Newspapering: 50 Years of Reporting from Canada and Around the World Norman Webster
Norman Webster Newspapering: 50 Years of Reporting from Canada and Around the World
Barlow Books/2020
In 1971, Norman Webster was The Globe and Mail’s China correspondent, covering ping pong diplomacy: the arrival of an American ping pong team that laid the groundwork for the beginning of diplomatic relations between Richard Nixon’s United States and Mao Zedong’s China.
After days of scrambling about, writing about the visit and taking photographs of what had become, as he put it, “not just a big story…a Big Story,” he shipped off his material the way he had learned was most efficient: on a flight to Shanghai, and then by Air France to Paris and on to Toronto. He then asked the American correspondents travelling with the team how they were doing it, and learned they were sending their stuff to Canton, across the border to Hong Kong, and then to the US. Norman
was elated. He knew this was a recipe for disaster, or at least lengthy delay by Chinese officials.
“I wrestled with my conscience, lost the battle and returned to the counter,” he wrote, years later. “Guys, I said, there’s something you should know. And I told them the whole story, including the Shanghai escape route.”
He was greeted with polite condescension; the Americans had everything taken care of. “Thanks anyway. And they left.” So did Webster, whistling.
“What happened? Well, the Canton-bound film somewhat got misplaced in transit and took days to reappear,” he wrote. “The Shanghai package, meanwhile, bumped along to Toronto, where The Globe and Mail ran a world scoop of photos of the Great Ping Pong Adventure. It also flogged them to Time (colour cover), Newsweek, Paris Match, The Australian, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and others around the world.” That one anecdote in this wonderful collection captures the essence of Norman Webster: cheerful, well-informed, shrewd, honourable,—and highly competitive. He is an athlete, and until recently played hockey and competed in triathlons.
This collection of Webster’s reporting ranges from London to Beijing, Oxford to Mogadishu and Quebec City to Queen’s Park with brilliant thumbnail sketches of Bill Davis, Mike Pearson, Daniel Johnson Sr., Zhou Enlai, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Di and many others. The texts, originally published in The Globe and Mail, The Gazette and Maisonneuve, are a blend of stories filed from the spot at the time and later, longer, sometimes nostalgic recollections. The result is a delight.
I first met Norman Webster in the fall of 1973. I had just joined The Globe and Mail, and had been sent—perhaps to learn from the best—to Queen’s Park for a few weeks, where Norman was the bureau chief. He was furious; he had just spent days following a Liberal leadership candidate around northern Ontario, and the story he had filed had been cut to ribbons. The lesson I learned from this was that whoever you were, The Globe owned your labour. I suspect that one of the lessons Norman may have learned was how to write in a way that made his stories difficult to cut. The pieces included in this collection are perfect examples: almost every one of them ends with a sting in the tail that no cynical copy editor would dare remove.
The insights stand up, years after they were written. The only case where he felt obliged to write a postscript was about Aung San Suu Kyi. While she was, as he wrote 11 years ago, “courageous, beautiful, eloquent, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (and) authentic leader of her people,” her “cold-hearted actions against the Rohingya Muslim minority” left him wondering. “Did we make a bad call here? Did a world and journalists looking for a heroine go overboard in our evaluation of Burma’s beautiful lady of the lake?” he wrote in 2018. “When she finally came to power after a long struggle with her generals, did she revert to the thuggish ways of those same generals?” He concluded that “the world may now be seeing the downside of the determination and ambition that served her so well under house arrest.”
Born and raised in Sherbrooke, Quebec in the Eastern Townships, Webster went to Bishop’s University, worked part-time for the Sherbrooke Record, and then won a Rhodes Scholarship. When he returned from Oxford, he was hired by The Globe and in 1965, at the ripe old age of 24, was sent to Quebec City where the Quiet Revolution was in full swing. After a stint at the long-gone Globe Magazine, he went to Queen’s Park: first as bureau chief, and then as a columnist. Then China. Then London—which, in those days, meant those parts of the world that were not Asia or the Americas.
This is a collection, not a memoir. It includes nothing about his time as editor-in-chief of The Globe or The Montreal Gazette. But Norman Webster’s
character shines through: his wry sense of humour, his respect for the people he writes about, his nuanced insight into their character, his deep historical understanding, his belief in bilingualism, his hatred of smoking and separatism, his affection for Montreal, les Canadiens, the Eastern Townships and the monarchy.
As he wrote about the Queen Mother, he “went to bat for decency, honour, love, family, freedom, royalty and good cheer.” Plus, of course, hockey and clear prose.
Contributing Writer Graham Fraser spent 19 years at The Globe and Mail, in Toronto, Quebec City, Ottawa and Washington. The author of several books, he served as Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages from 2006-2016.
gated public schools. In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution banned the Black contralto Marian Anderson from giving an Easter Concert in Constitution Hall, she resigned from their organization and invited Anderson to sing at the White House for the King and Queen of England. She travelled extensively across America and visited foreign countries by herself to assess their social and economic conditions—a first for a president’s wife—and all with the president’s approval. She travelled so much that a Washington Post headline in 1934 trumpeted: “First Lady Spends Night in White House”. During the Second World War, she vigorously opposed the shameful internship of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066, warning that: “If we cannot meet the challenge of really believing in the Bill of Rights and make it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race, creed or color; if we cannot keep in check anti-Semitism, anti-racial feelings, as well as anti-religious feelings, then we shall have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.”
She became, as Time magazine noted, “a woman of unequaled influence, superlative in her own personal right” and, as Michaelis notes, the “advocate for the voiceless”.
When his staff would urgently ask him to ask her to stop generating controversy over these issues, the President shrugged it off, saying it would “blow over”. When Eleanor asked him how he felt about her contrary stance on some legislation he supported, he said “you go right ahead and stand for whatever you feel is right.” She had come a long way from his Inauguration Day as New York Governor in 1929, when she told a reporter: “I don’t exactly know what is before me, but I expect to solve problems as they come along. That has always been my way and things always get done.”
She kept getting things done even after her husband died in 1945, participating, at President Harry Truman’s request, in the creation of the United Nations, accepting an appointment as chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, and reifying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, becoming the world’s foremost champion of human rights. It is hard to argue with the moniker H. L. Mencken gave her when he said she was “the most influential female ever recorded in American history.”
Her private life was complicated. The book extensively chronicles her loving relationship with the journalist Lorena Hicks, her husband’s with Lucy Mercer, her familial disappointments, and her omnisciently disapproving mother-in-law. Yet none of it blocked her courage. Brought up in a world that embraced the status quo, she embraced change. Trained to serve her household, she served her country instead. Told that women were silent marital adjuncts, she became her husband’s closest and most vocal advisor—and the most famous feminist in the world.
All this and more is chronologically delineated in this engrossing book.
The degree of detail can sometimes get in the way of the narrative flow, but it’s worth the effort because by the end, all the pieces fit perfectly and luminously reveal the astonishing story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s metamorphosis from a compliant woman of her times into a woman who reshaped them.
Of all the mesmerizing details in the book, one struck a personal chord. During the Second World War, she had “made it her mission to save as many Jewish European children as she could”, along with pressuring an unreceptive State Department to expedite 4,000 visitors’ visas for Jewish refugees including Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Near the war’s end, on April 16, 1945, the day after President Roosevelt died, Edward R. Murrow broadcast the first eyewitness account of a Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald. Neither he, nor Time or Life magazines which reported several days later from Dachau, identified the victims as Jewish. It took Eleanor Roosevelt in her column, at the end of that month to admonish: “Are our memories so short that we do not recall how in Germany this unparalleled barbarism started by discrimination directed at the Jewish people?”
She decided to visit some Displaced Persons Camps in Germany to see the state of the Jewish survivors for herself. In 1948, she visited the one in Stuttgart, where my father Jacob Silberman, a lawyer, was head of the D. P. Camp. He introduced her by calling her “the protector of human rights, fighter for freedom, peace and justice” and added: “You, Mrs. Roosevelt, are the representative of a great nation, whose victorious army liberated from death the remnants of European Jewry and highly contributed to their moral and physical rehabilitation… We are not any longer in a position of showing you here assets such as factories, farms, establishments and the like. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future”.
I was one of those children.
All the pieces fit perfectly and luminously reveal the astonishing story of Eleanor Roosevelt’s metamorphosis from a compliant woman of her times into a woman who reshaped them.
Justice Abella is on the Supreme Court of Canada.