraction of the great man’s zest and energy, and a brutal contraction of his public influence.
Nor, should the Conservatives win, does the thought of Don Cherry at the cabinet table, trying to refashion Stephen Harper into a reasonable facsimile of Ron MacLean, offer the mind any peace. In any case, politics is a tepid stew of compromise and euphemism, a nest of affectation and posturing—all genetic antimatter to His Outspokenness.
No, I applaud the Conservatives for their nerve and originality, and Stephen Harper for being man enough to contemplate his own eclipse, which would have been inevitable should Mr. Cherry have yielded to the party’s entreaty.
I think the time is ripe for a different thought, not original with me, though I have brought it up before.
The co-governor generalship of Their Excellencies Adrienne Clarkson and John Ralston Saul is moving to its flashy close. An eager and anxious nation awaits a worthy successor. These are large, well-heeled and splendidly itinerant shoes to fill.
Well, Don Cherry is the obvious, the blatant, choice. It was said of Diana, that most melancholy of Cinderella-celebrities, that she was the people’s princess. I do not think of Mr. Cherry as a princess, but he is the people’s governor general.
The Clarkson-Ralston Saul era has left its high-toned and circumpolar imprint. We have had a governor general ship of lofty (and, let us whisper it, bloodless) pretension, a harvest time for the canapé-and-string-quartet set. It has been a Chardonnay era at Rideau Hall. It’s time for some beer.
Being as he already is the impresario and master of ceremonies of the national ritual—hockey—Mr. Cherry already carries on his shoulders the mass fealty of this hockey-cherishing country. In every living room and den, in every pool hall and bar, at every checkout counter, in Tim Hortons and at Canadian Tire, Grapes—such is the affectionate diminutive of this man—is the toast of every Canadian heart.
I think he would bring to the office of governor general a kind of profile that has hitherto been only dreamed of, and a popularity not contingent on luring the country’s better novelists and musicians to high tea or the annual garden party. Governor General Don Cherry. It has quite a ring to it. The Conservatives’ loss will be the country’s gain.
Should this come to pass, I have only one wish: to be present when the Swedish ambassador presents his or her credentials.
I see now, more than four years after writing this homage (as the French foppishly put it—to borrow from an old comedy album), that my hopes of seeing Grapes as our GG are dim indeed. How dim? They have yet to so much as give Mr. Cherry an Order of Merit pin. A country that does not include Don Cherry on its roll of honour doesn’t have a roll of honour.
You are a very rich and powerful business person, a bit of a recluse, or with a severe distaste for publicity and an allergy to journalists. You hear Peter C. Newman wants to interview you, and the very notion is repellent. What’s the best course of action?
Well, if you’ve had the chance to read Here Be Dragons, Mr. Newman’s crowded and compelling memoir, the correct, least painful, way out of this quandary is simple. Surrender. Phone him up, right away, and get it over with.
Because if Mr. Newman really wants to interview you, you may be as secretive as a hermit, as elusive as a second-storey man, as disdainful of the press as, well, Conrad Black, but you are going to be interviewed.
He is best known in this country as the Boswell of the A-list corporate overachievers. The four volumes of The Canadian Establishment constitute the Debrett’s of Canada’s entrepreneurs. They constitute, as well, the first, and only, account of the sometimes shadowy, sometimes flamboyant people who own the big companies, live in the big mansions and exercise—by right of the power that large piles of money bestows, and the ego that usually attends the possession of both the piles and power—substantial dominion over the rest of us.
When Mr. Newman set his mind to sketching this set, his first problem was the most basic one: access. The majority of the wealthy and mighty in this country—especially at the time of Mr. Newman’s self-assignment—were not (thank God) in the Donald Trump mould. Not, in other words, walking publicity sponges, puerile show-offs and addicts of the dim and dubious pleasure of seeing their names in print or their haughty, smug faces on TV. Most were (the term is seen less frequently of late) WASPs. Reticence and hauteur characterized the majority.
It is one of the delights of Here Be Dragons to watch Mr. Newman stalk, seduce, extort, trick and beguile those who had set their teeth against having anything to do with him. The greatest journalistic skill is not the interview; it is getting the interview. I’ve known a few journalists who were more than normally resourceful in coaxing the reluctant to the studio couch or the probing microphone, but Mr. Newman’s artfulness and determination are all his own. He is a hedgehog with the cunning of a fox.
Here Be Dragons is the large book of a full life. The chronicler of others comes to the tale of himself. Ever since his flight from Europe at the age of eleven with his parents, from a beach at Biarritz in the early days of the Second World War, Mr. Newman, as he writes in a prologue, “was charged with a sense of purpose. I would search for security and stability, try to find safe haven in causes to follow and heroes to worship. By enlisting myself in the services of worthy men (and later women) who I could believe in, I would never feel so vulnerable or threatened again.”
This book is the grand narrative of that search, and in one dimension of the country, ours, in which it was mainly undertaken, and in another the story of himself, the busy, sometimes turbulent professional, of the personal transit of a driven, talented, eager and alert human being. There’s not a headline personality in Canada that Mr. Newman’s near-half-century career in journalism hasn’t encountered and mapped. Here Be Dragons is a very lively piece of social and political history. Mr. Newman is a one-man journalistic Niagara (twenty-two books, two million sold—and counting). He has learned this country through the people he has studied; studying himself studying them, he has drawn a thorough portrait of us both.
His signature—apart from the trademark headgear—is the monumental X-ray of our rich and mighty, the early Canadian Establishment. They are the Dragons of the current title, the remote unknown eminences behind or beyond the landscape of Canadian journalism—unknown, that is, until Newman appointed himself their naturalist.
The powerful can be shy. They must be courted to reveal themselves. The story of how he came to lure the reticent rich of the Canadian elite to his journalistic laboratory is not the smallest of this book’s many pleasures. For example, he won the keystone interview for The Canadian Establishment, with John Angus (Bud) McDougald, by haunting the company of everyone who knew him, and floating to them wild and wilful misapprehensions of Mr. McDougald’s financial worth and business dealings. Everywhere Mr. McDougald went, he was hearing of this “journalist” with the crazy estimations of his worth and practice. It took Mr. Newman the best part of a year to win it, but an invitation to Mr. McDougald’s Green Pines estate was finally forthcoming. Mr. McDougald had figured out “the trick,” but admired the guts behind it.
Mr. Newman’s writing had its serious intent. It was not, nor was it ever meant to be, just gossip. He was propelled by a thesis: “I would document my theory that most of our destinies were governed by a shadowy group of financial manipulators I called The Canadian Establishment. I would define and detail their origins, interconnections, rivalries, prejudices, values, strengths, mercenary motives and operational codes. This would not be a bloodless audit of their common strains—this would be a journalist’s exposé of who they were, what they did, and how they got away with it.”
Not quite Gibbon recalling the origin of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (“musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”), but there is something of a symmetry of intent here, in the sense of scope and mission, however dissimilar the canvas. Our Caligulas are smaller.
Mr. Newman seems to have come upon his distinct terrain early on. After a stint on The Financial Post in Toronto and Montreal, he got work at Maclean’s in its glory days. His colleagues included Peter Gzowski and Christina McCall (his soon-to-be second wife); Pierre Berton was a senior editor, and celebrated editor Ralph Allen guided the whole rich crew. It was then that he produced his first book, a dozen profiles of prominent businessmen, Flames of Power, published on his twenty-ninth birthday.
A handful of zesty reviews, including one in The Wall Street Journal, rocketed sales and confirmed him in what turned out to be his vocation: sketching the personalities, aspirations and connections of this country’s moneyed elite. He found he loved writing. And he learned he loved success in writing even more.
“Success turns a writer into a praise addict… . It becomes a drug, terminally unsettling to mental balance, a price I would willingly pay for the rest of my life.”
A comment from one of the luminaries profiled in Flames of Power, E.P. Taylor, breathed the note of patterned ambivalence with which Mr. Newman’s subjects came to regard him: “Well, we all know Newman is a goddammed Communist, but I’m not taking him off my Christmas card list yet.”
He would rise to the editorship of Maclean’s, and there would be many mighty detours from his dedicated trolling of the guarded waters of Canadian capitalism’s master sharks. Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years, his second book, was the one that made him. It was a pioneering piece of political journalism. It went for the guts and flavour of politics, spoken in a candour and detail that have become so commonplace it is difficult to see how original and daring they then were. It was also, typically, a monster of research and patient assembly. A thousand interviews, frequent meetings with real insiders, seventeen rewrites, ten galley proofs, and the close, creative oversight of Christina McCall went into its making. Mr. Newman doesn’t produce careless books.
Renegade in Power was a publishing home run. John Diefenbaker kept six copies, one annotated on every page, while swearing he had never read it. That he resented it profoundly is understatement’s understatement. In the Diefenbaker Centre at the University of Saskatchewan is a note, in the Chief’s own hand, the kindest sentence of which reads, “He [Newman] is the literary scavenger of the trash baskets on Parliament Hill.”
Newman sets a rich board, but for many I predict the crowning soufflé will be the chapter on Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. If the subtitle of Newman’s memoir—Telling Tales of People, Passion and Power—has to earn its keep, the chapter-essay on the Blacks will more than do it.
Mr. Newman has a unique purchase on this great fable of our time. He claims, not without daring, to have “invented” Conrad Black. I suspect the Lord of Crossharbour assiduously asserts that the patent on the great miracle of himself is his and his alone. But Mr. Newman, as Maclean’s editor and as the earliest biographer of Lord Black, was one of the first amplifiers of the Black persona and had singular access at the initial stages of Lord Black’s acceleration into fame, fortune and folly.
Mr. Newman’s account is superior to others because he is neither clinically neutral (a rare stance in accounts of The Conrad) nor dripping with glee (a much more crowded assembly) over Lord Black’s current miseries and mischiefs. In the early stages of the now-familiar rise, Mr. Newman saw much in Lord Black to admire—the potential to shatter the conventionalities of the dull Canadian business world, intellect in tandem with aspiration. This threads his account with something close to anger that Lord Black turned out to be just another acquisitive egomaniac, one with an absurd itch for archaic status, and distinguished only, as it turns out, by a more generous vocabulary than less-fluent compeers in the greed game—the CEO of, say, Enron.
When Mr. Newman is angry, his light touch and wicked pen take on a degree of flame and sharpness that make for wonderful writing. His thumbnail cameos approach a Muggeridgean callousness. Of Lord Black: “Conrad had turned himself into a latter day Citizen Kane. He looked like a young Orson Welles but behaved like an old William Randolph Hearst.”
Of Barbara Amiel: “Even in repose, she was always posing, playing the femme fatale in her own movie. While she kept insisting it was her mind not her body that merited attention, it was widely suspected she was Mother Nature’s little helper.”
There are many, a wicked many, more. In the caustic-asides department, Mr. Newman is one with Keats: “Load every rift with ore.”
Mr. Newman has gulped a lot of life. He has a taste for panorama, but it never overrules detail and individuality, the quirks and quiddities of each personality. This makes him an excellent diarist. He has a zeal for taking in the illuminating anecdote, and a flair for reproducing it in print.
I have remarked on the frightening industry and variousness of Mr. Newman’s career, but there must be time to remark on the writing. He is, on the evidence of this book, a very cheerful fellow. It might seem undistinguished to call Here Be Dragons a “happy” book, but it is. His observations and obiter dicta are crafted, keen and frequently funny. They save the book from the slightest shadow of tediousness and self-absorption. He is not afraid to boast of his accomplishments, personal or professional, romantic or scribal, but does so with insouciance and charm. He has enjoyed his ride, is bemusedly dazzled by his success, has savoured his talents, clearly loves writing, and values the wiles and stratagems that gave him entry where others (Hic Sunt Dracones) feared to tread.
He has a style that can work these various effects and responses. It can dispense an anecdote, sketch a character in a mini-essay, turn lyrical at moments of reflection or nostalgia, and is by turns pungent and relaxed, bare for story, barbed for impact. The many, many books, the editorships and articles, have sharpened a considerable talent. He has the instinct of a gossip wedded to the mind of a true chronicler: one who sees the arc of an age through the multitude of its particulars and personalities.
And, finally, he writes against the profound echo of what, as a child, he glimpsed and his parents felt and fled: the horror of the Second World War, and the catastrophe of the Holocaust. I have said he is cheerful, and my guess is that this is the cheerfulness of someone who has seen all that is the worst of us, felt some of it in his own Jewish legacy from those dark times, and determined there were only two faces with which to stare back at the world: an angry one or a determinedly embracing one.
He chose the latter, obviously. He is both a student of the world and—in one of his own terms—a jester. The world here is mainly, as I have said, ours, Canada. He has done a fine job of seeing a consequential part of it, has fashioned some of the very tools others in his trade now deploy. He has inflected the public record of this country, and he has lived a mixed, charming, various, replete life. He has known everyone who is anyone and passed on the highlights of that ranging acquaintance to his readers.
He has earned his cheerfulness. Here Be Dragons is a much more than worthy picture of ourselves, and a work of genuine wit and insight.
I hope it’s not awkward to bring this up, but the office of the governor general is a ceremonial post.
It’s useful to remember this, if for no other reason than to scatter the cloud of incense hanging over the installation of Michaëlle Jean this week. The jaded cynics of the national press corps went into full rhapsody mode, with reviews of her speech that whizzed past being merely complimentary and only halted at reverential because, I suppose, there was no higher place to go.
My Globe and Mail colleague John Ibbitson came as close to producing a swoon in print as, outside the delicate prose of the romance novelists, it is possible to do. Of Ms. Jean he wrote, “She is the becoming Canada,” a tribute made more plangent by being set off against the “old faces [and] old men” of those who hold real office in this country, one of whom—old face notwithstanding—actually appointed her.
Over at The National Post, the remorseless logician Andrew Coyne, who a few weeks back greeted the appointment of Ms. Jean with as blistering a denunciation as I can recall, started his piece with a surrender notice. “You are my Commander-in-Chief” was the least fervent whisper of his billet-doux.
All that was missing from some of the commentary was a burst of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” Lawrence Martin, in The Globe on Thursday, essentially positioned Ms. Jean, so late of two citizenships, as a new Joan of Arc of federalism.
Her arrival on the scene would topple the separatist dream, “turning the André Boisclairs of the world into ghosts.” (At the time of this writing, in October 2005, Mr. Boisclair was considered the rising star of separatism. He became leader of the Parti Québécois in 2005, but resigned in 2007 when the PQ came third in the provincial election.) Her speech, according to Mr. Martin, buried all the controversies that attended her appointment, even the one with her dressmaker. It’s a rare speech that quiets the Haberdashery Wars.
This is the kind of unleashed adulation that is normally on display only in the backyard of MuchMusic when Jessica Simpson or Shania Twain pay a visit to the teenagers, and recalls nothing in the political world so much as the ancient transports of Trudeaumania.
And, lest it be forgotten in the sunrise glow of Michaëlle Jean’s installation, every major speech she gives from now on, she will give as a figurehead. The voice will be hers. The words will be those of the prime minister who has dictated them. It is called the Speech from the Throne only in deference to the chair she occupies. Neither the chair nor its occupant bears blame for the prose.
Some of the response to our new governor general is easy to account for. She has immense and genuine charm. She is attractive and intelligent. As a good friend of mine from Newfoundland once said of another impressive woman—and this is a high compliment—“There are no flies on her, and if there are, they’re paying rent.”
Another reason is simple contrast. The real, as opposed to ceremonial, leadership of this country is woebegone and mediocre. There is something very saddening in the recollection, during the leaders’ debate in the last election, of just how many in the press and the public thought that the separatist leader Gilles Duceppe was the best performer.
Mr. Duceppe is no Cicero; that he could be thought to have outshone Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton speaks more to the dreariness of their presentations than to the sparkle of his.
The citizens of this country have a very lively and enduring suspicion that it is one of the most favoured and fortunate nations on the Earth. But they will have to stagger their brains to remember an occasion within the past twenty years or so when any of our national leaders gave some memorable and convincing articulation of why it should be considered so.
The new governor general’s speech was astonishing not in its content. In fact, in terms of one of its major themes—that the time of the “two solitudes” is past—it was seriously off-key and anachronistic. To dismiss the concept of two solitudes would have been a great line in a speech by a governor general thirty years ago. But the concept, like the phrase, is a pure museum piece.
So it wasn’t the speech itself. It was the spectacle of someone at the level of national leadership at least attempting, finally, to give voice to the worth of the country, and doing so with some confidence and conviction, that dazzled spectators and commentators alike.
In the week of David Dingwall, the year of Gomery and sponsorship, the decade of no real opposition politics, even one note of something that spoke to themes larger that “gotcha” politics, partisan frenzy and the daily horrors of Question Period took on an aura of substance and nobility by default.
Make no mistake: Her Excellency gave a good speech. But it was made so much better by all the other speeches that our real leaders have not given.
Rick Hillier is more popular than Avril Lavigne. But let’s forget popularity, General Hillier owns a far less vaporous distinction. He is probably the most respected public figure in all the country.
It’s easy to be liked when nothing’s going on, and no big deal to be respected when things are calm and easy. General Hillier’s standing with the Canadian public comes, however, from his service as the head of Canada’s military, at a time when it is actively engaged in a still unresolved conflict, suffering the inevitable losses of real combat, in a war that claims far from universal support here in Canada. He has had what is arguably the most difficult and painful job—though for a true military man being a soldier is more of a vocation—of anyone in Canada, but from one coast to the other, from the north to the south, General Rick Hillier has earned almost universal respect and admiration.
The accomplishments of his tenure have a lot to do with this. He hauled the Canadian military out of the cellar of public opinion and from the bottom of every government’s list of real priorities. Within the military and without, he refurbished its morale, bolstered its prestige. Other professions in this country are well esteemed. Soldiers are honoured.
Canada’s regard for its soldiers used to be manifested almost exclusively on Remembrance Day and other ceremonial occasions. General Hillier brought that regard to every day of the living calendar. He re-cemented the connection between the military and the Canadian public. A Canadian soldier today, therefore, man or woman, in army, navy or air force, walks a little prouder, smiles a little wider, because of that strengthened connection.
General Hillier is smart, straight and knows what he wants. He works like a dog. The modern military man has to know the battlefield and warfare, but he has to be equally skilled in politics, the media, the inside arts of Parliament Hill and the twilight combats of the bureaucracy.
General Hillier has the whole package. He is distinctly unchoked by political correctness, and he could offer master classes to politicians (and journalists, too) in the almost abandoned art of saying what you mean and meaning what you say. His deepest gift, I think, was knowing what his real job was; as he’s put it often, his first responsibility was to the men and women of Canada’s military. He said he was working for them and their families, and they believed him. It was no pose.
Which brings me to the central characteristic of our now-departing general. He inspired trust, and people, in and out of the military, genuinely looked up to him. The question his leaving might pose is why, in all the other public fields, and in politics, which is leadership, too, there are not more like him. General Hillier is as large as he is—and this is not said to his detraction—because leadership in other areas of public life is so flat, feeble and mediocre. Some politicians are said to have feared or envied him. They would have feared and envied less had they tried to be bigger themselves. We can leave that for now. This is General Hillier’s moment.
I think we can all be very pleased that we have had a public servant—for that, finally, is what a general most fundamentally is—who has elevated the service he led, and renewed the spirits and esteem of the Canadian military, and the spirit of esteem in which we hold them.
General Hillier is a rarity: a person in public service who excites distinct respect and an almost populist regard. It’s interesting that—as one might say, “of all people”—Auditor-General Sheila Fraser is another public-servant hero—not of General Hillier’s proportions, but an outstanding figure nonetheless.