Canada and Other Matters of Opinion Read Online Free

beyond the landscape of Canadian journalism—unknown, that is, until Newman appointed himself their naturalist.
    The powerful can be shy. They must be courted to reveal themselves. The story of how he came to lure the reticent rich of the Canadian elite to his journalistic laboratory is not the smallest of this book’s many pleasures. For example, he won the keystone interview for
The Canadian Establishment
, with John Angus (Bud) McDougald, by haunting the company of everyone who knew him, and floating to them wild and wilful misapprehensions of Mr. McDougald’s financial worth and business dealings. Everywhere Mr. McDougald went, he was hearing of this “journalist” with the crazy estimations of his worth andpractice. It took Mr. Newman the best part of a year to win it, but an invitation to Mr. McDougald’s Green Pines estate was finally forthcoming. Mr. McDougald had figured out “the trick,” but admired the guts behind it.
    Mr. Newman’s writing had its serious intent. It was not, nor was it ever meant to be, just gossip. He was propelled by a thesis: “I would document my theory that most of our destinies were governed by a shadowy group of financial manipulators I called The Canadian Establishment. I would define and detail their origins, interconnections, rivalries, prejudices, values, strengths, mercenary motives and operational codes. This would not be a bloodless audit of their common strains—this would be a journalist’s exposé of who they were, what they did, and how they got away with it.”
    Not quite Gibbon recalling the origin of his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(“musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”), but there is something of a symmetry of intent here, in the sense of scope and mission, however dissimilar the canvas. Our Caligulas are smaller.
    Mr. Newman seems to have come upon his distinct terrain early on. After a stint on
The Financial Post
in Toronto and Montreal, he got work at
Maclean’s
in its glory days. His colleagues included Peter Gzowski and Christina McCall (his soon-to-be second wife); Pierre Berton was a senior editor, and celebrated editor Ralph Allen guided the whole rich crew. It was then that he produced his firstbook, a dozen profiles of prominent businessmen,
Flames of Power
, published on his twenty-ninth birthday.
    A handful of zesty reviews, including one in
The Wall Street Journal
, rocketed sales and confirmed him in what turned out to be his vocation: sketching the personalities, aspirations and connections of this country’s moneyed elite. He found he loved writing. And he learned he loved success in writing even more.
    “Success turns a writer into a praise addict… . It becomes a drug, terminally unsettling to mental balance, a price I would willingly pay for the rest of my life.”
    A comment from one of the luminaries profiled in
Flames of Power
, E.P. Taylor, breathed the note of patterned ambivalence with which Mr. Newman’s subjects came to regard him: “Well, we all know Newman is a goddammed Communist, but I’m not taking him off my Christmas card list yet.”
    He would rise to the editorship of
Maclean’s
, and there would be many mighty detours from his dedicated trolling of the guarded waters of Canadian capitalism’s master sharks.
Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years
, his second book, was the one that made him. It was a pioneering piece of political journalism. It went for the guts and flavour of politics, spoken in a candour and detail that have become so commonplace it is difficult to see how original and daring they then were. It was also, typically, a monster of research and patient assembly. A thousand interviews, frequent meetings with real insiders, seventeenrewrites, ten galley proofs, and the close, creative oversight of Christina McCall went into its making. Mr. Newman doesn’t produce careless books.
    Renegade in Power
was a publishing home