181. Baron Black of Crossharbour | Lord Conrad Black

[0] Hey guys, just so you know, we've moved the podcast to once a week to give my dad some more time.

[1] He's not feeling well.

[2] It'll be released every Monday for the foreseeable future.

[3] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[4] This is Season 4, episode 35.

[5] In this episode, Dad is joined by Lord Conrad Black.

[6] Conrad Black is a Canadian -born British Pier and former publisher of the London Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, the Chicago Sun Times, the Jerusalem Post, and founder of Canada's National Post.

[7] He's a columnist and regular contributor to several publications, including the National Review Online, the new criterion, the national interest, American greatness, the New York Sun, and the National Post.

[8] Lord Conrad Black and my dad discuss his very interesting life, how he got into history, education, the newspaper business, living in Britain, his experience with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

[9] Incarceration, becoming a tutor and more.

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[22] Hello, everyone.

[23] Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Cross Harbor, K -C -S -G, born 25th of August 1944, is a Canadian -born newspaper publisher, financier, and writer.

[24] He is the author of 10 books, mostly dealing with Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessie and U .S. President's Frank Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, as well as two memoirs.

[25] He's currently writing a political history of the ancient world, concentrating primarily on the Romans and the Greeks.

[26] His father was businessman George Montague Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail, and media businesses through part ownership of the holding company, Ravelston Corporation.

[27] In 1978, two years after their father's death, Conrad and his older brother Montague took majority control of Ravleston.

[28] Over the next seven years, they sold off most of their non -media holdings to focus on newspaper publishing.

[29] Black -controlled Hollinger International once the world's third largest English -language newspaper empire, which published the Daily Telegraph in the UK, the Chicago Sun Times, the Jerusalem Post, the National Post in Canada and hundreds of community newspapers across North America before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company's assets.

[30] He is one of Canada's most recognizable and influential figures and has known many of the great political actors and cultural figures of the last half century.

[31] It's my great pleasure to have him as a guest today.

[32] Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

[33] Not at all, Jordan.

[34] Always a pleasure to speak with him.

[35] Yeah, well, it's very nice to see you again.

[36] It's been a couple of years since we've had the pleasure of speaking.

[37] And so I'm glad we have this opportunity, even though it's mediated by electronics.

[38] Well, I missed you.

[39] So I want to talk to you biographically, essentially.

[40] I'd like to walk through your life.

[41] And so let's start as far back as we can.

[42] Tell me about your childhood, if you would, and what stands out for you in relationship to your parents?

[43] Well, while I was born in Montreal, my parents moved here to Toronto when I was very young, not even a year old, and just at the end of World War II.

[44] And we lived in what was then just the edge of metropolitan Toronto, beyond us were farms.

[45] And that was up, for those of your viewers who know Toronto, right after the Bayview Avenue passes York University, Glendon campus and the Granite Club and Crescent School.

[46] Just beyond that was where we lived.

[47] And that was the outer limit of the city in terms of the built -up area.

[48] And so there weren't many young people around.

[49] you know, to visit with in the neighborhood.

[50] So the result was that I spent more time, I think, it was the beginning of the television era.

[51] Everyone had a television set, but they just got it in the last few years.

[52] And there were only a few channels on the air.

[53] And for the most part, you had either those funny antennas sitting on top of the receiver or, or antenna on the roof of your house.

[54] And so I spent a lot of time reading.

[55] And that was how I developed my interest in history.

[56] And I started reading about interesting historical personalities.

[57] And my father, although he was a successful businessman, had been a very accomplished academic as far as he went.

[58] But that was in the 30s.

[59] And his father came under great financial pressure.

[60] So my father became a chartered accountant in the theory that there was, as he put in no such thing as an unemployed chartered accountant.

[61] And in those days, people really had to think in terms of how could they do things that made it as likely as possible that they would be able to make an income and provide, you know, and afford to get married and provide for families.

[62] And it was a much more financially pressurized era than it is now.

[63] And that he graduated in 1937 and we were starting as a society to recover from the department.

[64] by them, but there were still huge numbers of unemployed, and he had to set aside his academic interest.

[65] But with that said, he was a particularly, I was particularly fortunate in adding him, apart from anything else, as a parent who encouraged that historical interest and knew rather a lot about many of the things that I took an interest in early on.

[66] And then as a really a remarkable gesture, my parents took my brothers, just the two of us in the family.

[67] took my brother and myself to Britain in 1953 at the time of the coronation.

[68] And we, you know, we toured around all these monuments and was still, the war damage in London was still very evident then.

[69] So we saw what the war was like from much closer than anyone experienced it in North America.

[70] And, you know, I remember it as very young people do remember, you know, visiting the Duke of Wellington's house.

[71] St. Paul's Cathedral and things like this.

[72] And so I always had an interest in history and was encouraged by my parents, my father in particular.

[73] And that was a, I think that was the only thing that was pretty clean, if not exactly, noteworthy, a bit different from most of the people I went to school with because they lived closer into town and had more social town than I did.

[74] So you speak of your father fondly by the sounds of it.

[75] It sounds to me like he was an encouraging figure in your life from a very young age.

[76] Is that a reasonable presumption?

[77] Yes.

[78] No, I remember both my parents very fondly.

[79] My father, and this is an area I wouldn't want to, for obvious reasons, get into too much.

[80] But later on, he became at times a slightly depressive personality, and his career was something of an anti -climax.

[81] He did very well and made a significant amount of money.

[82] And he was working with, I mean, with slash for a very famous Canadian industrialist, E .P. Taylor and in the brewing business, and he was the chief executive of what was then the largest, well, one of the largest brewing companies in the world, but certainly the largest in Canada.

[83] It was called Canadian Breweries Limited in those days.

[84] And he had a disagreement on policy with Mr. Taylor, and he said, look, instead of having an argument with this, I've done this job now for 10 years, and I don't need the salary.

[85] I don't need it to live in the way I've become accustomed to.

[86] So I will retire now.

[87] It's probably time for change after 10 years.

[88] You do whatever you want with the company, and we remain friends.

[89] and don't strain our relations, and that's what happened.

[90] And they remain friends to the end of his life.

[91] And but so he retired at the age of 47, and he was a well -to -do man. He didn't lack for anything in a material way.

[92] But the balance of his life, nearly 20 years, was an anti -climax.

[93] He just sat in his house and read and saw a steadily, slowly, slowly declining number of people.

[94] and he just never did anything particularly after that.

[95] I don't mean that he should have charged out and got a job, but that's not for me to say and wouldn't have served any purpose anyway unless he was particularly enthused about it.

[96] But someone like, I've found it's a perfectly good thing and often a very renovating thing to change careers.

[97] But, and I'm sure you would, in your experience, know this and believe the same thing, It is a bad thing to simply do nothing.

[98] Just sit in a rocking chair.

[99] That leads to a steady and accelerated level of decline.

[100] And that, unfortunately, is what happened to my father.

[101] I mean, he was 65 when he died, which is not really a good lottery ticket nowadays.

[102] But it was an anti -climax.

[103] But he always was an interesting man. I would even after, you know, I left.

[104] at the house to go to university when I was, gee, I was only 18.

[105] And apart from that, apart from one year, I didn't live with my parents again.

[106] But I was in Toronto much of the time.

[107] And I always saw them a lot.

[108] And it was always interesting, always had a good relationship.

[109] I had a somewhat turbulent period in my teens.

[110] And looking back on it, I can see that my parents treated.

[111] me with greater patience than probably I would have I run their position.

[112] But I believe that, you know, that was just a phase.

[113] In our last five years, my parents died only 10 days apart.

[114] And our last 10 years or so, we couldn't have been more cordial.

[115] You know, well, I was curious about your father because I'm curious psychologically about the role that fathers in particular play in relationship to encouraging their children, which seems to me a primary paternal role.

[116] And so when I see someone who's successful and who I suspect in some sense isn't intrinsically rebellious in their central spirit, maybe that's wrong.

[117] I'm always curious about their relationship with their father.

[118] I mean, you started to read early.

[119] You were reading history.

[120] He obviously, did he push books your way?

[121] Did he guide your reading?

[122] Sometimes.

[123] In particular, he gave me when I was 13.

[124] He handed me a book and he said, obviously, it's not for me to tell you what to read.

[125] But I do recommend this.

[126] And if you just read a few pages in it, I think you will want to continue.

[127] And it was A .G. McDonald's book, Napoleon and his marshals.

[128] To people interested in Napoleon, it's a very famous book.

[129] And for example, one of the great tombs on Napoleon, David Chandler's campaigns of Napoleon, a book of 1 ,300 pages of tremendous work of scholarship and very well written.

[130] In the forward credits, E .G. McDonnell, and people who write about Napoleon often do.

[131] It's a tremendously readable book.

[132] And it gave me a huge interest in Napoleon that I've kept up.

[133] I mean, after a while, you feel you know enough about somebody, but it was a great, it was a great encouragement and incitement and confirmation of the intrinsic interest in studying these very interesting personalities of the past.

[134] And he did a number of things like that, and in slightly different fields.

[135] Another one, some years later, two or three years later, he gave me a copy of Nancy Mitford's pursuit of love.

[136] Now, it's a novel, but about real people, but the name's changed.

[137] And it was a particular satisfaction to me in later years when I was living in Britain and was the chairman of the Daily Telegraph, and I met a lot of these people.

[138] Nancy Mitford, unfortunately, had died, but her sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire, I knew, and the Lady Mosley.

[139] the widow of Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader.

[140] I met her, and Jessica Mitford, who was married to a communist, was very eccentric British family.

[141] So a wide gap in their political views.

[142] And Nancy Mitford herself had a tremendous torrid romance with one of the most prominent figures in the entourage of General de Gaulle, and when he was the president of the Fifth Republic.

[143] And prior to that.

[144] So these books, I just cite those two in particular, but they were tremendously readable, interesting books, and they did launch my interest in different fields.

[145] He did that a number of times, but he was never oppressive or dogmatic about it, and actually quite subtle.

[146] I remember my parents took us on Easter holiday in 1955, so I was 10 years old, my brother's four years older, out to the West Coast by train and back.

[147] but we got around a bit in the West Coast.

[148] And on the train, my father gave us a reward if we would memorize Lincoln's address at Gettysburg.

[149] Now, it's only 10 sentences, you know, it's not that hard to memorize it.

[150] And we did, but it did incite my interest in Mr. Lincoln.

[151] And, of course, he's one of the great and arresting figures of modern history as well.

[152] So, yes, he did that.

[153] You put me in mind these nights.

[154] No doubtfully, if this was the chief focal point of our discussion, I could identify a good many other things.

[155] But I cite those ones.

[156] And by the way, on the Nancy Mitford piece, a house that is referred to in a pursuit of love is one that they love to go to because unlike their own house, it wasn't drafty.

[157] It wasn't that eccentric British rural nobilities, terribly uncomfortable house without real.

[158] hot water and then that kind of thing.

[159] It was just a very comfortable house with central heating and so on.

[160] And it turned out that a friend of mine rented it.

[161] And we went out there to lunch a few times.

[162] And it was, I mean, I couldn't explain that in a way that would be of any interest to anyone that was there other than my wife.

[163] But it was as if I'd been there before from having read about it.

[164] It was just a very interesting connection with my past.

[165] How old were you when you started to read seriously?

[166] I started when I was nine or ten.

[167] I remember reading the first volume of General de Gaulle's war memoirs when they were first published in English.

[168] They're the ones that begin all my life I've thought of France in a certain way.

[169] And it's beautifully written by the way.

[170] I mean, DeGle was a wonderful writer.

[171] He's not always historically reliable, but political memoirists rarely are.

[172] I mean, the same could be said of Mr. Churchill.

[173] But he's a lovely.

[174] writer and uh and so from then on i was i wasn't writing i mean for a while i read the boy's book of the navy and i i think i think we went through the hardy boys and that kind of thing for in approximately one month when i was seven or eight but i moved on to the history of the navy or some sports figures you know like ted williams or something like that and then i got into i got into the history thing when i was nine and stayed at it after that So how much were you reading when you were a kid, say, 9?

[175] Well, I wasn't a fast reader, but I was a retentive reader.

[176] So when I read something, I tended to remember it well.

[177] And a couple of hours a day, every day, and then a little more on the weekends.

[178] When would you do that before you went to bed?

[179] Did you have a routine?

[180] Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

[181] I was supposed to do my homework.

[182] And there were some television programs I watched that I like.

[183] But, yeah, I wasn't one of these young people who was just.

[184] stuck glued in front of a screen every free moment.

[185] A lot of youngsters nowadays are with the video games and things.

[186] I wasn't like that.

[187] I mean, it is possible.

[188] And I look, Jordan, as you and I know, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who do sit staring at a television set all day.

[189] But I, and they're always, as long as we've had television, there have been people who have been thoroughly captivated by it.

[190] But I was always rather more choosy in programming.

[191] I mean, I like things like war, victory at sea, you know, it's a drama but the U .S. Navy.

[192] Yeah, that was a great series.

[193] I know that series.

[194] It's great series.

[195] Yeah, and with Richard Rogers' music, which really taken from Wagner, a powerful beginning, showing the, you know, the aerial shots of the Pacific Fleet, this colossal maybe moving forward.

[196] But, and some of the humorous programs, like the honeymooners with Jackie Glees, not like, but I, but I would, I would know a program to watch and go and watch it for half an hour and then go back and read something.

[197] I wouldn't just sit there waiting for whatever it came next.

[198] And were you up all night with, with flashlight under the covers reading?

[199] Not all night, but often a little bit.

[200] And it has to be said that my parents were not overly authoritarian.

[201] It was a relatively large house.

[202] My mother would come up once in the of the night and make sure everything was fine, but I normally hear coming, but in any case, they didn't get particularly excited about my reading with a flashlight, because they correctly assumed the 9 or 10 or 11 -year -old would fall asleep anyway, so, you know, when he felt like it.

[203] So any idea what it is about history in particular that attracted you?

[204] Because obviously, you have an intrinsic interest in it.

[205] You didn't even gravitate towards fiction when you were a child.

[206] You gravitated towards nonfiction in history pretty fast.

[207] So what is it?

[208] I must say I went on a binge of fiction in university.

[209] And when I started, as one does, I mean, I found that with my own sons and daughter.

[210] And, you know, you suddenly become interested in writing and you read a lot that he wrote.

[211] And you're on to the next one, you know.

[212] So in that way, you know, I read a huge number of novels by famous novelists.

[213] And is that what you did?

[214] You'd find a novelist you really liked and then read everything and then move on to someone else?

[215] Basically, yeah, and especially the Americans, you know, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck and so on.

[216] And the latter two were alive.

[217] I was reading about them.

[218] I'm reading their words.

[219] But I got into others, but not as...

[220] comprehensive.

[221] I mean, I think I read four or five with books of George Elia and most well, you know, a number of Thackeray and you know, the obvious ones.

[222] And so what was it about history, do you think, that attracted you so much and so young?

[223] Because many, I mean, the personalities I was reading about were terribly interesting.

[224] I had extraordinary careers.

[225] And it started to give me, and this sounds ludicrous, you may, you and your viewers make clue that I'm a psychiatric case or something, but it's not as if I identified at all, let's say a man like Napoleon.

[226] It's just that in his career, you could see points where absolutely.

[227] Absolutely, everything was at risk, and he persevered successfully.

[228] And points where he was, you know, fortune had not smiled upon him, and things looked terribly bleak, and then suddenly things opened up.

[229] Now, it was a revolutionary time, unlike Canada in the 50s and 60s.

[230] I mean, you could scarcely think of them with less revolutionary place.

[231] And, but the pattern of events where people's fortunes change.

[232] changed so quickly, and in both directions.

[233] I mean, of course, Napoleon ended up in Santolina, but he actually attempted to commit suicide after he came back from Russia.

[234] And we were referring earlier to Abraham Lincoln, and there were moments where everything appeared to be terribly gloomy, he appeared to be a failure, was widely mocked for a variety of reasons, including his physical appearance, which in photographs is actually rather impressive.

[235] But it appeared to be hopeless and that he was consigned to being a failure who had tried to prevent the breakup of this country unsuccessfully and had propagated a war that was not successful.

[236] And of course, it all turned.

[237] And you end up appreciating the qualities of these people, both those to emulate and those to try to avoid.

[238] Now, in Mr. Lincoln's case, it's a particularly striking example because it is almost impossible to find something negative to say about him.

[239] He was a self -made man, but with none of that chippiness that self -made people up and had, he was a genuine intellectual, but an autodidact.

[240] And, and, but never with any of the pomposity or dogmatism of some intellections.

[241] And, and he, he, he was always saddened rather than angry at the many betrayals and disappointments he suffered.

[242] And while he was a rather morose man in some ways, he had a splendid sense of humor.

[243] He had a terribly difficult wife and had two sons die as boys.

[244] and this tragedy did not, these tragedies and afflictions didn't, didn't compromise his ultimate sense of optimism.

[245] And he was really a remarkably admirable character as well as the extremely effective statesman.

[246] And of course, he was a wonderful wordsmith.

[247] I mean, you were talking about the Gettysburg Address.

[248] I noticed when I first read it.

[249] under the incitement to memorize it, that, for example, where he said, fondly, well, you know, he said, for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live.

[250] I mean, just to use the same word as the noun and the verb in the same sentence, it's slightly artistic.

[251] And in the second inaugural when he said, fondly do we hope fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away I mean that is in fact a line of poet he was a remarkable wordsman and you were you were noticing that the way that words were crafted as well when you were reading history not as well as one does after a bit of practice but you know I started to notice and then started to look for it, you know?

[252] So, and all right, so you were reading well in advance of your years.

[253] What was it like for you going to school when you were, let's go when you were a child again, before you went to university?

[254] Well, I was, you know, you always did the necessary to be on the same wavelength, if you will, as your friends.

[255] You know, I didn't want to be thought of as a, I didn't mind being thought of as slightly eccentric.

[256] I didn't want to be thought of as an odd person.

[257] And in fairness, a lot of the other students were interested in a lot of things.

[258] I went to relatively, I guess, relatively good schools.

[259] I mean, I didn't like them very much, but I loved university, but I didn't like school very much.

[260] But I remember in 1958, I was 13, and because it was well known, that I was interested in France when the disturbances came in the spring of that year at the end of the Fourth Republic.

[261] Our class teacher asked me if I would, because this was on the front pages of the newspapers and led the news every night, you know, the return of de Gaulle from Colombe and 58, and the threat of the revolt by the army in Algerian.

[262] And the teacher asked me if I would give a five -minute comment on it the following day.

[263] So I did.

[264] And I was careful to try and not be pompous and not get into obscure things.

[265] And I don't mean to put on the airs if somebody was any, in fact, great authority in these matters.

[266] But I was flattered that he asked and I made an effort to try and make it interesting.

[267] and it was appreciated.

[268] It was one of those little experiences in life that was very positive and reassuring to me that my classmates didn't think I was just a kook, you know, and because they were reading about it too, and they were in a way saying, well, you know, what's going on in France?

[269] I mean, in Canada and Britain and the United States, you know, you didn't have the army threatening to return to the capital by parachute and take over the country and everybody going, into the country 120 miles to talk to a retired general, but whether he wanted to take over the government or not.

[270] I mean, we didn't have that being the speaking country, so it was a bit different.

[271] Do you remember anything of your ambitions at that time?

[272] Well, here I must say I was somewhat influenced by my father's milieu.

[273] Toronto in those days was, if I may say it, without I hope, sounding like an old dowager or something, a terribly plain.

[274] austere place.

[275] There wasn't any flare to it.

[276] It had nice residential areas, but it wasn't a good -looking city at all.

[277] Until the first subway was opened in the mid -50s, all the wires were above grounds.

[278] You know, these creosote, soaked, blackened telephone poles everywhere.

[279] We had down the thick clusters of wires and an inordinate amount of that old sort of Victorian reddish but not red brick or the color of Queens Park but with you know with the dust of years on it apart from a few individual buildings like the old Bank of Commerce for example and Osgood Hall and some others there weren't many nice looking buildings downtown it was not a nice looking city the way Montreal was, or let alone New York or something.

[280] And, and, and they're, you know, it was a virtuous place, but it was a terribly sober place.

[281] You know, you couldn't go to the cinema on Sundays.

[282] There wasn't a Sunday newspaper.

[283] Now, I, of course, was just a boy, and I didn't drink or anything.

[284] But older people, my cousins of mine who were older Sunday, wanted to go out with a date, they had to go to a hotel.

[285] to find a restaurant that was licensed.

[286] I mean, it was not only changed with John Roberts in the 60s.

[287] And so my father's friends, businessmen, as far as I could see, were the only people that had any sort of style, you know, Mr. Taylor and Mr. McDougold and Colonel Phillips, who was the chancellor of the university, that he was associated with them.

[288] and others who were friends of his, like John Bass and so on, they had some style.

[289] They had some Claire, and they were wealthy, but in a tasteful way.

[290] And they had, you know, it was kind of an attractive thing to aspire to be wealthy and enjoy it, but in a tasteful way, you say.

[291] I mean, Mr. Taylor built the jockey club.

[292] It was just a bunch of milk wagon horses and fixed races until he took it over and fixed it up.

[293] made it a great horse racing operation.

[294] And so I was sort of attracted to the idea of getting into business in a way that I could raise my, you know, raise my net worth and standard of living.

[295] But all was, I had a, if not exactly an academic interest, certainly an interest to study history and potentially to write some, although it took me a long time to summon.

[296] the courage to write in it.

[297] Yeah, so you've covered your interest in history, and now we've delved into a little bit into the origins of your interest in business, so that does leave that third issue hanging to some degree.

[298] So let's go to the time when you went to university.

[299] You said you read a tremendous amount of fiction in university.

[300] What did you major in, and what was it like for you?

[301] How do you remember your university experience?

[302] Very fondly.

[303] I went first to Ottawa, pardon me, to the, to Carlton University.

[304] And I had a somewhat rumbustious career in high school and changed schools a number of times.

[305] And finally, I came, if I may just back up slightly, if anyone is interested in my story, this is an interesting part of it.

[306] It's not for me to say whether it is in the abstract, interesting or not.

[307] But in grade 13, I finally concluded that these schools were so incompetent, and most of the teachers in them were so incompetent and, in addition, malicious, some of them, that I discovered that you could, in fact, write your matriculation examinations on your own.

[308] You didn't have to do it in a school.

[309] So I informed my father that this is what I was going to do in February of my last year in high school, except that in those days, you had nine examinations and you had to pass them all, or you didn't matriculate.

[310] So, you know, I was really taking a leap here, but, and the examinations were written in the old armory on University Avenue, where the, we're just immediately.

[311] to the west of Osbid Hall.

[312] It's now a Supreme Court building.

[313] But there was an armory there.

[314] And several hundred of us, of all ages, mainly older people, came in each day, put down five dollars, and we could write the examination.

[315] And I worked like a beaver to prepare for those examinations, and I passed them all.

[316] And if you'll pardon me, of quite a personal recollection.

[317] the way my father's house worked, he stayed up late as a habit I got from him.

[318] He stayed up late and he slept in.

[319] I mean, he got a lot done in a day, but he was operating on a slightly different clock from most people.

[320] Well, in those days, the post office delivered the mail to the house at about 8 .30 in the morning.

[321] On one particular day in the spring of 1962, my mother got it, and she saw this letter from the Ministry of Education addressed to me. So she surmised it might be my results.

[322] So she brought it to me. I opened up and I said, well, it was a scrape.

[323] I had a 50 and a 51, but I passed everything and I have matriculate.

[324] And I'm eligible for the university, though.

[325] I won't get into McGill or Toronto, which is what I want it, but I'll get into one of them.

[326] So she disappeared.

[327] And something that was unheard of on our house, about 10 minutes to 9 in the morning, I heard the unmistakable footfall of my father in his dressing gowns, it turned out.

[328] He said, I congratulate him.

[329] Extended his hand.

[330] I shook hands with him.

[331] And he went back to bed.

[332] Now, it sounds absurd, but it was a very moving experience.

[333] When he congratulated me, I said, well, you know, you've been more than intelligent, and I thank you for that.

[334] He said, it's fine, you know, congratulations.

[335] It was, that means a lot.

[336] And what do you think motivated him to congratulate you at that point?

[337] And why do you think it meant so much to you?

[338] I had great, we had our differences in those days, not in later years, but as one does, you know, one does have differences with parents sometimes.

[339] And but he was a very, very intelligent man and a good man. And I had great respect and admiration for him and for him to congratulate me in a way that wasn't perfunctory.

[340] It wasn't, you know, well done if you'd, you know, want to hand cards or something.

[341] The way he said it, he imparted a seriousness to it that made it clear to me that he thought that what I had done was a major achievement.

[342] And the fact that he thought it was, not only confirmed my view that it was, in fact, something of achievement, but the fact that he thought it was a major achievement coming from a very successful an intelligent man, which he was, and who was, after all the principal male figure in my life, it was a milestone for me. And what do you think made that accomplishment particularly worthy of both memory and note?

[343] What did it do for you?

[344] Now, you have alluded to the fact that you were causing some trouble in high school.

[345] Yeah, look, in a way, it legitimized the comparative hell -raising of my late high school years.

[346] it sort of wiped the slate clean.

[347] The score at the end of the game is you win, you graduate.

[348] So you weren't just a rebel without a cause?

[349] Yeah, well, I maybe didn't have a cause, but at least the rebellion ended with me still in one piece and in defensible shape morally, if you will.

[350] I mean, in terms of my ability to defend my conduct as a whole, not every part of it.

[351] Right, right, yeah.

[352] I mean, for all the nonsense and, you, you know, you know, foolishness that, and I had my full share of it for people at age, it ended well.

[353] And it was, look, it embarrasses me to say this, and particularly at this remove in time, but it actually was simply an achievement for somebody who hadn't been in a habit of really concentrating not much on schoolwork to buckle down and study all of these things.

[354] And I had some good scores.

[355] I mean, my overall average was not bad.

[356] And to do it all and pass it all the way I did was, it was an achievement.

[357] Right.

[358] Well, it sounds like that's when you learned to actually do some academic work.

[359] That's right.

[360] I think that is absolutely correct.

[361] Right.

[362] And that's a good preparation for university, because you do a lot better at university if you can work on your own.

[363] I mean, when I went to you.

[364] Especially when you're getting close to the exams and you have to really swat it up, you know.

[365] Yes, yes.

[366] I mean, I didn't work in high school, and I learned to work in university, and there was a big difference, and it was very much worthwhile learning to work.

[367] Okay, so you went off to university, and I have specific reasons to ask you about university.

[368] I've had discussions with a number of people recently about their university memories, some young people, including Yonmi Park, who is a refugee or an escapee from North Korea, who just spent four years at Columbia in New York, which was a dream of hers, and described it to me as a complete waste of time and money.

[369] And when I pushed her on that, insisted that she didn't have one course or one professor worthy of note, which was terribly shocking to me. And then I followed that up with Rex Murphy, who went to Memorial University in the 1950s and late 1950s and had nothing but positive things to say about his experience.

[370] And for me, when I went to a small college to begin with, but I had excellent professors there, they taught me. They were admirable people.

[371] They paid a lot of attention to me and to my friends.

[372] I learned to write.

[373] I learned to work.

[374] I learned how to buckle down and be serious about my academic pursuits.

[375] So for me, all the memories, almost all the memories of certainly my early university education and my graduate education, for that matter, were positive.

[376] But things may have changed since then, but your experience.

[377] I imagine that, young lady, from all I hear, most of these well -known American universities has just gone to pieces.

[378] but maybe the graduate departments are better, I don't know.

[379] But I imagine she at least enjoyed living in New York City.

[380] She'd learn something from that.

[381] Anyway, it's such a vital city.

[382] But you actually set this up for me very nicely, put me in mind of a couple of things.

[383] As an undergraduate, I did encounter a professor who did have a very profound impact on my, ability to focus on things, and my interest in certain subjects, you may even know her for all.

[384] I know Naomi Griffiths.

[385] She would now be in her early 80s, I think, but she's a specialist in Acadian studies.

[386] She was very friendly with the late Governor General Romeo LeBlanc.

[387] But she was a very fine lecturer and also a very kindly and sociable person.

[388] And And I got to know her a little bit, and she did help focus me in certain historic areas.

[389] But what happened after I graduated from Carleton was we were, I was in 1965, and we were getting into, they sort of run up to the centennial.

[390] And the, especially in Ottawa, there was a great emphasis on, you know, biculturalism.

[391] And it was clear that things were starting to really simmer in unpredictable ways in Quebec, unpredictable politically.

[392] And it was in the autumn of that year that in the guise of seeking a majority, Mr. Pearson and, advisors, some of whom I got to know quite well subsequently, called an election, and their real motive was to bring in some strong federalists from Quebec.

[393] They had never really replaced Mr. Salara as the federal leader in Quebec.

[394] And that was when Pierre Trudeau and Jean -Marchant, Gerard Peltier, and others came in.

[395] And they were starting to sort of pivot to meet this challenge to federalism from the bank.

[396] And one thing led to another.

[397] Because I was unsure what I wanted to do, for a year I operated, I bought for practically nothing because it wasn't worth anything from a good friend of mine, who Peter White, who had lived as my sub -tinent in my place in Ottawa my last year, when he was working with Maurice Sovey, but subsequently the concept of the Governor General, but he was then a junior minister in Mr. Pearson's government, but the first of that avant -garde from the sort of new Quebec to say, and he owned a little newspaper in the eastern townships, about 60 miles east of Montreal, and Nolton, Quebec.

[398] And I bought a half interest in that for $500, which is $499 more than it was worth commercially.

[399] But that's what I did for a while.

[400] And that was while you were a student.

[401] No, it was after I finished as an undergraduate before I went on to my next university.

[402] And so what happened was that infected me with interest in the newspaper business.

[403] I'd always had some because I was interested in me, again, a style of some of these famous newspaper owners, like William Randolph -Hurst, example, most obvious example, Colonel McCormick on the Chicago Tribune, and up to a point, some of the British press owners, Lord Beaver Burroth, was alive then, and Lord Northcliffe and some others.

[404] But obviously sitting out in Eastern Townships producing an eight -page half tabloid was a long way from living in San Clemente, you know, Mr. Hurst's famous house in California.

[405] But it also infected me with an interest in Quebec, in French Quebec.

[406] And even though it was an English paper, you know, obviously one was in a largely French milieu.

[407] So the upshot of that was that the next year I became a lost student at La Valle University, French University in Quebec City.

[408] And that was a terribly interesting and positive experience.

[409] I have to say, even though we were, I think, only 15 English -speaking law, I mean, primarily English -speaking law students in a faculty of, I don't know, 500 or so.

[410] And in the graduate arts building where we were, it all building, we were, there were thousands of students coming and going, and there couldn't have been more than 50 of us who weren't basically French -speaking.

[411] and in many cases, exclusively French -speaking.

[412] And it was an entirely positive experience.

[413] There was absolutely no ethnic antagonism.

[414] I mean, people got on well or they didn't, but not for ethnic reasons.

[415] And I have to say those people, all of them, could not have been more welcoming and pleasant as a group.

[416] And I've always had a bias in favor.

[417] Yes.

[418] questions to come out of that is, what did your undergraduate career do for you?

[419] Why were you motivated to buy this newspaper?

[420] And why did you go to a French -speaking university for law school?

[421] Ah, well, my undergraduate career was the point at which I turned from being largely a social operative, effectively studying, as frankly Jordan, I think most young men.

[422] do as undergraduates studying chiefly female anatomy and contents of the containers of alcoholic beverages.

[423] And I was more successful at the second than the first, but one got on, you know, and then you did, you've studied as much as you needed to.

[424] Well, Naomi Griffiths helped motivate me to treat it as a little more than something where you've just passed the years and checked the box of going from first.

[425] to second the graduating year.

[426] What did she do to do that?

[427] She gave me the vision of actually becoming an authority on some part of history and also writing about history.

[428] Then, so that would be my main answer to your first question.

[429] Your last one was why a French university.

[430] Your second one was why I bought the newspaper, right?

[431] Yes.

[432] I was at Luce -Ans, you say.

[433] So frankly, my friend Peter White said, look here, I need an editor of this paper.

[434] I'm here in Ottawa, and then at the end of it, the government changed in Quebec, and the Union Nacional won, Duplessi's old party won with Mr. Johnson, Daniel Johnson, Sr. And he hired Peter White as his chief English language assistant.

[435] He was head of the English language section of the Premier of Quebec's office, which is a serious position.

[436] And in the English community of Quebec, that is an important position.

[437] And he conducted it extremely well.

[438] And Mr. Johnson was a very impressive man, I thought, and still think.

[439] But he said, look, I've got to have an editor for this paper.

[440] I'm going to have to close the paper.

[441] Why don't you buy a half interest for nominal sum and be the resident editor for a while until you decide what to do?

[442] And then one thing led to another.

[443] And he was an alumnus of the law faculty of LaValle.

[444] And the number of famous English Canadians were most famously Brian Mulroney.

[445] He was in Peter's class.

[446] I mean, they're older than I am there, but five or six years older than I. And Michael Mayan's another.

[447] He's a senator.

[448] He's now, I think, the chancellor of McGillian University's grandfather was the prime minister.

[449] And others.

[450] And so once I got into that media, because of who I knew, I got a little bit into the edges of Quebec politics and I met Premier Johnson and our paper served the English residents of the Vice Premier of Quebec and the subsequent Premier Jean -Jacques Bertrand.

[451] So I got the, I don't mean no in the same sense, it was any other than, you know, Bonjour or something, but I got to sort of into the edge of that.

[452] And that period coming up to 1967 with the fermentation in Quebec, which was, very active politically, but nothing violent about it at that point.

[453] It was an exciting atmosphere.

[454] And you also said that you had become aware of newspaper owners approximately at this point.

[455] Well, just the way they lived.

[456] I mean, look, I never have aspired to live in the oriental monarchical fashion of William Randall first made most famous and caricatured.

[457] citizen came, you know, which Orson Welles officially denied it, nothing to do with Hearst.

[458] But as Time magazine put it, lawyers for Mr. William Randall, Hurst have determined otherwise and prosecuted accordingly.

[459] But the, it developed along that way.

[460] I became motivated academically, then had a reason to move to Quebec and get involved in this most modest scale.

[461] You can be short of just being a newspaper delivery boy, but in a position where I did everything.

[462] I was the publisher and the editor.

[463] Manhattan and assistant did the actual clerical work.

[464] But, you know, I sold the ads.

[465] I produced the circulation campaigns such as they were, and I wrote most of the content.

[466] So as you know, that's the way to do it all.

[467] Right, right.

[468] And then I thought it would be a good idea to pursue my studies in Quebec, in a French university, and Peter White helped me. And indeed, the Premier allowed his name to stand as a recommendation.

[469] Now, in Quebec City in 1966, if someone appeals for it or applies for entry to the law faculty and one of the sponsors is the prime.

[470] Prime Minister, Quebec, I mean, unless it's a joke, and this guy has never got past grade seven, he's going to be admitted.

[471] And it was an entirely positive experience, but you must understand it was a double and ultimately a triple experience, if I may elaborate.

[472] I really had to learn the language.

[473] I knew the kind of basic French high school graduate in Ontario knows where I would know a few words, but I didn't really know how to put a serious sentence together or speak fluently.

[474] And at that age, my early 20s, you know, I wanted, you know, I wanted a social life.

[475] I didn't want to live like a monk, you know, and so I, you know, you really have to pick it up.

[476] And so I was learning the language.

[477] And also, it came up that in 1969, when I was into my final year in the law school, the Sherbrook Daily Rec, and we're into a daily newspaper here, albeit small, an eight or nine thousand circulation, came up for sale on a distressed basis because they overcommitted to buying a press thinking they could sell enough business on the press to pay for it and they didn't so they were they restrained so Peter White and a third friend of ours and I bought that paper so in that space of time I became you know I made a major advanced my academic career qualified myself as a law graduate picked up, if I may say, a pretty good, solid competence in French, and became a newspaper co -owner.

[478] I believe I was the only publisher of a daily newspaper.

[479] Certainly the only one I've ever heard of anywhere who was at the same time a lost you.

[480] Now, there may have been others, but I haven't heard him anything like that.

[481] And so it was really out of that brief period, the rest of, or at least much of the balance of my career was launched.

[482] You know, that, you know, that happens to everybody, I suppose, but it was a slightly different pattern for me than most.

[483] Why law?

[484] Yeah, look, it's, uh, it's the neutral place.

[485] It was not that I ever particularly desired to be a lawyer, but you never go wrong with it, you know, it always helps you as a qualification for whatever you're going to do.

[486] And parts of it are an interesting subject.

[487] Now, I focused on, uh, constitutional and international, and, you know, You haven't helped anyone relying on my recollections of a Quebec civil code to get them through a, you know, a median wall case or some one of these funny minor bits of litigation you get.

[488] But, you know, the laws of broad field.

[489] There's lots of stuff that's interesting.

[490] You know, I never particularly desired to practice, and I never did practice.

[491] I had a couple of minimum wage cases where our company was the defendant.

[492] And I got, I got Brian Mulroney.

[493] It was a labor lawyer to coach me a bit.

[494] And I did exactly what he told me to, and they won the two cases about that was the own best of the practice I've ever had.

[495] I will say that it's been very useful to me. I mean, unfortunately, I've had a great deal of legal experience as a client of lawyers, including some very famous lawyers in the United States and Britain and Canada.

[496] But that does help you.

[497] If you know something about it, the basis of the law, it does help you in dealing with lawyers.

[498] So how did you manage your career as a publisher and your studies at that point?

[499] Well, I was pretty much of an absentee publisher.

[500] I would come there when I could and do certain things.

[501] I called upon certain advertisers in Montreal and Toronto when I was able to.

[502] But, you know, that was in, that was, what, nine months before I graduated.

[503] After that, I was a resident publisher.

[504] and then we started to build the business and branched out and bought more papers and it grew and grew.

[505] So the first paper that you bought, you did, you said the bulk of the writing and so how much time were you spending writing in a week at that point?

[506] Oh, when I was the resident publisher of a weekly paper?

[507] Yep.

[508] It took probably eight or ten hours to write the main contents of the paper for each week.

[509] I mean, you know, it's not, it's not absolutely the, you know, the chronicles of, you know, it's not the best collected editorials of the London Times.

[510] No, but you had to commit to produce it.

[511] No, yeah, you've got to get it to paper, yes.

[512] I mean, people are often curious about what it takes to be a writer.

[513] And I mean, one of the things that it takes to be a writer is to write and to produce constantly and on a schedule.

[514] At least that's how it seems to me. And it appears that you had a deadline that was continually renewing itself, and you had to produce content come hell or high water fundamentally.

[515] Yeah, and what you've said is very perceptive is now, I mean, there's no reason why you would know this, but I have millions of readers in the United States.

[516] I write these columns and four of them every week in the US.

[517] And it's just what you said.

[518] It's a deadline that comes up all of that.

[519] Now, yeah, it's only 1 ,200 words.

[520] So it's not, you know, it's not that much writing.

[521] But But on the other hand, it's a highly competitive field, and no one's going to pay you if, no one reads you.

[522] So you have to put down something.

[523] Yeah.

[524] Well, and that's still 365 ,000 words.

[525] No, not a year.

[526] You said weekly?

[527] Yeah.

[528] Yeah.

[529] Right.

[530] So it's 100 ,000 words a year.

[531] It's a book a year.

[532] Right.

[533] Yeah.

[534] This is true.

[535] And, no, you know, the news cycle is what it is.

[536] There's always plenty to write about.

[537] But that got me into that habit.

[538] You're absolutely right.

[539] you're writing to a deadline, and you can't bach at the deadline.

[540] If I could make a detour here, but a relevant one, as you know, and many of your viewers would, I was for a time a guest of the people of the United States and the Bureau of Prisons.

[541] Now, I ultimately won that battle, and I won it entirely, and in addition, ultimately, the charges were retroactively withdrawn, but, and it was an outrage from A to Z, but, but my, What I did while I was there was a tutor to students who did not succeed in the program the U .S. Bureau of Prisons has of requiring everyone who was not graduated from secondary school to do so.

[542] And so they have teachers and examinations every month.

[543] And those who were unsuccessful, they would send to me. And I recruited other tutors.

[544] I recruited a former head of the torpedo room of a nuclear submarine.

[545] is my science tutor, because I'm not qualified to do that.

[546] And for mathematics, the head of mathematics, former head of mathematics of a large high school in Little Rock, Arkansas was also a successful commodities trader.

[547] And these were people that were imprisoned at the same time?

[548] Yes.

[549] Yeah, but the non -violent things, I think one was a tax case and the other was alleged fraudulent use of a credit card or something, but they're highly qualified.

[550] So the three of us were tutoring these people.

[551] And these people would be sent to us, and they would arrive very kind of sullen and suspicious, which the conduct of the American criminal legal system invites and insights and incites and largely justifies.

[552] And I would give them a little speech that they didn't have to do a thing if they didn't want to.

[553] But if they wanted to leave there with their foot on the up escalator and an excellent chance to make a good living in a way that didn't lead straight back to a place like this, I could help them.

[554] If they didn't want that, that was fine.

[555] I didn't care.

[556] But I was there if they wanted.

[557] But the one thing I didn't want was for them to imagine that I was part of this awful system.

[558] I was a bigger victim of it than they probably were because I didn't commit any events.

[559] With that, the whole thing turned, and they became fully cooperative.

[560] So why did that speak?

[561] Okay, why did you formulate that speech?

[562] Why did you think it was justifiable?

[563] And why did it have a positive effect on the people that you were discussing?

[564] Because they had, in that great rich country of the United States, and I'm not a socialist, but they had not had a fair deal.

[565] Most of them, scarcely at any idea.

[566] who their father was, and from early times, their mother or somebody was saying, somebody's got to get some money here, we're going to be it in the street.

[567] And they were just cannon fodder in the drug war.

[568] I mean, they were at the last edge.

[569] They were the last edge of transfers.

[570] So some druggy was picked up.

[571] They say, where did you get that from?

[572] And they'd finger that person.

[573] And, you know, and they were cooked.

[574] So off they went to prison terribly oversets.

[575] One of my students got 25 years for driving a truck loaded with marijuana.

[576] He wasn't even a user himself.

[577] Anyway, a lad of 23 or something.

[578] By the way, I am one thing I am proud of in that same sense as my initial graduation from high school myself was that all of my lads passed, 206.

[579] So some of them had to take exams more than once, but they all graduated.

[580] How long were you in prison and doing this?

[581] Three years and two weeks.

[582] How long did it take after you were in prison before you started doing this tutoring, and why did you do it?

[583] No, no, I mean how long after I arrived in prison?

[584] Did it start?

[585] Yes.

[586] Only about a month, because one of my books was in the library, and the head of education said, look here, we've got to do something with these guys who just keep failing.

[587] I mean, there's nothing wrong with their IQ, but let's try something different instead of our teachers would you do it.

[588] And then I would answer your question about why I gave them a little speech.

[589] It was hardly a speech, but I pretty much said to you what I said to them.

[590] It was because I knew that they initially would think I was part of this evil system that they hated.

[591] And I had to make them understand that I was one of them and not one of the others.

[592] And that wasn't a pretense.

[593] It wasn't a falsehood.

[594] I was.

[595] I mean, my heart was with the prisoners and not with the...

[596] But you were also selling them something.

[597] You were selling them literacy as an escape from their current condition.

[598] That's it.

[599] I was selling them self -interest.

[600] And that's, you know, that's what that's, as the Australians say, it's a trier.

[601] I mean, that's one that'll go, you know.

[602] And but what I was going to say about them was, and this is going back to what you're saying about meeting deadlines, the American.

[603] or at least the Florida matriculation system, that's where it was, required an essay.

[604] And so I said, all right, you know, write an essay.

[605] And they had various topics that were usually used.

[606] So I said, take your pick of these.

[607] And some of these fellows literally couldn't write a word.

[608] They had a mental block.

[609] They couldn't write a word.

[610] And the way I got around that was, I said, look, we'll change the subject.

[611] term.

[612] You write on the sexiest woman you've ever seen.

[613] And you can use your imagination.

[614] There doesn't have to be such a woman.

[615] You can just make her up.

[616] And only I will read this.

[617] So if it'll help you, be as coarse and vulgar as you want.

[618] Use any sexual word you want, any way you want, anything.

[619] Just write what comes to mind.

[620] And that got them all going.

[621] None of them had a mental block after that.

[622] Why in the world did you take that tack and what made them, why in the world did they trust you?

[623] And then I have another question too, which is why did they pass?

[624] Why were you successful when the other teachers, let's say, or the system that was hypothetically designed to educate them failed?

[625] Well, because they wouldn't put out for them.

[626] They thought it was another trick of the establishment to use them.

[627] And they, in their minds, they were obliged to provide them food and shelter.

[628] And as long as they would just sort of sullenly went along with things, they didn't harass them too much.

[629] And so that was minimum compliance, but it was a survival regime for them.

[630] And that was really where their lives were reduced to at that point.

[631] And so I produced a sort of spark of light that they could actually better their lot raise their higher ability and therefore they're legitimate by which I mean legal income aspiration because they matriculated from high school they were more hireable and if they hadn't been and indeed in the case of a number of them I assisted them in becoming correspondence students in universities and and indeed I had a couple of them who started there then were released and continued physically at the university and graduated.

[632] I had one a couple of years ago, wrote me when he graduated from the University of Alabama.

[633] It's more than a couple of years ago.

[634] Now I was about six years ago, but he graduated from the University of Alabama.

[635] And to the extent I'm in touch with these people are all doing fine.

[636] They're all well -launched doing fine.

[637] Well, you obviously take pleasure in this particular accomplishment.

[638] You see, it was ironic, Jordan, because I didn't, I mean, I had a few teachers I like.

[639] We all remember the teachers we like, but there weren't that many of them in my case.

[640] And most of them I didn't like.

[641] I bought into the, into the view that really they were teachers because they couldn't make it in the world of adults.

[642] So they sought success in a place where they could assert their authority over smaller people.

[643] And I mean, this was my concept of the motivation of some of the teachers I had.

[644] But, and, you know, Shaw's famous comment, he who can does and he who cannot teach us.

[645] I sort of believed that.

[646] I thought there were exceptions, but in general, I thought these teachers were people who couldn't make it in a more substantial occupation.

[647] Now, that was an unfair judgment.

[648] But on the other hand, when I see what level of education those departary schools achieve nowadays, I'm not so sure it was an unjust judgment.

[649] But any case, that's what I thought.

[650] But I saw the other side of it when I was.

[651] tutoring these guys in the prison system.

[652] I saw the satisfaction of it, and I will give the Bureau of Prison System.

[653] They devised this graduation ceremony, and all the families would come, and they were emotional occasions.

[654] And I'm not a particularly emotional person, but one of a few seriously emotional, positive emotional moments I've had was when my two colleagues and I were introduced, and this whole pack room stood up and cheered, for about five minutes.

[655] And, you know, the, the girlfriends or wives or parents or whatever of my students would meet my wife in the visiting center and say, oh, your husband is, you know, my guy's teacher and we're so grateful to even all this stuff.

[656] It was very touching.

[657] And incidentally, Jordan, prison isn't the place for those people.

[658] I was in a low security place.

[659] None of these guys were violent and they weren't habitual offenders.

[660] It wasn't the right place for me. That's not the way we should treat these people.

[661] They're not bad people, and they're not unintelligent.

[662] And as I say, every one of mine passed.

[663] The problem was they just got a wrong turning early on.

[664] So let's return to the newspaper business.

[665] So now you're out of law school, and you have a second newspaper, and you've graduated.

[666] Now you've taken on the role as a publisher.

[667] Your empire starts to expand at that point.

[668] It does, but I had one more.

[669] One more lap to run on the educational side.

[670] I became a master's candidate and did receive the degree from McGill in French Canada Studies.

[671] Now, this came from, I mean, not the divestment, I'm volunteering it, that I went, because I knew Premier Johnson a bit, I don't know how conversant you are with modern Quebec history, but he was often referred.

[672] referred to as the son Duplessi never had.

[673] Maurice Duplessi, as you probably know, was he's the only person in history to serve five terms as Premier Quebec and he died in office.

[674] And Jean Lossage told me that if he'd lived, he would have been reelected.

[675] He was, he really knew how to, you know, how to organize that province politically.

[676] And, but he was a bachelor.

[677] But he advanced Johnson quite quickly.

[678] and Johnson was kind of his protege.

[679] And he had the same speaking style, a very witty way of talking.

[680] And he inspired my interest in DuPlessy, because up until then I had the, I was the conventional English -Canadian view, that DuPlessy was really a retrograde political character and a scoundrel, I mean, a colorful man and a clever man, no doubt, but a cynic and essentially much too authoritarian.

[681] I mean, there's some truth in that.

[682] But the fact is he produced the modernization of Quebec.

[683] He built the auto routes.

[684] He built the schools.

[685] He built every university except McGill.

[686] I mean, he was reelected because he delivered for the province.

[687] And but his technique was to get the nationalists and the conservatives to vote together, which is very difficult to do.

[688] Either you're too nationalistic and frighten the country.

[689] conservatives, which happened to him in 1939, or you're not nationalistic enough, and they get impatient with you, which is what happened to Jean -Jacques Bertrand in 1970.

[690] I mean, DuPlessy had it all organized for Paul Sovey to follow him and Daniel Johnson to follow him, but DuPlessy was a strong man. It was almost 70 when he died in office.

[691] Those two died in office in early 50s, and then the whole thing broke up.

[692] But my point was that Johnson stirred my curiosity about DuPlessy, because there clearly was a story to this man that wasn't being told.

[693] He was reviled as the author of The Great Darkness and all this sort of thing.

[694] So I went to a colloquy happen to get an invitation, and it came from Miss Griffith, who I mentioned.

[695] It was my old professor of Carlton, who said, you might be interested in this.

[696] So I went to it in three rivers.

[697] And it was a discussion of Duplica.

[698] And there was a panel.

[699] There was one pro -duplexie panelist, two anti -duplice ones.

[700] And I went up to the pro -duplexie one at the end of it.

[701] It was the somewhat well -known historian Robert Rumii, a Frenchman originally, who was a member of Accins -Franc, you know, Charles Maras, and he was at a demonstration in Place de la Republic in 1926, and the person next to him was shot dead.

[702] And with that, he left France and never returned, emigrated to go.

[703] back.

[704] Anyway, he, I congratulated him on upholding DuPlessé and we conversed for a while.

[705] And then I gave him a ride back to Montreal.

[706] And it turned out that he had been commissioned by an outfit called in French, the Society of Friends of the Honorable Maurice DuPlessie to write a book about DuPlessie.

[707] And they had all DuPlessie's papers.

[708] And so I, I, I, I, The idea is it came to my mind, well, look, you're writing in French, would they have any interest in allowing an English -speaking person to look at them and write about that?

[709] And he said, well, it's worth the try, sure, well, I'll recommend you, you say.

[710] And then it happened.

[711] The head of this outfit was the former Minister of Cultural Affairs in Johnson and Bertrand's government, Jean -Auel Tremblay, you may remember.

[712] And he's still alive.

[713] He's very elderly.

[714] And so he said, yeah, well, that's fine.

[715] And sure, you can, you know, you've got to keep them to yourself, all of which I, the rules I respected.

[716] And so I had all this stuff.

[717] And then when I saw what I had, I realized I had to do something about it.

[718] And this is what takes me back to having developed at least the ambition to write some history.

[719] So I calculated that if I enrolled at McGill, citing this as my proposed thesis topic, that would get me halfway through.

[720] and if I got halfway through, I'd have the momentum to finish it.

[721] That's where my first book came from, which is called Renverente Caesar, the life of Maurice DuPlessy.

[722] And so I got that side of things going at the same time as we built our newspaper company.

[723] And we bought within a few months a daily newspaper in Prince Edward Island and one in Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

[724] So I could say with a semi -straight face, We have a newspaper chain that spans the country from ocean to ocean.

[725] But I said, you know, the links are rather wide, and not many of them.

[726] So you're writing, you're done your law degree, you're writing now as well, and you've got three newspapers at this point?

[727] Well, and there were some weeklies.

[728] We were up to probably as many as 10, but then.

[729] We had some weeklets around Quebec, and then we got, we said that there were some available ones in British Columbia.

[730] Dailies and weekly.

[731] So we built it up.

[732] It was still a small company compared to, you know, the ones that own the big newspapers in the country.

[733] But we built it up to something, a bit of scale and stature fairly quickly.

[734] But it was a very profitable business.

[735] And normally we would make a bid based on the profitability of the present owner.

[736] And very rarely were these people who own the business.

[737] papers running them as profitably as they could.

[738] They were taking a nice salary for themselves, and they weren't that concerned with what the profit was.

[739] Well, we had an idea of what we could do with the profit.

[740] And then in those days, you could go to the local bank and say, look, we want to buy this paper, and we're asking you to loan us half the money.

[741] We'll take care of the rest.

[742] What we do is we give the vendor a balance of sale in the rest.

[743] So we didn't put out.

[744] anything, not a cent.

[745] But we always did raise the profit.

[746] We always raised the quality of the product, too.

[747] And our position always was that the best way to raise the profit was to raise the quality of the product.

[748] And even then, people who bought and read a newspaper were what it's called ABC1 readers, either high income or high education, relatively speaking.

[749] I mean, ignorant people didn't buy newspapers.

[750] And for the most part, poor people didn't buy newspapers.

[751] And people, advertisers wouldn't be interested in, wouldn't buy a newspaper.

[752] But anyone who bought a newspaper is someone, an advertiser wants to get to.

[753] He has disposable income.

[754] How much was your ability to make these newspapers that you purchased profitable and also to see an opportunity there, a consequence of you having done everything when you bought your first newspaper?

[755] considerable because I knew how much manpower you needed.

[756] And almost always these places had more manpower than they need it.

[757] Now, you know, we handled it gently.

[758] You know, we moved them out.

[759] You know, basically a lot of them were elderly, so we just gave them early retirement, topped up their pensions a bit and things like that.

[760] But, and they're small, so you're not talking about a lot of people.

[761] But if you've got a newspaper of 50 employees, And you get eight of them to take early retirement.

[762] You've got the payroll by almost 20%.

[763] And it's not that early retirement.

[764] You know, and in addition to that, there are all kinds of things to do to enhance revenue.

[765] I mean, very few of them at any notion of how you can hype the circulation relatively easily with contests and things like that.

[766] I was astounded at the people.

[767] And where we really saw this was in England, or the daily telegraph, the daily circulation over a million broadsheet papers, the biggest broadsheet paper in Europe.

[768] The British love these, as far as I'm concerned, utterly ridiculous contest.

[769] But if you've given a contest, even to get a, you know, a free subscription to the spectator, which we also own, they'll plunge into it.

[770] It's a circulation building.

[771] So that's the sort of thing that a, you know, an individual sitting in, for argument's sake, Nelson, British Columbia, having owned this newspaper for 30 years, he wouldn't know that.

[772] It wouldn't matter.

[773] He lived well.

[774] He was an influential person in his community, made a profit every year, having taken a nice salary for himself, there's three or four relatives in the payroll.

[775] The company owns his car and owns his speedboat in the lake and all this kind of stuff.

[776] I mean, Tam, that's all he needs, which is fine.

[777] But the fact is you can double the profits quite quickly.

[778] So now, do you have a plan at this point?

[779] You're being successful in purchasing newspapers and increasing their profitability.

[780] So you're building up more capital.

[781] Are you planning?

[782] Do you have an aim at this point just to continue expanding?

[783] And do you have an end in mind?

[784] And we brought it a long way forward.

[785] The biggest paper we had when things changed because of that shakeup in the Ravelston, thing that you mentioned in your intro, where when I started to focus on finance, it was Lusselaid in Quebec City, which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was once the chairman.

[786] And that was a newspaper of about 120 ,000 circulation a day.

[787] It's not big for Toronto, but that's what is it.

[788] It's, you know, I'm trying to say, I don't know the newspaper circulations now.

[789] I've been out of the business for a long time, but, you know, that's 120 ,000 papers today is a respectable size paper.

[790] It's not a huge newspaper, but it's not, it's not like the Nolan Eastern Townships advertiser, right?

[791] And there was some history to the Salé as well, so well -known paper in Quebec.

[792] So you - By the way, the history part that I best knew was from my studies of DuPlessy, where the, you know, it was, as I said, Sir Wilfred was the chairman at one time, was an absolute dyed -in -the -wall liberal newspaper.

[793] But the owner, Jacob Nicole, and he owned the newspapers in Three Rivers and Sherbrook also.

[794] He was one of the few people who was a senator and a legislative counselor, but the upper house of Quebec in those days.

[795] He was both at the same time.

[796] And he was the Liberal Party chairman for 20 years provincially while they were in office just before DuBlessie, and for nearly 20 years after when they were in office in Ottawa.

[797] He was a very powerful man in Quebec.

[798] And in the early days of television, he got the license.

[799] Dougless through his political contacts for eastern Quebec, south -eastern Quebec, around Sherbrook.

[800] And the best place to put his transmitter was at the top of Mount Orford, which was a provincial park.

[801] So he asked DePlessy if he could put his transmitter there.

[802] And DiPlessi said, you know, Jacques, you can put it.

[803] and you don't have to pay me more than $1 rent for me, being the province of the bank, but not as long as right under the words Lussela on your leading newspaper or the words the liberal organ.

[804] He said, right.

[805] At that point, Lussela, never mind that Mr. Nicole was a liberal senator and legislative counselor, became a union national newspaper.

[806] It just switched like that, and he got his license.

[807] Anyway, that, that's a very.

[808] That's a, in a way a red airing, but I thought it might amuse your viewers a bit.

[809] Right.

[810] So you're building up a newspaper empire.

[811] It's in Canada.

[812] It's limited to Canada at this point, but you start to expand.

[813] Is it first in the U .S. or first in the U .K.?

[814] And how does that move?

[815] We started to move in the U .S. in, let me think now, we got going there in about 70, 75.

[816] We bought a paper just over the border in Vermont, and then it grew up.

[817] I mean, of course, in a market that size, we fairly rapidly bought a huge number of these small papers.

[818] We had a formula to operate them, and you could bundle them together by region.

[819] And then when you combine their circulation, it became quite substantial in circulation.

[820] We had enough of them.

[821] And as you said in your intro, we had hundreds of these papers.

[822] And were you running writers across the papers?

[823] where these all independent fiefdoms?

[824] There were a few that we could run or buy from the outside of the discount for ourselves rather than the unit cost that obtained if we were only buying for one little paper, 10 ,000 sales or something like that.

[825] So we got economies to scale to a degree.

[826] But in the papers like that, you absolutely have to serve the local public.

[827] And you're relatively speaking, not under threat from television.

[828] religion, let alone once it came the internet, as much in those local paper.

[829] Because, you know, CBS or the CBC, or wherever you want, are not going to carry the, you know, the strawberry festival of the town your papers published in.

[830] You know, they just have the room for it.

[831] So you're giving people what they can't get anywhere else.

[832] And is that still the case?

[833] Are the smaller community newspapers still managing?

[834] Well, I think the internet is the internet.

[835] The internet is.

[836] has become so pervasive now.

[837] I think it's a threat even to those papers, but not as much as it is to a metropolitan paper.

[838] So how are you managing your time at this point?

[839] You have an increasingly large media empire.

[840] You're also still writing.

[841] Well, we divided it into regions, and I had the East and associates had the West.

[842] And then the big turn came in the matter you referred to when the, you know, what was called at the time, the Argus group of companies, the control of it became available.

[843] And that was quite an intricate business because the number of voting shares involved was quite small.

[844] So you would, because my father had his position, he died in 1976.

[845] So my brother and I, we technically, we didn't inherit his stock.

[846] We bought it from his estate, but in effect, we inherited it.

[847] And then there was a shareholders agreement and the principal associate died and there was some jockeying around in any case we, in accordance with the shareholders agreement, we bought the other stock.

[848] So we had control of the voting shares, which had, of this company, which had influential blocks of stock and historically controlling blocks of stock, although for in most cases they weren't.

[849] weren't a majority of shares of a number of famous companies.

[850] Massey Ferguson was one of the farm equipment maker, Dominion stores, the grocery stores, Domtar, the forestry products company.

[851] And the most interesting in a way was the old Hollinger mining company.

[852] He didn't do much mining, but it owned 60 % of an outfit that own big iron ore positions in.

[853] in Labrador and northern Quebec and long -term contracts to ship the ore that produced about $40 million of royalties every year, at basically no cost.

[854] The steel companies and their affiliates in the United States took the ore out and paid us the royalty.

[855] So we had that cash to work by.

[856] And then what I did was over a period, I reoriented that flow of cash and that business into the newspaper business.

[857] And we really, really took off when I bought control of the London Daily Telegraph, which was in a distressed financial state for $30 million, which we ultimately sold for $1 .327 billion.

[858] How long a period of time elapsed between the purchase and the sale?

[859] from 1986 to 2004 so 18 years?

[860] 18 years?

[861] Yeah, well, that's quite the return on investment.

[862] So are you in England?

[863] You buy the telegraph.

[864] Are you spending much of your time in Britain at that point?

[865] Well, after we bought it, I went there for two years in the summers only, and then I made it my chief residence after that for about 15 years.

[866] Yeah, so what was it like moving from Toronto to Britain?

[867] Well, I kept my home and my office here, but in the sense you mean it, I mean it, yes, I moved my main residence.

[868] Well, look, it moving into Britain as an owner of a big newspaper is not like just, you know, getting off the plane at Heathrow and going through the wadats to find a job for yourself, you know, so I was rather well received because of the position I had.

[869] but it was very interesting I was fortunate to get the very tail end of that era when a newspaper owners were very influential people I mean I don't think they are particularly influential now but it's not a good business now but London is one of the world's greatest cities and if you're well situated in London you meet a tremendous variety of interesting people who either live there or come through there, virtually everybody even think of comes through London at some point in a year.

[870] And there's normally some sort of occasion for them.

[871] So my wife and I were constantly receiving these formidable, sort of stiff, gold -edged invitations to come to have dinner with so -and -so or lunch with so -and -so or something, and, you know, it was a sumptuous life, but, but, I mean, my interest in it was really in the socializing with people, as well as at that time, I was a supporter of Mrs. Thatcher, and it was a very interesting and active time politically in Britain as she effectively desocialized the country.

[872] How well did you know her?

[873] I got to know her very well.

[874] She was my sponsor in the House of Lords, and she and Dennis came to our wedding party, and they often came to dinner with us.

[875] So you went to, you lived in Britain after you were in Canada.

[876] How, it'd be interesting for me to hear how you would contrast the cultures.

[877] What was it like being in Britain?

[878] I mean, I know you were in a very fortunate position when you moved there, and so you entered in the upper echelons of society.

[879] society.

[880] But you had a chance to see Britain from the inside and to contrast it with Canada and with the U .S. to some degree.

[881] So what did you observe and what did you conclude?

[882] Well, it was a country being renewed, you know.

[883] I mean, Britain at the time that Thatcher was elected, very narrowly elected in 1979, was a country with tight currency controls, top personal tax rate of 98%.

[884] So there's a lot of tax.

[885] cheating going on.

[886] And the British don't like that, you know.

[887] I mean, the real problem with Britain and Europe was not immigration.

[888] It was, it was the authoritarianism of directives from Brussels.

[889] And, you know, the French and the Italians essentially ignore the government as much as they can anyway, and they don't care what these directives are.

[890] They're not going to pay much attention to them unless they absolutely have to.

[891] And the French in particular are not going to take seriously anything that comes from the Belgians, or at least from within Belgium.

[892] And the Germans are the leading power in Europe, and they're accustomed to regimentation, so it doesn't bother them.

[893] But the British like to be law abiding.

[894] They like to obey the law, but they have to be sensible laws, and they have to be imposed by people that are accountable.

[895] So if you don't like what they're doing, you can throw them out at the voting place.

[896] And that was the problem.

[897] Well, that, in addition to the economic stagnation, finally boiled over when Thatcher and her friends, Keith Joseph and others, pushed out Ted Heath, Sir Edward Heath, and took the Conservative Party of Great Britain, Conservative and Unionist Party to the right, not the extreme right, but to a level of conservatism that conservative.

[898] fiscal policy and tax policy in particular and attitude to labor unions that the Conservative Party had not occupied really since the early days of Stanley Baldwin.

[899] And it wasn't back to them, but it was ideologically a similar position, but obviously refined to reflect changes in society over that period of more than 50 years.

[900] And so it was very interesting to see, and she was successful.

[901] I mean, I was there for her third election victory.

[902] She was the first prime minister since before the first Reform Act in the early 1830s to win three consecutive full terms, majority terms as prime minister.

[903] And she did it on the basis of radical change to the country.

[904] And it was quite exciting.

[905] Now, at that time, that was in the late 80s.

[906] Now, Brian Mulroney was an old friend of mine.

[907] He was, he was, I mean, your question didn't deal with politics only, but given my position as a newspaper business, politics had a lot to do with it.

[908] Brian was doing something about that, but Canada, as old, was operated, you know, much closer to the middle of the field.

[909] You know, it never got that far left, and he didn't move it as far as far as.

[910] Thatcher moved Britain and in any case that, you know, it's not a unitary state like Britain.

[911] It's a much different system.

[912] But they, the, it, it, you didn't have, I mean, I thought Brian was a good prime minister, but you didn't have that sense of profound change and radical change and exciting policy formulation.

[913] I mean, it was one of the few periods in my life where I sort of transmogrified into a, into a sort of semi -policy won, you say, because we had positions on all this stuff.

[914] And the other aspect that was the Cold War was still going on.

[915] And there was still some controversy in Britain in that there was always in the left wing of the Labor Party, especially, and the far out old imperialist wing of the Tories as well, this antagonism to the United States.

[916] And when I moved there was in the latter Reagan years.

[917] And of course, he was an important president and had an eventful period as president.

[918] And it happened I knew him too, and I'd known him before he was president.

[919] And so I, you know, I wasn't under the illusion that I was at the center of things.

[920] I wasn't, but I was actually pretty close to the center in Britain because my first trip there is the chief shareholder of the telegraph company.

[921] The prime minister invited me to lunch on Saturday at Checkers.

[922] And she said, look here, you know, we need you.

[923] We can't win without you.

[924] Are you with us?

[925] And I said, oh, I'm with you all.

[926] And I said, but let me ask you something.

[927] And this was right after Mr. Murdoch had made his big changeover and moved to a new plant.

[928] and decertified and basically dismissed the old, you know, the old pre -print and printing unions that used to shut the papers down all the time arbitrarily.

[929] The shop foreman would have, you know, lose a game of darts at his pub or something and come in and call all the workers had.

[930] It was almost as bad as then.

[931] And she, since Murdoch was acting within the law, she ensured that his titles could be produced.

[932] I said, look, I don't think we're going to get to the point that Rupert's at, but, you know, we're putting through voluntary retirements, but you don't know.

[933] And if we need to import people from other countries to help get our papers out, she interrupted me and said, I'll sign the work permits myself.

[934] And that was it, as Charles Poell, her long -serving chief secretary, very distinguished public servant in Britain, wrote, politically speaking, it was love at first sight.

[935] I mean, he was there that luncheon.

[936] And we just got on like smoke and did right to the day she died.

[937] Well, she was a little non -compose, man to slatterly.

[938] But I knew her well and her very well.

[939] And as I said at our barbers in my wedding party, I thanked her and said, I never would have come to this country or wished to do business in this country but it wasn't for you, and that was true.

[940] So what made her able to do what she did?

[941] I mean, she was a woman in a sea of men.

[942] She was a radical leader in many ways, obviously on the conservative front.

[943] She had apparently had tremendous strength of character.

[944] What did you see in her that made her able to do what she did?

[945] She was an extremely courageous person, and she was that type of person who focused exclusively on relevant sequential facts in analyzing a problem.

[946] And she had been, I believe, the education secretary in the Heath government, 70 to 74, and was the co -founder of the Center for Policy Studies.

[947] She came to the conclusion along with a number of others.

[948] Some of them were intellectually more, frankly, sophisticated than she was.

[949] like Keith Joseph, that Britain simply had to change, that what was called the Attlee settlement, where it was colloquially in Britain called Buttskillism after Rab Butler and Hugh Gatescoe, who was, Gatescoe was the leader of the Labour Party between Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, and Rab Butler was the deputy prime minister for, and all was the runner.

[950] up to leader all through the Churchill, Eden, McMillan years into the Heath period.

[951] And, and, and, uh, a Starlight that was seen also.

[952] And it was, it was kind of a lookalike government where they agreed in most things.

[953] And Margaret concluded, this isn't working.

[954] Britain is falling behind.

[955] Our standard of living is, is not keeping pace with the Germans or the French or the Americans.

[956] And this is why, and we've got to change.

[957] And she was absolutely right.

[958] But, you know, sometimes just stating home truths in simple ways is so far from what people are used to.

[959] It sounds more radical and it is.

[960] What she was saying wasn't, in fact, all that radical.

[961] She was saying things like, we can't have just completely irresponsible work stoppages.

[962] We can't have capricious middle -level union officials just calling everybody out for the fun of it whenever they, you know, have had a bad night or something.

[963] And we can't take 98 % of people's income.

[964] I mean, it's nonsense.

[965] I mean, it's just nonsense.

[966] It'll cost 99 cents to collect the 98 cents.

[967] I mean, your collection costs get too high.

[968] Cheating becomes outrageous.

[969] Rich people move away.

[970] It's just nonsense.

[971] And she had a way of putting it very clearly and very persuasive.

[972] And that group was an ideal team for that time.

[973] She had some people, Nigel Lawson, for example, was a former editor of the spectator, senior writer for the Financial Times, academic economist, but a fine debater.

[974] And he put through absolutely radical budgets where, you know, they cut the top tax rate between Jeffrey Howe and Nigel, they cut it from 98 % to 40%.

[975] And, you know, she had a group that could argue it in Parliament and in the country.

[976] She had an academic group led by Keith Joseph and her Center for Policy Studies group.

[977] Kenneth Minogue, I don't know if you know these people, well -known academic economists and specialists in other areas who could put it forward in a way that was where they could defend it against, you know, the best debaters of the left.

[978] And she was a powerful leader who kept the whip on the backs of the Tory party and said, this is what must be done.

[979] And this is why we have to do it.

[980] And, you know, when she said the lady's not for turning and sacked half her government and so forth, she showed, I mean, she was right.

[981] But, but, there's no doubt that at times traditional opinion within that party and the Tory grandees didn't approve of her and they never liked her and they stabbed her in the back in the end.

[982] But even those who were involved in that had to admit that she made a tremendous difference and the best of them.

[983] For example, Michael Heselton, very able man. I'm a very good defense secretary and then came back in other roles.

[984] But he he agreed with her policy.

[985] He couldn't stand her person, and she couldn't stand him.

[986] But he was no slacker when it came to the policy.

[987] She was the right person for the right time.

[988] Now, unfortunately, as so often happens when people in Democratic countries have held an elected office for a while, she started to lose her sense of political self -reservation.

[989] And I, you know, I became, because we had a big parliamentary contingent in the press gallery and did a lot of political reporting.

[990] And Neil Kinnick, the leader of the opposition, labor leader, told me one day that the first parliamentary report he read every morning was ours, because even though we were a rabidly pro -thachate paper, the reporting was always fair and always perceptive.

[991] And that was our standard.

[992] And that was what I always tried to enforce everywhere in every country in all our papers was to separate reporting and comment, which you've rarely get nowadays.

[993] And as the agitation with Thatcher's authoritarianism within the conservative parliamentary party increased, we would hear it naturally.

[994] And the editors would tell me these things.

[995] So I said, all right, look, put 10 more people into the press gallery.

[996] I mean, they give a press pass to anyone that the telegraph asked for, given them.

[997] our position.

[998] And I mean, you know, we were the backbone of the nation.

[999] You know, we had over a million sale, and 98 % of them were conservative voters.

[1000] And, and I said, for once, I will, I will ignore your expense accounts, which were outrageous.

[1001] They always are from journalists.

[1002] And I almost sack the editor when he expected me to pay for chartering a helicopter to take him to drinks party in Brighton.

[1003] But I said, look, I'll ignore all of that.

[1004] Tell these guys, divide it up.

[1005] Take the entire conservative parliamentary party, every MP, divide them up into groups.

[1006] And over the next few months, have your guys take them all out and apply them with drink and find out what is really going on there.

[1007] And when I had all this, I asked for an appointment, the Prime Minister's office said to come over later that day.

[1008] And I said, look, This is what I've done.

[1009] Obviously, I didn't name anyone.

[1010] That would be dishonorable.

[1011] I did not give one name.

[1012] But, for example, the chief whip rent him his name was.

[1013] We couldn't wait to see the back of that, and I don't think she had the clue of this.

[1014] So I didn't mention him.

[1015] I didn't mention anybody.

[1016] I said, I'm telling you, Prime Minister, your parliamentary party is seething with this content.

[1017] There's an absolute rancid element there, and it's very, it's gone a long way into that group.

[1018] And you've got to, if you, pardon my being so imperious here, you've got to, I'm not saying you should accommodate or appease them, but make a few course corrections that attract more of them, turn, break the momentum of this.

[1019] And she said, oh, rubbish, absolutely rubbish.

[1020] She said, they're all slackers.

[1021] They're cowards.

[1022] I said, of course, they're cowards.

[1023] That's what makes them dangerous.

[1024] And, you know, and it was only a few weeks later that, you know, she, you know, pushed poor old Jeffrey Howard and the 1922 Society, the group of non -cabinet MPs in the governing party, essentially gave her the high jump.

[1025] And it was very unfortunate.

[1026] We ran an editorial on the front page was very rare the day before, which I contributed the last sentence.

[1027] the editor, Max Hastings was not a pro -Thatcher person.

[1028] But the last sentence was that Margaret Thatcher is one of the great leaders who has arisen in a thousand years of British history.

[1029] And as long as she wishes to remain as Prime Minister, she may count on the support of this newspaper.

[1030] And she wrote me a handwritten personal letter thinking.

[1031] But she went.

[1032] And I told the editor to put a black border around.

[1033] on the story.

[1034] And he said, please, you're not serious.

[1035] I spared it in that.

[1036] But that's how I felt it was, it was a tragedy.

[1037] Not a tragedy, but a sadness.

[1038] She was a great leader.

[1039] But, you know, Jordan, I don't believe in term limits.

[1040] I mean, basically the voters will decide.

[1041] And if they've got a good person in the office, let you keep the person there.

[1042] And in the United States, the only time in the history of that country where anyone saw the third term, the entire future of our civilization dependent on his being elected.

[1043] And that was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, because the Republicans would never have come up with Wendley.

[1044] And Britain and Canada could not have continued in the war.

[1045] And they wouldn't have got a war leader as good as that anyway.

[1046] And Wendell Wilkie was a good man, but he was no FDR.

[1047] But if we look back at it in the last, what, 50 or 60 years, the only leaders in, you know, in important countries who've left office in good physical health and good political health were the term limited Americans, Eisenhower and Reagan.

[1048] And maybe Clinton, but more Eisenhower and Reagan.

[1049] I mean, if they'd been allowed to and had chosen to do it, either of them would have won a third term easily.

[1050] They're very popular.

[1051] But, as Roosevelt said, you've got to have a new, even though it's you running for re -election, it has to be for a new reason.

[1052] You have to give the people a new reason to vote for it, which he did do.

[1053] I mean, he was, you know, beat the depression, you know, accelerate prosperity, stay out of war, win the war.

[1054] You know, he had a different thing each time.

[1055] I digress.

[1056] Now, Margaret Thatcher was, she was very courageous and very admirable.

[1057] I have to, and also a wonderful person in small ways.

[1058] I mean, the staff at Downing Street and Chequers loved her.

[1059] She was terribly polite to these people in a way that, you know, and some of the labor prime ministers like Callahan weren't particularly.

[1060] And certainly a man like Ted Heath had no manners anyway, so he wasn't polite anyway.

[1061] I mean, I'd rather like him as a person, and he was an interesting man in a way.

[1062] I didn't particularly like him politically, but he wasn't very polite.

[1063] But Margaret Thatcher was very polite to those people, no matter how rough she was in her own minister, she felt they could defend themselves, but, you know, someone serving tea at Downing Street couldn't, and so he had to be polite to these people, and she was never condescending about it.

[1064] I mean, she was from Grantham.

[1065] Her father was a grocer, now he was ultimately the mayor of Grantham.

[1066] So he was a well -known man in Grantham.

[1067] But in the world of Westminster and Belgrade, the Great and the Good and the Dukes and the Rich and everything, they looked upon her as a ludicrous figure.

[1068] I mean, some, you know, some jumped up battle acts from the Midlands.

[1069] And she was never particularly self -conscious about that.

[1070] But it must be said she was always a little awkward.

[1071] And in that way, I had a kind of a past because I wasn't part of an awful class system in Britain.

[1072] I wasn't anything.

[1073] I was like from another planet.

[1074] But I have to say this about her, she did not have a good sense of humor.

[1075] She occasionally said funny things, but she wasn't a naturally humorous person, which is not the end of the world.

[1076] But it's nice if you've got a better sense of humor than she did.

[1077] And she was a little oversimplified in the view sometimes.

[1078] I mean, the fact is when you get right down to it, she didn't like Europe because she didn't like the main European nationalities.

[1079] I mean, the Germans and the French, she didn't mind the Italians, but she couldn't take the Italians seriously.

[1080] But she'd rather like them.

[1081] But she never forgave the Germans for the war.

[1082] And she thought the French were sharpers and sly, cunning and devious people.

[1083] And she sort of worked in stereotypes, you know.

[1084] Now, if she met an individual person from Germany or France, obviously, perfectly polite to them.

[1085] But fundamentally, she didn't trust either of those countries.

[1086] And she didn't feel it was really Europe's job to lead the Danes and the Dutch and all these small.

[1087] smaller countries that wanted Britain in to help them, see?

[1088] And she rather liked the Americans, and she never forgot, and she told me this many times, she never forgot what the United States did in World War II, how desperate Britain's condition was, and how overwhelmingly helpful the Americans were.

[1089] She had great admiration for Roosevelt.

[1090] And she said, and each year from 1942, we'd see more and more of the Americans in Britain.

[1091] And I know there were, there were frictions here and there and things.

[1092] But to us, it was just wonderfully reassuring more and more these big, tall, strong American boys would arrive ready to invade Europe.

[1093] And she was, her family were practicing Methodists.

[1094] and every Sunday they would invite an American serviceman that they would see in the church service to come back with them to have lunch.

[1095] They thought it was a nice thing to do to young men overseas or missing their families and so on to show some hospitality.

[1096] I mean, she was a very genuine, traditional, low church Protestant, but tolerant, no religious animosities of any kind.

[1097] And most of her constituents were Jewish.

[1098] And just straight, what you saw was what you got, you know, but a very strong, good, well -rounded leader.

[1099] But if what you need, which is what they did need, was someone to make radical change and say, the lady is not returning, and this is what we have a mandate to do, and we're going to do it, she was the perfect leader.

[1100] Once you got into a suppler situation, that would not be her forte.

[1101] I mean, she, you wouldn't confuse her with Disraeli or something.

[1102] I mean, if she'd gone to the Congress of Berlin instead of Disraeli, they would have ended up in war with Bismarck.

[1103] You know, I mean, she probably started the starting as soon as her train left, but, but, you know, it was horses for courses and she was a wonderful leader for the time.

[1104] as a person, she was an outstanding person, absolutely loyal.

[1105] I've great admiration for, great admiration, and for Dennis, too.

[1106] You knew Reagan as well.

[1107] I did.

[1108] Not as well, but I knew him, yeah.

[1109] I knew him before he was president, when he was president, and after he was president.

[1110] And what were your impressions of him?

[1111] Extremely formidable man. And he was to start with one of the most charming men I've ever met.

[1112] I mean, practically all politicians are reasonably charming when they put their mindset.

[1113] Otherwise, they're in the wrong business.

[1114] But he was, he was disarmingly pleasant without being staccarin or over ingenuous.

[1115] It was just a charming guy, good raconteur, terrific raconteur, very good conversations.

[1116] And I think he was a great leader.

[1117] I don't know who's any dead about that.

[1118] He was a wonderful speaker.

[1119] He kept it to a few basic points.

[1120] He vulgarized them, as the French say.

[1121] He made these complicated issues simple, and it was almost impossible.

[1122] Is that something he shared with Thatcher, that capability?

[1123] Yes.

[1124] But in a slightly different way.

[1125] He would throw in a humorous aspect that was disarming.

[1126] And he would also, he'd make it a little more anecdotal in folks.

[1127] she will win, but not not where his argument deteriorated.

[1128] He was a very skillful debater.

[1129] If you're interested in this, you can find it on the internet the debate he had with Robert Kennedy over that business about the left -wing academic in New Jersey, Genovesa, where he was a far left and there was a dispute about his ability to remain at a state university because he was so communist.

[1130] And at the end of it, Robert Kennedy said, don't ever put me into a debate of that.

[1131] I mean, Reagan, I had some conversations then where I was astounded, even, you know, well after he was present and was supposedly in decline, where he had an astounding recall of the detail of things.

[1132] He was a much more comprehensively intelligent person than was widely known because he sometimes seemed flat -footed when a direct question was put to him.

[1133] I mean, you know, the American tradition is not one of debating like it is in the parliamentary tradition.

[1134] I mean, he was a governor and then the president, and he never debated with anybody when he chose to, Leslie Kennedy or when he actually was in the elections.

[1135] And but he, but he, this idea that he was a, you know, what did Clark Clifford call him an amiable dunce or something?

[1136] I knew Clifford, too, and Reagan was the smartest Clifford, a different type of intelligence, but he was a very intelligent man. He was, he was, in a way, an inspirational figure because in his life, he only had six jobs.

[1137] He was a life, you know, a guardian of people swimming, whatever, you know, lifeguard.

[1138] Yeah, lifeguard.

[1139] Yeah, life care.

[1140] And then he was a baseball announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, California bound in the Great Depression.

[1141] And then a screen actor, including, I think, six terms.

[1142] head of the Screen Actors Guild, but his job was an actor.

[1143] And then he was the vice president for public and personnel relations for General Electric Corp, and then governor of California and president of the United States.

[1144] And he only, I believe, only had four elections.

[1145] He beat Edmund G. Brown, who defeated Richard Nixon four years before by over a million votes.

[1146] And he defeated Jesse Unra by over a million votes running for reelectionist governor.

[1147] And he beat President Jimmy Carter by, I think, nine million votes.

[1148] and then Walter Mondale just died the other day by over 15 million votes.

[1149] I mean, it was just a very modest career.

[1150] He was a graduate of Eureka College.

[1151] And then he just went all the way up to the top of the country and stayed there.

[1152] And he undoubtedly was a very good president.

[1153] No, from this.

[1154] I've got to say this room, Jordan, he wasn't Mr. Nice guy.

[1155] He came across brilliantly, it's Mr. Nice Guy.

[1156] In that sense, he was little like FDR, he came across a very charming nice guy.

[1157] But, you know, Ronald Reagan didn't go to the funerals of the people who launched his career like Alfred Bloomingdale and Justin Dart and Henry Salvatore.

[1158] You know, Nancy Reagan, for all her peculiarities, was a very human person.

[1159] Reagan had wonderful human qualities.

[1160] I mean, I don't know if you or I, if we had a, as General Al Haig said, a round in the chest and the collapsed lung would walk into the emergency room and say, I hope you people are all Republicans the way he did.

[1161] I mean, that wasn't, he wasn't, you know, recording a film there.

[1162] I mean, he really did have a bulletin's chest.

[1163] But he was fixated on certain targets.

[1164] And while he was always, he was always sort of pleasant to everybody, I never got.

[1165] the impression he was awash with human sentiment where in her way nancy was you know and that way she was kind of his ambassador to you know let your hair down be spontaneous so you sound like you were fond of her too yeah i didn't know her as well i thought she was admirably devoted to him i mean look there's something about that california thing that spooks me a bitch you know where she consult these astrologers and all like whatever works for you but that kind of thing makes me a bit uneasy but yeah she was very nice to tell you I have to say whenever I met her she was very very nice look I have to say whenever I met her Hillary Clinton was nice so I don't like it politically all right so you're back in Britain you're you're running the telegraph and you're also moving up through the ranks of British society you're made a Lord how did that come about?

[1166] Well, you know, if you own a big newspaper, you don't have to do very much for that, you know, you just have to have your party in office.

[1167] Or indeed, now you don't even have to have that.

[1168] I was installed by Blair, but I was put up by the conservative leader at the time, William Hague.

[1169] That's basically an ex officio thing.

[1170] My predecessor had, his predecessor, it was, you know, that was Lord, Lord Hartfeld immediately had a man prior to that, Lord cameras.

[1171] And what did it mean to you?

[1172] And what were the, responsibilities that are associated with it.

[1173] Well, it's what you want to make out of it.

[1174] I mean, if I hadn't had my career interrupted as it was, I, you know, I would have, you know, I came in as an active peer, and I gave a number of speeches in my arrangement that the conservative whips office was that I would not presume to advise the British on their pensions or even their schools, but I'd speak on foreign policy and alliance matters.

[1175] And that's what I did.

[1176] And that was at the time of the Iraq war.

[1177] when incidentally, Blair needed us because, you know, well, there are whips in the House of Commons who can normally control the votes.

[1178] It's a life appointment in the Lord, so you can do anything you want, peers can get stuff.

[1179] There's nothing they can do better.

[1180] And Blair needed the conservative peers to support his policy.

[1181] So he phoned a number of us, including me, and we did support him.

[1182] But if it's a serious subject, it is the best debating forum in the world.

[1183] And, you know, it has this image of being a bunch of, you know, down at the heel, probably drink sodden descendants of people who did brilliantly in a hundred years war or something.

[1184] That isn't what it is.

[1185] It's, it's, the numbers fluctuates around 800 members now.

[1186] There are a fixed number of about 100 that are hereditories, but apart from a few specific office holders, like the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshall and Premier Duke and the Marcus of Salisbury and a couple of others.

[1187] The elected, I'm sorry, the hereditary peers are elected by other hereditories.

[1188] So they have a runoff too.

[1189] And my friend, Lord Rothermear, owner of the Daily Mail, he didn't.

[1190] didn't win.

[1191] He was defeated by his fellow hereditary, Lord Rothschild, Jacob Roschowell.

[1192] He didn't run, but he didn't run because he knew that he wouldn't win.

[1193] And by the way, those are two people who should be there.

[1194] They're very good people.

[1195] But the, and then obviously influential people.

[1196] But the, in a serious debate, you know, you remember, you have the previous chiefs of the defense staff.

[1197] You have the heads of the main universities, you have leading academics, Asa Briggs, for example, you have cultural figures like Andrew Lloyd Weber, Yehudi Meny when I began, and you have the leaders of great corporations, the main trade unions, trade union Congress and so on, and senior cabinet officials.

[1198] I mean, when I spoke in the Iraq war debate, it was right after the last previous defense secretary, and prior to him, the last previous chief of the defense staff, field marshal Brammer.

[1199] And the way it works is it's very fair.

[1200] leaders of the parties and the House of Lords determine an issue to be debated.

[1201] And if people in their groups want an issue debated, if they support for it, they do that.

[1202] So they meet and they agree, I will give this, make it a 12 -hour debate over several days.

[1203] And then whoever leads and closes for each party, they're fixed and they, within reason, and speak for as long as they want.

[1204] The rest of the time is divided up equally between, all of those who signed their desire to speak, which isn't put in a public place, I mean, public to the people who have any business being in the Palace of Westminster, not out of the street, but, you know, anyone who, you know, any peer going by, right?

[1205] I'll speak of that.

[1206] He puts his name up.

[1207] And then it's divided up equal allocation of time.

[1208] There's a clock on all of the four walls.

[1209] The Lord Chancellor presides.

[1210] And you can see your time.

[1211] And you don't go over your time.

[1212] There are no rude interruptions.

[1213] There's no of that awful name -calling and barnyard imitations.

[1214] You get nice comments and think.

[1215] Very polite.

[1216] And you sit down when you're finished.

[1217] And if you don't, there's sort of a clerk of Lord Chanson stands up.

[1218] And at that point, you really have to say.

[1219] And everyone does.

[1220] And then when the debate ends, everyone goes.

[1221] and peers bar, and it continues.

[1222] But on a serious subject, you get absolutely brilliant speakers.

[1223] And it's just extremely well done.

[1224] What's the net effect on British policy?

[1225] It varies.

[1226] I mean, sometimes the government needs it.

[1227] And there are always some members of the government who sit next to Lord, frequently the Attorney General, for example, because they always want an extremely respected barrister as the Attorney General of the country.

[1228] And that person is likely not an MP.

[1229] So you put in the eyes of lords, and that's where he serves for.

[1230] But as a matter of fact, as the business of the country unfolds, generally speaking, the influence isn't great.

[1231] I mean, they may add an amendment here or there, but these are technical matters.

[1232] But times arise when because there are no whips and there is no discipline, I mean, people vote how they want to vote.

[1233] The position of the laws of boards can be very important.

[1234] Then all of a sudden, when I was there, and I expect to get back to this one of these days, all of a sudden your phone's ringing from some prominent figure in the government you haven't heard from for the last five years, you know, they need your vote.

[1235] And are the debates made available to the public in any form other than printing form?

[1236] No, no, they're on television.

[1237] as that's the commons are.

[1238] Of course, they're also recorded and available to anyone who wants them, you know, in written form.

[1239] So, all right.

[1240] So does your empire, your media empire at this point, is it, does it reach its peak with your acquisition of the telegraph?

[1241] Are you growing past now?

[1242] No, no, we went on after that.

[1243] We bought the Chicago Sun Times.

[1244] We bought the Fairfax papers in Australia, very distinguished papers.

[1245] And then we bought the Southam Papers in Canada in 1996.

[1246] and founded the National Post a little after that.

[1247] And so at that point, it was right in there was when it was at its height.

[1248] And it was a big company.

[1249] In that industry, it wasn't a big company compared to Microsoft or something, but it was a big company in that industry.

[1250] So what's happened to your relationship with Canada while you're in Britain?

[1251] Well, I came back often, and I kept my house in office here.

[1252] So I kept it up well, you know.

[1253] I mean, I'd come back a lot and spend practically the whole summer here.

[1254] So, you know, it wasn't as if I was absent altogether by any means.

[1255] And, you know, when we had all the papers here and I'd see the papers, I'd be talking to my associates in one business and another here all the time.

[1256] I was in the United States a lot, you know, our headquarters was in New York.

[1257] So I was moving around a lot, you know.

[1258] And I had home from different cities.

[1259] Right.

[1260] And are you pleased with the way things are going at this point in your life?

[1261] Yeah, I am now.

[1262] It was a very difficult patch, and it was very difficult.

[1263] But, yes, now I am pleased with how things are going.

[1264] I have been for some years.

[1265] Well, sorry, I wasn't clear.

[1266] When you're in the stage of expansion that you just described?

[1267] Yes, yes.

[1268] Although I started to have real misgivings about the few.

[1269] of the newspaper business, and they were well -founded misgivings, but we had an exit strategy that was being conducted very successfully until, as you said, in your intro, those problems arise.

[1270] Shall we talk about that a little bit?

[1271] Okay.

[1272] So what happened?

[1273] You hit a peak.

[1274] You were running this incredibly influential company, and trouble started to brew.

[1275] Why, and what do you see when you look back?

[1276] Well, I took a good look at the Internet, and I just did not see how newspapers could continue as a growth industry.

[1277] And so, although it was painful...

[1278] And this was when?

[1279] Starting in the...

[1280] Let me see now, starting, we're really in the early 90s, around 93.

[1281] And so we sold Australia at a very...

[1282] very handsome profit and had it arranged in a way where it came through with no capital gain assessment on a house company.

[1283] We bought basically out of bankruptcy, not because it wasn't a good company.

[1284] It's just been over levered financially.

[1285] So it was a financial problem rather than an operational one.

[1286] And then where it really turned was with when I sold, most of the Canadian newspapers to is the Asper, Israel Asper, who owned the global television network.

[1287] And we were continuing to do that.

[1288] We're rolling these papers out.

[1289] The idea is we keep the telegraph and basically, and some of the smaller ones in the U .S. that were particularly profitable.

[1290] If you've seen the movie Groundhog, Pung Satani, Pennsylvania, we owned that paper.

[1291] 50 % of its total revenues were pre -tax profit.

[1292] It was a very rich paper, not a big paper, but very profit.

[1293] And that's where we were proceeding when the legal problems arose.

[1294] I mean, we were going to distribute the money, not as dividends, but buying in and canceling shares in a way that was voluntary.

[1295] People wouldn't be, you know, they would tender their shares to us, because our offer we would compact the company and keep some cash and reposition it in different businesses.

[1296] But before we got into the implementation of the expense of part of that, these legal problems arose, and then the whole thing moved sideways and downwards after that.

[1297] What did you see on the horizon for newspapers that made you nervous about the continued viability of the business?

[1298] I just didn't see how we could hold the readers against the internet, that the incursions of the internet would be irresistible.

[1299] Yeah, we just didn't ultimately have a defense against it.

[1300] And we tried various things.

[1301] You know, we ran, we put up internet sites, but they were really just enticements to come into the physical paper.

[1302] And essentially, that was the problem with the newspaper industry's response.

[1303] It put things on the Internet, but unless you just give your content away free, in which case you're eventually going to go bankrupt, you're really in trying to entice people to buy your product and pay for the huge physical plants that print the papers and the vast networks that distribute them.

[1304] And that was the problem.

[1305] The Internet had no cost to use print and no cost to deliver it.

[1306] Yeah, well, and it's also an incredibly effective place to advertise.

[1307] and so you know and my prognosis was right and my remedy was right there were problems but there weren't problems created by me and what caused the legal problems well we're getting into a real jungle here but essentially what happened was that some activist shareholders who were essentially in the green mail business they would they would buy into a company where they saw that ultimately the value of it could be greater and then agitate for sale so they would start stirring up shareholders and creating scenes at the shareholders meetings and things like this well i never had any problem of the shareholders meetings and right to the end i never had the slightest problem of winning any vote at those meetings but what what they did was they exploited an american provision of the securities and exchange act as amended but it enabled them to set up a special committee to review what they were complaining about, which was that some of these people, when they bought assets from us, paid a non -compete fee to my associates and myself personally.

[1308] And this is done in that business.

[1309] And for example, in Canada, when we sold to Izzy Asper, at the same time, the Sun papers were for sale because I believe McLean Hunter had.

[1310] a cross -media problem where they couldn't own the television cable and the newspaper in the same setting.

[1311] So you had papers coming up for sale in Calgary and Edmonton and Ottawa where we had papers.

[1312] So Asper wanted a non -compete from us.

[1313] You say we wouldn't then take his money and go and buy another paper.

[1314] I hire everyone away from the place we just left and compete with them.

[1315] So that was a reasonable thing to do.

[1316] But anyway, we had people who complained and said it shouldn't go to us.

[1317] Now, in the case of Asper, that didn't go anywhere because he wrote me a letter saying that he wanted this and he wanted it from us and there was no ambiguity about that.

[1318] But some of the cases in the U .S. were more ambiguous.

[1319] But we could have managed all of that.

[1320] But once it got going, the special committee and its counsel discovered that an associate of mine had done some naughty things.

[1321] and in the American manner, having done the naughty things, he said, all right, look, I will give evidence against Mr. Black.

[1322] Never mind that Mr. Black had not done any naughty things.

[1323] I'll give evidence against him if you will give me this deal.

[1324] You're saying, and this was done through counsel.

[1325] You know, the plea bargain system was completely undermined the entire functioning of the criminal justice system.

[1326] So this was done.

[1327] And so the next thing I knew, we were.

[1328] We're all being charged for things we didn't do, and I've ultimately been found not to have done.

[1329] But meanwhile, I, you know, took 15 years of my life to get rid of it all, and the asset was destroyed.

[1330] Everything we'd all worked 30 years to build was reduced to nothing to bankruptcy, you know, which incidentally meant that more than one and a half billion dollars of shareholder value on the hands of people other than ourselves just evaporated.

[1331] that was the singular and supreme triumph of the, of the, you know, the shareholder governance movement.

[1332] There was a complete fraud.

[1333] There's just a bunch of self -righteous hypocrites taking fees for themselves and ruining companies.

[1334] How did you, how did you survive it?

[1335] What enabled you to stay, well, to stay functional enough to serve as a tutor, for example?

[1336] Well, I, no, I knew that I had not, in fact, broken the law.

[1337] was fighting the good fight of the wrongfully accused.

[1338] I mean, I'm not innocent as a person, but in terms of the criminal statutes of the United States, I was certainly innocent.

[1339] So I had the moral righteousness to fight.

[1340] And I had the historic knowledge that the alternative to fighting was to be just absolutely eliminated in every respect, except physically and conceivably in that way, too.

[1341] If I just lost heart altogether, I'd lose the will to live.

[1342] So you have to fight.

[1343] You just have no, you know, it's the cornered, it's the cornered animal.

[1344] You have to fight, or you're going to be, you know, wiped out.

[1345] And, and then, and then in the area, I think you're getting at, maintenance and morale, you know, it was very difficult at times, but I'm of that view that believes that essentially life is privileged.

[1346] And, and that you may, you make the most of it, however bad it is.

[1347] And unless you're terminally ill and the death door, you can always derive some satisfaction from the privilege of life, even if it's just going outside, breathing the fresh air and looking at a blue sky.

[1348] And seeing, you know, leafy trees moving around in the breeze, it's still, it's wonderful when you compare it to nothing, which is the alternative.

[1349] And so there is a duty to carry on.

[1350] And both my experience individually and as an observer and such acquaintances I have with history shows that fortunes change.

[1351] And if you, you know, if you can persevere long enough, you come through things and live to fight another day.

[1352] So, I mean, it sounds pretty humdrum.

[1353] No, no, I wouldn't say so, not when it's, not when it's acted out in reality.

[1354] And you said that you're satisfied with your life at the moment, that it's full and it's rich.

[1355] Oh, it's good now.

[1356] It's good now.

[1357] I know.

[1358] Look, I'm following Napoleon's advice to regain lost territory in the inverse order of their loss.

[1359] So I'm sort of bootstrapping myself up in one way and another.

[1360] But, you know, I look, I have a new perspective now that I would not have had.

[1361] And look, I'm not saying I'm glad I went through all I did.

[1362] But it had its rewards and its rich experiences.

[1363] including the ones you mentioned about the prison.

[1364] But I would never have had the prominence as a commentator that I do.

[1365] I have millions and millions of readers in the United States.

[1366] And I'm astounded at how many people read my stuff.

[1367] And I get invitations to speak and go on tours and things and go out and, you know, when we're not hobbled by a pandemic, go out and cruises in the Mediterranean.

[1368] and talk to people and the cruise ships and things.

[1369] And it's also, you know, when I, when I, when I, when this came upon me, I'd written two books that you bless you one and then one about myself, which was really just to deal with accounts of my career that, that I considered not to be accurate.

[1370] I just didn't think they were malicious.

[1371] I just didn't think they were very informative.

[1372] So that's why I did it.

[1373] but I'd written two books only.

[1374] And as you kindly mentioned, I've written eight since then.

[1375] They've all been from modestly to very successful.

[1376] And I like being right.

[1377] And I absolutely would not have had the time to do it if I'd had to be a functioning chief executive of a $2 billion a year sales company.

[1378] I mean, it is a full -time job, and you've got to do it right.

[1379] So when you look back, what do you think you did right if you're there's lots of people who are watching this interview who are trying to put their lives together in one way or another and looking for guidance in their attempts to do that what what is it that you've done or what is it that you've seen other people do that you admired and that were successful that was particularly was particularly productive and useful and meaningful let's say and maybe even right Well, I think people who do what they have an aptitude to do are much happier than that, unfortunately, very large number of people who were stuck in occupations they don't like.

[1380] So it's been my good fortune that either I was able to do what I wanted to do and had some aptitude to do.

[1381] I was able to make that choice, or I locked into it.

[1382] I didn't realize.

[1383] I had absolutely no idea that I had an aptitude.

[1384] for it, but as it turned out, I did, you see.

[1385] I mean, I, it's like anything else, I guess, I had always assumed that practically anybody who wrote a book of history really knew a lot about it, was competent writer, and did a good job.

[1386] Well, now that I've done some of them, I mean, as you said, I wrote a book about President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

[1387] There's a vast literature about Roosevelt.

[1388] And some of the people have written about him been very good.

[1389] But a lot of them, it's rubbish.

[1390] Absolute rubbish.

[1391] It's not well written, and it's not accurate.

[1392] And they miss a lot of things.

[1393] It's even more so the case of Mr. Nick's name was so terribly controversial.

[1394] And indeed, the reason I wrote about those two men was to fill a gap.

[1395] I never write where I think I have nothing you to add.

[1396] I felt that Roosevelt was divided between worshippers and these people uttering this nonsense about him being a communist and the traitor to his class who gave Eastern Europe away to Stalin all this kind of nonsense.

[1397] And the thing to do was to put it out.

[1398] He was neither a saint -played man nor a communist.

[1399] He was extremely important and capable and talented political leader and leader of a government, but for the reasons I enumerated, not out of Kant and the emotionalism.

[1400] And with Mr. Nixon, I mean, he was just pilloried as a, essentially a man with a clovered and feet and horns on his head, you know, and he wasn't.

[1401] He was a very good president.

[1402] And by the way, there's still no probative evidence that he committed to crimes.

[1403] He admitted himself.

[1404] He made some serious mistakes.

[1405] And certainly some of the people in his entourage committed crimes, but there's no evidence that he did.

[1406] And the one term that he served was one of the most successful in the history of the country.

[1407] If you take into account that when he came in, there were 550 ,000 American draftees at the ends of the earth with no exit plan, 200 to 400 coming back dead every week, no relations with China, no arms control talks, riots everywhere in the U .S. every week, all over the place.

[1408] He stopped all that.

[1409] He was very, very good president.

[1410] Anyway, so it was reassuring to me that I could actually do that because I'd always assumed before that the people who did it, did it adequately.

[1411] Well, some of them do, but a lot of them don't.

[1412] And there's always room for improvement, or almost always.

[1413] And so I, you know, gradually my horizons expanded.

[1414] And now I'm in finance and rebuilding my fortunes somewhat, but the exact opposite to how I began in business where, I mean, as far as anyone in the public would know, where because I took over a company, it was made famous by a very famous businessman, E .P. Taylor and Bud McPiggled in particular, I was in the public eye all the time.

[1415] And as a young man, it's naturally going to be irritating to a lot of people.

[1416] Well, now I'm not.

[1417] I mean, I am up to a point, but as a commentator, but no one has a clue what businesses are.

[1418] They're private and they're in different countries and no one knows.

[1419] And so I don't have that problem of wrestling with a public relations monster all the time.

[1420] And I think you mentioned in one of the books that I read that you, in retrospect, wish that you would have handled the public relations.

[1421] end of things, I suppose, in a more sophisticated manner or earlier, that you didn't realize how critically important it might be.

[1422] Am I recalling that accurately?

[1423] Is that a fair situation?

[1424] Substantially so, yes.

[1425] But my view was there's no way to avoid a lot of attention.

[1426] So what I should do is meet it head -on and at least cause to.

[1427] to be discarded the caricature that all business people are fundamentally stumble bums of self -expression.

[1428] I can't actually give a fluent explanation of what I'm doing.

[1429] And secondly, to advance the idea that business is, in fact, not just a bunch of grubby businessmen scruffing for cash.

[1430] It actually is an interesting subject.

[1431] And I thought those were correct premises, and I was successful at that.

[1432] But where what you said is exactly right is I didn't appreciate as much as I perhaps should have or would have if I were more experienced, how tired people can get of someone who doesn't have a natural call in her attention.

[1433] I think this, incidentally, was one of the chief problems of the immediate former president of the U .S. he always believed, and I've known him a long time, he always believed that there was no such thing as bad publicity, no matter how apparently negative it was.

[1434] Well, up to a point he was right, but not, it wasn't right once he became president.

[1435] Because once he got to be the, in Roosevelt's phrase, the head of the American people, he didn't need the publicity.

[1436] And he didn't, he didn't want it and was undignified for him to be seeking it, let alone for him to tolerate so much of it.

[1437] to be baiting sessions where his enemies challenged him and he responded.

[1438] I mean, he had reached a position where you can safely rise above most of that and just spoke when you have speak when you have something to say.

[1439] When my book about Roosevelt, there's a little piece in a letter he sent to someone who'd been a colleague of his in the Wilson administration where he was saying how a president has to know when to be in front of the public and when not, when it will irritate the public and when not.

[1440] Well, I wish I had, obviously, I never had a position of 1 % of the consequence of being president of the U .S., but I wish I had taken that on board even at the modest scale of where I was, you know, before I embarked on a list.

[1441] But, you know, part of surviving and growing older is you'll learn things.

[1442] I think perhaps that's a good place to stop.

[1443] Okay.

[1444] Well, I've kept you too long.

[1445] I hope either people find somebody interesting, or if not, they should put it on when they're afraid they may be suffering from insomnia.

[1446] Well, look, thank you extremely for talking with me today and for...

[1447] Always a pleasure.

[1448] Always a pleasure, Jordan.

[1449] I appreciate it very much, and I hope we get to do it again.

[1450] There's many things that we didn't talk about.

[1451] I didn't talk about any of your opinions about current affairs, or...

[1452] or about the future, many things that I would have liked to have discussed.

[1453] We can do it another time, if you want.

[1454] Great.