WHAT WAS MOST ENJOYABLE about the Telegraph was not the stiff cardboard invitations to almost every important social, cultural, and political event in London and certainly not the grand state dinners. It was being at least a presence in the great debates over the foreign policy issues of our time. According to U.K. political correctness, I often brought the Telegraph out on the wrong side of those debates. I didn’t think so, but we played a part in them. I had access to Cabinet ministers and historians, academics from the best British universities, and thinkers from that extraordinary seam of British intellectual life. The Telegraph’s magic opened doors in Europe and even some in North America.
It wasn’t all pleasant, and occasionally there were conflicts and rows, such as the fracas mentioned earlier over Max Hastings’s firing of Carol Thatcher (whose mother was a great and friendly prime minister with a parliamentary majority of over 100), but also involving many other writers. The Sunday Telegraph managed to libel Muammar Gadhafi’s son as a terrorist, and the uncommonly difficult and gigantic Scots writer Bruce Anderson, a sidekick of Perry Worsthorne and Frank Johnson, referred to the Attorney General of Ireland, Mr. Murray, as “a shifty unshaven fellow, who would try to sell a gypsy a three-legged horse.” Perry Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, had found a charming lawyer who did not believe in the tort of libel, and some of these liberties were unfortunately expensive. I never penalized the offending reporters.
I was always attracted by the traditional newspaper publisher’s influence on public affairs, when cautiously exercised, but I was always peering over my shoulder at the electronic media, looking at the corporate mirror for any potential financial vulnerabilities, and staring furtively about at the more redoubtable of our competitors, Rupert Murdoch and Vere Rothermere. Most political influence, like supposed influence on one’s journalists or even children, and like, I later discovered, instructions to counsel, was illusory or fleeting. But even the false sensation of importance was bracing.
A good part of my determination to keep the Daily Telegraph upmarket was not only because I was certain this was the best way to ensure its viability, but because I believed in its power to influence positively to some extent the serious political arguments of the time. This was a dangerous addiction, as I kept telling Barbara when contemplating whether we had reached the right time from a shareholder’s point of view to sell the newspaper.
There were many issues that ignited firestorms at the paper. The most heated moments at editorial conferences were over the Irish Question. Northern Ireland was the United Kingdom’s longest-festering domestic problem – an issue of great matter to a swathe of the British and almost no matter to anyone else, except some Irish Americans, such as the Kennedys, whose take on the issues was very tribal. Much blood had been shed over whether Northern Ireland could secede from the U.K. On this matter as on the question of integrating into Europe, Max Hastings and Charles Moore were in direct opposition to each other. The Sunday Telegraph’s Moore was against any compromise. Although he is himself a Roman Catholic convert, Charles strongly identifies with the Ulster Protestants, to the point where he almost ran as an independent Unionist MP in a Northern Ireland by-election. I have always found it difficult to understand the appeal of a political movement whose raison d’être is to stage provocative and insulting marches through the residential neighbourhoods of other religious groups. This is perverse even by Irish standards. The Daily’s Hastings wanted to pull British troops out, oblivious of the requirements of British sovereignty and the fate of the abandoned Ulster Unionists’ majority.
Bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army had gone off in London streets and shops and then finally in 1996 at Canary Wharf, where our newspaper offices were housed. The bomb, intended primarily for our paper though other papers and large financial firms were also housed there, took the roof off the Guardian’s printing plant, and so we printed their next day’s edition. Several people died, including my newsagent, a pleasant East Indian who was stationed directly in front of our offices. As the Telegraph had substantial influence in Northern Ireland, Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened with me when he structured the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 to prevent Moore from endorsing a no-vote. Our editorial of support, a bland and tepid one at that, was wrung from the leader conference only by my threat to write the editorial myself – always a means of setting a fire under the editor’s chair. I didn’t mention the prime minister but said that we were not going to ally ourselves with the Sinn Fein terrorists and the Paisleyite anti-papist bigots in opposing an arrangement that, whatever its limitations, was supported by all respectable elements involved, including the British and Irish governments and parliaments. The Telegraph was not decisive in the referendum and chiefly spared itself needless embarrassment.
IF THE IRISH QUESTION – rather like the Quebec Question in Canada – was of little interest and matter to anyone but the British and some Irish Americans, the European Question was of tremendous importance to America but never to America’s public, press, or political elites. The European Union (EU), headquartered in massive splendour in Brussels, is a huge, overbearing, and petulant organization. From 1996 to 2009, the EU commissioners have struggled to get their equally massive constitution (forty times longer than the American Constitution) ratified by member countries. Joining up to the EU is in effect resigning one’s own national sovereignty. For America, it would be equivalent to Congress turning over most of its serious powers to some multinational institution of the Organization of American States who would in the name of unity “harmonize” its members’ domestic, monetary, and foreign policies. Initially, it was thought all EU members would hold a referendum on the new constitution. When the French and Dutch referendums resulted in a “no” vote, Germany and the United Kingdom put their referendums on hold. The EU approach is that of an admirer turned stalker: Brussels never takes “no” for an answer. Should a referendum go against its constitution, the EU arranges either for a second vote (Ireland) or for the parliaments of the various countries to vote “yes” without the direct consent of the electorate. People cherish their national institutions, and while, to differing degrees, they may want to be part of this union – and its grants, trade policies, subsidies, and transfer payments – electorates tend to dislike giving away their sovereignty. The parlous financial situation is gradually weakening the EU, a situation not helped by the inclusion of countries from Central and Eastern Europe with tottering economies, nor by the propensity of the EU to leap on every costly passing bandwagon, such as the unachievable 20 per cent reduction in carbon emissions, despite unconvincing evidence connecting them to global warming, which it is not clear is actually occurring.
As it is now, the EU is an attempt to set up a challenge to American power by a continent that still wants America to solve its problems. For some reason, no U.S. administration has really grasped this, though Nixon and Reagan and Bush Jr. all expressed reservations (to me) about the motives of the Euro-integrationists. Domestically, it is an attempt to establish permanently a body of regulators (in Brussels) composed of the most enthusiastic Euro-joiners among the politicians and civil servants of the member countries and turn absolutely everyone else, including the political classes of each European country, into the regulated, following the rules of some polite version of syndicalism. The Daily Telegraph had been, with The Times, the Mail, and the Sun, the leading bulwark against Britain being subsumed into a federal Europe, in spite of the enthusiasm of Max Hastings for signing up.
Western Europe is a tired, socialistic continent, without the energy even to reproduce biologically, almost incapable of private-sector job creation, and reduced in strategic terms to forming a European Union rapid deployment force that was, in fact, for some years nothing more than parade ground units ready to march down the main boulevards of the European capitals on their national days and often even relying on American air transport to get them there. Nine of the ten most aged populations in the world are in Western Europe. In Italy, only three people in ten work, at least officially. In fact, many retirees work in the grey market. In the 1990s, in the United States, 44 million jobs were eliminated as superfluous or inefficient and 75 million private-sector jobs were created, for 31 million net new jobs. In the European Union, outside the United Kingdom, a net 5 million jobs were created in the same decade, all in the public sector. The paradox of this has been that the Europeans do not see that American power, which they resent, maintains their ability to be weak, to have shrunken defence budgets, a relatively stagnant economy, and a general attitude of righteous lassitude.
Cardinal Carter had me to dinner with the visiting Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in 1990 at his home. Only the three of us and Cardinal Carter’s chancellor were present. Cardinal Ratzinger lamented “the slow suicide of Europe:” its population was aging and shrinking, and the unborn were being partly replaced with unassimilable immigrants. He thought that Europe would awaken from its torpor, but that there were difficult days ahead. Like other cardinals of my acquaintance (including our host), he was a far-sighted judge of important secular matters.
IT WASN’T EASY TO MAKE these strategic points in serious circles in the United States. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was my great ally in Washington, urging that the U.S. compete with Europe for intimacy with Britain, invite the U.K. into the North American Free Trade Area, and not just wave Britain into the arms of the Franco-Germans. We testified together at the U.S. International Commerce Commission in 2002 that the United Kingdom should be invited to join the renamed and generally expanded North American Free Trade Area.
The United States, through much of the Cold War and for a time after, tried to propel Britain by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back into Europe, understandably, to make better Cold Warriors of the Europeans. By sheer momentum, the U.S. continued to advocate this policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, oblivious of the fact that this was not in the U.S. national interest. The well-regarded U.S. ambassador in London, Raymond Seitz (who became a Telegraph plc director when he retired and will, unfortunately, re-enter this narrative), told me Britain should join Europe “to keep German troops out of Paris.” I suggested he was over-reacting.
As with Ireland, I found myself refereeing internecine disputes between our editors. Max thought Europe essentially a good thing to be furthered, so long as it didn’t lead to higher taxes or more belligerent trade unions. Max was not very contemplative, enjoyed holidays in Italy, and was generally able to rely on his editorial entourage and his friendship with Douglas Hurd to reassure himself that the concerns of the skeptics were ill-founded. Charles feared the worst of the Brussels Euro-government and was frequently encouraged in this by Euro-spokespeople, who spewed out the thousands of insane directives purporting to regulate everything from lavatory manners in European boarding houses to the size of bananas and condoms.
The head of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, formerly France’s socialist finance minister, poured gasoline on the fire by telling British labour audiences that whatever Margaret Thatcher had taken from them, Europe would restore. Improving relations between the European nationalities is a great and admirable development, but the official agents of it are often hard to take seriously. This was well before Europe’s current problems began to hemorrhage.
THE TELEGRAPH AND ITS READERS were naturally very much involved with European politics. Germany remained the most formidable power, and through my friend George (Lord) Weidenfeld, German chancellor Helmut Kohl invited me several times to dinner with him in the Kanzlerbungalow, the quaint Bauhaus glass house on the east bank of the Rhine where the chancellor lived in Bonn.
Kohl was very preoccupied with the Battle of Verdun, where several family members died in both World Wars. From my days as a teenaged summer tour guide in and around Paris, I was able to go verbally over the ground with him, from the Douaumont Fort, then the largest in the world, where Charles de Gaulle was taken prisoner when wounded, on March 1, 1915, to the monument to André Maginot, to the Ossuary, where there are the remains of 180,000 French combat dead.
Kohl allowed that it had been one of the great frustrations of his career that he had made so little headway with Thatcher in alleviating her anti-German attitudes. (I have often thought that one of the major strategic errors of the German air war was bombing Grantham, Lincolnshire, where Margaret Thatcher was growing up. She has spoken of it angrily for more than sixty years since.)
A stroll around the forest of building cranes of Berlin induced the feelings that disquiet Helmut Kohl. There is something of the national teenager in the unfocused muscularity of great and proximate monuments of the official architecture of successive failed regimes in Germany’s tortured history, in layers like those of a tree from Prussian times to the fall of the Wall. There is great strength and attractiveness, and even occasionally charm, but also the uneasy feeling of awkwardness and lack of discernment and judgment. Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate, Bismarck’s Reichstag, soon the Hohenzollerns’ restored schloss, remnants of the Third Reich including Hitler’s sealed bunker, and Stalin’s gigantic East German embassy are all within a few hundred yards of each other. Kohl feared these lacunae and developed a policy of Euro-federalism as an antidote. I am convinced he sincerely meant “a European Germany, not a German Europe.”
Charles Moore, our foreign editor, and our Berlin correspondent and I visited Kohl’s successor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The government had moved from Bonn to Berlin. The Brobdingnagian new chancellery was not ready, so we visited Schröder in his temporary office, formerly occupied by Ulbricht and Honecker, in a Stalinist Socialist Realist building in East Berlin. With wooden floors and stained-glass windows and Spartan furniture, it looked more like the refectory of an underfunded religious order than the office of the leader of one of the world’s greatest nations. Where Kohl felt passionately the dangerous currents of German history, Schröder seemed to me a modified Bill Clinton; none of the policy wonk but all of the good-time Charlie with a twinkle in his eye.
The two issues that caused me the greatest controversy were my views on Israel and America. These issues were never a formal part of my later troubles, but the intensity of antagonism among much of the British media and chattering classes levelled against Israel and America was notable – and noted by American commentators in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. I was not on the acceptable side of the street as far as these two matters were perceived in London society, politics, or the media. When my troubles began, it was payback time, reflected in the heightened hostility of much of the U.K. press. This hostility was eagerly picked up by both the Canadian press and Murdoch’s New York Post, though neither shared the anti-Israeli sentiment. But the repetition of these damaging stories made dampening Hollinger’s corporate strife that much harder. This steady stream of stories in New York, London, and Toronto, accompanied by the most irritating photos or cartoons, contributed to a confected atmosphere of received contempt for us that grew like Topsy and held that we were crooks, and nasty self-important crooks at that. This had to be grappled with sometimes, to prevent it from becoming accepted conventional wisdom.
IT WAS ALLEGED THAT UNDER the saturnine Hebraic influence of Barbara, I was a Zionist propagandist. There is no truth to any of this. Barbara is unwaveringly proud of her Jewish heritage but not a particularly peppy Zionist, and finds the State of Israel difficult and often unreasonable. She believes that, having been established, it should not fail, and particularly not at the hands of those who would cheerfully kill all the Jews. Nor does she understand why Israel should be held accountable for a level of behaviour that no other country in the world – least of all its neighbours – must meet. I share her view and did long before we were together.
The antagonism toward Israel in the U.K. and much of Europe was and remains intense. In December 2002, we held a dinner at our home in London for then Spectator editor Boris Johnson, after his election to parliament as Michael Heseltine’s successor in Henley. The guest list came from Boris, and among those he invited was the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, whom I knew quite cordially. He was a protegé of Chirac’s and a fairly integral Gaullist in his foreign policy view – one that included championing Quebec’s independence, which he now privately acknowledged was a lost cause, and truckling to the Arabs while disparaging Israel.
Bernard maintained the customary Gaullist facade for his position by claiming to be opposed to anti-Semitism and not to be poorly disposed to the United States, except when that country was manifestly in error, which is at practically all times when it is not engaged in assisting France. He spent most of his energies, as the Quai d’Orsay has since de Gaulle’s return to office in 1958, harassing and obstructing the elaboration of American foreign policy. Bernard was rather accessible to the Arab interpretation of Middle East peace issues.
He and I were seated at the same table, and at one point he volunteered that most of the problems of the world were now the fault of “that shitty little country Israel.” I expressed some incredulity and asked in French if I had heard him correctly. He assured me that I had and repeated the same words in French, adopting “shitty” as an anglophone might adopt coup d’état or savoir faire. I mentioned the episode to Barbara, who was writing a column on the acceptability of anti-Semitism in polite society. Barbara referred to this incident and to some other social utterances of the same general tenor in her column but carefully wrote only of “the ambassador of a prominent EU country.” Other newspapers began phoning around, and Bernard’s staff unwisely put their hand up and admitted that their man was the author of the remark. The French embassy then began the casuistical process of redefining the phrase, claiming that the ambassador meant only to say that “Israel was a small but not undistinguished country.” This was enough for someone to put a sign on one of the editorial lavatory doors at the Telegraph: “A place for the Performance of Small but not Undistinguished Activities.”
A considerable furor ensued throughout Europe. Some suggested that Barbara had breached etiquette by printing remarks made at a private dinner at her home. Many were outraged at the ambassador’s inelegant and undiplomatic remarks, and many were also amazed that a prominent French ambassador would be so stupid as to confess to such comments. Bernard wrote the Telegraph a letter for publication claiming that he had said nothing of the kind. I told the editor that he should advise the ambassador that we would run the letter but would put beside it a refutation by the other people at the table, and that he might prefer something that would improve appearances somewhat. He did, and wrote a tasteful and not evidently mendacious letter that we printed without comment. I called upon him and we agreed that the incident was now closed. He was soon transferred to Algiers, far from a promotion, and unfortunately died prematurely a couple of years later.
I don’t find that anti-Semitism in Britain goes much beyond people looking down their noses at “Jew” matters and the occasional act of vandalism by Muslim thugs or non-sectarian skinheads. But there is room for a less quiescent interpretation, and those moments sometimes occurred in the pages of the Spectator. My friend Taki Theodoracopulos, one of my staunchest supporters in my recent problems, wrote a piece in early 2001 that effectively stated that the United States Air Force was commanded by the Mossad in the Israeli interest and that the Israeli Defence Forces, as a matter of blood sport, impaled and otherwise killed Palestinian youth. I came home to find Barbara in tears over the piece. She found the level of Jew-baiting in London perfectly tolerable, but to see it in one of our own publications written by a man she both liked and admired hurt her deeply.
Tears or not, the piece was too much for me. I took recourse to the standard practice in rebutting anti-Semitism since the time of Dreyfus and Zola, with a J’accuse response. I advised Boris Johnson that it was on its way, catching him on a Saturday evening on his cellphone, as he explained, at the top of the “hardest, steepest piste in Gstaad, staring into the face of death.” Shortly after the fracas with Taki, Piers Paul Read, A.N. Wilson, and William Dalrymple, three competent writers of high position and reputation in British journalism, and Charlie Glass, a former correspondent and hostage in Beirut who fell in love with his guards and captors, wrote a letter to the Spectator decrying my ownership of the Jerusalem Post and comparing the newspaper unfavourably to the Jerusalem Report, which in fact we also owned. Through leaks from their chums at the Spectator they learned of their error and tried to withdraw their letter. But I would not allow it to be withdrawn. (I had banned Dalrymple for a time from the Telegraph after he published a fictitious account of Israeli desecration of Christian religious sites.) The fierce firefight that bubbled on in the pages of the Spectator was a moderately entertaining read.
THE OSLO ACCORDS IN 1994 opened up the fissures within our newspapers, especially the Jerusalem Post, over the Mid-East peace process. The accords committed Israel to handing over Gaza and, in sequence, most of the West Bank, and committed the Palestinians to ending terrorism, assisting the Israelis in rounding up designated terrorists, expunging the anti-Israel clauses from the Palestine National Charter, and maintaining a police force of twenty-eight thousand lightly armed officers. Yasser Arafat never honoured any of this. Instead, he developed a heavily armed, quasi-military police force of forty thousand, provided no co-operation at all in combating terrorism, and unctuously blamed other Palestinian elements for the continuation of terrorism. The National Charter remains un-amended more than fifteen years after the Oslo Accords.
Editor David Bar-Illan attacked the Oslo settlement in the Jerusalem Post. I wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post, the Daily Telegraph (which endorsed Oslo), and some of our other newspapers, offering the most tepid endorsement of Oslo but urging ratification by the Knesset (parliament). I thought it would be disastrous for Israel’s credibility if the Knesset repudiated Rabin and Peres. Bar-Illan took civilized issue with me in the Post, while the publisher, the militant Colonel Yehuda Levy, who on occasion attended the office in his battle fatigues (though claims that he brought his Uzi machine gun with him are untrue), and the former acting editor, David Gross, wrote fulminations against me, in the usual contentious Israeli manner. This was a dust-up of rare proportions as the general public made their views known on our letter pages and in competing media. I was attacked in Israel, Britain, and Canada by the Arabists and the general ranks of pacificators of all ethnicities as being insufficiently enthusiastic about this Nobel Prize–winning breakthrough for peace. And in Israel and in some circles in the United States, I was rounded upon with equal fervour for approving the sale of Israel down the river to its enemies.
I have always understood the Arab view that the terrible things that were done to the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were not done by the Arabs and that the great powers had sought to expiate their own indifference to the plight of the Jews by giving them Arab land. But it was not Arab land. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in what is now Israel for thousands of years, and the land that is Israel has never been governed by Arabs; the Romans were replaced by the Byzantines, then the Turks, then the Crusaders, the Turks again, the British, and finally the Jews.
The existence of Israel is symbolic of the Arab decline in general over many centuries, and Israel is not the cause of that decline. The answer to the decline is for the Arabs to govern themselves more intelligently, to become a factor in the world for reasons other than the exportation of oil and terror, and to add the cubit to their own stature necessary to end the unnatural obsession with Israel. They are surely capable of it. Much of the preoccupation with a return to 1967 borders with Israel is also humbug. Most of the militant Arabs, when questioned closely, do not accept those borders; they are merely a waystation on the trek to the total occupation of Israel by an Arab majority. The demand for a return to the 1967 borders presumes that those borders had an unbreakable legitimacy, and it assumes that the initiation of aggressive war and response to it, and victory and defeat in that war, are interchangeable positions. The Arabs unleashed the 1967 war, and Israel won it, though Israel made serious strategic errors after that war.
The Arabs were never going to be pushed out, and they were never going to become contented citizens who would prefer a good Jew to a bad Arab as a leader. This had effectively been the contention of Jerusalem’s splendid fourteen-term mayor, Teddy Kollek. But the 1967 borders had severely divided Israel, leaving the West Wall in Muslim hands and reducing Israel to nine miles in width as its narrowest point. The outline of a durable peace emerged in the discussions that Ehud Barak had with Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. The Palestinians would have a state. Whatever the doubtfulness of their claim, being an indistinct nationality with an ancient and inexact name, they had been dispossessed, and the Israeli argument that they had departed voluntarily in 1948 is sophistry.
At the Telegraph, the divisions between those who tended to note perceived Jewish particularities and those who didn’t were easy to notice. We had a group of well-connected Englishmen, for whom “Jew” matters caused them to look as if their fish were off a bit.
Princess Margaret, who took a drink and was frequently a rather entertaining woman, used to exclaim: “Oh, that is Jew!” On one occasion, she distinguished between two lyrical variations of Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, saying “Sinatra is Sicilian; Streisand is Jew.” (The fact that they were both Americans was deemed superfluous.) This practice reminded me of some rabidly partisan U.S. Republicans (starting with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy) who always refer venomously to “the Democrat Party.”
Max’s subsequent marriage to a Jewish woman complicated things. Max told me he became so accustomed to leaving dinner parties at his wife’s insistence, because of what she regarded as anti-Semitic slights, that he had to remind her on one occasion that they were in their own home and she could throw out whomever she wished, but he wasn’t going anywhere. For them, any peace agreement would be progress and any absence of peace was Israeli unreasonableness. Charles Moore was better than that but lapsed easily into tired British relativism. It seemed to me, though I know of no one who agrees with me, that the otherwise inexplicable British dislike of the Jews comes in part from the unpleasant fact that the British effectively sold the same real estate (Palestine) twice in the darkest days of World War I. They feel the Israelis are ingrates, caused unnecessary agitation in the twilight of their empire, and since there has never really been any solution except to divide the territory between the two claimants, that the Israelis should have been more conciliatory, as the stronger faction.
WHEN THE LATE AUGUSTO PINOCHET, the former Chilean president, came to Britain in 1998 on a military purchase mission, with a special passport and a Ministry of Defence escort, he was briefly hospitalized in Britain and subsequently detained on a technically defective warrant taken out in Spain by a headline-seeking Spanish far-left judge and prosecutor, under pan-EU rules. The warrant alleged atrocities by Pinochet against Spaniards in Chile at the time of the overthrow of the Communist Allende government in 1973.
The history of the Spanish left would suggest they were not a natural source for complaints about civil rights. Clearly, this was an internal Chilean matter, which was the subject of a delicate balance of political power within that country. Eventually, the British judicial process established that the only period for which complaints against Pinochet could be heard was after he had reconstituted a democratically elected congress and a popularly approved constitution. The clear and unhelpful lesson of this ill-considered intervention to the world’s dictators was that they should never step down but hang on to power, like Franco, the Castros, or Robert Mugabe. To retire voluntarily as Pinochet had done, relinquishing absolute power, would render any dictator’s life hazardous.
The day after Pinochet’s detention, Henry Kissinger telephoned me and urged editorial opposition to what had happened. He’d also phoned Rupert Murdoch. We had already adopted that line, as had Murdoch. Barbara and I went to lunch with Pinochet in the modest house where he was detained near Windsor. A family member stayed with him at all times, and he had become Internet-adept, keeping in close touch with Chile by this means.
Though in his mid-eighties, Pinochet struck us as alert, cheerful, relatively uncomplaining, and somewhat mystified by the inhospitable reception accorded him. His movements were restricted to about twenty feet out to the front or back of the house where he lived. The five or six soldiers on guard in the house watched television all evening. He was at pains to say that he had spent much of his life in barracks and that his custodians were “nice fellows.” But the noisiness and bright lights that illuminated the house all night made sleep difficult. Pinochet, a fervent Roman Catholic, was not allowed to go to church. For alleged security reasons, he was not even allowed to go out for a drive.
I spoke about Pinochet’s detention with both the prime minister and the lord chancellor (Derry Irvine, who called it “a cock-up”), without effect as far as I know, though he was released eventually and lived on to a prodigious age. I don’t whitewash Pinochet or the horrors of the Allende-Pinochet struggle, but this was neither the place nor the way to resolve these deep grievances.
WHEN BARBARA AND IMARRIED, I was living in a roomy cottage-style house with a specially built library and solarium in Highgate, north London, on a double lot adjoining a park. My children had returned to Toronto, and their attic playroom had become Barbara’s workroom, where she became accustomed to “friendly little spiders marching solemnly across my word processor.” She did not want a large house, just a more centrally located one. London, where she was born and had spent part of her childhood, had been her home for the last eighteen years, and she had worked fiercely to develop close friendships. We compromised, moving to a larger home than Barbara had wanted but in a more central location.
Later, fantastic stories circulated of the opulence of our homes. Our London home had five bedrooms, a dining room, and a very generous but awkwardly U-shaped drawing room. Much of the remainder was used as book and work space. There was a very small exercise room and a rather showy indoor swimming pool and Jacuzzi decorated with faux-Greco mosaics installed by the former owner. The house was large, certainly, but far from grandiose or overpowering.
My house in Toronto was the single place that could always bring me peace. I had rebuilt and extended my parents’ house and expanded the property to almost eleven acres, unusually generous for a Toronto home. The contents are not particularly noteworthy, but it is a correct and pleasing Georgian house improved since 1976. Now it has two double-height, connected libraries entirely panelled in oak as well as a spacious workroom for Barbara with large windows and French doors overlooking the gardens. The house probably contains more than twenty thousand books, as well as the hundreds of still unpacked boxes of books that were moved there from London. The rebuilding of the house was the first serious residential project of Thierry Despont, a French architect and Harvard alumnus who has gone on to great architectural eminence, so it is a milestone in a noteworthy career. Despont subsequently designed a handsome indoor swimming pool, a walled garden, and a chapel, which was consecrated by Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter and Cardinal Aloysius M. Ambrozic of Toronto. We have had a number of events there, including my installation as a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great, and I use the chapel every day when I am in that house.
I am always happy there. I was brought up on the property and know most of the trees individually. (No, I do not converse with them.) I could almost walk around its acres of lawns and glades blindfolded. It has been my address for sixty years. Whatever the fluctuations of my relations with Canada, I have always felt that that house is home. I still do.
Barbara did not want anything in Palm Beach; I did. My house there was a family home on a quiet street. It had no ocean or water views, and to her it was just another house in one of the most boring cities in North America. She had accepted Toronto out of spousal respect for the ties of family and sentiment. We compromised by moving to a larger house at the far south end of Palm Beach spanning ocean to lake with fine views of both.
We eventually bought an apartment in New York. It had two bedrooms, and two workrooms. On the fashionable side of town, on an unfashionable second floor, the apartment was perfectly commodious for our purposes. I could work there and make business telephone calls feeling confident that they would not be the subject of office discussion. The legend created by my opponents in the media that features Barbara and me as latter dissolute Caesars, lolling and social climbing in palaces bought from my pilferage of public companies, is unfounded in all respects, as was eventually made clear in court. It is particularly unjust to lay any of this on Barbara. When I married her, she sat happily most evenings at her desk in a comfy but small flat with a galley kitchen, wearing a telephone headset as she gathered research for her newspaper and magazine columns. Her social list seemed to consist of six close friends whose time zones coincided with her nocturnal working hours.
Unfortunately, the media has represented her as a Marie Antoinette, bullying or inducing me into the pathways of extravagance and even ostentation. Barbara dislikes dinner parties, especially her own, and one of the few aspects of our current difficulties she enjoys is the decline of social pressures. I like large houses, and I like interesting people and stimulating dinner conversation. The now infamous photograph of us going to an eighteenth-century fête de campagne costume party at Kensington Palace dressed supposedly as Marie Antoinette and Cardinal Richelieu showed, in fact, Barbara as an ersatz bourgeoise and me as a generic cardinal, both of unknowable nationality. We couldn’t make up our minds about whether to attend, and by the time we did, we had only a day before the party to find our costumes. Her blue Viyella dress and my red religious garb were the two last available outfits at Angels Fancy Dress. Unlike my cardinal, Richelieu had a moustache and goatee, and always wore the insignia of some of his many offices (from court chaplain to grand admiral), and while Marie Antoinette may well have sported the elaborate hairdo that Barbara’s Lebanese hairdresser so brilliantly designed, I doubt if paniered Viyella would have been the late Queen’s choice even for shepherdess days.
Regrettably, we seem to have reached the point in the United States, Britain, and Canada where if a man enjoys himself, knows some famous people, expresses opinions in public, and has a glamorous and autonomously successful wife, he mounts the guillotine of public and media opprobrium. Perhaps it has always been so. Anyway, I don’t doubt I could have played my cards more diplomatically (and will when I return).
THERE IS A PASSAGE AT THE beginning of Thackeray’s Book of Snobs that Barbara was particularly fond of reading to me when urging me to come to sleep. I thoroughly enjoyed a varied social life and at the same time I was committed to our business and wanted to write books. I normally got up between ten and eleven, reached the office at eleven to eleven-thirty, left at seven, returned from dinner, if out, or turned to work if in, at about eleven, and worked until around 4 a.m. She would enter my study at some point, usually around two-thirty when I was still writing or exchanging transatlantic faxes in a difficult deal, William Makepeace in hand, and intone: “‘I have long gone about with a conviction on my mind that I had work to do – a Work, if you like, with a great W; a Purpose to fulfil; a chasm to leap into, like Curtius, horse and foot; a great Social Evil to Discover and to Remedy. That conviction has pursued me for years. It has dogged me in the Busy Street; Seated itself by me in The Lonely Study; Jogged my elbow as it lifted the Wine-cup at the Festive Board …’” and so on. The passage continues in that vein, and is highly amusing. I thought I was more focused than that, but it was a cautionary tale, and somewhat germane. Neither Barbara nor I knew quite how apt it would become.
OUR COMPANY’S ADVISORY BOARD annual dinner grew out of the old Hollinger Mines dinner, and in the reflections of critics, the advisory board was transmogrified into a snobs’ ladder for “social climbing.” That I enjoyed contact with the extraordinary mix of people we had on the board was undeniable. They enjoyed each other. Otherwise, they would not have come, because I didn’t pay them much.
Allan Gotlieb had served with distinction as Canada’s ambassador to the United States. I invited him to become the publisher of Canada’s Saturday Night magazine and a director of Hollinger Inc. He suggested to me in 1992 that we might want to follow the example of a number of companies and set up an advisory board. These were essentially groups of exceptional people, often retired, who would gather once a year to give their views of the world for a modest fee and would generally be available throughout the year in the event of a specialized need. They had no legal liability, unlike an orthodox director, and so it was a convenient arrangement and not overly costly to the company. I thought it would be a resource for the management and help broaden the views of editors and journalists. Allan was well placed to recruit interesting Americans, and I thought I could round up some interesting British and Europeans.
I was accused first of hobnobbing and then of orchestrating and bankrolling an international right-wing conspiracy. We recruited Gianni Agnelli (controlling shareholder of Fiat and legendarily stylish Italian senator and former playboy); Dwayne Andreas (builder and head of Archer Daniels Midland, the world’s greatest agribusiness, and one of America’s most politically influential businessmen); Moshe Arens (former Israeli defence minister and ambassador to the United States); David Brinkley (renowned newscaster and commentator for NBC and ABC); Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security advisor under President Jimmy Carter); William F. Buckley (famed conservative publisher, author, and debater); Peter (Lord) Carrington (former U.K. foreign and defence secretary and secretary-general of NATO); Martin Feldstein (chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers); Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (former president of France); Sir James Goldsmith (flamboyant anglo-French financier and political activist); Chaim Herzog (former president of Israel); Joseph Joffe (German magazine editor and commentator); Henry Kissinger (former U.S. secretary of state and national security advisor); Richard Perle (President Reagan’s assistant secretary of defense for national security policy); Jacob (Lord) Rothschild (financier and patron of the arts); Margaret Thatcher (former U.K. prime minister); Paul Volcker (former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve); George Will (U.S. columnist and commentator); and, later, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Apart from Kissinger, Perle, Gotlieb, and me, some directors also entered in fully, including Richard Burt, Marie-Josée Kravis, Robert Strauss, George (Lord) Weidenfeld, and, on one occasion, Cardinal Carter.
It was a remarkably talented group and no hallelujah chorus for the American right. Jimmy Goldsmith was at this point quite critical of the Americans, as was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing much of the time. (Goldsmith created a rather awkward atmosphere at a small dinner I gave in Paris for Pamela Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to France, by his aggressive remarks about President Clinton, to which she responded by placing her handbag on the table and refusing to either eat or speak. It was not my most rousing success as a host.)
My original point in agreeing with Allan Gotlieb’s suggestion for an advisory board was that it would be an interesting association and might help to de-Southam-ize some of our journalists by introducing Canadian journalists and editors to the world and possibly even liberating British journalists from some of their stereotypes about the United States.
Our Advisory Board embodied a wealth of experience. Gianni Agnelli, next to the Pope probably the most admired man in Western Europe since the death of Charles de Gaulle, died in 2003, after Fiat, the greatest of all his passions, encountered severe difficulties, from which it has largely recovered. He served with Rommel in Africa – “a star,” he called him – and then with the Italian contingent in Russia. He concluded the war in the Italian army, fighting on the Allied side to liberate Italy from the Germans, and pointed out to me from his yacht on Lake Como the approximate place where Mussolini was shot by partisans after being apprehended trying to escape Italy dressed as a German soldier.
When asked how he had arranged for the Fiat shareholders to receive the company’s profits and the Italian government to defray much of the losses when they occurred, he stared into the distance and said, “You must remember, we are the country of Machiavelli.” But not even Machiavelli would have had the imagination to devise some of Gianni’s initiatives. When he lost control of the shoproom floor and the Communist unions brought Fiat to the verge of bankruptcy, he brought in Libyan Colonel Muammar Gadhafi as a sizable shareholder.
When the crisis had passed, he prevailed upon his sister Sunni, then Italy’s deputy foreign minister, to advise the American ambassador in Rome that Fiat might not be eligible for defence contracts in the United States because of having a designated terrorist government as a large shareholder. Fiat was duly advised that this was the case, and the Italian parliament obligingly assisted in removing Gadhafi as a shareholder, albeit at a substantial profit.
Dwayne Andreas (who built up Archer Daniels Midland from a few grain elevators to an immense company) was friendly with all American politicians. He could mobilize the farm state senators and on any important matter colluded with Lane Kirkland of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations to round up an insuperably large number of senators. The irony was especially cruel when this intimate of Thomas E. Dewey (who died in Dwayne’s Sea View Hotel in Miami Beach), Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole, among many other prominent politicians he had befriended and supported, came to grief in family legal problems. His declining years were shadowed by the imprisonment of his son.
Chaim Herzog had been nicknamed Vivian when he had served in the British army in the Second World War, because people couldn’t pronounce his first name. His father had been the chief rabbi of Northern Ireland. After the war, Herzog joined the Israeli independence movement and subsequently became one of the leading lawyers in Israel, a member of the Knesset, an ambassador, the military governor of Jerusalem, a chairman of one of the country’s largest companies, and ultimately the president of the State of Israel. While a slightly ponderous man, he was fascinating to me because of his recollections of the kaleidoscope of life he had witnessed.
It was a fierce passion for history that interested me in this group. Herzog had fought with Ben Gurion. Giscard d’Estaing had worked closely with de Gaulle. Peter Carrington commanded the defence of a reach of the south shore of Britain in 1940 “with fifty World War I rifles, one antiquated field piece, and my revolver, but it never occurred to me that we would not win.” A few weeks before, he had stood for seven hours in chest-deep water at Dunkirk, waiting to be evacuated. When he recounted being strafed by German aircraft, almost run over by Allied ships, and almost incinerated by gas flaming on the waters, he drily repeated what his brother-in-law, a banker, had then said: “I cannot believe that this operation has come off as planned.” Lord Carrington is an inexhaustible storehouse of amusing recollections and spontaneous quips. There are few people still active who can authoritatively express, naturally and even soulfully, rather than surmise, the unconquerable will of Britain in a time when the whole future of civilization depended on so few warriors, very young and very brave. He held the small dinner on his eightieth birthday party at the German embassy in London: he wished to emphasize his desire for good relations with Germany, having seen at first-hand the devastation of that country in 1945. He is the ultimate Whig nobleman.
I remember reading of Giscard d’Estaing’s prowess as de Gaulle’s finance minister when I was sixteen years old and he, aged thirty-four, delivered lengthy and detailed budget speeches to the National Assembly from memory. I also remember when he deserted the general in 1969 “with sadness but with certitude,” providing the margin of victory for de Gaulle’s enemies. I had not, until fairly shortly before, dreamt of having the opportunity to sit in Giscard d’Estaing’s house, brandy in hand, and gently ask the former president of the republic about these times and events.
Many books have been written about Sir James Goldsmith. His obituaries described him as “one of the most buccaneering and charismatic figures” of our time. On his father’s side, he was descended from a prominent Frankfurt Jewish banking family. His mother was a French Catholic. His own business skills were superb and made him an early billionaire. I met him through Andrew Knight, then editor of The Economist (later for three years the chief executive of The Telegraph plc) at a diner à trois. Afterwards, Goldsmith invited me to lunch at his office and introduced me to his circle, the first of a number of occasions staged in order to try to recruit the Telegraph to one or another of his mad causes.
When I first arrived in Britain in 1986, Goldsmith was a great legend. I remember seeing his performance at the U.S. senatorial committee over his hostile takeover attempt of one of the country’s leading rubber companies. The utility of a “white knight” was raised. He responded, referring literally to pigmentation and honours: “I’m white, I’m a knight.” His most famous aphorism was “When one marries one’s mistress, it creates a vacancy.” Jimmy had several wives and concurrent bearers of children, and assaulted bourgeois sensibilities. He was a remarkably vital, formidable, powerful presence. Exquisitely mannered, perfectly tailored, physically imposing, graceful like a great cat, very courteous yet evidently capable of savage verbal outbursts, he was the most compelling outsider I have known.
With his comrades and acolytes, Goldsmith operated a Darwinian parallel establishment that used to be known in its heyday as the Clermont set. It mocked and shocked the British establishment. John Aspinall (Aspers), who founded the Clermont Club in London’s Mayfair in 1962 and used his casino profits to sustain wildlife sanctuaries in Britain for gorillas and tigers, was perhaps his closest friend.
After Aspinall lost a third keeper in the tiger cages of his splendid private zoo, the local municipality banned people from entering tiger cages. Aspers set up a great controversy, denouncing this as an infringement of the Magna Carta and of the birthright of the British people for a thousand years, hiring aircraft to tow banners proclaiming the right to enter tiger cages above the south shore sea resorts of Britain during the summer, and so forth. He formed a grand coalition from left to right, and when he overpowered the mystified and unoffending local council, he held a party at his casino, where Barbara sat next to the former (and future) far-left mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. (It was he whom Boris Johnson defeated in 2007, calling him “Ken Leavingsoon.”) Other contemporaries included Jonathan Aitken (a member of parliament and Lord Beaverbrook’s grand-nephew), the outrageous but likeable and often brave columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, of a Greek shipping family, and a number of others.
Aspers campaigned for Jonathan Aitken in his constituency and bellowed at the astonished voters to tear down their schools and hospitals, renounce their state benefits, refuse to pay their taxes, and return to the independent notion of citizenship of olden time. His colourful harangues were immensely popular.
From my earliest days as a resident in London, I became something of a habitué of these people. They wished to entice me, and the Daily Telegraph, into their counter-establishment. At this they were unsuccessful. I am no upholder of the establishment in Britain or elsewhere, but nor am I an anti-establishment iconoclast. Though I was not prepared to join them in their unholy apostasy, I loved them in a way. They were more loyal to me than was much of London’s orthodox society. They were not going to succeed in establishing a new society, but they were faithful to themselves to the end. Jimmy fought an election campaign at the head of his preposterous Referendum Party, keeping the pancreatic cancer and chemotherapy treatments he was having a complete secret from the press. Although he achieved only about 1 per cent of the vote, he did help ensure that Britain would not join the European Monetary System without a referendum. He died less than eight weeks after the election.
He had previously been a member of the European parliament. He asked me how I thought he would get on as a legislator, and I replied that he would be a splendid success: he would ravish those women whose appearance warranted it, bribe the men, and reduce the already disorderly parliament in Strasbourg to chaos. He bellowed appreciatively and said that this was his intention exactly.
Goldsmith’s parental skills were as novel as his marital notions. One day in about 1980, Jimmy discovered that his son from his second marriage, Manos, had sold the silver from Jimmy’s London house to pay gambling debts at Aspinall’s casino. He asked the Daily Telegraph information service to locate the closest community to the exact opposite side of the world from London. The answer was a small town on the south island of New Zealand. Jimmy telephoned the directory information of that town and arranged a menial job, at his own expense, for Manos in a restaurant there. Off the young man went.
Aspers also succumbed to cancer. I had always thought that when the end was near, John would go among his tigers and not return alive. He had lost half his face to cancer and then was mugged on the streets of Belgravia with his wife. Naturally he fought back. Henry Kissinger and I went out to Kent to see him two weeks before he died. He was as brave as one of his great beasts, though terribly withered by then. There was no self-pity, morbidity, or even apparent sadness. We took our leave with firm handshakes and reciprocal thanks. Henry wept discreetly.
Had they lived, both Goldsmith and Aspinall would have avoided the squalid and demeaning spectacle I am now undergoing. Their instincts would have told them to get clear of the corporate governance zealots before they could become homicidal Lilliputians.* They would have been invaluable through this difficult time and magnificent allies uncontaminated by the bourgeois notions of hypocritical seemliness that affected many of my acquaintances. Jimmy’s flamboyant and splendid widow, Annabel, and her family, have been fiercely supportive. When the controversy arose over the cover-price cut at the Telegraph and Cazenoves scurried for cover in the almost unbroken City tradition, both men congratulated me on not being intimidated by the false rules of a rigged game. I miss them.
I sat beside Gianni Agnelli at the secular memorial service for Jimmy Goldsmith in Smith Square. A succession of eulogists, from Margaret Thatcher to Chief Buthelezi, remembered Jimmy, almost all with great eloquence. Toward the end, Gianni said to me, in his exquisite English accent with slightly de-emphasized r’s: “It’s so splendid it almost makes dying worthwhile.” Gianni’s own funeral five years later required special trains to bring mourners to Turin. His family shook hands with more than two hundred and fifty thousand members of the public. All the leadership of the Italian state and church were present; it was an occasion for almost medieval popular grandiosity for the greatest Italian; not the pagan tribute to the Western world’s great outsider that Jimmy had earned.
In the egalitarian levelling that has made glamour repulsive and social fraternization at any more intellectual a level than the bowling alley into an orgy of toadyism or vulgar exhibitionism, going out to a sit-down dinner is a sign of Ludovican self-importance. But as a general rule, hospitality is done with sprezzatura – the effort concealed and all done with the appearance of ease, as Anthony Blunt defined it – and brings together good conversation and interesting people, then the palate, eye, and brain can be pleased simultaneously.
I believe the Advisory Board served its purposes well, including that of facilitating business opportunities for the company and sharing know-how. By 2002, I had decided it would be wound up. The costs had spiralled up and it was also becoming too time-consuming. Our journalists had benefited as much as I thought they could, and besides, many of its members were getting on in years and beginning to lose touch. With the multiplication of advisory boards, general meetings, and symposiums, it was also becoming more difficult each year to get a good outside speaker. Allan Gotlieb argued strongly in support of retaining the Advisory Board on the grounds that it was the principal source of my standing and influence in the world, which to me was a convincing display that the time was more than ripe for its cessation.
A favourite insult of the prosecution at my trial in 2007 was to speak contemptuously of my wanting to go to tea with the Queen, as if such an outing were a vain frivolity. Had the Queen asked me to tea, I would have considered it a remarkable invitation. The Queen is a woman who has been at the forefront of much of contemporary history, has met almost all the people that our times have honoured. In a purely ex officio role as chairman of the Telegraph, I did meet the Royal Family, including the Queen, and more often the Queen Mother, who was a neverending source of anecdotal history and gave me several remembrances of Franklin Roosevelt.
In London, the Royal Family is a distinct social entity. They are naturally the ultimate leaders of society and continue to be the subject of a good deal of obsequious deference. They are, to the very limited degree that I know them, courteous and conscientious people. It would be an exaggeration to say that the hereditary principle has endowed the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth with a super-abundantly gifted first family. Their intelligences vary, but they work hard. The Queen Mother and Princess Diana were the great stars, as is now Prince William. Princess Alexandra is the most charming. The Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal are both very intelligent. So, though not overly imaginative, is the Queen. Princess Diana came to dinner with us a couple of times and was very witty as well as very beautiful. She was scheming and was possessed by the fury of a scorned woman. The only brake on her republicanism was her desire to be mother of the King. Though uneducated, and with an office of giggly, jolly-hockey-sticks Sloane-rangers, Princess Diana was running a parallel monarchy in her last few years and was skating rings around the real Royals.
Royals are different. Polite though they are, they are almost never close to non-royals and have mastered the secret of aloofness. And they have a rural bourgeois perspective, even the wealthy European royals of the Bourbon tradition. I saw this most plainly at a birthday party, I believe it was his sixtieth, for the exiled king of Greece, Constantine, a very amiable man of monarchic mien. The party was held at Highgrove, the home of the Prince of Wales. Guests were primarily from the royal families of Europe. The few of us who were not members of a royal family included some of King Constantine’s wealthy, Greek ship-owning backers and a few others. (Barbara, trapped in her social unease, which was especially acute when it came to royal families, had pleaded illness. This was not unfamiliar to me. When the Duke of Edinburgh came to Toronto and visited our house with newspaper mogul Ken Thomson to see my ship model and naval book collection, I had to plead her absence due to a New York commitment. She was in fact upstairs in her workroom behind a locked door.) Constantine’s birthday party was an insight to royalty at play. Guests were entertained by a slapstick comedian wearing a dinner jacket and carrying a giant cello out of which he produced some dirty laundry, as if from a washing machine. This led to some slapstick of the British lavatory variety. All the royalty were shaking with laughter, tears streaming down their faces, from Princess Caroline of Monaco to the centenarian dowager Queen of Denmark, including both Queens Elizabeth. A delightful and intelligent Greek lady friend of mine was sitting next to me, and we stared at each other in straight-faced disbelief as the crowned and coroneted contents of the current Almanach de Gotha split their sides watching the buffoonery.
IT WAS INTERESTING TO CIRCULATE simultaneously in relatively exalted circles in London and New York. Where London mixed all manner of people, occupations, and nationalities together, reflecting the capital of an important country and the diverse nature of the crossroads city of the world, New York society was topped out by a few continuators of the Astor-Belmont-Vanderbilt 400 aristocracy of a century before. Beside and around it surged the teeming plutocracy and meritocracy of New York’s mighty competition of achievers and hustlers in every field.
The different groups would come together at the expensive galas each championed in support of their preferred causes, especially the Metropolitan Museum and Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art, and Carnegie Hall. In the great apartments of Park and Fifth Avenues, and along the East River north from 59th Street, apart from the permutated and adoptive aristocracy, only the odd museum director, orchestra conductor, diva, or writer would appear, and only the more culturally involved of the business community.
It was largely because of Brooke Astor, the crafty and timeless widow of Vincent Astor (who spent her first forty years – socially – climbing slowly, hand over hand, and literally knew the ropes), that the notion of a WASP aristocracy had a golden, fifty-year, Indian summer (WASP in style and foibles, as there were many Roman Catholics and Jews, some African-Americans, and even a few Muslims among them). It was always an unstable and not very legitimate patriciate, afflicted by philistinism, English-imitative, but stylish and brilliantly opulent, and most of its tenured regulars were pleasant and interesting. Their hospitality was always sumptuous.
As Johnson & Johnson heir David Netto said after being rushed by the Met (Museum), referring to Brooke Astor’s comrades and social heirs, Jayne Wrightsman and Annette de la Renta, “They’re irresistible, if that’s your thing; living treasures, and you don’t meet people like that every day. If you care about the ‘top people,’ you’ll want to hang on. There’s something about them that’s pure magic.” (Rogues’ Gallery, Michael Gross, p. 476.)
That could include a little youthful hyperbole, but it is a convivial and sometimes swashbuckling group. It was in many ways all an imposture, as most of the doyennes had closets as full of skeletons as of couture, but this is the unwitting source of much of their interest. Although the noblesse oblige tradition of Roosevelts, Harriman, Sumner Welles, Douglas Dillon, David Bruce, the Dukes, and others has died out, Henry Kissinger has filled the public service and intellectual voids and has been bound to their souls with hoops of steel.
Brooke Astor kindled public curiosity by courting the press, and admitting some of them, such as Barbara Walters and Charlie Rose, to her inner circle, and by gaining publicity for her charitable works and by stepping out in splendid livery and with great panache. She was scrambling much of the way, and was conversationally pretty erratic at times. (She was a practising Episcopalian but gave a country home to Francis J. Cardinal Spellman, and later told me that Spellman had disappointed her because he was a sexual exhibitionist.) Spellman had disappointed her with private indiscretions, which, though not completely implausible, are not easily believable either and do not merit repetition here, but were a diverting conversational gambit.
Her last seven or eight years she was not really competent, and vulgar litigation has revealed a sad story of her later life. No one has taken up the torch to continue the same notion of a New York aristocracy, and the whole concept is probably long past its sell-by date. I must add one word of special thanks to Jayne Wrightsman, who has been a generous friend through thick and thin for thirty years. She is a voluntary owner of a “Conrad Will Win” T-shirt.
EARLIER IN THIS CHAPTER I mentioned how my pro-American sentiments were a source of enmity in the U.K. and to a lesser degree in Canada. When the tragedy of September 11, 2001, took place, Barbara and I were in Toronto preparing to leave the next day for New York. There was a tremendous outpouring of sympathy in the world. At a human level, it was hard not to identify with the thousands of innocent victims, the brave firefighters, and the unconquerable spirit of New York. Many were doubtless influenced by the unfamiliar spectacle of the United States as a victim. But it was clear from President George W. Bush’s remarks before the day was over that it would not remain a victim for long.
In all our newspapers, as well as in the House of Lords, of which I was by then a member, and in a number of speeches and articles, I defended the post–September 11 Bush-Blair position, which attracted a rare congeries of opposition. The United States was accused of being trigger-happy. The mantra “They can’t go it alone” was endlessly repeated, but its real meaning, of course, was that the United States could do just that, much to the consternation of those who found their own marginalization grating, but not sufficiently so to galvanize them into doing anything about it.
I have never understood where the idea arose that the armed forces of the United States could be deployed in response to successive acts of war against the United States only with the permission of the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – particularly France, Russia, and China. It was advocated, in effect, that the United States, having built and sustained an immense military capacity, had to put it at the behest of countries that did not wish the United States well, do not necessarily share its values, and affect a neutrality between, on the one hand, a wronged America and affronted international law and, on the other, the evil of Saddam Hussein. Obviously, no sane person in the United States would subscribe to any such concept.
In the Iraq debate in the House of Lords at the end of 2002 (where the Conservatives’ votes were necessary to pass approval of the government’s war policy), I said that this interpretation of the relationship between the United States and the United Nations Security Council was an attempt to treat the United States as a great St. Bernard dog, which would take the risks and do the work while others, and not necessarily genuine allies, would hold the leash and give the instructions. One of my noble colleagues leapt excitedly at the metaphor and asked if I had ever tried to restrain a St. Bernard bitch in heat. Another said that the U.S. was not a St. Bernard but a Rottweiler.
I was interested in ending the double stalemate with the two major Persian Gulf powers, Iran and Iraq, whose combined animosity to the West (just about all they could agree on) made it almost impossible to exercise any influence in the area. I also thought it would be useful to give the masses of an important Arab country a taste of power-sharing, if not perfect democracy. Saddam Hussein was an enthusiastic terrorist supporter in Israel and Palestine, and I was not especially concerned with weapons of mass destruction, as they could be eliminated without the drastic step of occupying the entire country.
At the time of the invasion of Iraq, I never imagined that the United States would disband the Iraqi armed forces and police, hurling four hundred thousand people into unemployment while leaving them their weapons and munitions, hoping they would all become quail hunters or target-shooting enthusiasts; this was arguably, along with failing to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War, the greatest military blunder in U.S. history. Nor did I imagine that the United States would for a long time prove so inept at the manipulation of local factions. Nor that there would be such inadequate attention paid to protecting, among other sites, Iraq’s electric generators, oil pipelines, and museums. (Of course, I also didn’t imagine, and could not have conceived, that the United States would persecute me half to death either.)
By expanding its annual current account deficit to $800 billion and by stranding almost its entire conventional ground forces capability in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has reduced its influence in the world. If weakening the country was the aim of the French and Russians, instead of obstructing the United States in Iraq, they should have urged it forward vigorously.
For urging Canada to compete with the United States and take an imaginative role in reorienting the Western alliance, I was widely portrayed as an unpatriotic Canadian. For urging upon Britain a course that would preserve British identity and maximize Britain’s advantages as vital to both Europe and America, I was reviled – by ultra-skeptic Enoch Powell and Euro-joiner Edward Heath, with both of whom I was reasonably cordial – as an American Trojan horse and by European commentators as a CIA parrot screeching at Europe from an ill-gotten gilded cage on Fleet Street. And in Israel, where we eventually moved the Post back from the Jabotinskyan inflexibility of David Bar-Illan to the pragmatic realism of Bret Stephens (now one of the Wall Street Journal’s writers), I was, like so many sober voices indigenous to the country, caught in the crossfire between the hardened factions pursuing peace or security, the one virtually to the exclusion of the other, when they are in fact ultimately inseparable.
My only serious political objective in the United Kingdom was to resist Euro-integration until Britain would not be trading the institutions that have served it well for centuries for inferior ones, would not be going back to pre-Thatcher tax levels and industrial relations, and would not be subsuming its relations with the United States into the relations of France and Germany with that country. Chancellor Kohl professed to find those criteria reasonable during our conversations. My brief period of modest influence in British public policy did not end as I would have wished, but my only serious public policy objective was embraced by a majority of Britons. I no longer have any standing, but I did what I could.
I have referred to my contacts with a number of leaders of several countries. The only request I have ever made of any government, apart from supplementing our requests for zoning changes in Chicago when we were building a new printing facility and redeveloping our office site there, was when I asked the incoming Harris government in Ontario not to impose compulsory helmets on adult bicyclers in the parks system. The new premier made an exemption in his order-in-council that has enabled me to continue my leisurely rides through the parks near my house in Toronto without putting on the airs of a Tour de France contestant. This is not much to show for millions of dollars of contributions and a great deal of editorial support and advocacy, but it is all I ever actually asked or specifically wanted.
* A clarifying word about corporate governance: I personally took the telephone calls and replied to the letters and questions of doughty individuals, no matter how small their shareholdings and no matter how obscure or eccentric their concerns. I considered that anyone who had invested in our company was entitled to access to me. I was happy to do this and usually enjoyed the contact, especially in Britain and Australia, where such activist shareholders tended to be rather colourful. My objections were to corporate guerrilla war waged by well-oiled institutional bully-boys, holding hands with their fellow raptors in violation of the spirit of the securities rules, though their antics were generally and deliberately overlooked by the SEC, and using other peoples’ money to masquerade as champions of the odd-lot shareholders. Almost equally nauseating were those piously hypocritical executives who appeased them and substituted richly compensated self-abasement for industrialism and serious management.