IT WAS ANOTHER DIFFICULT Christmas. The 2003 holiday season had been implacably gloomy, but 2004, despite the Breeden report, was upbeat as we charged toward privatization. Now, as of December 15, 2005, the U.S. government was trying to send me to prison for ninety-five years and impoverish me. On Christmas Day, I read the Book of Job. I discovered that while Job had endured more severe oppression than I had, he had been much less patient. I aspired to his deliverance but not to his additional rewards of living one hundred and twenty years and having forty more children.
I now organized what I called “the little boats of Dunkirk” to address the immediate financial crisis and borrowed from Barbara, two of my children, and a few very close friends small amounts of money to pay and thus keep the data company on side. I was told by the company that if their invoices were not paid within days, all outstanding data would be inaccessible to us and could be permanently deleted. Then we would have to try to fight a trial with hundreds of thousands of pages of material available only by hand; it simply could not be done. The pressure for money had driven Barbara to desperate measures. She was trying to sell her jewelery and discovered only gemstones were marketable. The valuable antique pieces she had were not of interest. Her large diamond ring, which became an object of desire for Prosecutor Sussman, was my gift to her on her sixtieth birthday. She knew how upset I would be if I heard what she was doing, and so she kept quiet until it was necessary to get information from me for possible buyers. Being accused of facilitating money laundering was a fear for anyone buying from us because the prosecution had done such a thorough job of tainting us. Barbara was reduced to sitting in odd locations to hand over the stone and its Gemological Institute of America certificate for examination by various oily gem dealers who seemed to take pleasure in telling her how fine it was before rejecting it on moral grounds. Whether this was a negotiating tactic is hard to say. Those with whom I dealt by telephone were among the most repulsive businessmen I have encountered, and I stopped the whole process.
In one of several coincidences that struck me as somewhat providential, on the airplane back from Washington to Toronto on the day of the New York seizure, I encountered Gordon Arnold, a school-friend from fifty years before, whom I had rarely seen since our school days. He was now a neighbour and offered his assistance in any way possible. At the decisive moment, he lent me several hundred thousand dollars against some furniture and works of art. It was a lifesaver in this very difficult time, and he was a true and unsuspected friend.*
When I walked through or around my house, I now found a crowded gallery of mementoes from my early youth, my adult life, and from the residences in London and New York. Even the trees had been familiar to me for more than fifty years. Almost every step, inside or out, brought flickerings, at first premonitory and subconscious, and then precise, of what had been lost or severely compromised: people who had died, friends now lost, pleasant connections gone forever. It was a cavalcade of the departed, great and small, but each person, thing, or revenance was something comfortable or satisfying, and apparently irreplaceable. I was prematurely forced to embrace Dr. Viktor Frankel’s famous consolation that “to have been is a form of being, and in a sense, the surest form.” I would have to get by for the duration of this combat with memories that were beyond re-creation. In our barricaded domesticity, I even set up a little cardboard shelter in the garden room for dazed ladybugs that had been shut in by the elements.
Nostalgia was the constant companion of my thoughts, and melancholia was never far off. I battled to fight off morose impulses, like a retreating army fighting marauders. I retained memberships in all my clubs, in Toronto, London, New York, Montreal, and Palm Beach, but almost never set foot in them. Famous or once-familiar addresses were mute effigies of what life had been. I clung to vestiges of my former life, still struggling to convince myself that some of it could be recovered, that I would find the money to oil the greasy legal system, that justice would ultimately prevail despite its many setbacks. The question of whether I would survive long enough financially to defend myself against false and malicious charges was still unanswered.
HOLLINGER INTERNATIONAL HAD finally come current on its financial reportings, not having fired and sued KPMG as it should have done, because Breeden, who had recommended suing KPMG, had since become the court-appointed monitor of KPMG, and their testimony was thought likely to be useful against us. (In fact, it would be useful to us.) He resolved his evident conflict of interest in favour of the larger source of payments to him.
Barbara had exercised her options at Hollinger International and moved to sell her shares in January. The transfer agent, under orders from the company, held up the transaction for almost a week. I got Canadian counsel to threaten the transfer agent, and eventually, just in time, $2.4 million came in from this source. This allowed me to start to pay down Baker Botts, pay the emergency lenders, and start on the Greenspan and Genson retainers.
The light at the end of the financial tunnel was growing brighter – and it was distinctly not an incoming locomotive – when Leo Strine, doubtless pleased at his role in producing the criminal indictment he had effectively solicited nearly two years before and showing no sign of realizing the billions of dollars of shareholders’ lost value he had caused, warned Hollinger International that he would not allow them to welsh on their indemnity of former officers’ legal fees. The company was happily paying the legal fees of the docile directors, but not of Breeden’s foes. Strine, to his credit, balked at this.
My new Delaware lawyers, David Jenkins and Joelle Polesky, replacing the gentlemanly but unsuccessful Jesse Finkelstein, came to see me in Toronto in early February 2006 and soon arranged a deal with Hollinger International’s Delaware counsel. Rather than face Strine, with whose equal-opportunity arbitrariness my opponents too were quite familiar, they chose to pay a high percentage of my past and current legal bills. This was another big step forward, as it wiped away most of the arrears to Baker Botts and further assisted me with my new lawyers.
These were stop-gaps, but they kept body and soul together. I really cracked the financial problem when I recruited Stan Freedman, an able commercial lawyer, to become so obstreperous as a minority shareholder in Horizon Operations, one of the private newspaper companies, that we effectively obliged Radler to buy us out. Radler had recruited new investors, so this now became possible for him. He was happy enough, I’m sure, to see the back of me.
The formal defection of Radler prompted us to consider what deal he had made. His sentence was twenty-nine months and non-objection to a treaty transfer, which, in practice, meant a six month, minimum security confinement in Canada, and he appeared to have saved the private newspaper companies, which were his intended corporate destination anyway. This assumedly meant that the Canadians had passed on their threat to charge him with perjury when he testified in Kelowna (BC) that he and I were equal shareholding partners in Horizon Operations, where Todd Vogt (innocently, as he later assured me) fronted a third 25 per cent block of stock that was in fact, Radler’s. Atkinson had scratched this out of public filings when we were squaring my position with foreign ownership rules governing newspapers in Canada, after I had ceased to be a Canadian citizen following my fracas with Chrétien.
Vogt, when contacted, would not appear as a witness in Chicago, though he was very embittered by how Radler had treated him, having formerly been virtually one of the family, and was severely embarrassed, he said, opposite his own in-laws, when Radler had tried to pretend in court that Vogt really was a serious Horizon shareholder while also being associated with his father-in-law in the competing local newspaper. The fact that he did not wish to testify did not mean that we did not have plenty of room to undermine Radler as a witness when the time came. He had not aroused Atkinson’s and my fullest suspicions when his chicanery first came to light in 2002 because Radler always went to ground an observed complete silence whenever anything embarrassing to him occurred. There was no shortage of these things: the failure of most of his private ventures on behalf of the small venture capital business he ran with Peter White and me as silent partners. There were the motels, jewellery stores, oil and gas wells, or at least sites drilled in the hope of finding some accessible energy reserves.
He showed the same furtiveness about the endless losses at the Jerusalem Post. He overpaid for the newspaper, left me to justify to shareholders the US$17 million he had paid, and held himself out to the world’s Jewish community as a champion of Israel. He was addicted to his status as an international notable in the Jewish community and too egotistically vulnerable to admit that his formula of endless cost-cutting would not eliminate the loss at the Post. He had put our Israeli partner in the printing of the Yellow Pages in that country on the board of Hollinger International. He didn’t tell us that our partner ditched us and took the profitable printing business elsewhere.
He compounded our problems by sponsoring an editorial policy that was too hawkish for all but the most ardent Zionists. Under Radler, the Post adopted a Jabotinskyan posture of pursuing a greater Israel; the inconvenient Arab populations that happened to be there would be induced to emigrate by unspecified means. It was an editorial and financial embarrassment, but it conformed to the Radler method: tough talk regardless of its cost and futility. He was a sort of misguided, kitsch John Wayne with both employees and readers.
I had a reasonably conservative definition of Israel’s security interests, but Radler’s ideas, imparted to him by tough-talking Israeli charlatans of a greater Israel, were too much for me, and Radler put some strain on my relations with sensible Israelis such as Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s brilliant fourteen-term mayor.
To accommodate the nasty gnome from Chicago, the Canada Revenue Agency had issued an absurd assessment, just as the OSC had laid ridiculous charges, to show Canada had not lost interest in, or even become a farm team in, the great championship round of what some of my friends now called the game of Let’s Kill Conrad. As in so many other competitions, Canada emulated the worst and not the best of America, and here earned a good second prize in the Lottario of persecution.
I relied on the cockiness and belligerency of Sussman to drive Atkinson and Kipnis and their counsel more closely into our arms and hoped that their presence would dampen any tendency by the jury to single me out for the punishment of the formerly rich and famous. It was a tenuous strategy, dictated more by necessity than by choice – there was hardly a menu of valid options. After a brief holiday in the now famous house in Palm Beach (an aerial photograph of it appeared in the New York Times), wondering again as I left whether I would ever see it again, we returned to Toronto and to the campaign for a buyout by Radler from more of the private newspaper operations.
The initial payment for Horizon Operations (Canada) under the shareholders’ agreement for Horizon Canada enabled me to remove all the Canada Revenue liens and appeal their entire assessment after I had paid it. Within a year, having done their obeisance to the shrieking Sussman, Canada Revenue remitted to me three-quarters of what I had paid, with interest, and acknowledged that it had not been owed. The Horizon payment left us a couple of million extra, which, coupled with Strine’s indemnity, enabled me to deal with the lawyers more effectively. As the Canada Revenue money came back and more of the community news paper sale proceeds came in, cash piled up in amounts I had not known for some time, and, once again I wondered at the strange turns in these struggles. Acute cash penury was transformed in a few months to a comfortable state and the defrayal by indemnity of most of my legal bills. This latter munificence at the behest of the inevitable Vice Chancellor Strine, who on his forays on the lecture circuit took to referring to me almost as Montgomery had described Rommel, saying I was “a great presence in [his] court,” as if to take some grandeur for himself in his scandalous ruling.
The removal of the tax lien on the Palm Beach house provoked Sussman to a bizarre exercise of frustrated aggression. Despite all the illegal telephone intercepts and pseudo-knowing tips from Radler (whom I never told anything about my investments and interests), and his incitements to belligerency of Canada Revenue, Sussman had no idea what my resources were. I had moved so cautiously to liquidate assets gradually and at reasonable values, that my durability galled him.
He had assumed that after his seizure of the proceeds of the New York co-operative apartment sale, I had no money and would be passing the begging bowl among my wealthy friends. Since Sussman was leading Radler by a chain, trussed, bound, and gagged, he could have stopped the Horizon buyout, but either Radler’s pride prevented him from mentioning it until it had happened or Sussman was already on to his next wheeze.
At Alberta Newspapers, the acquisition of which had not been a related-party transaction (Hollinger International had had no involvement), Radler had also brought in new investors to facilitate paying all the restitutions he had made himself liable for. I generated an offer for the entire group that was entirely reasonable, and this forced Radler to bring his new partners into line and meet the offer. In order to satisfy his concerns about foreign ownership, I had sold shares to Barbara at the formula price and in an arrangement entirely designed by the company lawyer, an obtuse minion of Radler’s. Now that arm’s-length, enterprise-value prices were being invoked, there was a real profit for Barbara. This had the double effect of producing cash and enriching Barbara, who was practically insusceptible to the rapine of the U.S. attorney and his Canadian accomplices. It was a win double, in sporting parlance, and Sussman was not much of a sport.
Sussman reacted to my defeat of his financial strangulation plan like an angry U-boat admiral dismayed that war time Britain was feasting on tropical fruit. He began a new offensive based on the canard that since obviously I wasn’t broke, I must have lied in my obligatory financial statement filed with the court and underestimated my net worth. In furtherance of this argument, Sussman, a bold but reckless tactician, ordered Radler to repay the shareholders’ loans at Horizon Publications (U.S.), a company that Breeden had called a scam by Radler and me but that had been passed as part of the Radler plea bargain so that after he had delivered my head on a plate and had his correctional golfing holiday, Radler could live prosperously ever after, screaming at the advertising salespeople in such centres of urban vitality as Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and Medicine Hat, Alberta. What Sussman was doing was a gamble: he was releasing money to me deliberately to further his argument in court that I had lied about my net worth. Two years later, which justified Radler’s soft sentence, praised him for keeping the prosecution abreast of all payments I received from the private newspaper companies. This helped Sussman allege that I had misrepresented the value of my assets, and assisted him in asking the Canada Revenue Agency to challenge my tax returns.
This generated $6 million for me, which, in one of our last conversations, Radler had told me would not be shaken loose for a long time, if ever. Sussman rushed to the judge to accuse me of perjury, released inflammatory filings to the press, and demanded that U.S. marshals be empowered to sell my Palm Beach house, that my bond be revoked, and that I be taken into custody at once. So began a four-month struggle that was a trial within the trial. The $6 million was put into escrow.
The world press was incited to new flurries of enthusiasm at the speed and proportions of my descent; the British press especially, which normally sniped at the vagaries of the U.S. justice system, became almost bestially aroused at the prospect of my being imprisoned without even the irritating formality of a trial. If I could be imprisoned sine die without trial, this would be a miraculous consummation, and the British press bandied it about as a live possibility for several weeks. The implication was that this would not indicate any absence of due process, merely a confirmation of my infamous crimes.
It would be unjust to underestimate the loyalists and the steadily growing group of supporters who saw at least part of the sham that was being perpetrated. Many friends – Elton John and David Furnish, Barry Humphries (Dame Edna), Lizzie Spender, Joan Collins and Percy Gibson, Martin Feldstein, author David Pryce-Jones and his wife Clarissa, historian Andrew Roberts, Anna Wintour and Shelby Bryan, and others – honoured us by coming out of their way to see us. William Buckley, George Will, Donald Trump, Seth Lipsky, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and more were publicly supportive. Philanthropist Lee Annenberg, financier Roger Hertog, New Criterion editor Roger Kimball, Commentary editor Neal Kozodoy, Brian Mulroney, writer Norman Podhoretz, international financier Ezra Zilkha, and many others were unwavering. Old friends rallied, from my early days, and virtually all my relatives. Many of these people I had not seen for decades, and I did not even know the current country of residence of many others. While there were many disappointing desertions, we never felt ourselves outcasts. The loneliness arose from the fact that though we had our supporters, social contact became difficult. Friends didn’t want to talk about our travails, yet ignoring them completely was difficult for everyone, as they were so preoccupying. The legal front either oppressed conversation or was the unmentioned 900-pound gorilla in the room. There was also a steady shift in the nature of friendly acquaintances. An increasing, and eventually very large, number of people from many countries who were complete strangers to me, including a large number of Americans, recognized the unfairness of the plea bargain system and many of the legal precedings, and the catastrophe of my successors’ management, came forward in droves, every week. I developed some close cyber-friendships with these far-off supporters.
WHEN SUSSMAN BEGAN HIS CAMPAIGN to have a forced sale of my Florida house and have me imprisoned for perjury because of the financial statement I had signed, it was hard to believe that a U.S. court would take such nonsense seriously.
Sussman poured it on: our Black Family Foundation’s contribution to the Canadian Opera Company was an act of fraud by me to deprive litigants and creditors. The contribution came from my father’s estate. Next, he put it about that Jack Boultbee was posting $10-million bond, when, in fact, Boultbee was posting $1.5 million. Sussman had already had his try at intimidating my mortgagee in Palm Beach not to renew my mortgage (though he also declined to call it) and then claimed that I was in default, and thus in violation of bail terms. Sussman endlessly accused me of sham transactions in transferring money to my wife, when the fact was that Radler had asked for these transfers to meet the foreign ownership of media restrictions in Canada and that Radler’s counsel had arranged all of it, including the sale to my wife, according to the formula that applied to all shareholders, as a matter of contract law.
Yet my own counsel fumbled meekly through these monthly scheduling meetings and Judge St. Eve felt her way very cautiously between the conflicting views. Finally, I prevailed on Eddie Genson and his colleague, Marc Martin, to produce a filing that detailed the assistant U.S. attorney’s many outrages. When our gloves-off rejoinder, imaginatively entitled “Basta,” came in, Judge St. Eve found resolution, and rejected Sussman’s demand for a revocation of bond. She released $5 million of the $6 million of shareholder advances at Horizon U.S. that Sussman had instructed Radler to pay to advance Sussman’s case for bond revocation and immediate imprisonment of me, by claiming I had deliberately undervalued these assets. She added a further $1 million to bail, bringing it to $21 million. She emphasized that she was not seeking the sale of my Palm Beach house.
My $21 million bail was secured now by more than $30 million, as Canada Revenue had departed Palm Beach (and other targets of mine for their abusive, Sussman-inspired liens and attachments). Another US$5 million from this unsuspected source, on the judge’s order, illustrated again the mercurial nature of my financial fortunes; four months before, I had been gasping for every cent. Now, Barbara and I had many millions in the bank. Between that and Strine’s enforcement of the legal costs indemnity, I could have afforded Brendan Sullivan after all, as I had unsuccessfully assured him would be the case.
IN APRIL 2006, I WAS READY TO START writing about Nixon. For two years I had been devouring books and documents about him, and my researchers, Adam Daifallah, a very intelligent young man who had helped me with FDR, and Edward Saatchi, son of British friends, were about to start work, with the blessing of the Nixon Library and Center, in the vast Nixon archives. I set myself the ambitious goal of writing three thousand words per day. It was an antidote to the legal travails. Instead of waiting for lawyers to telephone, I just wrote from the research material and interrupted myself as necessary to take calls from counsel and others.
I met my writing goals and had audaciously calculated that I could finish a draft of a four-hundred-thousand-word life of Nixon by mid-autumn and did so. My editor, the brilliant and delightful Bill Whitworth, former editor of The Atlantic magazine, and I spent two months editing it and started into production. Publishers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States all came forward nicely, and I received five times the advance I had had for FDR. I was now a known quantity, and the universal opinion on first reading was that this was a book of equivalent quality to my Roosevelt, and about a hotter button (though less distinguished) president. I must credit the ubiquitous Toronto-based entertainment lawyer Michael Levine for much of that; he is the personification of the conflict of interest, but also of the honest resolution of it, and of the related-party transaction that works for everyone. I wish that I had had the assistance of such a person in corporate matters.
It was a good time to be a Canadian. Barbara thought I was waving the Maple Leaf around a bit exuberantly in my newspaper columns on Canadian affairs, but I was both sincere and accurate. I concluded that a few interviews and three speeches – one to Moses Znaimer’s Idea City, one to the Empire Club of Toronto, and one to the World Presidents and Young Presidents – could be useful. They were well received. Even Eddie Greenspan, who had counselled silence, as lawyers normally do to clients, acknowledged that I had been correct. Miraculously, we even began to win a few motions in the courthouse in Toronto.
As my book on Nixon steadily advanced, it was inevitable that gratuitous comparisons, involving psychological liberties, would be made between my subject and me. In fact, there was little comparison, and not only because of the huge disparity in our positions and newsworthiness.
In my case, I could not give the authorities enough, was never reluctant for the whole story to be told, and wanted everything laid out. It was the prosecutors who were trying to suppress evidence of the looting of our companies by our successors, and to introduce the ravings of Strine and Breeden. I’m not a bit like Richard Nixon, though in most respects he was an admirable person with whom comparisons would be flattering.
EVENTUALLY, THE RAVELSTON RECEIVER changed the company’s plea to guilty and promised to pay a fine of $7 million to the United States, money that by now the company did not have. There was also an open-ended claim for restitution. It was completely irresponsible, and despite a brilliant argument by Peter Howard on our behalf in the commercial court, the atmosphere had not sufficiently evolved, there or on appeal, to prevent the judge from approving this insane scheme. The steamroller of the American prosecutors rolled on. At least I could afford to wait until my day in court.
Succeeding Walker, Carroll, and Kelly at Hollinger Inc., Wesley Voorheis’s regime carried to new depths the pursuit of the creators of the company’s wealth, which they had entirely dissipated by mid-2007, as the share price evaporated and the company for which we had bid $7.60 per share in 2005 sought insolvency protection. In exchange for Hollinger Inc. not being indicted, Voorheis pledged every possible assistance against me. On this one point, at least, he was as good as his word and he outperformed even Walker and Strosberg.
At this point, the American prosecutors had sixteen charges against me. They had thrown all the spaghetti at the wall, and the general practice was that some would stick. If the jury clung to a sensible notion of a reasonable doubt, we should win – as long as Greenspan proved as good a barrister in his U.S. debut as he had been for nearly forty years in Canada. That was to prove a larger imponderable than I had foreseen.
The prosecutors withdrew their claim against me for receiving the CanWest non-competition payments (though they still claimed I had fraudulently included Atkinson and Boultbee in them). They also withdrew the charge of not paying taxes in Canada, to enable, Sussman explained with his usual veracity, the Canadian taxing authorities to proceed against me. He knew perfectly well that Canada Revenue was returning most of the money it had wrongfully assessed.
Sussman – stung by the sharp defeat he suffered after he had prepared the world for my imprisonment without trial, and hyperactive – advanced swiftly from another direction. Voorheis devised a lawsuit that held that my associates and I, twelve years before, had stripped Hollinger Inc. The allegation was that we had enriched Hollinger International, where our equity interest was 24 per cent, at the expense of Hollinger Inc., where we were 65 per cent shareholders. The transactions all produced huge gains for the Hollinger Inc. shareholders and were approved by outside advisers and independent directors in both companies. It was the most inane lawsuit that had yet surfaced in this mad sequence of almost totalitarian fantasies.
Voorheis told Sussman that, based on this lawsuit, he might be able to find a judge willing to impose a total worldwide-asset freeze on me ex parte, a secret hearing at which I would have no representation, as in the New York apartment-sale freeze (it makes the prosecutor’s task considerably easier when the judges just seize the defendant’s ability to defend himself and tell him afterwards). He did just that. The most abysmally predictable of the mindless Osgoode Hall meddlers, the inevitable Colin Campbell, produced reasons for an asset freeze on my wife and me without notice to us that were so outrageously unfair that none of my counsel could believe at first that it wasn’t a send-up.
In a special Voorheis touch, the service of the “Mareva” injunction, which had been obtained two weeks before, was effected at 6 p.m. on August 25, just before the arrival of my dinner guests for my sixty-second birthday and in front of my children. At the front door, a woman with a video camera taped the serving of the order to our baffled houseman, who had been told on the speaker phone from the gate that some boxes from Eddie Greenspan’s office were being delivered.
A Mareva injunction tightly controls the access of an individual to his or her own money, ostensibly from fear that the person might move it to another jurisdiction and flee righteous creditors. By including Barbara, the claimant and the court were giving credence to the Sussman claim that the Chicago court had rejected as false – that I had improperly transferred assets to her. It also lent a completely unwarranted legitimacy to the unutterably fatuous Voorheis action.
This was an almost unbelievable development. I was convinced that even in this degenerated jurisdiction, this was going too far. Despite the implications of it, I was determined not to mention it to my birthday guests, though it was hard to put it out of mind. We had a pleasant birthday dinner. I did not mention the latest and most hideous manifestation of the evil of the American prosecutors, the complicity of my usurpatory successors, and the witless credulity of the Toronto bench.
Greenspan was on holiday in Venice. I worked with Earl Cherniak, and with David Roebuck and Peter Howard, all distinguished lawyers. Roebuck, cautious though he was, said that the Mareva conditions, which would have forced the sale of both my homes, could be beaten back.
Voorheis’s lawyers wrote at once to the mortgagee of my Toronto house, Murray Sinclair of Quest, forbidding him to accept a mortgage payment. (Glassman had already tried to buy the mortgage from Murray, who explained that “that is not how we do business.” Thank God for a few honest men.) It had come to this new low tide in my affairs. Greenspan returned; I had summarized the statements in Voorheis’s supporting affidavit, and a group of my counsel, among the most distinguished barristers in the country, called on the chief justice of the court and suggested that in light of Campbell’s evident bias, he should recuse. They were referred to Campbell himself, who declined but admitted curiosity about why such a request could possibly be made of him. Greenspan walked him through the shortcomings of Voorheis’s affidavit. We did not want a court case on the subject at this point, as it might not be possible to keep Campbell’s mad Red Queen reasons for granting an ex-parte Mareva injunction out of the court record in Chicago.
Both Campbell’s reasons for granting it and Voorheis’s reasons for getting it were so inflammatory they could have seriously affected my trial. Voorheis had to acknowledge that there were a few inexactitudes in his affidavit. Campbell urged compromise. Hollinger Inc. retreated to a point that permitted all existing normal expenses. In addition, as usual in legal matters, any payments to the professional legal class were permitted. The clannish solidarity in the matter of getting all bills paid is a tighter bond at the bar and bench than any other professional association I have known.
The revised agreement effectively released Barbara from any onerous requirements. The remaining financial restraints on both of us were very irritating but could be managed. An impartial monitor was agreed and installed. Once again, the Americans, as Machiavelli had warned of mercenaries, had found their (Canadian) collaborators almost useless and completely self-interested. I could trace the jack-knife arc of Sussman’s disappointment from the tenor of press inquiries that he had eagerly generated and then vainly tried to control.
There was a sad aspect that still perplexes me. Barbara was furious: she did not want to sign the revised agreement. Her inclusion in any sort of monitoring was so unwarranted that she was prepared to go to court and fight. “Let them send me to jail,” she said. Unfortunately, I knew that when she hit on a theme, she would follow it anywhere. She had no independent lawyer in Toronto at that point and so was dragged into this settlement without representation. “I’m trying to get my mouth to say yes,” she replied when my lawyers urged her to sign the settlement for my sake. I shared the view of counsel that we should take this deal now, to keep these bizarre allegations out of the Chicago case. Barbara went along with well-founded reluctance. In Vancouver, the judge turned down the request for a Mareva injunction against Radler, based on exactly the same claims, writing that “the evidence tendered in this case, including significant portions of the Voorheis affidavit, was objectionable on many bases. In many places in that affidavit, it is difficult to extract ‘facts’ from opinion, ‘opinion’ from ‘hearsay’ and ‘hearsay’ from ‘invective’ and ‘argument.’ In fact, I would describe a large portion of that affidavit as argument dressed up as evidence….” But in Toronto, Barbara, who had not a single criminal or civil charge against her, had to sign an agreement obligating her to follow tight reporting requirements. As Voorheis kept touting the fiction of “litigation assets,” i.e., against us, he appointed as trustee a contemporary of Justice Campbell, retired Justice Jack Ground. This boil will have to be lanced and will be, shortly after this book is published.
The three usurper regimes at both Hollingers and Ravelston steadily devised new ways to annoy me. Richter claimed that Argus Corporation owned the three paintings of me by Andy Warhol, apart from the one I had given to an art museum in Vancouver. The actual papers were ambiguous, but in fact I owned them, as I had paid Andy for them. It was just another method to curry favour with the puppet-master in Chicago and try to generate demeaning publicity. We finally agreed to leave them where they were, one in my home, one in storage in London, and one in the office in Toronto, and I posted an insurance bond, through the courtesy of Duncan Jackman, Hal and Maruja’s capable and gracious son, who was now in charge of the Jackman group’s extensive operations. Though the temporary break I had had with his father naturally never came up, I was pleased to retain a relationship with the next generation of that talented family.
This issue would arise again, as Richter desperately tried to extract the last cent from Ravelston and Argus. We eventually arranged that I would have an opportunity to buy two of the paintings at auction, and one at the auction price without auction. As I, in fact, owned them, it was inexpressibly irritating to have to pay for them twice, but I was not prepared to put the matters before another Toronto kangaroo court for the delectation of the press.
AT EACH NEW STATION IN THE long, tortuous assault by the U.S. government and its quislings, there would be the very irksome racket of media helicopters. As our home is only about two miles from a hospital, we were accustomed to the noise of distant helicopters transporting emergency cases. The photographers were a different sound, closer, noisier, and aggravatingly persistent. Aerial photographs of both my homes were constantly in the press, as Sussman fulminated and erupted in his ambition to pitch me out of them. He later confessed that his chief ambitions were to force the sale of the Palm Beach house and to seize Barbara’s diamond ring. This was the infernal and psychotically aggressive mentality that was opposing us, in the name of American justice. (He failed in both ambitions.)
In the spring, summer, and early autumn months, I enjoyed spending mornings working in the walled garden between my library and my chapel, with fountains on each side. There I altered completed Nixon chapters before sending them to editors or made notes for a National Post column, or read the daily newspapers. And in the late afternoon, I enjoyed the same activity on our terrace, watching the chipmunks and squirrels and bigger game including foxes and deer. This was the view from our drawing room terrace that Elton John had instantly recognized as “necessary for [your] sanity.” At such occasions, half-hour, low-altitude circlings of the house by helicopters with large cameras protruding in pods from their fronts incited musings about a loaded, over-the-shoulder, ground-to-air missile launcher.
SUSSMAN’S ACTIONS WERE BOTH fanatical and vulgar. In dealings with my New York lawyer over Sussman’s seizure from me of the proceeds of the New York co-op sale, Sussman continuously referred to parts of “Black’s conspiracy to defraud the shareholders.” In part, he had taken the bait from Breeden. In part, he had torqued up his frenetic natural aggressivity and focused it on whoever happened to be in his sights. Thus any exculpatory evidence was, as he put it several times, “a hand-job for Conrad” or a “self-serving letter.” The absence of evidence merely meant it had been removed. Even when his case seemed to disintegrate, there was not a faint possibility that the targeted people might be innocent.
It is a problem for all prosecutors to distinguish between their important duty to punish crime and protect society from criminals and the prior step of coming to reasonable opinions about whom to target. Since the subjects of prosecutor wrath are deemed by prosecutors to be offenders who have wronged society, there is a very swift leap from the presumption of innocence to the extermination of the possibility of innocence in the mind and hearing of the prosecutor. The cart surges in front of the horse, and instead of defending society against people who had been proved, or who he had good reason to believe, to be bad, by focusing on people presumed to be innocent, Sussman was instantly making them guilty.
Because I had agreed with Malcolm Muggeridge’s view that almost anyone, in certain circumstances, could be guilty of crimes, and because I had seen enough of police and prosecutors to know how unreliable their judgment was, my attitude and behaviour to people I knew who came under this sort of scrutiny and accusation did not change. I had not foreseen the sadistic, bourgeois pose of offended decency that many would adopt toward me. This was why the posturing of seedy journalists, suddenly made over as Victorian dowagers, bandying about censorious descriptions of totally innocent people was especially odious. Being removed from Christmas card lists was particularly irritating. An abrupt end to most Canadian and American (but not British) invitations, the one place where it was practically impossible for us to attend such occasions, created a sense of eeriness.
As a former chairman of the cardinal’s dinner in Toronto, a gathering of about twenty-five hundred people at the Convention Centre, I generally attended this gathering. In November 2006, when introduced along with many other former chairmen, I received a prolonged ovation. It was a moving moment. People I knew by sight but had not conversed with in my parish church wished me success with that Canadian understatement and even shyness that is such a pleasing contrast to the hale and bluff back-slapping of some other nationalities, including the most proximate one (as even Ernest Hemingway, briefly a Toronto resident in the early 1920s, observed).
There were particular individual disappointments. Not just financiers I had dealt with, but a frequently consulted doctor who had been something of a friend, whom I had supported through financial adversity, and who had stayed at our home in London; an eminent clergyman also withdrew. They became insufferably indiscreet and unacceptably testy. These relationships just fell away. It was disorienting, but they were eventually replaced by happier successors.
One of the most grinding clichés of the time was that we would “find out who are friends were.” More of a revelation was who our enemies were, and the crossover between them was substantial and sometimes piercingly disappointing. Yet there were heartening moments and many, in all countries, remained not only solid, but rallied in contrarian manner.
In addition to winding up the Nixon project and going through the editing, and my writing in the National Post, I was composing case summaries for counsel. We now had the FBI–U.S. attorney interviews with scores of people. I wrote a seventy-two-page dissection of the contradictory remarks and testimony of Breeden, Thompson, Kravis, Burt, Healy, and Kissinger, as well as an outline of a response to all the counts.
I eventually discovered that these interviews were rarely written up accurately by the government and the interviewees were not shown the summaries. With that said, as all interviewees had their own counsel present, those who wrote up the interviews couldn’t engage in wholesale fabrication. He recorded that Kissinger said that he believed I was guilty as charged of every allegation.
This included a large number of charges that were later dropped or thrown out by the jurors. Kissinger supposedly added that this would not affect our friendship, but that our friendship made my crimes more painful. I can hardly believe that Kissinger thought I was a racketeer and money-launderer, and I would certainly rank his credibility above that of the FBI. But the formula is familiar. Henry professed agreement with the apparently winning side and imperishable goodwill to the other side. This technique may work in the Middle East and Indochina, where treachery and violence are everywhere, but it is not an appropriate way to treat a “best friend in the world” and “indispensable pillar of my life.” Five years later we rehashed these unhappy times. It was a cultural difference. Henry did what came naturally, and as he was advised by the doubtless dessicatedly cautious Paul Saunders.
This work on the prosecution interviews and my wind-up of the Nixon book gave me some considered perspectives on my tortuous relationship with Henry Kissinger. Friendship is fine, but Richard Nixon warned me that Henry Kissinger is not reliable in a crisis. He does possess admirable physical courage, as when he proceeded to chair a conference session after being up all night when he lost the sight of his right eye due to a thrombosis.
Henry owed me benign neutrality at least. I never asked for his help or for him to become involved at all. I sought only the heavily qualified prestige of his abstention. He withheld even that. I admire him. I greatly enjoyed my relations with him. It was an honour to be his friend, as he idiosyncratically defined friendship.
And it did bother him to abandon me. He told several people, including some that he would not have imagined would communicate with me, that he regretted the strain on our friendship.
Henry Kissinger deserted me by rote, by intuitive recourse to his formula, seeking the strategic position between principle and expediency even in this small matter, as a cat reflexively stalks a bird. There was no animosity in his sudden desertion, and he meant me no harm, any more than a cat dislikes animals it tries to kill. The Kissingers, though still sending amicable gestures, were among those who could not bring themselves to send us a Christmas card after 2003. Voting for Breeden’s outrageous putsch at every stage when he could have abstained, or even, with an updraft of bravery, dissented, was deeply offensive. His conciliatory messages in the latter stages of these events seemed to me to express a breezy idea that it had all been unpleasant but now we could be friends again.
Henry had never really understood the cultural difference between Metternichian compromise and Reaganian focused strength, or between a ramshackle empire preserved by manoeuvre and autocratic chicanery, and a mighty republic with the strength to assert itself, but with the conscience to require that it be in a presentable cause. He and Nixon worked well together because both were devious and the fragility of Nixon’s political position required him to do a great deal by stealth. Henry came through Watergate apparently unscathed, but he never came back to government. He prided himself on the prestige he retained, but after 1977, they were barren years. Reagan didn’t trust him (“He wasn’t loyal to Dick,” he told me in 1989), and neither did George Bush Sr. His regime of endless conferences with other ex-office holders was no substitute for the real thing.
One of his biographers said, with some reason, that Henry was “a combination of Beelzebub and Woody Allen.” Kissinger’s actions take nothing from his public career or his private standing, but I had taken his professions of friendship seriously, and reciprocated them. I must blame myself for not recognizing the nature of the beast. But abandonment by Henry Kissinger in the greatest crisis of my life, after decades of friendship, wreathed in superlative testimonials, following many years of my prior admiration of him, though it has had little practical consequence, was a terrible wound that I feared would never heal. In this, as will be recounted in the appropriate place in this narrative, I am grateful to report that I was mistaken.
I WROTE FURTHER MONOGRAPHS on various parts of the case, as well as my fifty-page refutation of Tom Bower’s and others’ libels. I was a veritable torrent of composition from late morning to early morning, with only the twilight interruptions to watch the sunset from the terrace, and not even those once the mercury descended and daylight time was over.
The immense, outsized United States has many faces. For four decades I was a vocal defender of most of them. It was now my strange misfortune to encounter, at point-blank range, the ugliest and nastiest American face of all, that of its legal system. Among these were Richard Breeden and Patrick Fitzgerald. The experience has been so repugnant that it could not fail to reduce my confidence in the country that I had admired above all others, for all my conscient life.
Fitzgerald had held the press conferences in our case and had wildly exaggerated any possible negative construction of the facts; there was no evidence that he knew the case well or that any of the prosecutors had done more than take Breeden’s report and launch the usual trial opener of two years of press assassination, witness intimidation, and financial strangulation. Now that the trial was nearing, even the elements of the media that had so diligently personed the shovels in my interment had, if only to build drama, to acknowledge that it was going to be a main event after all. A main event cannot have a foregone conclusion. At this long undreamt-of extremity, the odds seemed to be narrowing.
* As I flew from Reagan to Pearson airports, on a flight that offered connections to Trudeau, Lesage, and Stanfield airports – Washington, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Halifax – I thought that someone was no longer young who knew the people after whom the airports are named.