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COMMENTARY
November 29, 2006
A knight
As Aristotle taught us, writing on the quality of magnificence, a gentleman does not count the cost.I wish that I had a few thousand words to write about my friend Larry Wills Henderson, who died early Monday, age 89. But then I would also need a few days to research his life, and access to correspondence between us, and between Henderson and another man, that is currently locked away beyond my reach. He was an important Canadian, though my younger readers may never have heard of him. As Henderson himself -- a man familiar with short deadlines -- I will do the best I can in the space. Older readers may remember that he was the first solo “anchor” of the CBC National News on television. That was back in the 1950s, before my time. It was after Henderson had already distinguished himself in the field as a journalist, in Korea and Europe; in our signal corps, in North Africa and Italy; and even as a Shakespearian actor of real promise, in England. He was a man of adventure, whose “Journey to Samarkand” (1960; still turns up battered in secondhand bookstores) is quite worth the read. He had a presence about him, a command implicit even in his famously short temper. It communicated well through the small screen -- an authority, even then in his mid-thirties, that gives déjà vu, when one sees the old clips. Television newsreaders have a function that has been sadly twisted through the decades since: they are a voice of authority, a voice of their nation. Henderson meant “Canada” to a large public, between 1954 and 1959, when Canada was a much different nation. He looked and sounded incorruptible. He was. A friend of my extended family, he was among my heroes, from high school forward. Even as an adolescent atheist, I admired him for his uncompromising Catholicism. I knew he would go to the wall for it. That is more or less what defined a hero for me -- that wall-going quality, in combination with great human decency. Like another great Canadian, George Grant, he was willing to speak the word "abortion" aloud in polite society. (Not that he was welcomed there.) This was my test of both courage and decency: for even as an adolescent atheist, I knew contraception is wretched, and abortion is murder. But I don’t think it was his Catholicism -- at first -- that made him persona non grata in the mainstream Canadian media, or got him marked as a kind of public enemy by the Pearson and Trudeau governments. Instead it was his anti-Communism. From fearless curiosity, he learned a great deal about how Soviet agents of influence and their “useful idiots” had infiltrated Canadian official and public life, and he was feared by several who knew what he knew. He knew, for instance, the disgraceful secret history of Canada’s role in Vietnam, through our efforts on the International Control Commission, and many other things that should be told some day. Thus he suffered the fate of most Cold Warriors -- to be dismissed as a paranoid, to become an Unperson in smug liberal society. Still, he would be recognized occasionally as one of our country’s leading experts on foreign affairs, someone who actually knew what he was talking about, when true information happened to be required. It was in the 1970s he emerged as a major Catholic presence -- though again, below the screen of mainstream media. As editor of the Catholic Register, he made the paper thunder against the abortion culture; then driven out of that, he founded The Challenge as a voice in the wilderness for Catholic truth. I learned more from him about how Canada is actually governed than from any other informant, save one. Yet I chiefly remember the pleasure of aimless talk: for Henderson was a traveller and wonderful raconteur. He had the gift of getting into places you could not go, and then getting out again. I used to lunch with him at the Silver Rail, on Yonge Street in Toronto. We would kill the afternoon. He never wanted to be an outsider. He loved moving and shaking, he longed to be an insider, but there was no room for him "inside" the Canada that emerged in the 1950s and ’60s. He was an outsider by assignment, not choice. For he had the gift of prophecy: which is not that of a prognosticator, but rather of a teller of disregarded truths. Nobody could want to be a prophet. But then, as Robert Musil wrote (and I’ve quoted before), "If it were not so hard to distinguish stupidity from talent, progress, hope, or improvement, no one would want to be stupid," either. Though he'd been out of action for a few years, I often thought of him, and several times, writing my own blather in the daily fishwrappers, the thought of his face has delivered the courage to "just say it". A Catholic and a Crusader; a Canadian; a knight. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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