Baron Black of Crossharbour | Lord Conrad Black | EP 181

50m read

·Nov 7, 2024

[Music]

Hello everyone! Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbor, KCSG, born 25th of August 1944, is a Canadian-born newspaper publisher, financier, and writer. He is the author of 10 books, mostly dealing with Canadian and American history, including biographies of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis and U.S. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Donald Trump, as well as two memoirs. He's currently writing a political history of the ancient world, concentrating primarily on the Romans and the Greeks.

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. In 1978, two years after their father's death, Conrad and his older brother Montague took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, they sold off most of their non-media holdings to focus on newspaper publishing.

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, he was 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.

"It's my great pleasure to have him as a guest today. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today."

"Not at all, Jordan, always a pleasure to speak with you."

"Yeah, well it's very nice to see you again. It's been a couple of years since we've had the pleasure of speaking, and so I'm glad we have this opportunity, even though it's mediated by electronics. I missed you. So let's—I want to talk to you biographically essentially; I'd like to walk through your life and so let's start as far back as we can tell. Tell me about your childhood, if you would, and what stands out for you in relationship to your parents."

"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. We lived in what was then just the edge of metropolitan Toronto; beyond us were farms. That was up, for those of your viewers who know Toronto, right after Bayview Avenue passes York University, Glendon Campus, and the Granite Club and Crescent School. Just beyond that was where we lived, and that was the outer limit of the city in terms of the built-up area. So there weren't many young people around, you know, to visit with in the neighborhood.

The result was that I spent more time—I think it was the beginning of the television era—everyone had a television set, but they just got it in the last few years. There were only a few channels on the air, and for the most part you had either those funny antennas sitting on top of the receiver or an antenna on the roof of your house. So I spent a lot of time reading, and that was how I developed my interest in history. I started reading about interesting historical personalities.

My father, although he was a successful businessman, had been a very accomplished academic as far as he went, but that was in the '30s, and his father came under great financial pressure. So my father became a chartered accountant in the theory that there was no such thing as an unemployed chartered accountant. In those days, people really had to think in terms of how they could 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.

It was a much more financially pressurized era than it is now. He graduated in 1937, and we were starting as a society to recover from the Depression by then, but there were still huge numbers of unemployed. He had to set aside his academic interests. But with that said, I was particularly fortunate in having 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.

Then as a really remarkable gesture, my parents took my brother and myself—the two of us in the family—to Britain in 1953 at the time of the coronation. We toured around all these monuments. The war damage in London was still very evident then, so we saw what the war was like from much closer than anyone experienced it in North America. I remembered, as very young people do remember, visiting the Duke of Wellington's house and St. Paul's Cathedral and things like this.

I always had an interest in history and was encouraged by my parents, my father in particular. I think 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 time than I did."

"You speak of your father fondly, by the sounds of it. It sounds to me like he was an encouraging figure in your life from a very young age. Is that a reasonable presumption?"

"Yes. I remember both my parents very fondly. My father, in this scenario, I wouldn't want to, for obvious reasons, get into too much. But later on he became, at times, a slightly depressive personality, and his career was something of an anti-climax. He did very well and made a significant amount of money. He was working with, I mean with E.P. Taylor, a very famous Canadian industrialist 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. It was called Canadian Breweries Limited in those days.

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 ten years, and I don't need the salary; I don't need it to live in the way I've become accustomed to. So I will retire now. It's probably time for a change. After 10 years, you do whatever you want with the company, and we remain friends and don't strain our relations.' And that's what happened; they remained friends to the end of his life.

He retired at the age of 47 and was a well-to-do man; he didn't lack for anything in the material way. But the balance of his life, nearly 20 years, was an anti-climax. He just sat in his house and read and saw a steadily, slowly but steadily declining number of people, and he just never did anything particularly after that.

I don't mean that he should have charged out and got a job—that's not for me to say—and wouldn't have served any purpose anyway unless he was particularly enthused about it. Someone like it's a perfectly good thing and often a very renovating thing to change careers. But I'm sure you would, in your experience, know this and believe the same thing: it is a bad thing to simply do nothing, just sit in a rocking chair. That leads to a steady and accelerated level of decline, and that, unfortunately, is what happened to my father.

I mean he was 65 when he died, which is not really a good lottery ticket nowadays. But it was an anti-climax. But he always was an interesting man. Even after, you know, I moved out of the house to go to university when I was, gee, I was only 18, and apart from that, apart from one year, I didn't live with my parents again. But I was in Toronto much of the time, and I always saw them a lot. It was always interesting; I always had a good relationship. I had a somewhat turbulent period in my teens, and looking back on it, I can see that my parents treated me with greater patience than probably I would if I were in their position.

But I believe that was just a phase. In our last five years, my parents died only ten days apart. Our last ten years or so couldn't have been more cordial."

"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. 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; I'm always curious about their relationship with their father. I mean, you started to read early; you were reading history. He obviously did—did he push books your way? Did he guide your reading? How did that all happen?"

"Sometimes he, in particular, he gave me, when I was 13, he handed me a book and he said, 'Obviously, it's not for me to tell you what to read, but I do recommend this, and if you just read a few pages in it, I think you will want to continue.' It was A.G. McDonald’s book, Napoleon and His Marshals. For people interested in Napoleon, it's a very famous book, and for example one of the great tomes on Napoleon, David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon— a book of 1,300 pages of tremendous work of scholarship and very well written in the forward credits A.G. McDonald. People who write about Napoleon often do; it's a tremendously readable book, and it gave me a huge interest in Napoleon that I’ve kept up.

After a while, you feel you know enough about somebody—but it was a great encouragement and incitement and confirmation of the intrinsic interest in studying these very interesting personalities of the past. He did a number of things like that, and in slightly different fields. Another one, some years later—two or three years later—he gave me a copy of Nancy Mitford's Pursuit of Love. Now it's a novel, but about real people; the names changed. 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, my Nancy Mitford unfortunately had died, but her sisters, the Duchess of Devonshire, I knew, and Lady Mosley, the widow of Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, I met her, and Jessica Mitford, who was married to a communist—very eccentric British family and so a wide gap in their political views.

Nancy Mitford herself had a tremendous, torrid romance with one of the most prominent figures in the entourage of General de Gaulle when he was the president of the Fifth Republic and prior to that. 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. He did that a number of times.

But he was never oppressive or dogmatic about it and actually quite subtle. 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. But we got around a bit in the west coast, and on the train my father gave us a reward if we would memorize Lincoln's address at Gettysburg. Now, it's only 10 sentences, you know, it's not that hard to memorize it, and we did, but it did incite my interest in Mr. Lincoln. And of course, he's one of the great and arresting figures of modern history as well."

"So, yes, he did that. You put me in mind; no doubt if this was the chief focal point of our discussion, I could identify a good many other things, but I cite those ones. And by the way, on the Nancy Mitford piece, a house that is referred to in Pursuit of Love is one that they love to go to because unlike their own house, it wasn't drafty. It wasn't that eccentric British rural nobility's terribly uncomfortable house without real hot water and that kind of thing. It was just a very comfortable house with central heating. And so it turned out that a friend of mine rented it, and we went out there to lunch a few times.

I mean, I couldn't explain it in a way that would be of any interest to anyone that was there other than my wife, but it was as if I'd been there before, from having read about it. It was just a very interesting connection with my past."

"How old were you when you started to read seriously?"

"I started when I was nine or ten. I remember reading the first volume of General de Gaulle's war memoirs when they were first published in English. They're the ones that begin, 'All my life I've thought of France in a certain way.' It's beautifully written. By that I mean de Gaulle was a wonderful writer. He's not always historically reliable, but political memoirists rarely are. I mean the same could be said of Mr. Churchill, but he's a lovely writer.

From then on, I wasn't writing—I mean for a while I read the Boys' Book of the Navy, and I think we went through the Hardy Boys and that kind of thing for 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 the history thing when I was nine and stayed at it after that."

"How much were you reading when you were a kid, say, nine?"

"Well, I wasn't a fast reader, but I was a retentive reader. So when I read something, I tended to remember it well, and you know, a couple of hours a day every day, and then a little more on the weekends."

"When would you do that? Before you went to bed? Did you have a routine?"

"Yes, yeah, pretty much. I'd have, you know, I was supposed to do my homework, and there were some television programs that I watched that I liked. But yeah, I wasn't one of these young people who was just stuck glued in front of a screen every free moment the way a lot of youngsters nowadays are with the video games and things. I wasn't like that. I mean, it is possible. 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, but I—and they're all, as long as we've had television, there have been people who've been thoroughly captivated by it, but I was always rather more choosy in programming.

I mean I liked intro things like War Victory at Sea. You know, it's a drama about the US Navy. Yeah, that was a great series. I know that series; it's great, and with Richard Rodgers' music it was really taken from Vogue, powerful beginning showing the aerial shots of the Pacific Fleet, this colossal navy moving forward, but some of the humorous programs like The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason I liked. But I would know a program to watch and go and watch it for half an hour and then go back and read something. I wouldn't just sit there waiting for whatever came next."

"Were you up all night with a flashlight under the covers reading?"

"Not all night, but often a little bit, and it has to be said that my parents were not overly authoritarian. It was a relatively large house. My mother would come up once in the course of the night and make sure everything was fine, but I normally heard her 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 I did when I felt like it."

"Any idea what it is about history in particular that attracted you? Because obviously you have an intrinsic interest in it. You didn't even gravitate towards fiction when you were a child; you gravitated towards non-fiction and history pretty fast."

"I went on a binge of fiction in university, and when I started—as one does, you know? I mean, I found that with my own sons and daughter, and you suddenly become interested in writing and you read a lot that he wrote, then you're on to the next one, you know? So in that way, I read a huge number of novels by famous novelists."

"Is that what you did? You'd find a novelist you really liked and then read everything and then move on to someone else?"

"Basically, and especially the Americans, you know? Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck and so on. And the latter two were alive and I was reading about them or reading their words. But I got into others but not as comprehensive. I mean, I think I read four or five of the books of George Eliot. You know, the obvious ones. So what was it about history do you think that attracted you so much and so young?

Because many of...the personalities I was reading about were terribly interesting. They had extraordinary careers. And it started to give me—this sounds ludicrous here. You and your viewers may conclude that I'm a psychiatric case or something, but it's not as if I identified at all with, say, a man like Napoleon. It's just that in his career you could see points where absolutely everything was at risk and he persevered successfully and points where fortune had not smiled upon him and things looked terribly bleak, and then suddenly things opened up.

Now it was a revolutionary time, unlike Canada in the '50s and '60s. I mean, you could scarcely think of a less revolutionary place. But the pattern of events where people's fortunes change so quickly, and in both directions—I mean, of course, Napoleon ended up in Santolina. But he actually attempted to commit suicide after he came back from Russia. And if we were referring earlier to Abraham Lincoln, there were moments where everything appeared to be terribly gloomy, appeared to be a failure. He was widely mocked for a variety of reasons, including his physical appearance—which in photographs is actually rather impressive.

But it appeared to be hopeless 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, and of course it all turned. You end up appreciating the qualities of these people, both those you emulate and those you try to avoid. 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. He was a self-made man but with none of that chippiness self-made people have, and he was a genuine intellectual but an autodidact.

But never with any of the pomposity or dogmatism of some intellectuals. He was always saddened rather than angry at the many betrayals and disappointments he suffered, and while he was a rather morose man in some ways, he had a splendid sense of humor. He had a terribly difficult life and had two sons die as boys, and this tragedy did not—these tragedies and afflictions didn't compromise his ultimate sense of optimism. He was really a remarkably admirable character, as well as an extremely effective statesman.

And of course he was a wonderful wordsmith. We were talking about the Gettysburg Address. I noticed when I first read it under the incitement to memorize it that, for example, where he said, 'For those who here gave their lives that this nation might live,' I mean just to use the same word as the noun and the verb in the same sentence is slightly artistic.

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 poetry. He was a remarkable wordsmith, and you were noticing that the way that words were crafted as well when you were reading history?"

"Not 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?"

"So, all right. So you were reading well in advance of your years. 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?"

"Well, I think I was, you know, you always did the necessary to be on the same wavelength, if you will, as your friends. You know I didn't want to be thought of as... I didn't mind being thought of as slightly eccentric; I didn't want to be thought of as an odd person. And in fairness, a lot of the other students were interested in a lot of things. I went to relatively, I guess, relatively good schools. I mean I didn't like them very much, but I loved university, but I didn't like school very much.

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, 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 Colombia in '58, and the threat of the revolt by the army in Algeria—and the teacher asked me if I would give a five-minute comment on it the following day. So I did, and I was careful to try and not be pompous or to get obscure things, and I don't mean to put on the airs of somebody who was any, in fact, great authority in these matters, but I was flattered that he asked and I made an effort to try and make it interesting.

It was one of those little experiences in life that was very positive and reassuring to me that these my classmates didn't think I was just a kook, you know, because they were reading about it too, and they were in a way saying, ‘Well, you know, what's going on in France?’ 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, you know, can take over the country and everybody going out into the country, you know, 120 miles to talk to a retired general about whether he wanted to take over the government or not. I mean, this we didn’t have that in an English-speaking country, so it was a bit different."

"Do you remember anything of your ambitions at that time?"

"Well, I must say I was somewhat influenced by my father's. I mean, Toronto in those days was, if I may say it without sounding like an old dowager or something, a terribly plain austere place. There wasn't any flair to it. It had nice residential areas, but it wasn't a good-looking city at all. Although until the first subway was opened in the mid-'50s, all the wires were above ground. You had these creosote-soaked, blackened telephone poles everywhere weighted down with thick clusters of wires, and an inordinate amount of that old sort of Victorian reddish—but not red brick, or the color of Queen's Park, but 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. And there—you know, it was a virtuous place, but it was a terribly sober place. You couldn't go to the cinema on Sundays; there wasn't a Sunday newspaper. Now, I of course was just a boy and I didn't drink or anything, but if older people—many cousins of mine who were older—on Sunday they wanted to go out with a date; they had to go to a hotel to find a restaurant that was licensed. I mean it was that only changed with John Roberts in the '60s, 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. McDougall and Colonel Phillips, who was the chancellor of the university that he was associated with, and others who were friends like John Best and so on. They had some style; they had some flair, and they were wealthy, but in a tasteful way. So it was kind of an attractive thing to aspire to be wealthy and enjoy it, but I had a—not exactly an academic interest, certainly an interest in studying history and potentially to write something, although it took me a long time to summon the courage to write anything."

"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, so let's go to the time when you went to university. You said you read a tremendous amount of fiction in university. What did you major in and what was it like for you? How do you remember your university experience?"

"Very fondly. I went first to Ottawa, pardon me, to Carleton University, and I had a somewhat robust career in high school and changed schools a number of times. Finally, I came—if I may just back up slightly—for anyone interested in my story, this is an interesting part of it. It's not for me to say whether it is in the abstract interesting or not, 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. You didn't have to do it in school.

So I informed my father that this was 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. So, you know, I was really taking a leap here, but the examinations were written in the old armory on University Avenue where they were just immediately to the west of Osgoode Hall. It's now a Supreme Court building, but there was an armory there and several hundred of us of all ages, mainly older people, came in each day, put down five dollars, and wrote the examination.

I worked like a beaver to prepare for those examinations, and I passed them all. If you'll pardon me, quite a personal recollection, the way my father's house worked, he stayed up late; this is a habit I got from him. He stayed up late and he slept in. I mean, he got a lot done in a day, but he was operating on a slightly different clock from most people. Well, in those days, the post office delivered the mail to the house at about 8:30 in the morning, and on one particular day in the spring of 1962 my mother got and saw this letter from the Ministry of Education addressed to me.

So she surmised it might be my results, so she brought it to me. I opened it up, and I said, 'Well, it was a scrape. I had a 50 and a 51, but I passed everything and I have matriculated, and I'm eligible for the university, though I won't get into McGill or Toronto, which is what I wanted, but I'll get into one of them.' So she disappeared, and something that was unheard of in our house, at about ten minutes to nine in the morning, I heard the unmistakable footfall of my father in his dressing gown as it turned out. He said, 'I congratulate you,' extended his hand. That's right, and he went back to bed.

Now, it sounds absurd, but it was a very moving experience when he congratulated me. I said, 'Well, you know, you've been more than intelligent, and I thank you for that.' He said, 'It's fine, you know, congratulations.' It meant a lot.

And what do you think motivated him to congratulate you at that point, and why do you think it meant so much to you?"

"I had great—we had our differences in those days, not in later years, but you know, as one does, one does have differences with parents sometimes. But I had great respect and admiration for him. And for him to congratulate me in a way that wasn't perfunctory— it wasn't, you know, 'Well done if you wanted to hand it cards or something,' the way he said it, he imparted a seriousness to it that made it clear to me that he thought what I had done was a major achievement.

The fact that he thought it was not only confirmed my view that it was, in fact, something—an achievement, but the fact that he thought it was a major achievement coming from a very successful and 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? What did it do for you? Now, you have alluded to the fact that you were causing some trouble in high school."

"Yeah, yeah, look in a way, it legitimized the comparative hell raising of my late high school years. It sort of wiped the slate clean. The score at the end of the game is you win. See, you graduated. So you weren't just a rebel without a cause."

"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. I mean in terms of my ability to defend my conduct as a whole—not every part of it, right?"

"Right, right, yeah. So, for all the nonsense and the, you know, foolishness that—I had my full share of it for people that age; it ended well. Look, it embarrassed 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 the habit of really concentrating that much on school work to buckle down and study all of these things, and I had some—I had some good scores. I mean my overall average was not bad, and to do it all and pass it all the way I did was an achievement."

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

"That's right. I think that is absolutely correct."

"Right, and that's a great good preparation for university because you do a lot better at university if you can work on your own. I mean, especially when you're getting close to the exams, you have to really swat it up, you know?"

"Yes, yes. 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."

"Okay, so you went off to university, and you know I have specific reasons to ask you about university. 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. 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 late 1950s and had nothing but positive things to say about his experience, and for me when I went to—I went to a small college to begin with, but I had excellent professors there. They taught me; they were admirable people. They paid a lot of attention to me and to my friends. I learned to write. I learned to work. I learned—I learned how to buckle down and be serious about my academic pursuits. 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. So things may have changed since then, but your experience?"

"Yeah, I imagine that young lady... from all I hear, most of these well-known American universities have just gone to pieces, but maybe the graduate departments are better, I don't know. But I imagine she at least enjoyed living in New York City; she'd learned something from that, and it's such a vital city.

But, I did encounter a professor who had a very profound impact on my ability to focus on things and my interest in certain subjects. You may even know her; Naomi Griffiths, she would now be in her early 80s, I think. But she's a specialist in Acadian studies; she was very friendly with the late Governor General Romeo LeBlanc.

She was a very fine lecturer and also a very kindly and sociable person, and then I got to know her a little bit. She helped focus me in certain historic areas, but what happened after I graduated from Carleton was we were—I was in 1965, and we were getting into the run-up to the centennial.

Especially in Ottawa, there was a great emphasis on biculturalism, and it was clear that things were starting to really simmer in Quebec, politically, in unpredictable ways. It was in the autumn of that year that, in the guise of seeking a majority, Mr. Pearson and his 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 that they had never really replaced Mr. Salara as the federal leader in Quebec.

That was when Pierre Trudeau and Jean-Marchand, Gérard Pelletier, and others came in, and they were starting to sort of pivot to meet this challenge to federalism from Quebec. One thing led to another, and because I was unsure what I wanted to do, I for a year 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-tint in my place in Ottawa my last year when he was working with Maurice Sobe, but subsequently the concert to the Governor General.

He was not a junior minister in Mr. Pearson's government, but the first of that avant-garde from the sort of new Quebec. He owned a little newspaper in the Eastern Townships, about 60 miles east of Montreal, in Knowlton, Quebec, and I bought a half interest—not for $500, which is 499 dollars more than it was worth commercially, but that's what I did for a while.

And that was while you were a student?"

"Yeah, you know it was after I finished as an undergraduate and before I went on to my next university. And so what happened was that infected me with interest in the newspaper business. I'd always had some because I was interested in the, again, the style of some of these famous newspaper owners—like William Randolph Hearst, for example, the most obvious example, or Colonel McCormick on the Chicago Tribune. And up to a point, some of the British press owners—Lord Beaverbrook, who was alive, and Lord Northcliffe, and some others."

"And so once you got into that milieu, because of who I knew, I got a little bit into the edges of Quebec politics, and I met Premier Johnson. Our paper served the English residence of the Vice Premier of Quebec and the subsequent Premier, Jean-Jacques, that period, coming up to 1967, with the fermentation in Quebec, which was very active politically, but nothing violent about it at that point. It was an exciting atmosphere."

"And you also said that you had become aware of newspaper owners approximately at this point, and so..."

"Well, it just—the way they lived, it was—I mean, look, I'd never have aspired to live in the Oriental monarchical fashion of William Randolph Hearst, made most famous and caricatured in Citizen Kane, you know, which Orson Welles officially denied anything to do with Hearst, but as Time Magazine put it, lawyers for Mr. William Randolph Hearst have determined otherwise and to prosecute it accordingly.

The development along that way was, I became motivated academically then had a reason to move to Quebec and get involved in this most modest scale you can be short of just being a newspaper delivery boy. But in a position where I did everything—I was the publisher and the editor, man I hadn't an assistant who did the actual clerical work, but you know, I sold the ads, I produced the circulation campaign, such as they were, and I wrote most of the content."

"So, yeah, and then I thought it would be a good idea to pursue my studies in Quebec in a French university. And indeed, the Premier allowed his name to stand as a recommendation. 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 Minister of Quebec, I mean unless it's a joke and this guy has never got past grade seven, he's going to be admitted.

And it was a terribly interesting and positive experience, I have to say, even though we were, I think, only 15 English-speaking law students—primarily English-speaking law students—in a faculty of 500 or so. In the graduate arts building where we were, tall building we were in, there were thousands of students coming and going, and there could have been more than 50 of us who weren't basically French-speaking or, in many cases, exclusively French-speaking. And it was an entirely positive experience; there was absolutely no ethnic antagonism. I mean, people got on well or they didn't, but not for ethnic reasons.

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

"And I've always been so biased. Yes, questions to come out of that are: What did your undergraduate career do for you? Why were you motivated to buy this newspaper? And why did you go to a French-speaking university for law school?"

"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 do as undergraduates—studying chiefly female anatomy and contents of the containers of alcoholic beverages, and I was more successful at the second than the first. But one got on, you know, and then you did your studies as much as you needed to. Well, Naomi Griffiths helped motivate me to treat it as a little more than something where you just passed the years and checked the box of going from first to second to graduating year.

And now, your last one was why a French university you're saying was why I bought the newspaper, I think—"

"Yes."

"I was at loose hands, you say, so frankly my friend Peter White said, 'Look here, I need an editor of this paper; I'm here in Ottawa, and at the end of it, the government changed in Quebec, and the Union Nationale won. Duplessis’s old party one with Mr. John Johnson, Daniel Johnson Sr. I mean, he was a very impressive man, I thought and still think.

He conducted it extremely well, and Mr. Johnson was a very impressive man, I thought and still think. But he said, 'Look, I've got to have an editor for this paper; I'm going to close the paper. Why don't you buy a half-interest, phenomenal sum, and be the resident editor for a while until you decide what to do?' And then one thing led to another.

He was an alumnus of the law faculty of Laval, and the number of famous English Canadians—most famously Brian Mulroney—he was in Peter's class; I mean they're older than I am by five or six years older than that, and Michael Milnes, and other, he's a senator, he's now I think the Chancellor of McGill University; his grandfather was the Prime Minister.

And so once I got into that milieu 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 residence of the Vice Premier of Quebec and the subsequent Premier Jean-Jacques, that period, coming up to 1967 with the fermentation in Quebec."

"And you also said that you had become aware of newspaper owners approximately at this point, and so..."

"Well, it just—the way they lived—if you don't have the ambition to specifically work with the family and the family and therefore the business to serve the public interest, you have to make a choice to become a self-sufficient family, and that's a rare and precious thing to do and to remain in office.

My point was that Johnson stirred my curiosity about Duplessis because there clearly was a story to this man that wasn't being told; he was reviled as the author of the Great Darkness and all this sort of thing. So I went to a colleague who happened to get an invitation and it came from Miss Griffiths, who I mentioned was my old professor at Carleton, who said you might be interested in that.

I went to it in Three Rivers, and it was a discussion of people and there was a panel. There was one pro-Duplessis panelist and two anti-Duplessis ones. I went up to the pro-Duplessis one at the end of it. It was a somewhat well-known historian, Roberto Rooney, a Frenchman originally, who was a member of Axion Francaise. You know Charlemagne, he was at a demonstration in the Place de la Republique in 1926, and the person next to him was shot dead, and with that, he left France and never returned, immigrated to Quebec.

I congratulated him on upholding Duplessis, and we conversed for a while, and then I gave him a ride back to Montreal, and it turned out that he had been commissioned by an outfit called in French the Society of Friends of the Honorable Maurice Duplessis to write a book about Duplessis. They had all Duplessis's papers and so the ideas 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?' And he said, 'Well, it's worth the try. Sure, I'll recommend you.'

Then it happened; the head of this outfit was the former Minister of Cultural Affairs in Johnson and Bertran's government, Jean-Claude Tremblay, you may remember, and he's still alive; he's very elderly. He said, 'Yeah, that's fine; you can—but you know you’ve got to keep them to yourself and stuff,' all of which I respectfully adhered to, and I had all this stuff, and then when I saw what I had, I realized I had to do something about it.

This takes me back to having developed the ambition to write some history. So I calculated that if I enrolled at McGill, citing this as my proposed thesis topic, that would get me halfway through, and if I got halfway through, I'd have the momentum to finish it. That's where my first book came from, which is called 'Render Unto Caesar: The Life of Maurice Duplessis.' So I got that side of things going at the same time as we built our newspaper company."

"And we bought, within a few months, a daily newspaper in Prince Edward Island and one in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. So I could say with a semi-straight face we have a newspaper chain that spans the country from ocean to ocean, but I suppose the links are rather wide and not many of them."

"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?"

"Well, then there were some weeklies. We were up to probably as many as ten, but then we had some weeklies around Quebec, and then we got—there were some available ones in British Columbia, dailies and weeklies, so we built it up. It was still a small company compared to the ones that owned the big newspapers in the country, but we built it up to something of scale and stature fairly quickly.

But it was a very profitable business and normally we would make a bid based on the profitability of the present owner, and very rarely were these people who owned the papers running them as profitably as they could. They were taking a nice salary for themselves and they weren't that concerned with what the profit was. Well, we had an idea of what we could do with the profit.

Then, in those days you could go to the local bank and say, 'Look, we want to buy this paper and we want we’re asking you to loan us half the money; we’ll take care of the rest.' What we do is we give the vendor a balance of sale notice, so we didn't put up any—not a cent. But we always did raise the profit; we always raised the quality of the product too. Our position always was that the best way to raise the profit was to raise the quality of the product.

Even then, people who bought and read a newspaper were what is called ABC1 readers, either high income or high education, relatively speaking. I mean ignorant people didn’t buy newspapers, and for the most part poor people didn’t buy newspapers, and people advertisers wouldn't be interested in wouldn't buy a newspaper. But anyone who bought a newspaper or someone an advertiser wants to get to because he has disposable income."

"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?"

"Considerable, because I knew how much manpower you needed. Almost all of these places had more manpower than they needed. Now, we handled it gently; we moved them out. A lot of them were elderly, so we just gave them early retirement, topped up their pensions a bit and things like that, but and they're small, so you're not talking about a lot of people. But if you've got a newspaper of 50 employees, and you get eight of them to take early retirement, you've got the payroll down by almost 20%, and it's not that early retirement, you know?

In addition to that, there are all kinds of things to do to enhance revenue. I mean very few of them had any notion of how you can hype the circulation relatively easily with contests and things like that. I was astounded at the people, and where we really saw this was in England or the Daily Telegraph with daily circulation over a million broad-sheet papers—the biggest broadsheet paper in Europe. The British love these, as far as I'm concerned, actually ridiculous contests, but if you give them a contest, even to get a free subscription to the Spectator—which we also own—they'll plunge into it.

It's a circulation building, so that's the sort of thing that, 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 it wouldn't matter. He lived well; he was an influential person in his community, made a profit every year, having taken a nice salary for himself, has three or four relatives on the payroll. The company owns his car and there's his speedboat on the lake and all this kind of stuff. I mean, to him, that's all he needs, which is fine, but the fact is you can double the profits quite quickly."

"So now do you have a plan at this point? You're being successful in purchasing newspapers and increasing their profitability, so you're building up more capital. Are you planning? Do you have an aim at this point just to continue expanding?"

"Well, we brought it a long way forward. The biggest paper we had, when things changed because of that shake-up in the Ravelston system, Argus, the thing that you mentioned in your intro, was La Soleil, Quebec City, which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was once the chairman; that was a newspaper about 120,000 circulation a day. It's not big for Toronto, but that's what is that? It's, I don't know the newspaper circulations now, I've been out of the business for a long time, but, you know, that's 120,000 papers today, it's a respectable-sized paper; it's not a huge newspaper, but it's not like the northern Eastern Townships Advertiser."

"And there was some history to La Soleil as well. It was a well-known paper in Quebec."

"By the way, the history part that I best used from my studies of Duplessis was that, you know, it was—as I said, Sir Wilfrid was the chairman at one time. It was an absolute diehard liberal newspaper, but the owner, Jacques Nicole, and he owned the newspapers in Three Rivers and Sherbrooke. He was one of the few people who was a senator and a legislative counselor, but the Opera House of Quebec in those days used both at the same time.

He was a very powerful man in Quebec, and in the early days of television, he got the license, Douglas, through his political contacts for Eastern Quebec, Southeastern Quebec around Sherbrooke, and the best place to put his transmitter was at the top of Mount Orford, which was a provincial park. So he asked Duplessis if he could put his transmitter there, and Duplessis said, 'You can put it there, and you don't have to pay me more than one dollar rent for me being the province of the bank.'

But not as long as right under the words ‘Le Soleil’ on your leading newspaper are the words 'The Liberal Organ.' He said right at that point, La Soleil never mind that Mr. Nicole was a Liberal senator and legislative counselor became a Union National newspaper. He just switched like that and he got his license anyway. But that's a red herring, but I thought it might amuse your viewers a bit."

"All right, so you're building up a newspaper empire. It's in Canada; it's limited to Canada at this point, but you start to expand. Is it first in the U.S. or first in the UK, and how does that..."

"But we started to move in the U.S. in, let me think now, we got going there in about 1975. We bought a paper just over the border in Vermont, and then at Grande Isle, I mean, of course, in a market that size, we fairly rapidly bought a huge number of these small papers. We had a formula to operate them, and you could bundle them together by region, and when you combined their circulation, they became quite substantial in circulation if you had enough of them."

"Was there a specific strategy that led to this acquisition spree?"

"And as you said in your intro, we had hundreds of these papers. And were you running writers across the papers, or were these all in independent fiefdoms?"

"There were a few that we could run, or buy from the outside at a discount for ourselves rather than the unit cost that the obtained if we were only buying for one little paper, ten thousand sales or something like that. So we got economies to scale to a degree, but in the papers like that, you absolutely have to serve the local public, and you're relatively speaking not under threat from television, let alone once it came, the internet, as much in this local paper because, you know, CBS or the CBC or whatever you want are not going to carry the, you know, the strawberry festival of the town your paper is publishing. They just have the room for it, so you're giving people what they can't get anywhere else."

"And is that still the case? The internet has become so pervasive now, I think it's a threat even to those papers, but not as much as it is to a metropolitan paper."

"How are you managing your time at this point? You have an increasingly large media empire; you're also still writing about into regions and I had the east and associates had the west, and then the big turn came in the matter you referred to when, you know, when the, what was called at the time the Argus group, etc., became available.

Now that was quite an intricate business because the number of voting shares involved was quite small. Because my father had his position, he died in 1976, so my brother and I—we technically didn't inherit his stock; we bought it from his estate, but in effect, Meredith and, and then there was a shareholder's agreement and the principal associate died, and there was some jockeying around, and in any case, we, in accordance with the shareholders' agreement, we bought the other stock so we were—had we had control of the voting shares which had a, you know, influential blocks of stock and historically, controlling blocks of stock of a number of famous companies: Massey Ferguson was one of the, farm equipment banker, Dominion Stores, the grocery stores, Domtar, the forestry products company.

And the most interesting, in a way, was the old Hollinger Mining Company; it didn't do much mining, but it owned 60% of an outfit that owned big iron ore positions in Labrador in Northern Quebec and long-term contracts to ship the ore that produced about 40 million dollars of royalties every year - basically no cost. The steel companies and their affiliates in the United States took the ore and paid us the royalties, so we had that cash to work with, and then what I did was, over a period, I reoriented that flow of cash and that business into the newspaper business, and we really took off when I bought control of the London Daily Telegraph, which was in a distressed financial state for 30 million dollars, which we ultimately sold for 1.327 billion dollars."

"How long a period of time elapsed between the purchase and the sale?"

"From 1986 to 2004."

"18 years?"

"Yeah, well, that's quite the return on investment."

"So are you in England? You buy the Telegraph, are you spending much of your time in Britain at that point?"

"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."

"What was it like moving from Toronto to Britain?"

"Well, I kept my home and my office here, but in the sense you mean, yes, I moved my main residence. Well, look, 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 waterheads to find a job for yourself. You know, I was rather well received because of the position I had, but it was very interesting.

I was fortunate to get the very tail end of that era when 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 you know, 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 you can think of comes through London at some point in a year.

And you know there's normally some sort of occasion for them. So my wife and I were constantly receiving these formidable sort of stiff gold-age invitations to come to have dinner with so-and-so or lunch with so-and-so or something. It was a sumptuous life."

"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 de-socialized the country."

"How well did you know her?"

"I got to know her very well. She was my sponsor in the House of Lords, and she and Dennis came to our wedding party. They often came to dinner with us."

"So you went—you lived in Britain after you were in Canada. How would it be interesting for me to hear how you would contrast the cultures? What was it like being in Britain? I mean, I know you were in very fortunate position when you moved there, and so you entered in the upper echelons of society, 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. So what did you observe, and what did you conclude?"

"Well, it was a country being renewed, you know? I mean, Britain at the time that Thatcher was elected, very narrowly elected, in 1979, was a country with tight currency controls—a top personal tax rate of 98%—so there's a lot of tax cheating going on. The British don’t like that, you know. I mean, the real problem with Britain and Europe was not immigration; it was the authoritarianism of directives from Brussels.

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. They’re not going to pay much attention to them unless they absolutely have to, and the French, in particular, are not going to take seriously anything that comes from the Belgians, or at least from within Belgium. And the Germans are the leading power in Europe, and they’re accustomed to regimentation, so it doesn’t bother them.

But the British like to be law-abiding. They like to obey the law, but they have to be sensible laws and they have to be imposed by people that are accountable. So if you don’t like what they’re doing, you can throw them out at the voting booths, and that was the problem. Well, that, in addition to the economic stagnation, finally boiled over when Thatcher and her friends, Keith Joseph and others, pushed out Ted Heath for Edward Heath and took the Conservative Party of Great Britain—the Conservative and Unionist Party—to the right—not the extreme right but to a level of conservatism that conservative fiscal policy and tax policy in particular, and attitude to the labor unions that the Conservative Party had not occupied really since the early days of Stanley Baldwin.

So it was very interesting to see, and she was successful. I was there for her third election victory. 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, and she did it on the basis of radical change to the country, and it was quite exciting.

Now, at that time, I was— that was in the late '80s. You know, Brian Mulroney was an old friend of mine. I mean, he was, I mean, your question didn't deal with politics only, but that given my position as a newspaper in the newspaper business, politics had a lot to do with this."

"And Brian was doing something about it."

"But Canada operated, you know, much closer to the middle of the field. You know, it never got that far left, and he didn't move it as far as Thatcher moved Britain—in any case, it’s not a unitary state like Britain; it's a much different system. But if 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.

I mean, it was one of the few periods in my life where I sort of transmogrified into a sort of semi-policy wonk, because we had positions in all this stuff. And the other aspect that was the Cold War was still going on, and there was still some controversy in Britain in that there was always in the left wing of the Labour Party, especially, and the far-out old imperialist wing of the Tories as well this antagonism to the United States.

And when I moved there, it was in the latter Reagan years, and of course he was an important president and had an eventful period as president, and then I happened to meet him, too. I'd known him before he was president and while he was president and after he was president."

"How did you find that experience?"

"A extremely formidable man. He was, to start with, one of the most charming men I’ve ever met. I mean practically all politicians are reasonably charming when they put their minds to it; otherwise, they’re in the wrong business. But he was disarmingly pleasant without being staggering or over-ingenuous. He was just a charming guy, good raconteur, terrific raconteur, just very good conversation.

And I think he was a great leader; I don’t really doubt about that. He was a wonderful speaker; he kept it to a few basic points. He vulgarized, as Mr. Friends say, made these complicated issues simple, and it was almost impossible—was that something he shared with Thatcher, that capability?"

"Yeah, yes. But in a slightly different way, he would throw in a humorous aspect that was disarming, and he would also—he'd make it a little more anecdotal and folksy than she would have been.

But not where his argument deteriorated; he was a very skillful debater. If you’re interested in this, you can find on the internet the debate he had with Robert Kennedy over that business about the left-wing academic in New Jersey, Genovese, where he was, at far left, and it was a dispute about his ability to remain at a state university because he was a communist.

At the end of it, Robert Kennedy said, 'Don’t ever put me into a debate with that guy again.' I mean, Reagan, I had some conversations with him where I was astounded even, you know, well after he was president and was supposedly in decline where he had an astounding recall of the details of things.

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. You know, the American tradition is not one of debating as it is in the parliamentary tradition.

I mean, he was a governor and then the president, and he never debated with anybody other than when he chose to; it was with Kennedy here when he actually was in the elections. But he—this idea that he was a, you know, what did Clark Clifford call him? An amiable dunce or something?

He knew Clifford too, and Reagan was the smartest politician. A different type of intelligence, but he was a very intelligent man. There was—he was, in a way, an inspirational figure because in his life he only had six jobs. He was a lifeguard for people swimming, whatever, in Illinois and then he was a baseball announcer in Des Moines, Iowa; California bound in the Great Depression, and then a screen actor, including, I think, six terms as the screen actors' guild.

But his job as an actor 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. He only had, I believe in, had four elections; he beat Edmund G. Brown who defeated Richard Nixon four years before by over a million votes. He defeated Jesse Unruh by over a million votes running for reelection. He beat President Jimmy Carter by I think nine million votes and then Walter Mondale just died the other day by over 15 million votes.

I mean, it just was a very modest career; it was a graduate of Eureka College and then he just went all the way up to the top of the country and stayed there, and he undoubtedly was a very good person."

"So from this, but I've got to say this, you know? It was ironic, Jordan, because I didn’t—I mean, you know, I had a few teachers I liked. We all remember the teachers we liked, but there weren't that many of them in my case, and most of them I didn't like.

I bought into the view that really they were teachers because they couldn't make it in the world of adults, so they sought success in a place where they could assert their authority over smaller people. I mean, this was my concept of the motivation of some of the teachers I had.

But Shaw's famous comment, 'He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches'—I sort of believed that. I thought they were people who couldn't make it in a more substantial occupation. Now, that was an unfair judgment, but on the other hand, when I see what level of education those who depart our schools achieve nowadays, I'm not so sure it was an unjust judgment.

But in any case, that's what I thought, but I saw the other side of it when I was tutoring these guys in the prison system. You know, I saw the satisfaction of it, and I will give the Bureau of Prisons this—they devised this graduation ceremony, and all the families would come, and they were emotional occasions.

I'm not a particularly emotional person, but one of the few seriously emotional positive moments I've had was when my two colleagues and I were introduced, and this whole packed room stood up and cheered for about five minutes, and 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 a teacher, and we're so grateful.'

It was very touching. And incidentally, Jordan, Princeton isn't the place for those people. I was in a low-security place, none of these guys were violent, and they weren't habitual offenders. It wasn't the right place for them."

"Well, they're not bad people, and they're not unintelligent, and as I say, every one of mine passed. The problem was they just got a wrong turning early on."

"So let's return to the newspaper business. Now you're out of law school; you have a second newspaper, and you’re, you’ve graduated. Now you've taken on the role as a publisher; your empire starts to expand at that point."

"It does, but I had one more lap to run on the educational side. I became a master's candidate and did receive the degree from McGill in French Canada studies.

Now, this came from—I mean, not that you’ve asked me; I’m volunteering it. I went to, because I knew Premier Johnson a bit, it— I don’t know how conversant you are with modern Quebec history, but he was often referred to as the Sun Duplessis.

Never had Maurice Duplessis, as you probably know. He’s the only person in history to serve five terms as Prime Minister of Quebec, and he died in office. And Jean Lesage told me that if he’d lived, he would have been re-elected. He really knew how to, you know, how to organize that province politically.

But he was a bachelor and he advanced Johnson quite quickly, and he had the same speaking style, very witty way of talking. Would it inspire my interest in Duplessis? Because up until then, I had the—I was the conventional English Canadian—the Duplessis 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. I mean, there’s some truth in that, but he produced the modernization of Quebec. He built the autoroutes, he built the schools, he built every university except McGill.

I mean, he was re-elected because he delivered for the province, and he was a strong man who was almost 70 when he died in office. Those two died in office in the early ’50s, and then the whole thing broke up. But my point was that Johnson stirred my curiosity about Duplessis because there clearly was a story to this man that wasn't being told."

"I went to a colleague who happened to get an invitation and it came from Miss Griffiths, who I mentioned it was my old professor at Carleton. She said you might be interested in that, so I went to it in Three Rivers, and it was a discussion of people and there was a panel; there was one pro-Duplessis panelist and two anti-Duplessis ones, and I went up to the pro-Duplessis one at the end of it.

It was a somewhat well-known historian, Roberto Rooney, a Frenchman originally, who was a member of Axion Francaise, you know, Charlemagne, and he was at a demonstration in the Place de la Republique in 1926, and the person next to him was shot dead, and with that, he left France and never returned, immigrated to Quebec.

So the ideas 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?' And he said, 'Well, it's worth the try; sure, I'll recommend you.'

Then it happened; the head of this outfit was the former Minister of Cultural Affairs in Johnson and Bertrand’s government, Jean-Claude Tremblay, you may remember, and he’s still alive; he’s very elderly, and he said, 'Yeah, well, that’s fine; you can—but you know, you've got to keep them to yourself and stuff,' all of which I respectfully adhered to.

And I had all this stuff, and then when I saw what I had, I realized I had to do something about it. This takes me back to having developed the ambition to write some history. So I calculated that if I enrolled at McGill, citing this as my proposed thesis topic, that would get me halfway through, and if I got halfway through, I’d have the momentum to finish it. That’s where my first book came from, which is called 'Render Unto Caesar: The Life of Maurice Duplessis.'

So I got that side of things going at the same time as we built our newspaper company."

"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?"

But it was a very profitable business and normally we would make a bid based on the profitability of the present owner, and very rarely were these people who owned the papers running them as profitably as they could. They were taking a nice salary for themselves, and they weren't that concerned with what the profit was. Well, we had an idea of what we could do with the profit.

Then, in those days you could go to the local bank and say, 'Look, we want to buy this paper, and we want we’re asking you to loan us half the money; we’ll take care of the rest.' What we do is we give the vendor a balance of sale notice, so we didn't put up any—not a cent.

But we always did raise the profit; we always raised the quality of the product too. Our position always was that the best way to raise the profit was to raise the quality of the product.

Even then people who bought and read a newspaper were what is called ABC1 readers, either high income or high education, relatively speaking. I mean ignorant people didn’t buy newspapers, and for the most part poor people didn't buy newspapers, and people advertisers wouldn't be interested in wouldn't buy a newspaper. But anyone who bought a newspaper or someone, an advertiser wants to get to because he has disposable income."

"Considerable because I knew how much manpower you needed. Almost all of these places had more manpower than they needed. Now, we handled it gently; we moved them out. A lot of them were elderly, so we just gave them early retirement, topped up their pensions a bit and things like that. But they were small, so you're not talking about a lot of people.

But if you've got a newspaper of 50 employees, and you get eight of them to take early retirement, you've got the payroll down by almost 20%, and it's not that early retirement, you know. And in addition to that are all kinds of things to do to enhance revenue. I mean very few of them had any notion of how you can hype the circulation relatively easily with contests and things like that.

I was astounded at the people, and where we really saw this was in England or the Daily Telegraph with daily circulation over a million broadsheet papers—the biggest broadsheet paper in Europe. The British love these as far as I'm concerned—actually ridiculous contests but if you give them a contest, even to get a free subscription to the Spectator—which we also own—they'll plunge into it.

It's a circulation building. So that's the sort of thing that 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 it wouldn't matter. He lived well; he was an influential person in his community. He made a profit every year, having taken a nice salary for himself; he had three or four relatives on the payroll.

The company owns his car and there's his speedboat on the lake and all that kind of stuff. I mean, to him, that's all he needs, which is fine, but the fact is you can double the profits quite quickly."

And did you have an interest, and we brought it a long way forward. The biggest paper we had, when things changed because of that shake-up in the Ravelston system, was La Soleil, Quebec City, which Sir Wilfrid Laurier was once the chairman of. That was a newspaper about 120,000 circulation a day; it's not big for Toronto. But that’s what is that? It's— I don't know the newspaper circulations now; I've been out of the business for a long time—but you know, that's 120,000 papers today. It's a respectable-sized paper; it's not a huge newspaper, but it's not like the Northern Eastern Townships Advertiser."

"And there was some history to La Soleil as well, a well-known paper in Quebec."

"By the way, the history part that I best used from my studies of Duplessis was that, you know, it was—as I said, Sir Wilfrid was the chairman at one time. It was an absolute diehard liberal newspaper, but the owner, Jacques Nicole, owned the newspapers in Three Rivers and Sherbrooke. He was one of the few people who was a senator and a legislative counselor; he was the opera house of Quebec in those days.

He got the license for Eastern Quebec, Southeastern Quebec around Sherbrooke. The best place to put his transmitter was at the top of Mount Orford, which was a provincial park. So he asked Duplessis if he could put his transmitter there, and Duplessis, he said, 'You can put it there, and you don't have to pay me more than one dollar rent—or more than a dollar rent for my being the province of the bank.'

But not as long, I mean, right under the words 'Le Soleil' on your leading newspaper are the words 'The Liberal Organ.' He said right at that point, La Soleil never mind that Mr. Nicole was a Liberal senator and legislative counselor who became a Union National newspaper. He just switched like that and he got his license anyway.

But it's a red herring, but I thought it might amuse your viewers a bit."

"All right, so you're building up a newspaper empire. It's limited to Canada at this point; but you start to expand. Is it first in the U.S. or first in the UK? How does that..."

"We started to move to the U.S. in, let me think now, we got going there in about 1975. We bought a paper just over the border in Vermont, then at Grande Isle, I mean, of course, in a market that size, we fairly rapidly bought a huge number of these small papers. We had a formula to operate them, and you could bundle them together by region.

When you combined their circulation, they became quite substantial in circulation if you had enough of them. And as you said in your intro, we had hundreds of these papers."

"Were you running writers across the papers, or were these all in independent fiefdoms?"

"There were a few that we could run or buy from the outside at a discount for ourselves rather than the unit cost that may have been obtained from only buying for one little paper, ten thousand sales or something like that.

So we got economies to scale to a degree, but in the papers like that, you absolutely have to serve the local public, and you're relatively speaking not under threat from television, let alone once it came the internet as much in this local paper because you know CBS or the CBC or whatever you want are not going to carry the, you know, the strawberry festival of the town your papers publishing. They just have the room for it, so you're giving people what they can't get anywhere else."

"And is that still the case? The internet has become so pervasive now, I think it's a threat even to those papers."

"But not as much as it is to a metropolitan paper. So how are you managing your time at this point? You have an increasingly large media empire; you're also still writing about into regions, and I had

Baron Black of Crossharbour | Lord Conrad Black | EP 181

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