Two heavyweights

One of the pleasures of our Wellington library, it being so intimate, is that you can take stock of what’s on the shelves pretty quickly.

Just next to the checkout desk is the “070” Dewey Decimal group— journalism. A few months ago, a big thick (463 pages) tome caught my eye. It was the 1984 book Looking for Trouble by the Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington. And then, a couple of weeks ago, my eye caught another one: Here be Dragons, a 2004 volume (708 pages) by Peter C. Newman.

Each book is a retrospective of a career in journalism, and each is a darned good read. Each man has published untold hundreds of thousands of words in his lifetime, is well into his eighties and is a resident of the Quinte area. Each manages to describe, in a lively way, people and events that are not quite recent enough to have stayed in our collective memories, but not quite old enough to have been pounced on by the historians in their normally arid fashion.

Worthington is perhaps best known as the founding editor of the Toronto Sun. While the book covers his Sun years, to me it is most interesting for his summaries of the 15-year period between 1956 and 1971 when he was the Toronto Telegram’s man on the spot in “civil wars, revolutions, crises and uprisings.” Who today talks of the Congo (1961) or the Nigeria/Biafra civil war (1970)? Who is ready to learn some lessons from them? The author offers plenty of food for thought.

Worthington, the columnist, has earned a reputation for playing on the right wing. His recent take on France in Mali, for example: the French military doesn’t spend too much time agonizing about the rights of those they catch in terrorist acts, which is a good thing.

But playing on the right wing doesn’t mean that Worthington is wrong in his judgements. In fact, time has proven some of his key insights correct. He despises Soviet communism (and was a key link with the defector Igor Gouzenko). Here’s what he had to say, five years before the collapse of the USSR: “…no other system performs so ineptly for its people. After 70 years, the largest country on earth with the most natural resources, an able and energetic people, a government that has absolute power and has to answer to no one, still cannot adequately house, clothe and feed its own people.” And of China: “…being in China as a resident foreigner is not as oppressive as being in the USSR. The relentless gloom of the Soviet Union—the soulless system of cheating, corruption and meanness—is not reflected in China. Despite the assembly line similarity of every Chinese—even all the bicycles tend to be painted black—there is more animation, cheerfulness and humour.”

Peter Newman is the former columnist for and editor of Maclean’s magazine, and the author of zillion-selling books about the Canadian establishment, the Hudson Bay Company, and recently, saving Canada. He has also taken up a position as a journalist in residence at Kingston’s Royal Military College.

I parted company with him the day I read his description of Joe Clark as being like a “fawn caught eating broccoli”—although he does admit the phrase was his “worst blunder” into the world of satire. He also admits to writing to the music of Stan Kenton; so therein might lie a connection.

But I rejoined him on reading this book. His opening chapters on escaping from under the Nazis and a privileged childhood in Czechoslovakia to a fresh but poor start in Canada I found absolutely riveting. And his portraits of Conrad Black (prior to the jail time and partly successful appeals) and the Bronfman family (originally Manitoba bootleggers) are withering. Even if you are not interested in the hows and whys of Newman’s prodigious career, you can still enjoy the verve he exhibits in his retrospective writing.

Both Newman and Worthington have developed a skill for being able to size a person up and communicate their picture effectively—which may be the key to their professional longevity. Let me give two examples from each book.

As for Newman, one is his description of the role of Pierre Trudeau in the so-called “apprehended insurrection” and FLQ crisis, for which he mounts a credible argument that permits him to describe Trudeau as “the gunslinger with an icicle for a heart.” The other is his description of the pathetic dying days of John Diefenbaker’s political life. Considering that his book Renegade in Power speeded that death, Newman writes with considerable compassion.

As for Worthington, his mordant portrait of Albert Schweitzer living off his reputation in his declining years is memorable. So is his description of Judge Joe B. Brown, the ribald Texas judge with whom Jack Ruby’s celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli was unable to make the slightest headway.

So: two heavyweight (in both senses) journalistic memoirs. Right by the checkout desk. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll notice on the journalism shelf our esteemed publisher’s doorstopper book entitled Duking it out: my epic struggles at the Wellington Times. But I think I’ll let someone else review that one.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.