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COMMENTARY
September 14, 2005
Mulroney & Newman
If I'm gonna defend Bush (see recent columns), I'm gonna defend Mulroney, too. The new "gotcha" book against the former prime minister, by Peter C. Newman (The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister) is an obscene gesture. The public response to it ought to be contempt, for the person making the gesture. And that person was not the Rt. Hon. Martin Brian Mulroney.Mr Newman has done something so despicable as should put him beyond the boundary of polite society. Except, thanks partly to such behaviour having become commonplace, we no longer have polite society. Whether or not Mr Mulroney knew he was being tape-recorded (and given the remarks, I frankly doubt he knew), Mr Newman not only used, but highlighted the very phrases that a responsible transcriber would instinctively suppress. These remarks were obviously not meant for public repetition, let alone to feed the titillation that Mr Newman is now escorting to the bank. His latest claim, that he did not betray Mr Mulroney, but "was trying to show his human side", merits additional contempt. Mr Mulroney's response was princely. Rather than deny he made the remarks, he said (through his spokesman, Luc Lavoie), "I was reckless in talking with Peter C. Newman. This was my mistake and I'm going to have to live with it." Yet, after allowing for a somewhat inflated view of his own historical importance -- not unusual in a former head of government -- I find most of the show-stopping remarks attributed to Mulroney to be not only lively, but essentially true and just. Indiscreet, yes -- heroically indiscreet, and therefore not suitable for a television audience, but quite suitable for the green room. Indeed, he renews my confidence that he had some idea what was going on around him. His remarks on how Pierre Trudeau destroyed Canada are worth pondering deeply. Likewise, his remarks about his successor, Kim Campbell, were, though ungallant, reasonably fair. She did indeed spend much precious time, in her first and last prime ministerial campaign, dawdling with a new Russian lover. In a statement released yesterday, she now claims she was, in effect, set up by Mr Mulroney to take his fall. Yet she had the lead over the Liberals in the early polls, back there in '93, so the election was hers to lose. And, oh did she lose it. So many other things I've heard, from Mr Mulroney's backstage repertoire, have struck me as sound; right down to his catastrophically controversial "rolling the dice" remark about the Meech Lake Agreement (also made naively off the record, in an agreement the journalists broke). It was the colourful way he put things "to the boys" (who included prominent backstage women) that could be used to hang him. But only by people prepared to breach the most elementary standards of human trust. As to his personal opinions on the political and media culture in Ottawa: what can I say? "Sick little town" sounds about right; though no reflection on the million other people who live there. His vanity could be used against him, in legitimate ways, but only by keeping things on the public record. Oriana Fallaci, the greatest of modern political interviewers by my lights -- a crazy anarchist Italian woman with strangely prophetic qualities -- also exploited vanities. See her book, Interview With History. She could persuade powerful men to hang themselves in the full knowledge they were on the public stage, and without resorting to cheap flattery. Indeed, that is what made her fascinating to so many powerful subjects, from Ayatollah Khomeini to Henry Kissinger: that she was something beyond their control, something perhaps their egos could master, using all the charm of power. But she was truly indifferent to the charm of power, and no one ever did master her. Mr Newman is no Fallaci. Instead he got his result by playing a confidence trick, on a man he pretended to befriend. It happens I have some slight, lapsed, personal interest in the matter. I was once approached with the idea of doing a biography of Mr Mulroney, by one of the former prime minister's confidantes. My counter-proposal was to take, as a model, Merle Miller's oral biography of Harry Truman, Plain Speaking -- letting the subject speak for himself, and asking hard but strictly fair questions. I knew Mr Mulroney had been profoundly abused by the media (as Harry Truman was in his time). My ambition was hardly to pile on. Though no great enthusiast for the gentleman, myself, it is my instinct to resist rather than join a ratpack. I thought it would be worth presenting Mr Mulroney's case in his own colloquial language, redolent of his generation and his personal origins -- his sometimes hokey beliefs, and real loyalties, and his fine tactical mind. But of course with profanities and prolixities docked. A Canadian reader might begin to see him whole, even take a little pride, that such a basically decent and honest man (for all his blarney) had been our prime minister. (How much more decent than what preceded and followed him.) Quite apart from politics, I thought Brian Mulroney an example of a kind of Canadian we don't see any more, the product of times and conditions that have passed, not for the better. I now regret that something like that was not done, by a sympathetic though not uncritical recorder. And that the field was thus left open to a shameless literary thug. One who knows he is presenting material to an audience seeped in a morality that ranks words above deeds, and who thinks nothing of feeding that monster. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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