Complete exoneration, Conrad Black declares
HIS REAL CRIME WAS TO STRIKE UN-CANADIAN IDEOLOGICAL POSTURES
When I began work at Conrad Black’s National Post in 1998, one of my assigned tasks was to occasionally drive home my boss, editorial-board chief John O’Sullivan, to his Toronto quarters — which happened to be in Conrad Black’s unusually large house. I was then driving a nine-year-old Volkswagen Golf whose fan belt made a high-pitched shrieking noise in cold weather. And the footmen of the Black estate could not usher me off the property fast enough once I’d discharged my passenger.
Eventually, I advanced in the world to such extent that I would sometimes be invited into the house as a guest in my own right. By this time, my host’s circumstances had become more diminished, and so there were fewer footmen. On the most recent occasion, Black even greeted me at the door personally — alongside two of the biggest dogs I’d ever seen. I later learned that the breed is Hungarian Kuvasz, which according to Wikipedia, is “a livestock guardian (which) kill(s) wolves, coyotes, and other predators, and this instinct remains intact in the modern dog. Handlers should be alert to signs of tension, and intervene before a dangerous situation develops.”
“Be very still and let them see that you are not a threat,” said Black as the larger of the two snarled at me in the entry hall. The smaller specimen, which I instinctively feared most, stared at me with a completely flat expression, much like the understated mob-movie sociopath who does the actual dirty work once the capo gives the head nod.
A man who lives a pampered life never quite knows how he’ll react when he feels himself to be at mortal risk. My own reaction in that moment was to cup one hand under my crotch and the other under my throat. Black, meanwhile, walked toward me and said, in a sort of kindergarten sing-song style directed at the dogs, “Oh look, it’s my friend Jon. Yesssss … my friend. Hello, Jon. Welcome to our home. Jon is our friend. We like Jon.” Black then put his arm on my shoulder — to help assure these 100-pound beasts that I was neither wolf nor coyote. The dogs never attacked, and I allowed my hands to drop from their defensive assignments. Now at something approaching ease, I was ushered into the drawing room, where my host and I spoke at some length about the Battle of Waterloo, whose 200th anniversary had just passed. In my many years of service as Black’s (by turns) minion, friend and editor, this was surely the Conrad Blackiest experience I’d ever had.
There is also, in that vignette, a microcosm of the utterly unrepentant way in which Conrad Black always has presented himself to the world. For what publicist would counsel an ex-con seeking to rehabilitate his reputation amidst these trappings of great wealth, attended to by canine velociraptors worthy of Montgomery Burns?
Black, who spent three years in a Florida prison after being convicted for felony fraud and obstruction of justice, never pretended that he was a changed man; never dropped the out-oftime Anglo-Canadian patrician persona, or the schoolboy fixation on great battles and model warships. At his darkest hour, when American prosecutors and agencies were using every imaginable motion, lien and injunction to bankrupt the man, he clung to this residence on Toronto’s storied Bridle Path, from which redoubt he stayed true to his grandiose, almost Wodehousian image.
To someone who lives outside Canada, it is difficult to explain the level of anti-Black hatred that has existed in some quarters of this country. The animus has little to do with the actual criminal case against Black, which was based on white-collar charges that few Canadians ever fully understood. Rather, his real crime was to strike un-Canadian ideological postures, and to start up the National Post, whose creation in 1998 forever broke up the lazy left-centrist boys club then dominating high-concept Toronto-based media.
For the anti-Black chorus, prison was nice. But what they really wanted was for the man to submit, to make some penance in a public way, to beg for readmission to the world of Canadian arts and letters and Toronto high society. The fact that Black not only refused to do so (re-entering both milieus on his own terms), but also has remained an active and popular (if often crotchety) presence on the pages of the National Post, a popular speaker, a productive book author, and an all-around bon vivant, drove many Canadian pundits into a state of high agitation. (Bob Hepburn of the Toronto Star stands out for special mention, as his many columns about Black passed almost into the realm of clinical derangement.) And so it is hard to imagine how additionally galling it must have been to hear Wednesday’s news that Black now has been fully pardoned by U.S. President Donald Trump. To call Black an ex-con at this point in time is (if I may adopt the modern idiom) a form of “dead-naming.” For the letter of American law requires that we affirm Black’s status as innocent, which is always how the man self-identified anyway. Passionately, consistently, relentlessly.
I might even say, maddeningly. Until late 2014, I served as the editor of Black’s weekly column on the National Post opinion pages, in some cases receiving his articles through the email system run by the U.S. prison system. No matter what the ostensible subject of Black’s column might have been — Quebec separatism, the American Revolutionary War, global warming — he usually would tuck in three or four paragraphs proclaiming his innocence, often under the most absurd editorial pretexts. And one of my first orders of business as editor, in most cases, was simply to remove all this material. This was a repetitive task. But it did serve to convince me that Black always was a true believer in his own innocence.
The more difficult question is whether Black is a true believer in Donald Trump. As has been widely noted, this week’s presidential pardon does not come in a vacuum. The two men know each other from Palm Beach circles. Black has written a fawning book about Trump. And here are a sampling of headlines of some of Black’s columns over the past three years: The Genius of Trump (July 23, 2016), Donald Trump Is A Man Of His Times, Whose Time Has Come (May 12, 2018), Trump Is Already The Most Successful U.S. President Since Reagan (Nov. 18, 2017), and, my personal favourite, Trump Invokes Sacred Duty to Raise up America’s Magnificence (Jan. 21, 2017). Squint hard, and a certain theme emerges, no? Indeed, it’s hardly unfair to suspect that Black has been spending the past three years pumping editorial quarters into a presidential slot machine that just paid out on five cherries.
No one can be sure what truly motivates another writer. But for what it’s worth, I do think Black’s admiration of Trump is genuine — even if there may be other, perhaps unconscious, motives at play — in large part because his veneration of this obnoxious president is, in fact, entirely consistent with Black’s other intellectual fixations.
Even before Black was prosecuted by U.S. authorities, the primary theme in his books and scholarship always was the rehabilitation of autocratic historical figures — Cardinal Richelieu, Maurice Duplessis, Richard Nixon, Otto von Bismarck — who hoarded power and strongarmed opponents. A late convert to Catholicism, Black is drawn heavily to traditional hierarchies, and to the Junker elites who dominate them. When prosecutors came after Black, the events of his own life began to blur into this historical worldview, with Black himself (who famously once dressed up as Richelieu, accompanied by wife Barbara Amiel as Marie Antoinette) playing the role of besieged alpha. As a result, Black has become disposed to tease out the saving graces of just about any leader set upon by bien pensant critics.
Consider that in late 2013, Black wrote not one, but three columns defending former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. (This would be the guy who smoked crack, not his abstemious brother Doug, who now serves as premier of Ontario.) In one, The Salvation of Ford, he wrote of the mayor’s critics that “by their bestial self-righteous excess and implicit mockery of a large echelon of the population that identifies with the mayor, made him more popular than ever.” I know of no material benefit that Ford was in any position to confer upon Black. It was simply a case of Black putting his chips down, by life-hardened instinct, with the bad boy whom we were all supposed to hate.
This Sunday, May 19, will mark the 16th anniversary of the date when Black’s legal troubles formally began — the day Tweedy Browne Co. sent its demand letter to Hollinger International insisting on an investigation into corporate payments made to Black and his associate, David Radler. During all these 16 years, Black has never once conceded the truth of the substantive accusations against him. Whatever else may be said of his actions and methods, he has been the same man, telling the same story, to lawyers and judges, in books and columns, on TV and social media. All with the goal of securing the final, formal vindication that arrived this week via a single presidential phone call.
Life doesn’t often turn up roses like that for any of us, which is what makes this a pretty remarkable story. If Black’s critics allowed themselves a moment of honest self-reflection, they might acknowledge, however briefly, this extraordinary moment of victory for Canada’s one and only lord of the manor.
LIFE DOESN’T OFTEN TURN UP ROSES LIKE THAT FOR ANY OF US.