It Was Always About Him
Not since George Brown has a Canadian journalist wielded such direct political power as Peter C. Newman did in his prime. His reporting helped destroy two prime ministers (Diefenbaker and Pearson) and contributed to creating a third (Pierre Trudeau).
Now Newman has written a memoir of his extraordinary life, Here Be Dragons. Because of Newman's huge impact on Canada, the book is being read avidly. Because of Newman's famously long memory and equally famously thin skin, it is being reviewed with circumspection.
That circumspection does the book-reading public a disservice. There is a great deal to be learned from Peter Newman. None of it will be learned by taking his story at face value.
Newman alerts the reader to his own unreliability in the opening pages. It's the late spring of 1940. He is 11, hiding with his family on a French beach waiting for the steamer that will take them to England. "Suddenly the banshee wail of a Junkers Ju-87 Stuka of the Luftwaffe pierced the night air. ... I stared -- transfixed -- up at the pilot. Planes were much slower in those days, and I vividly recall glimpsing the pilot's face as he climbed out of his run. He had turned on the cockpit light -- after all, there was no one shooting at him -- and I could see his countenance clearly through the canopy glass." Newman then proceeds to offer a lengthy meditation on the character revealed by the pilot's heavy features.
Planes were indeed slower in the 1940s than they are today. But the laws of optics have not changed at all. In 1940, as in 2005, a pilot who turned on an overhead light inside a plane flying at night would have blinded himself. The story is vivid and even moving, but false.
Peter Newman earned national fame as the most lethal Ottawa columnist in Canadian history. By good luck, he arrived in Ottawa at almost exactly the same moment as the most chaotic government in Canadian history: John George Diefenbaker's. The cabinet rapidly broke apart into warring factions, and Newman -- then as ever a superb sleuth and beguiling interviewer -- winkled out one amazing story after another. The ultimate result was his 1963 bestseller, Renegade in Power.
Renegade finished off John Diefenbaker's reputation in the elite world of the central Canadian media -- and not so coincidentally it made Peter Newman's. Or rather, it made the reputation of Peter C. Newman: As he shrewdly acknowledges, the addition of that middle initial to his byline announced the birth of a new personality. "I created it; I chose it; but in the end it was not me."
Who was this created character? He was an impoverished Czech Jewish refugee, condemned to perpetual outsiderdom by a WASP ruling class "that lined the halls of their ... Rosedale or Westmount mansions" with "musty portraits of their ancestors." Peter C. Newman's awe of these golden creatures would provide the breathless background for his most commercially successful series of books, those on the "Canadian establishment."
But one suspects that Peter Newman, the writer not the character, understood this was all bunk. Peter Newman the writer came from a background grander than that of almost any of the Rosedalians or Westmounters he wrote about. One detail that Newman always emphasized in his anecdotes about Conrad Black was that the young Black was delivered to school by a chauffeur-driven limousine. But back in Czechoslovakia, Newman too had once been chauffeured to school -- and unlike Black's, his family's car was the only car in town.
The interplay between the insinuating humility of Peter C. Newman on the one hand -- and on the other hand Peter Newman's inner knowledge that in intellect, drive and accomplishment he was the equal and more than the equal of the Titans, Acquisitors, and Inheritors he publicized -- provided the strange tick-tock energy of Newman's career.
Again and again in this memoir, Newman talks about his compulsion to use his literary gifts first to build up his eventual targets -- and then to smash and destroy them. Yet no matter how unjust he was, no matter how cruel, Newman never lost his conviction that it was always he who suffered most. Which is how it is possible for him to write a chapter on the triumphant success of Renegade, carefully detailing how utterly it overthrew Diefenbaker, how many copies it sold, how much he was paid for the ensuing speaking engagements, and then to conclude by self-pityingly quoting his friend Dalton Camp, "the true victim of Renegade in Power was not Diefenbaker, but Newman."
Here Be Dragons is itself a perfect example of the Newman method. If any one thing is selling this book, it is the promise of scandalous revelations about Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel. It was Newman who made Black and Amiel into celebrities in the first place: Black, by dubbing him the Establishment Man in a best-selling book of the same title; Amiel, by giving her a prominent column in Maclean's. Today, Newman has new purposes, and so in this book he gleefully savages his old friends.
In the end, though, the supreme target of the Newman tick-tock method is Canada itself. If Peter C. Newman the public figure stood for any one thing, it was his passionate patriotism, his burning love for Canada. So exuberant is his devotion that it supposedly puts to shame his more demure fellow-countrymen. Newman writes: "Americans wear their hearts, and their flag, on their sleeve. In the Canada I love, even the mildest display of open affection for one's home country is seen as an eccentric curiosity, if not a dangerous aberration. Americans are the eternal honeymooners, proclaiming their love from the rooftops; we are the long-married couple, expressing an ocean of sentiment in a shy smile."
It is I think deeply revealing that the thrice-divorced Newman should compare his patriotism to marital love. There was a play on Broadway a decade ago with the brutal title I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change. That is exactly the attitude that Newman took toward Canada. He loved everything about it except its flag, its national anthem, its excessively White Anglo-Saxon Protestant governing elite, its post office boxes, its Westminster system of government, its north-south patterns of trade, and so on and on and on. All would have to be transformed and brought up to date in one expense-be-damned spasm of reform.
The spasm was unleashed in 1965 and its consequences reverberate to this day. The primitiveness of his thinking about economics reveals how Newman could have been so badly misguided. "In exchange for our borrowed American affluence, we sold our way of life to the highest bidders." It would be hard to cram more economic nonsense into a sentence than that one there -- but over the years from 1965 to 1985, Newman and those who thought like him kept trying.
Newman now lives in London and Zurich with his fourth wife. The Canada he left behind bears only the faintest resemblance to the British Dominion to which he migrated in 1940. Peter C. Newman was one of the chief architects of the work of demolition and reconstruction that has preoccupied Canadians for the past half century. He says he was impelled by love. But it is hard to see what he would have been done differently if his motive had been rage.
Newman, as I said, is a candid writer, but not always a trustworthy one. Yet in one of those famous early morning writing sessions of his, he for a moment at least allowed the truth to slip out through his careful fingers:
"Why all those big fat books? Because I thought that if I could steer the head, the rest of the body would follow. I was no passive player, no deferential nomad begging for refuge: I set out to make my adopted land the sort of place I could trust -- a liberal, tolerant, and independent Canada ... The regional battles of my adopted country meant little to me. They were merely there to be studied and mastered, but they did not command my loyalty. Only one thing demanded my allegiance, because it is what makes the world turn. My internal compass was set to achieving personal power."
So it was. Peter C. Newman says he has found satisfaction as he nears his journey's end. But one quietly suspects that the old sailor would have had a happier landfall had he set his tiller for a truer north.