Conrad Black Read online

  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 leg
al 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.