CITIZEN @175
Ex-editor Spicer reminisces
This year, the Ottawa Citizen — the capital's oldest continuously operated business — marked its 175th anniversary. This edited excerpt from former editor Keith Spicer's book, Life Sentences, is part of a series celebrating the newspaper's past and looking to its future.
You get only one chance, they say, to make a first impression. About six weeks before I turned up for work, the Citizen's page one announcement of my appointment had nearly done me in. Instead of dwelling on my 13 fairly rich years as a journalist, it kept calling me “Dr. Spicer.” I groaned. To make the newsroom's old boys sneer, you could do no better: the Herr Doktor tag would mark me forever as an eccentric, dream-a-minute egghead.
If RCMP raids and libel suits were the standard, my first six weeks were a stunning success. Unfortunately, I can't claim all the credit. Within a few days of my arrival a Mountie came in, asking me to reveal the source of an embarrassing story. To his dismay, I invited him into the boardroom with managing editor Nelson Skuce and a notebook-in-hand young reporter. “What is he doing here?” said the Horseman. “To report on your visit,” I answered, having agreed on this beforehand with Nelson.
Silence. Agenda shot, the Mountie left — with Nelson and me doubtless added to somebody's “subversive” list. A week or so later, New Brunswick Premier Richard Hatfield sued us. Like several other news outlets, we had reported that Mounties (again!) had found 26.5 grams of marijuana in his travel bag while, a few weeks earlier — psychedelic lèse-majesté? — he was accompanying Queen Elizabeth II.”
But scandal-wise, the big excitement came on Feb. 12, on a slow afternoon barely five weeks after my arrival, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's defence minister, Robert Coates, resigned following a Citizen story. The tale? While visiting the Canadian military base at Lahr, Germany, Coates and two aides had allegedly dropped in to a nearby strip club called Tiffany's. We feared a potential security risk — the KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) notoriously used young women (“swallows”) to compromise NATO personnel. Our libel lawyers loved us, and began kicking tires at sports-car dealers. But after months of legal skirmishing costing over $1 million, we would agree to a case-ending compromise, without withdrawing our original story.
Around 8 a.m. on March 12, 1985, three Armenian terrorists attacked Ottawa's Turkish embassy, killing a young Canadian security guard. The newsroom leapt into action, dispatching reporters and photographers. Our early-afternoon edition carried extraordinary coverage, including details of the siege, lots of context, and a fabulous spread of photos. Some of these went around the world, and all the agencies took their lead from us. The story was tragic, arresting, incredibly exciting. Our staff were dazzling. I started realizing how much I would come to love this job.
The next drama was the explosion of the U.S. Challenger space shuttle on Jan. 28, 1986. I had been watching this on TV with newsdesk colleagues when, 73 seconds into the flight, the shuttle blew up.
The presses were already running, but I made a snap decision to stop them and make this our main story, with off-the-TV-screen picture, for our home-delivered edition. This meant ripping up page one and at least a 20- to 30-minute delay in the whole production chain. Luckily for me, none of the complications of stopping the presses cost the paper too much in lost newsprint, staff overtime, late delivery, rush-hour traffic jams.
Gradually, my involvement in a few such stories helped disarm skeptics. Reporters and department heads started coming to me more easily. When the Chernobyl nuclear-station meltdown happened three months after the shuttle disaster, on April 25-26, I sensed we had begun to work as a team. I especially loved working with young reporters — encouraging them by stopping for a chat, or sending them notes when they
pulled off a good story or crafted a well-written piece.
Over time, I wrote on everything under the sun: national and international politics, social and cultural issues, even slices of life. I would often stir the pot by attacking Ottawa's sacred cows, such as the public service — a surefire way to fill our letters page with apoplectic denunciations. Once I outraged my friend Shirley Thomson, director of the newly reopened National Gallery, by vividly mocking her staff's choice of contemporary art. (I also dismayed our excellent art critic, Nancy Baele, who in her column next day put me back in my cage.)
Occasionally, too, I would write an angry piece about some “small” injustice. Once I wrote about a poor woman whose mean-spirited ex-husband had played endless tricks to deny her half of their beekeeping business she had helped
build. After years of litigation, she finally won in the Supreme Court. But the lawyers took all her money, so she shot herself. Eighteen years later, I got a fax in Paris from another woman, who said she had kept that column on her refrigerator all that time to give herself courage in a similar situation. I was flabbergasted. After meeting her in Ottawa, I realized that columnists rarely get to know how they help or hurt people. The sheer unlimited freedom to think aloud in a column, to say your piece as you wish, to defend values you care about — or just to play with ideas and words and emotions — is an inestimable privilege.
Barely half a year after I hit Ottawa in 1985, Hull-Ottawa French private TV station CHOT invited me to host a weekly interview show on federal politics called Sur la Colline (On the Hill), and publisher
Paddy Sherman agreed this might be a good PR for the paper. My first three guests were Tory prime minister Mulroney, Liberal Opposition leader Jean Chrétien, and NDP leader Ed Broadbent. This got me — and the Citizen — back into the mind of the national capital's French-speakers. So did convincing our publisher to launch a splitrun edition for western Quebec. I also hired Jacques Parizeau — then out of office as Quebec's separatist minister of finance — as a weekly columnist on financial matters. A congenial man, Parizeau stuck to our agreement and wrote on finance.
Near the end of my time with the paper, the Citizen brought to Ottawa the famous Russian physicist and human-rights dissident, Andrei Sakharov. Known by Cold Warriors as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he was called by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee a “spokesman for the conscience of mankind.” Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last Communist leader, released Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner, from internal exile in Gorky in December 1986, and I hit on the idea of getting the Citizen to invite them to Canada as our guests.
World editor Ilya Gerol acted as go-between, and publisher Russ Mills sprang for the money. We organized honorary doctorates for both of them at the University of Ottawa and arranged a visit to the National Research Council. For four whirlwind days the couple were our guests, and we splashed them all over the paper. While Sakharov toured the newsroom, I hosted his wife in my office for about 40 minutes. A brave but not chatty woman with thick, hugerimmed glasses, she and I talked about their new-found freedom and their visit. Like a good Armenian, she smoked incessantly. Like a good Canadian, I didn't notice.
Photographer Yousuf Karsh was thrilled to have Sakharov as a subject. He did a masterful portrait of the great scientist-dissident wearing a Russian fur cap — a little in the spirit of Karsh's famous photo of Nikita Khrushchev. We had feared that Estrellita Karsh and Yelena Bonner, both “custodians” of world-famous men, might not hit it off, but they got along like long-lost sisters. The final public event was a dinner for about 40 in the grand hall of the new National Gallery. A string quartet played softly, Parliament stood in graceful highlight on the Hill behind the tall widows, and good wine flowed. The whole evening was magic. Speeches were few, simple, and history-tinged.
My last self-assignment was to go to Paris July 14, 1989, to cover the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. As I filed my copy from the Latin Quarter, I felt the old reporter's thrill, now numbed with sadness. We put out a glorious special supplement on the revolution and on France. In my last column the day I left, I recapped the felicities of being the colleague of my colleagues, and ended by stating the obvious: after being a newspaper editor, there are no promotions.