WHEN I WAS interviewed by Maclean’s in 1986, I mentioned how much Canadians’ attitude to business had changed in the years since I had arrived. “Money-grubbing has become respectable,” I said. Peter Newman’s blockbuster gossipy business books would not have been of such overwhelming interest to ordinary folk in the fifties or sixties, but business leaders had somehow acquired star quality. Key Porter had started early in publishing business books.
Diane Francis, then a lead columnist for the Financial Post, Maclean’s, and the Toronto Sun, gave us a slew of entertaining business books, including Bre-X: The Inside Story and Immigration: The Economic Case. Sandy Ross of Canadian Business used to stop me on my way through the Key Publishers’ rabbit warren to tell me about new developments in the Southam family saga—a story he relished and had hoped to write one day—and Conrad Black became a poster guy for second-generation success with his purchase of Argus Corporation, rising to international media fame with his acquisition of the UK’s Daily Telegraph.
The National Business Book Awards were launched in 1985. Peter Foster’s The Master Builders, about the Reichmann family empire, was our contender in 1986, and Ken Lefolii’s Claims: Adventures in the Gold Trade, about mining and the unusual cadre of people who prospected for, invested in, and speculated in gold, won in 1987. Conrad Black’s A Life in Progress was a finalist in 1993.
Conrad, by then, presided over a major newspaper conglomerate, Hollinger Inc. I was, for a short time, a director of Hollinger and later of Argus Corporation. Hollinger was, by far, the most fascinating board I had been on, though I had found Maritime Life, Empire Company, Alliance Communications, and Peoples Jewellers interesting and sometimes challenging. Argus was Conrad’s holding company but meetings were attended by, among others, Paul Reichmann and His Eminence Emmett Cardinal Carter.
Conrad was probably the only board chair who had no illusions about the book business when he asked me to join the Hollinger board. Most of the meetings were held in the boardroom at 10 Toronto Street, whose door had served as the cover of Peter Newman’s The Canadian Establishment. I looked forward to the discussions of newspapers, the political situations in the United States and the UK, in Australia and Israel (Conrad had also bought the Jerusalem Post), and had a ringside seat at the Daily Telegraph’s newspaper price war with News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch, the take-no-prisoners Aussie proprietor of the London Times and much else besides. The Times, trying to beat the Telegraph’s circulation, had assumed that aggressively lowering the price of its papers would do it. When that didn’t work, they inserted free Eurostar tickets into each copy of the Saturday paper. Conrad was, in the end, forced to lower his own paper’s price.
I loved listening to Conrad’s erudite, often ornate, and sometimes very funny review of his empire and its enemies.
Now and then I noted words I had never used and never heard anyone else use, a great deal more fun than the jargon of life insurance. (I had planned to commission an actuaries’ joke book, but fortunately never got around to it.)
I attended days-long Advisory Board meetings that included people like David Brinkley, William F. Buckley, Lord Carrington, Henry Kissinger, billionaire financiers Lord Rothschild, Gianni Agnelli, and Jimmy Goldsmith, economist and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, global strategist and US presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and George F. Will. I once had a fascinating conversation with Brzezinski about the long-term effects of quick, painful economic reforms in Poland and the economic outcome of the end of the Soviet Union. Already, he had predicted Russian efforts to reestablish a sphere of influence to mirror the former Soviet empire.
Another time when I attended the advisers’ meetings with a broken leg, Lady Margaret Thatcher helped me to the washroom. While I hobbled, she talked with admiration about the United States’ having been founded on idealism and about civilization being in peril “as long as brutal forces of enslavement walk the earth.” She was the least guarded politician I have met. The current state of the European Union, unfortunately, confirms her fears of what would happen if you tried to force together disparate nations with different objectives.
Conrad’s A Life in Progress has a wonderful jacket: black-on-black elegant, minimalist but striking. It was designed by the preternaturally talented Scott Richardson,I who also designed Farley Mowat’s second Key Porter book, Born Naked. It would be difficult to invent two people less alike than Farley and Conrad, or two books less alike than their memoirs. I think it says something interesting about Key Porter that we proudly published both. We were eclectic in our choices and, apart from our environmental dedication, not particularly ideological.
A Life in Progress, while offering interesting portraits of Henry Kissinger, Brian Mulroney, Lyndon Johnson, and Margaret Thatcher, is revealing about the private Conrad Black. Since then, he has published eleven more books, including his epic work on Roosevelt, a controversial biography of Nixon, a second autobiography, and his history of Canada. He ultimately sold his company’s interests in the Southam papers to Izzy Asper, founder of CanWest Global Communications, in what Peter Newman billed as “the largest media transaction in Canadian history.”
In 1998 we published a new, shortened edition of Conrad’s Duplessis as Render unto Caesar: The Life and Legacy of Maurice Duplessis.
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IN 2003, NEW York investment firm Tweedy, Browne initiated an investigation into Hollinger’s management practices. Initially Conrad welcomed the special committee and its chairman, Richard Breeden. All corporate files and papers would be open to them, he said. He was confident, he told me, that the company’s books were in order. The special committee’s report, however, accused Hollinger’s chief shareholders of “corporate kleptocracy” and initiated a suit against them for inappropriately acquiring Hollinger assets.
I followed the course of Conrad’s trial in Chicago closely and thought American justice had failed—as it has failed in many other cases (except on television). A hallmark of the US system is a ninety-nine per cent conviction rate, ninety-seven per cent without a trial. So, just this about Conrad’s case: his persecutors lacked the one essential ingredient for a fair trial: credible proof of wrongdoing. They abandoned three of seventeen counts against him even before the trial began. One more was abandoned during the trial. The jury discarded a further nine counts. Eight justices of the US Supreme Court threw out four more counts. When the Chicago appeal judges were left to reassess these four convictions, the court either had to abandon the case or try to make something stick. Two charges stuck: one for improperly receiving $285,000 from the sale of newspapers, even though corporate files showed that matter had been approved by the audit committee and the board; the second was for obstruction of justice. Conrad had removed thirteen boxes of his papers from his former Toronto office. The prosecution claimed that he had done so furtively, and in contravention of a Canadian court order. In fact, he removed them in broad daylight, under his own security cameras, having announced his intention to do so. Furthermore, there was no Canadian court order forbidding him to remove his papers.
Conrad spent three years and two weeks in jail. He was a model prisoner, witty even about his incarceration and polite to the men who shared his fate. He taught history and English and French grammar to inmates who wished to pass exams, and he learned first-hand how the US justice system discriminates against blacks and the poor—“the US system of injustice,” he called it.
In A Matter of Principle, published in 2010 by M&S, he recounts the events leading up to his incarceration, the members of the Special Committee charged with discovering what, if any, wrongdoings there had been under his leadership of Hollinger, the trial in Chicago, the appeals, and his time in prison. Meanwhile Hollinger’s value (about $2 billion) disappeared. Conrad accused his accusers: “Court-protected charlatans took $100,000 a month in directors’ fees each and rifled the treasury for their own benefit.”
Conrad returned to Canada and continues to write columns for the National Post and National Review, and though there are those who still insist he acted with unenlightened self-interest while running his companies, he is practically mobbed by well-wishers and admirers at social events. In 2011 he sued members of the Special Committee for libel and accepted a $5 million settlement.
I. Scott himself, as C. S. Richardson, wrote two novels, one of which, The End of the Alphabet, should be read by everyone who is planning a trip to Paris.