BIG JOHN, AS most people called John Bassett, former newspaper publisher, was a Hearstian figure, loose-limbed, wide-shouldered, handsome with a toothy smile and a large handshake. He had been a tennis champion, but when his knees started to give him trouble, he hired tennis pros to partner with him for doubles games that Julian and I had no hope of winning. Nor did Peter Worthington and Yvonne Crittenden, though we all enjoyed losing on the courts at the Bassetts’ impressive Caledon home.
Some years we would dine in the great hall while a chamber orchestra played at the top of the grand staircase. Isabel was an attentive and welcoming hostess; John was ebullient and edgy, wanting to debate and argue about obscure British history, long-forgotten wars, and the politics of the day. John had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Progressive Conservatives in two elections, once in Quebec and once in Ontario. Julian had worked in both federal and provincial elections, and Ontario premier Bill Davis had been trying to persuade him to run for Parliament.
Peter was thinking about announcing his candidacy for the nomination of the Progressive Conservative Party in a Toronto by-election. He was outspoken, opinionated, charming, and looked remarkably like Harrison Ford in the later Star Wars movies. The roles he had played were as swashbuckling as Ford’s, except that Peter’s were real and genuinely life-threatening. His father, Major-General Worthington, “Worthy” or “Fighting Frank” to all who knew him, had fought in the First World War. Peter had been an air gunner in the Second World War and had fought with the Princess Patricias in the Korean War. As a correspondent for The Toronto Telegram, he’d reported on wars, coups, and revolutions in the Congo, Iraq, Algeria, Angola, Lebanon, New Guinea, Biafra, Israel-Egypt, and Vietnam.
Peter had a gift for being on the cusp of history. He had interviewed Iraq’s Sandhurst-trained Brigadier Abdel Karim Kassem, and he was there when King Faisal’s uncle, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah, refused to surrender and his whole family, including the children, was massacred. He had met one of the world’s “most durable monarchs,” King Hussein of Jordan, over Coca-Cola and coffee. Alone in Gamal Abdul Nasser’s study, he interviewed Egypt’s strongman for about three hours. Nasser joked about cartoons of himself in the British papers. When Peter mentioned Israeli fears about being driven into the sea, Nasser just laughed. “That’s just Arab rhetoric,” he told Peter.
He interviewed the Dalai Lama, India’s Nehru, both Mobutu and Lumumba in the Congo, and a very drunk Soviet spy, Kim Philby, in a bar in Beirut. Once he was trapped in a firefight between the French Foreign Legion and the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria. Astonishingly, you can see Peter in the famous photograph taken by a news photographer at the moment Jack Ruby gunned down Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. Peter helped and supported Igor Gouzenko, the man who first revealed the extent of Soviet spying in Canada and was disbelieved by many. Peter believed him, and Peter was right. He also interviewed Gouzenko and wrote the story.
When Peter was stationed in the USSR for The Toronto Telegram, Olga, the intriguing, seemingly eccentric, but pretty wife of a senior Soviet KGB man, asked for his help to defect. Though he was initially suspicious that Olga was a double agent, Peter found a way with the help of James Leslie Bennett, then head of Canadian counterintelligence (he would later sue writer Ian Adams), and after a few narrow escapes, the pair reached Canada, where Olga settled and managed to eke out a living, mostly from Peter and Yvonne.
Not surprisingly, Peter’s favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling.
I had been trying to persuade him to write a book since the seventies. Having heard all these stories, wouldn’t everyone? But he was too busy to write a memoir and he thought he still had a lot of life to live. He had launched the Toronto Sun in 1972, with two other former Telegram staffers, Don Hunt and Donald Creighton. They had the advantage of the Telegram’s subscriber list from John Bassett and a bit of money they had scraped together. Eddie Goodman—political insider, founder of the law firm Goodman and Goodman, and another Bassett friend—had been the first outside investor to put his money on the table.
With Peter as the Sun’s editor, the new tabloid was irrepressibly feisty, innovative, entertaining, irreverent, and outspoken. While it drew attention for its “Sunshine Girls,” it also championed democracy. “Democracy is valued most by those who have lost it,” Peter wrote. When many liberal idealists continued to see the USSR through rose-coloured glasses, the Sun remained deeply suspicious of the Soviet Union. It also challenged Pierre Trudeau’s sympathies for Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong.
In 1978, after his first triple-bypass surgery, Peter hired journalist Barbara Amiel to replace him as editor. Barbara, then still married to George Jonas, with whom she had co-authored By Persons Unknown: The Strange Death of Christine Demeter, was a columnist at Maclean’s and a very glamorous woman about town. Peter continued as a columnist.
He resigned from the Sun’s board of directors in 1982, when they voted (unanimously, except for Peter) to sell the tabloid to Maclean Hunter. He assumed that the paper would lose its independence and become dull. He thought that success had already made it less than it should and could have been. It would no longer be breaking stories, no longer strutting its opinions across the front page as it had done during the first years.
Surely he would, at last, be ready to write that book.
But no, he tried to get the federal Progressive Conservative nomination in Broadview-Greenwood, and when he was blocked from that, he ran as an independent. He lost to the NDP,I giving my book yet another chance to be completed. I have kept two of Peter’s campaign posters and one five-foot-high photo of him, taken when he climbed to Mount Everest’s base camp after his second coronary bypass.
We published Looking for Trouble in 1984. To my surprise, while Peter was on his publicity tour for the memoir, he was fired by the paper he had helped start. He thought he could be critical of the Sun when it deserved criticism. As it turned out, he couldn’t.
Of course, we issued a new edition of Looking for Trouble, featuring Peter’s dismissal and its aftermath.
Eventually, when tempers cooled, Peter returned to the Sun as a columnist, filing his stories well ahead of the deadlines, and filing at least twice as many as he was paid for. Being Peter, he couldn’t resist what he called “the boy scout stuff,” so he took off for Angola to write about the fighting, to Eritrea to see the war of independence for himself, and to witness a few incidental skirmishes along the way.
Peter’s last column was published on May 14, 2013. This is how it began:
If you are reading this, I am dead.
How’s that for a lead?
Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.
I. I suspect Joe Clark’s Tories gave a sigh of relief as Peter was never going to be a silent backbencher.