George Napoleon Epps

Transcription

Tina Srebotnjak: Let's get right to it. Tonight's host is one of Canada's most recognized journalists, he's the anchor and senior editor of TVO's flagship current affairs program, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin". So, what could his name be? Steve Paikin. [applause] Steve Paikin: Welcome. Conrad Black: Thank you. SP: One of the challenges you and I are gonna have tonight, is that... What these people don't know, is that you came into our studios at TVO a week and a half ago, and sat down and did an hour-long interview with me for "The Agenda", which will be on June 18th. So, I had to sit down today and try and write all new questions that you haven't heard before, so that I didn't bore you. [chuckle] So, I'm gonna try. Hopefully, these will be all new questions and you will not be bored. CB: I'm sure I won't be, Steve. And I want to say that you are exceedingly conscientious, 'cause most people in your occupation do not go to the same lengths, not to be boring. [laughter] SP: It starts already. Okay. [chuckle] Here we go. It's not like nobody has ever written a book about American history, or the development of America's even strategic history. So I wonder, when you actually sat down to write this thing, what went through your head in terms of saying to yourself, "Here's what I need to say that hasn't been said before about this vast topic"? CB: I only sat down to write at all because I felt that, in fact, it hadn't been addressed in this way, and in fairness to myself, Henry Kissinger made the same point in his introductory note. There is of course, as you say, a vast literature on the history of the United States, and much of it is extremely distinguished, absolutely rigorous, scholarly, and well-written. And if I was just walking in that furrow, there would be no point to do it. But to the best of my knowledge, and my knowledge has not been altered by the suggestions to the contrary by that peculiar reviewer in The Globe and Mail the other day, [chuckle] this issue has not been addressed in this way, which is to say that the growth of the United States wasn't just an organic thing, like planting something in your garden and watering it well, and it just grew and grew because they had the English language, and a capable leadership, and the ability to populate half of a very rich continent, and to attract millions and millions of extremely motivated people from all over the world to come to their country. CB: It happened partly because of that, of course, but you could say almost the same thing of Brazil, or Argentina, or something. I mean, they had every advantage but they haven't had a history like that, and the difference is the decisions. And often, I felt, and this is really the point of this book, decisions that have been under-recognized by a number, perhaps 12 or 15 or their particularly eminent statesmen, all of whom, or almost all of whom, are well known, but not necessarily for the things that I credit them within this book. So, there's a new aspect, otherwise, I wouldn't have done it. If it was just an attempt to do what's already been done well before, I wouldn't do it, and there would be no point to do it. SP: Benjamin Franklin, is he at the top of that list of statesmen? CB: Damn close to it, and chronologically, along with Washington, yes. But I mean, of course, he's a famous name, and a revered name, and justly so. He was a great intellect and was recognized throughout the world as that. He was just as much a doctor as Samuel Johnson was, and from the same university. He was a member of the Royal Academy, and the French Academy. An inventor, a printer, an intellectual, a writer, a publisher, but also one of the great diplomatic geniuses of world history, in this accomplishment in assisting to persuade the British to evict the French from Canada and then persuading single-handedly, by an extraordinary variety of diplomatic methods, including the seduction of a lot of people around the court, of persuading the French, where Parliament had not sat for 170 years, to go to war on behalf of Republicanism, democracy, and secessionism, was astonishing. I mean, he who had this small group of colonists on the eastern shore of North America, manipulating the British to get rid of the French, and the French to get rid of the British, the two greatest powers in the world. How did he do it? It was genius. But it's not usually presented in that way. SP: How much of America's genius, if I can put it this way, was their good fortune to have been settled in this way by the British mostly? CB: A significant amount, without question. Indeed, as I make the point, after Franklin and Washington, I think the greatest figure of the Revolution was Thomas Jefferson, because he was a propagandist. He actually, sitting there in Monticello, as a slave owner who didn't even get around to emancipating his slaves in his will as George Washington did, and who had seven children with one of his slaves, but wrote, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And he referred to slavery as a famously, as a fire bell in the night... Well, it certainly was for Ms. Hemmings, the proprietor of Monticello, was feeling that way... But the fact is, the Americans at the end of the revolution, had no more rights as people, than they had had at the beginning, other than that they had a government resident in their own territory, on their side of the Atlantic and not overseas, and they had no more rights than the British had, a citizen of Britain or a citizen of Switzerland or parts of Scandinavia or parts of the Netherlands. CB: It was only the light end of the nations and all the rest of Jefferson's grandiloquent amplifications, because of the American genius which they've never lost and had from the earliest days, and you still see it at the Super Bowl thing; the genius for the spectacle, coupled to the immense growth of the country because it was putting a British society down at the edge of a vast continent, that they could then attract tens of millions of people through, and to assimilate them to the English language and loyalty to the US Constitution and they're still doing it. But to a degree, we're doing the same thing but on a smaller scale. But the answer to your question is a great deal. Or maybe if they'd have have been, with no disrespect to Portugal, than be a Portuguese colony, and the Portuguese did sail around New York a bit, it wouldn't have had the same advantages. SP: Let me follow up on this slavery angle that you just brought up and I wonder how you rationalized in your own head the lofty words of the Declaration of Independence and the wonderful words, the grandiloquence, I think, you put it, of the Constitution, with that. CB: I don't 'cause I think it was a fraud but the Americans aren't bad at fraud, you know? [laughter] CB: But it was a fraud in a good cause but they just chose to overlook at them. In the Constitution, as approved, I'm not, sure if many of you would know this, but for purposes of calculating the number of electors for the Electoral College to choose the President or the number of the members of the House of Representatives of each state, three-fifths of the slave population was counted. So, in effect a free person in practise, white person in the southern states, would have a larger vote than a person in a state where there was not slavery, because he got the credit for three-fifths of the slaves in that state or that community did. And it was basically an outrage, where the South would not have joined in the Union without it, but it was a very sore point, right up to the Civil War. CB: But then, in that inimitable American fashion, they had this horrible war in which 750,000 people died in a population smaller than Canada's today, and we were talking about this in the reception before tonight. The Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia were smashed to rubble and scorched to ashes by the Union Army. It was a terrible war. And the South was completely defeated in the end, the slaves were emancipated and the South, therefore, got credit for calculating membership in the Electoral College of the House of Representatives for all of their population because there were no slaves and they didn't allow them to vote anyway for 100 years. They didn't let the black people vote in the South until President Johnson's time, Lyndon Johnson, not Andrew. SP: I'm not sure you touched on this in your book, if you did, I missed it. But we weren't us yet during the American Civil War, we weren't Canada yet officially, but who's side were we on? CB: We were for the North because Canada had a very distinguished record of admitting fugitive slaves. We received 60,000 of them which was a considerable number of people for Canada at that time, when its population was only a couple of million. And Daniel Walker Howe is a very distinguished American historian and I'm sure many of you have read some of his books, and he was a contributor of a large volume in the Oxford University History of the United States, and as you would expect, a very serious, comprehensive, well-written series of volumes. And he quotes a letter from someone who fled from Alabama, I believe, and got all the way through and settled in Southern Ontario, and wrote a letter back to his former owner telling him that he owned his own home, he was a loyal subject of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria, his children went to school and they were treated as everyone else. And I say that our history in this country in that matter was extremely distinguished. I'm proud of it. SP: Let me move you forward. CB: By the way, I think the Americans today respect us for it. SP: Woodrow Wilson, when he was President, raised the size of the US Army, you tell us in the book, from 200,000 to four million, in a year and a half. Is that when the US truly became a superpower in the world? CB: They were getting awfully close when Theodore Roosevelt doubled the size of the Navy and built the Panama Canal, and he won the Nobel Prize for Peace for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese war because he did not want either of those powers getting too pre-eminent over the other. Because those were the, those three and the British were the three powers in the Pacific, they were the four powers in the Pacific, and so he was inching up to it. But when President Wilson, who was a pacifist at heart, when the Germans, in their absolute lunacy -- a mistake as immense as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour -- said that they would sink American ships, merchant ships, a neutral country, on sight, the United States obviously couldn't put up with this. CB: No serious country could put up with such a thing, they knew perfectly well the US would enter the war, and if they just hadn't done it, the war would have ended in a compromised settlement. But when Wilson had no choice... He was a great intellectual, he is rivalled only by Jefferson, I think, and perhaps John Quincy Adams, as the most brilliant man who ever sat as President. He'd been the President of Princeton University for 10 years prior to being the governor of New Jersey and then the President of the United States, he turned threw this horrible, hopeless war, into a war to end war, and a war to make the world safe for democracy, and his war message in April of 1917 is one the greatest, most eloquent speeches ever delivered in the history of the United States. CB: And he uplifted the spirits of the war weary allies, the French and the British in particular. France had suffered two million dead at this point. And that's what it was. It was war to end war and make the world safe for democracy, and to begin some, not exactly world government, but a coordination of the nations. Now the League of Nations didn't work, the United States never joined it, Wilson was rejected, he took a terrible stroke and his life ended in great bitterness. But he was a great prophet, he was the first man to inspire the masses of the world with the vision of enduring peace and I think he was a great man. I always thought that. SP: Show of hands here. When the list of the great Presidents is published, it's always Lincoln, FDR and Washington. Who agrees with that? Hands up. CB: And now, just a second, before you put your hands up. Are you asking if they agree they were great, or are you asking if think they're the only great ones? SP: Not the only great ones, but when you make your top 10 list, the top three, and you can switch the order around, it's always Lincoln, FDR, Washington; Washington, FDR, Lincoln, whatever. Would you agree those are the top three of all time? Yes? Hands? Who says no? Okay, you break the tie, do they belong in the top three? CB: Oh yes. SP: They do? CB: Yes, I think so. Yes, I think they were all great Presidents. SP: I mean, the greatest. CB: Yes, I think so. The only other one that I would say was a great President, and this will, I suspect, not meet with universal agreement here, but I don't think he was as immense personality and a leader as the three you mentioned, is Reagan. I mean, there's probably plenty of people around who don't think he was but he... [laughter] He was pretty successful. SP: You do know we're in Downtown Toronto, right? CB: I know. Yeah. [laughter] CB: We may even be in an NDP district, I'm not sure. [laughter] SP: But... [laughter] SP: On your list, Lincoln, FDR, Washington, in that order? CB: Oh I haven't resolved that in my own mind. I really feel a little awkward trying to sort of, who would... What the order would be. I mean, they were gigantic figures all of them, and I'd just leave it at that. SP: Okay. CB: Reagan, I have my views, but I wouldn't put him... I'd say he was a great President, but not like those three were. SP: Would he... Alright. Let's fill out the list a bit. If you had to go to four and five who would be there? CB: May I do this? I think the second category would be unusually talented Presidents, and in that group, in order of their inauguration, I would say, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, the little known James K. Polk, with a funny name, but he was a pretty effective President, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and brace yourselves, get ready for defibrillation, Richard Nixon. [laughter] SP: We got a smattering of applause here from the 5% of the people in this riding who always vote Tory, that's right. Okay... [laughter] SP: Well, alright, it begs to follow up, why Nixon on that list? CB: Just looking around the room, I think there are a great many people in the room, who remember, as I do, and as you probably do not... [laughter] What the... That's a comment on his youth, not his memory. [laughter] CB: What the condition of the country was like in 1968 when Mr. Nixon was elected. There were 550,000 draftees in Vietnam, 200 to 400 were coming back in body-bags every week, no one knew what they were doing there. Ho Chi Minh had made it clear that he wouldn't make peace on any remotely acceptable terms. Johnson had effectively been chased out of office. There were race riots and anti-war riots all over the country, every week, everywhere. The campuses were aflame. There were sky-jackings. There were no relations with China. No peace process in the Middle East. No relations with the major Arab powers. Nothing productive going on with the Russians. Arms control discussions had been suspended after the Soviet's suppression of Czechoslovakia. And this is what Nixon took over and he was the first President since Zachary Taylor in 1848, to take office with his party in control of neither House or the Congress. CB: After four years, he had extracted the United States from Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government. He'd opened relations with China. He signed the greatest arms control agreement in the history of the world with the Soviet Union which effectively acknowledged American military superiority, which he, with his usual subtlety in these matters, called "nuclear sufficiency", by which he meant putting 10 war heads independently targeted in every missile, and he'd founded the Environmental Protection Agency, he abolished the draft, reduced the crime rate, ended inflation, there were no riots, no assassinations and he carried 49 states and won by the greatest plurality in the history of the country, right up to the present day. Eighteen million votes and he did it because he delivered on everything to the country. SP: And resigned. Not an insignificant footnote. SP: Well, that... But you asked me why I put him there because his that... One full term that he had, was next to Lincoln's and I would say, FDR's first and third terms, the most successful single term in the history of the United States right up to now. And on that he deserves to... Now, if we're getting into the mitigations, I mean, if that was the whole story, he'd be a great President and he isn't in my opinion, because... And I knew him in his last five years, he was quite serene in his last five years compared to what he had been, I understand, but he was, in some ways, a neurotic man. He did and said some very odd things, and that mitigates his claim to greatness, but it doesn't erase it. He did what he did, he rendered immense service to the country and that was why they reelected him by 18 million votes. SP: And I'll just, if I may, I don't wanna reduce this meeting to emotionalism but I'll just cite to you the conclusion of Henry Kissinger's eulogy of him which was delivered at the Nixon Library where he's buried, where the very modest house person which he was born, is just beside it, and Henry Kissinger said, he recited aspects of his career and he said, "He achieved greatly, he suffered deeply, but he never gave up. He loved his country. He was devoted to his family, and service was his honour." And in the end, that was Richard Nixon. He was a courageous and patriotic, but very complicated man. And it's time we stopped this ludicrous pretence that he was uniquely morally unqualified to be President. He was a saint compared to some of the other holders of that office. [laughter] [applause] CB: I have to call it as I see it. SP: That's why the room is full, they came to hear that tonight. Having read your book, I came across so many interesting "factoids", let's call them, that I didn't know before and I wanna see how many of them you remember, okay? Here we go. Tell us something fascinating about the deaths of the second and third American Presidents. CB: The what? SP: The deaths. CB: They died on... SP: D-E-A-T-H-S. CB: They died on the same day the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which one of them, Mr. Jefferson was the chief author of. They died on July 4, 1826. SP: Adams and Jefferson? CB: Yeah. SP: Same day. CB: Yeah. SP: They didn't like each other. CB: The last 10 years were good, they didn't before that. And Adams' last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still lives." [laughter] And, you know, on July the 4th, 1863, the Union effectively won the Civil War because it won at Gettysburg, a three-day battle, in which there were 50,000 casualties in three days, and as General Doubleday said, "The ground is littered with the dead." And they won the surrender of the fort at Vicksburg, so they could split the Confederacy, split Arkansas and Louisiana and Texas out from the rest of it. General Grant secured the surrender at Vicksburg, and they took 30,000 confederate prisoners. And a crowd marched spontaneously to the White House to congratulate the President, led by a regimental band. And Mr. Lincoln came to the balcony and he said that this was a spiritual day, the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the death of two of the most distinguished of his predecessors. And he said, "It calls for a speech, that I am not able to do justice to the occasion by improvising, so I shall take the music", he said and he gave that speech at Gettysburg, the famous Gettysburg Address a few months later. SP: Next. CB: That's more than you wanted to know but anyway, there it is. [laughter] SP: Only two men have ever been President, Vice President, and Secretary of State. Name them. CB: You see... This is like that BBC program, My Word, you see. And I'm only... If I had to say, "I'm rather astonished to hear that's not a matter of common knowledge." [laughter] CB: I'm confident that the answer is the unsurprising Thomas Jefferson, who was the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President... I'm sorry the... Yes, the second Vice President and the third President, and the less well known Martin Van Buren. SP: Now how many in here would have gotten Martin Van Buren? Hands up, honestly. Don't anybody put your hand up 'cause we know you wouldn't have. [laughter] CB: I'll take this one step further. If we're getting down to outright obscurity, I bet you, many of you watch the television series The Sopranos and you remember the man, where the car ran over his head, lived in Kinderhook? Well, Kinderhook, New York is only famous because of Martin Van Buren, who in addition to the offices Steve mentioned, was at different times, the Governor, a Senator, and the Minister to Great Britain and he was known as the "Red Fox of Kinderhook". So there you have it. SP: Six degrees of separation between Tony Soprano and Martin Van Buren. [laughter] CB: That's it. SP: Interesting. Mr. Black, youngest man ever to be President? CB: Theodore Roosevelt. SP: Youngest man ever elected President? CB: John F. Kennedy. SP: Oldest man ever elected President for the first time? CB: Ronald Reagan. By only one year, over William H. Harrison. Yes. [laughter] CB: The difference being that Reagan served two terms and... SP: What happened to Harrison? CB: Well, he gave a very lengthy inaugural address in the course of which he caught a terrible cold and died of pneumonia after one month. One month, short of serving President. SP: Not good. Three future Presidents were elected to Congress for the first time in what year, and name them. CB: Well, it's conceivable to me it happened more than once but the one time that I know of was in 1946, elected congressmen from respectably, I'm putting it in the order that they became President, Massachusetts, California, and Michigan, were John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. SP: Okay, you're showing off now. [laughter] SP: Okay, here's another one. We didn't do any of these on TV, which is why I'm doing them now. Trying to keep it fresh for you, Lord Black. Okay, here we go. CB: I'll try to be modest. [laughter] SP: Name an administration where neither the President nor the Vice President were elected to either of those offices that they held? CB: Well, that I think would be Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. SP: You wanna explain how that happened? CB: Yeah, well, then again, I'm sure many of the people remember. Richard Nixon was re-elected as we were talking about a minute ago, in 1972, with that most peculiar running mate, Spiro T. Agnew, although he was very important in actually winning the election in '68. And then Agnew resigned, pleading nolo contendere to the charge of having taken bribes from his Governor of Maryland, and then of course, President Nixon named Gerald Ford, Congressman Ford, the minority leader of the House of Representatives, as the Vice President, and then Mr. Nixon resigned about six months to eight months later, and then Vice President Ford became President, and then he nominated the former four-term Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller for Vice President, he was confirmed, so there you have those too. May I turn that on it's ear a bit? CB: The only time in the history of the United States, as you all know, that someone ran for a third term was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and he won with Henry Wallace as his Vice President, but he ran against Wendell L. Willkie and Senator McNary of Oregon. And both Willkie and McNary died in the following four years. So if Willkie had gave it, he was the strongest opponent Roosevelt had, now you couldn't beat Roosevelt. He was invincible, politically, but Willkie gave it a good try. But if Willkie had won, that would have been the only time. They didn't have the idea of replacing the Vice Presidency if it was vacant, although that's a constitutional amendment, post-Kennedy's assassination. And you don't know who would have ended up being President. It would have been the Secretary of State, who I suspect would have been the former President Herbert Hoover but of course, we don't know. That's more trivia than you wanted, but there it is. SP: Let's dive a little deeper. You had a scenario in the book whereby Douglas MacArthur becomes President at some point. CB: Well, yeah, that was I think my Roosevelt book though. Oh, yes, you're right. By God, you're right. SP: I read the book. I read the book, okay? CB: In my Roosevelt book, I authored the theory that in some respect, he would have been a more... He would have been a slightly preferable allied commander in Western Europe than Eisenhower, though Eisenhower was very good and very successful. And we certainly can't fault him, in my opinion. But I did say that that might have catapulted MacArthur into the presidency, and he would not have been anything like as a reliably good a President as Eisenhower proved to be. Now, but what you're saying, you're absolutely right. At the 1952 Republican Convention, remember they'd lost five elections in a row, four to Roosevelt and one to Truman. SP: Republicans? CB: The Republicans had, yeah. So, at that convention in '52, the candidates were General Eisenhower, the Senate Leader Robert Taft, son of the former President and Chief Justice, and the subsequent Chief Justice of the United States, and former three-term Governor of California, Earl Warren. Now, Richard Nixon, as a senator from California, had to sign a pledge of loyalty to Warren to be approved as a delegate, even though he was a US Senator. So, he signed it. He privately gave his leader in the senate, Robert Taft, his assurance that he was for him but in fact, he made a deal with the de facto head of the Eisenhower campaign... Eisenhower was the head of NATO, ostensibly living in Paris but in fact, obviously closely in touch with this campaign to get him the nomination... CB: And he made his deal with the leader of the Eisenhower nomination forces, who was the former two, twice-nominee for President and at that time, in his third term as Governor or New York, Thomas E. Dewey, that since there was going to be a contest over seating delegates between Eisenhower and Taft, he, Nixon, would produce a California vote in favour of the Eisenhower delegates, that this would put Eisenhower in as President, and Dewey would lobby Eisenhower to give the Vice-Presidential nomination to Nixon. And it all happened. But I know that... The fact is, as Taft saw this developing, he said, "If I am elected as the nominee, I will invite General MacArthur to become my Vice-Presidential candidate and MacArthur let it be known that he would accept that. And as it turned out, Taft died in 1954 and if he'd been nominated, they were not gonna elect the Democrat six terms in a row, so he probably would've won, not as well as Eisenhower did, but he probably would've won, and then he would've died and MacArthur would be President. So that was the scenario. SP: There you go. [laughter] SP: That's not bad that you can... Anyway, okay. Last one on this. CB: Truly, this is a mnemonic feat to remember some of this stuff. [laughter] SP: He was the first senior American official to be Roman Catholic and served 29 years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Who am I talking about? CB: An absolutely terrible man. And it shames me as co-religionist of his, but it was Roger B. Taney. And... SP: You get them all. Yeah. CB: And he followed John Marshall, and the two, together, were 63 years, Chief Justice. SP: Which, ultimately, is more important in your view, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Or peace, order and good government? [laughter] CB: We must all concede the presentational genius of the Americans and there is no doubt that they got the better of that formulation. Now, whether, in fact, they have enacted it in their country better than we have, it is another matter. But in fairness, their sociology is more complicated. We never had slavery in this country. And let us not deceive ourselves, it wasn't because of our moral exaltation, there was just never any economic reason for it. You only had, in those days, you only had slavery where the slaves could do certain types of work in very hot weather better than the non-slaves and we didn't... The Canadian climate isn't like that. But, in fact, it's made it comparatively difficult for the Americans. But with all that said, their formulation of national goals, I think, is more alluring than ours, but I think we've done a damned good job of producing life, liberty, happiness, as well as peace, order and good government. SP: One left. He's gonna get an applause. Okay. [applause] CB: Am I redeeming myself for the Nixon-Reagan stuff? [laughter] SP: I'm gonna ask one last question and then you can see a microphone in the middle of the room here. And feel free, if you like, to line up and ask your questions of Conrad Black. I've always wanted to ask you this, but never quite had the guts, but now it feels like the right time. CB: Fire when ready, goodly. [laughter] SP: What does " fisciferous " mean? CB: Vociferous? SP: Yes, you used the word in the book, "fisciferous ". CB: Yeah. SP: And you use it in a lot of interviews, too. CB: Well, not often. No, not often. Attempting to split into factions and be argumentative and divisive. SP: Okay. CB: Say, "The politics of Italy is fisciferous", you know? SP: Got it. I could've gone to my Funk & Wagnall, but I'd rather have heard it from you. [laughter] SP: Okay, folks, your turn. Who's going to be brave and get it started here? I see them moving already. Okay. CB: There's a man who looks a little like Speaker Sam Rayburn. [laughter] S?: Well, first of all, I just want to say, welcome back to Canada. We missed you. CB: Thank you sir. Thank you sir, I missed you, too. [applause] S?: I wanna ask you about political financial accountability and I wanna preface it with the more recent liberal government in this province that's squandered $10 billion of our money on a number of projects. And when asked about that, they delivered 56,000 pages of redacted... They were all redacted. In addition, said to us, in a questionable way, that they're taking the Teaberry two-step and they're also, at the same time, thinking to themselves that they're getting a free pass in all this. So I'd like to ask you: How do we, as citizens of this great province, make our politicians more financially accountable for the kind of silly, hilarious decisions they've made on our behalf? CB: It's a good question. I'm not really a partisan in Ontario, I mean, at the provincial level but I have to agree with you. I didn't know it was as much as $10 billion but there were some absolutely horrifying squanderings of money and backpedaling and dissembling, and it was just shocking, and I couldn't agree more. And I am surprised that the new Premier hasn't put her predecessor over the side mark, 'cause she could do it. I mean, there's cabinet government to a degree, but she could hang it around his neck like a toilet seat, and he deserves it. [laughter] CB: So, in a way, I credit her with loyalty, but I'm afraid it's not so much loyalty as that ghastly, old, liberal solidarity, "We can do no wrong." That sort of unctuous sense that some liberals have, "That we're the party of government and we just do, whatever we do is right, 'cause we did it." S?: She did apologize, which suggests that she thinks there was something wrong that happened. CB: Okay. Well, I think that she acknowledged that there'd been some... Maybe I'm being hard on her, but I thought it was a pretty soft reproof and a kind of weaselly run for the escape hatch. [laughter] CB: But to answer your question, "What do we do about it?", I think we've got to change governments. I don't think Ms. Horwath is the answer, and I think Hudak is a hard sell. He might not be a bad Premier but he's not a strong party leader, I don't think. But I think, my theory is that people objectively have lost the confidence or the right to the confidence the electorate, then you've got to change them. And the fact is I don't think we'd change them for worse government than what we've had. And I'm not anti-Dalton McGuinty. He's like most politicians, a very nice guy to meet him. But he made some horrible mistakes and somebody's got to pay for this. And they can't just pretend that it was like building three miles of highway that shouldn't have been built or something like that. There were massive wastages of money. S?: Just on a closing note, I would personally like to see some of them taken away in handcuffs and put in jail. I mean when someone wants to vote four seats, for $680 million of my tax dollars, I wanna see someone go to jail. CB: I must take issue with that and I'll tell you why. If you said, sentenced to community service, I could chin myself on that, but I have to tell you this, I have been in prison and it is a completely wasteful, ineffective, and unjust way of dealing with anyone, other than violent people. Violent people have to be segregated from society, I accept that but graft takers, they must be punished, but not by prison. That just costs and wastes more money and doesn't achieve anything useful. Let them work for free for the public for a while, or something like that. SP: Thank you, sir, for the question. Next person. Thank you. Yes, ma'am, your turn please. S?: I'd like to get your view on whether or not the Senate in Canada should be abolished? [laughter] CB: I don't think so. I'll tell you why. I mean, I may be slightly partial because I'm a member of the Upper House in Britain. [laughter] CB: And I must tell you, I mean, we're not paid anything. We don't put in expenses, I'm not paid one cent. And the only ones who are, are the one's who are actually in government, and they're paid in their capacity as members of the government or officials of the party, like the whip of the opposition or something, but not because they're members of that House. But when we have a debate in the House of Lords on a serious issue, the quality of debate is the highest I've ever seen or heard. And you have in that house, the former leading politicians, I mean, holders of the main offices; Lady Thatcher was a member and Harold MacMillan, Harold Wilson, and Lord Hume and so on. But you have the leaders of the main universities, the leaders of the great corporations, the leaders of the big unions, leading historians like Asa Briggs and Hugh Thomas, people from the arts, like Yehudi Menuhin and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and PD James. CB: And you get a tremendously high quality debate, very courteously conducted, and no one oversteps their time, not by one minute. And my arrangement was, I didn't feel it was my place to tell the British about their pensions and things like that, but I'd speak on foreign policy and alliance matters and I did, and I spoke. And we had the chiefs of the Defence staff, the former chiefs, they're all there, some of the leading clergy, the Chief Rabbi, the Archbishop of Canterbury and so on. And it's a wonderful debate. Now I think, I think the answer is not to abolish the Senate. I don't think the answer is an elected Senate because unless the House of Commons give up jurisdiction, no serious person would go through the rigmarole of an election to sit in a house that has as little influential as the Senate. CB: I think the answer is, to get better senators. I don't mean better senators than any particular individual but just in general. And some of them are very good, but in general, a higher quality of senator. And what I would suggest is, that you would expand it by 50 members at once, and you have an all party... Representatives of all the parties, meet and just devise a list of the 50 most distinguished people in this country, between the ages of 20 and 75, who aren't now in the Senate, or the House of Commons, and offer them a Senate seat, those 50, whoever they are, all plausible walks of life, and get us a better group of senators. Then people would pay more attention to them. And I think that's the way to do it. It's a rich country. Politically, I'm not that impressed with the House of Commons either, so I don't think the answer is to get rid of the other house, it's to make the other house better. SP: Thank you for the question, ma'am. Yes, sir. [applause] S?: Always a delight to spend... SP: Raise the mic if you would, sir. There we go. S?: I said always a delight to spend time with Conrad Black. CB: I'm privileged. S?: I wonder if you could share your thoughts about something that's in the headlines, these days particularly in light of you being a former media mogul, and that is this whole story of Mayor Ford, the Toronto Star, what do you see going on there? CB: Again, we've touched on this in the reception we had earlier and some of you will recall that when I took it upon myself, really, just because it was, I thought a funny thing to do, to give my advice on the election to the voters of Toronto from my then residence as guest of the great American people. [laughter] CB: I said that I thought a person who had said, as Robert Ford did of an alderman, "He has other fish to fry besides feathering his own nest, that anyone who would say such a malapropism was unfit for high public office." [laughter] CB: I mean, you can take it from Casey Stengel but not from the Mayor of Toronto or Yogi Berra. So, he wasn't my candidate and I think he was sort of like the embarrassing guest at a family Christmas party. But... [laughter] CB: But he was elected Mayor. I mean, he was elected Mayor, he's the Mayor, and I think that a lot of this has been a vendetta against him and I don't like it. And I think this business of these uncorroborated allegations and shopping around this video for $200,000, is a disgrace. It was an absolute disgrace. S?: If you were still editing the National Post... If you were still running the National Post and two of your reporters had said, "We have seen the video, we are not in possession of it, but we've seen it. It's the Mayor, he is smoking crack", what would you have done? CB: I'd say we can run the story, but you can't say for sure that he was smoking crack, and you have to ask him for a reply. You can't just run it without asking him for a response. But I certainly wouldn't have approved paying one cent to get the video. And if the Mayor is a cocaine user, it's a police matter. Well, they can subpoena anything they want, they can get what they want, the Crown Law Office will do it for them. And if that's what it is, that's where it belongs, but it doesn't belong in this shabby, endless, denigration of a man who rightfully holds his office, whether the majority of us in this room including myself, would vote for him or not, is beside the point. S?: If you had a choice, who would you vote for if you had a choice? CB: You mean of... Do you mean of the people who ran Mayor? S?: No, no. Next time... CB: Of the people mentioned, I'd be all for John Torrie, I'd be all for Karen Stintz, from what I know of her. I'd put those two first. [background voice] SP: Hang up, we're taking questions over here. We're taking questions over here, please. Yes, at the microphone please. S?: Yes, I would... CB: Go to a microphone, I'll take your question. Sorry. S?: Okay. I'd like to ask what your views are of North American Union and a corollary to it, would you like to be the benevolent emperor of that union? [laughter] Did you bring him tonight? That's a great storyline, you know? [laughter] CB: No, look, I think, I might be in favour of a Federal Union in Canada and the US. I think the Americans could have done it. When our dollar was at $0.65 and if they'd offered parity the way the west Germans did to the east Germans, and when they had a country and a system that functioned better than it does now, they might have been able to do it, but... And would have been a brilliant deal for them. They would have more than doubled the natural resources of their country, they would have added 33 million comparatively law-abiding people. And it just would have been a genius move for the Americans, but they didn't do it. CB: And by the way, I think they made a mistake not going farther than they have to get closer to the Latin Americans because in the end, the United States is going to have to be more involved with other countries in this hemisphere, to deal with the challenge of a China that's more developed and has so many people. And that to some degree, they've missed their opportunity. And I suggest that, as Steve would know it, towards the end of my book, but a Federal Union I don't think would be... I don't think they could make this country an offer that would give us a better life than we have as a country or as a population than we have now. And you flatter me with this last part of your question but I don't believe in emperors other than where they're established like Japan. I mean Napoleon was a hell of an emperor, but it didn't work in the end. Didn't it? [laughter] SP: Yes sir. S?: Once Barack Obama's second term is done, do you have in mind any particular people that would be good to run for either the Republicans or the Democrats to be their next President? CB: I assume that Hillary Clinton has a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. It was a remarkable act by Obama to pull the Clinton's party head from under them when he did in 2008. It was their party, and Bill and Hillary are not... It's not amateur night. They're hard ballers and he took their party right out from under them. And I assume she'll take it back, unless there's something seriously wrong with her health. On the Republican side, I assume that some of the people that would've made stronger candidates last year will come forward. Some of these governors, like the man in Wisconsin, and so on, look quite good, but I don't know enough about them but of the ones that are more visible, I assume Christie will run, I assume Jeb Bush might run, I do know him a bit, he's much, the most impressive of the Bushes. I mean, if the first two could be President, he would, I think, do a better job at it. [laughter] CB: And I assume Marco Rubio would run and... Those would be the most obvious ones, but it's conceivable to me that Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana, but his wife's already left him once, and then come back, and said she'd leave him again if he ran, so I... Mr. Nixon said, "I never respected a politician who couldn't control his wife", so... [laughter] SP: What about Governor Cuomo of New York for the Democrats, a possible presidential candidate? CB: Look, I'm kind of the wrong person to ask, Steve. I was for Mario Cuomo when he ran for Mayor against Ed Koch, I was never for him for Governor, he had three terms, he damn near bankrupted the state, and I don't particularly like this guy, I think he was a terrible Attorney General, hardly an improvement on Spitzer, who was a lunatic. Hillary would have my vote, if I had a vote on that one, if it was between those two. But he might make the race, he might, it's not for me to say he wouldn't make the race. SP: Yes, sir. S?: Mr. Black, thank you very much for a wonderful evening. Now, your emphasis has been on greatness and strategy and success. Well, perhaps, leaving aside W, do you sort of have Presidents in mind who really messed it up badly? What was it that was the big error they were making? And you also kind of described the United States as having fraud, a wonderful face and yet, there's a back story. And I'm wondering whether you think that back story, that stratagem has been creating problems for them, and possibly the world. Do you have comments on the failure, the error, and the danger, the peril, that the United States has often faced when it was making serious moves in difficult directions? CB: I think, on the first thing, I don't think there's been a President who was a bad man, as such. I mean, they've had some very mediocre Presidents and they had some people who couldn't do the job properly, but I don't think they were bad people. Now, they weren't saintly, some of them were slightly shabby, but not worse than that, and most of them were... I think most of them did their best, it's just sometimes, they couldn't do it. And then, especially in the period running up to the Civil War, the Democrats had this formula that they would protect slavery in the South, but avoided secessionism, so you could do that with a strong leader, like Andrew Jackson, but they got successively weaker Presidents after Polk, and it became essential to get people who had no record at all, like latterly, the elevation of judges in the US, so if they ever have to make a decision on abortion or something, you can't get them confirmed. And so you've got people who shouldn't have been President, like Millard Fillmore, he was the Vice President that succeeded Taylor, or Franklin Pierce, or James Buchanan, I mean they weren't good Presidents and they shouldn't have had that job. SP: You said Harrison was the worst ever. CB: No, the shortest ever. SP: No, not William Henry, the other one. CB: No, Benjamin Harrison wasn't the worst ever. No, I wouldn't say that, I'd say, probably Buchanan was. I promise you, Steve, I didn't say that Benjamin Harrison was the worst ever, I didn't think he was terribly good. SP: Least consequential, maybe? CB: One of them. One of the least consequential, yeah, but that was in the time when it didn't really matter who the President was. Between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, it didn't really matter. The President didn't do anything, there was nothing for him to do. But on this business of America, I wanna be careful on this, I do not... I mean, the moral quality of America, that part of what you asked me... I don't mean to denigrate that country as a moral entity, I think most Americans are decent people who love their country and work hard, and they're good people. And if I may say, I know the country well. We own newspapers in 30 states and I've been in almost all the states at one time and I know a great many Americans, many prominent ones, but many very ordinary ones. It is justly and deservedly, the great nationality that it is. CB: But I think there is this weakness in the United States, or at least this tendency that I think is sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness, to create an image and put an immense and imposing facade over things that are banal or even slightly contemptible. And so, they take terribly ordinary people and suddenly magnify them up to be great stars. The American star system is terribly abused. It's magnificent entertainment, but I think Hollywood and everything that's come since, really had its origins in Jefferson's genius as a polemicist. And I don't mean to say the whole country is fraudulent, of course it isn't. I think my conclusion of the next to the last chapter in this book was, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it completed a rise in just 200 years, that was without the slightest parallel or precedent in the history of the world. That wasn't a fraud, That was the real thing. But there is this tendency to put a kind of fraudulent patina on a great deal of American life, and it devalues it. It's a tasteless and vulgar thing but you have to take it as it is. It's their country, and they run it the way they want to run it. SP: Just to let everybody know in line, thank you for question, sir. I'd love to get through everybody who's in line right now. We're on a bit of a timeline right now, so economical questions, economical answers and we'll go through everybody in the line. [chuckle] S?: Okay. I'll keep it short. In your remarks on President Nixon, you said that his neuroticism mitigated but did not override his greatness but you contrast the legacy of President Nixon to that of Ronald Regan, the great communicator, whose achievements maybe are of equivalence to those of Nixon, but whose communication skills have left him with sort of this historical image of greatness. So, to what extent is the greatness of a modern President defined not by his strong character or skill as a diplomat or strategist, but by his ability to resonate emotionally with his public? CB: By the way, Mr. Nixon, at his best, was a very good speaker, too, and I think that the expression "great communicator" was really invented by Democrats grudgingly acknowledging that Regan was persuasive. In fact, Regan was a hypnotic public speaker. He was a great, great orator. You could get alpine-sized goosebumps listening to him, no matter how cynical you were. He was a wonderful, wonderful speaker. He could talk anybody into anything. He was a great, but benign demagogue. And I think he was a great President because he ended the Cold War and created 18 million jobs. It wasn't because he was a great speaker. CB: That got him in as President and helped him keep the leadership of the country. I mean, keep him at the head of public opinion. Part of the premise of your question I would not agree with, but certainly it helps to be very capable at putting your message across but it isn't essential. I mean, Truman and Eisenhower weren't good speakers. They were good writers, by the way, but they weren't good speakers, but they were effective Presidents and the people followed them. But Roosevelt, Roosevelt had everything. He was a wonderful speaker and a great President. So, it's not an either or thing. It just helps if you speak well. Mr. Nixon's best speeches, like the silent majority, where he ended saying, "North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. No power on earth can do that, except the United States", it was a great speech, it was a very great speech. SP: Thank you. Next, please. S?: I'm gonna surprise you a little and say that my experience directly with Argus and a few of the others goes back actually before your early days. For instance, I popped in several times and had quite a good reception around the corner at Toronto Street in the days of Edmondson and Swindon. I'm sure you'll know them... CB: Know them well. Very fine men. S?: And around the corner, John McDougald and Wallace McCutcheon, in their hay day, Wallace McCutcheon was very brief. He was promoted to the Senate and I think he only probably lasted not much over a year there before he had a very early death, and then was followed by one of the senior colleagues of your father, Colonel Peters... SP: Forgive me, sir. Sir, excuse me. Could I nudge you towards the question? We have a couple of people who are behind. S?: Okay. Well, actually, it wasn't to make a question, it was to make it pretty easy for you because of the fact that you've got a few things that you'd like to comment on because I could go on for another couple of minutes in the background that would be of real interest to you, it would make it easy if you've got a few things that you'd like to comment on. CB: Well, look, on the people you mentioned, I knew all of those and it was my honour to succeed John A. McDougald as the Chairman of the company. Actually, the President, Nelson Davis was the Chairman, briefly. And Harry Swindon, Harry Edmondson... Jimmy Swindon, I should say, and Harry, they were very fine men, and it was a good company and it remained a good company all the time that I was there. Unfortunately, and we are not here to discuss this, but my opponents paid themselves a scandalous amount of money to run it completely into the ground. And, but we'll see if we can't retrieve the name and do something with it, but I thank you for taking me back to another era and naming people that I remember with fondness and respect. They were very kind to me in the early days of my career. SP: Would you like to run a company again? CB: Not a public one. [laughter] CB: But we took Argus private and everyone went out happily and got a nice profit on the way out. By the way, Wallace McCutcheon stayed as a Senator longer but he was only one year in the Cabinet but he ceased to be a member of the Cabinet because Mr. Diefenbaker's government was defeated. But he ran for the leadership in 1967 against Robert Stanfield and John Diefenbaker. SP: Thank you. Gentleman in the red. S?: Hello, as you know, 2013 marks the continuing bi-centennial of the war of 1812, which many people don't know lasted until Christmas Eve 1814. Obviously, William Henry Harrison was a general in the northwest during that war. I just wanna know, from your perspective, if you know, we say it ended in a tie or at least a Canadian win, as we hope. What were the effects for the Americans, did they win? Did they gain a new sense of identity by defeating the strength of the British Empire? SP: Do you wanna take issue with his saying that it ended in December 14, given that Andrew Jackson won a battle in New Orleans... S?: The treaty was signed on that... SP: The treaty was signed but the war didn't end. But okay, we get your point. CB: He's right, the war was over, but look, the Americans claim that, and Albert Gallatin, in particular, led the peace delegation at the conference of Ghent, said that America proved its point, that it had held its own against what was emerging, as the Napoleonic Era ended the greatest power in the world, the British Empire. You can make that point, but at the beginning of the war, Jefferson wrote to General, to Colonel Duane, and said, "Taking Canada is a mere matter of marching." Well, it's fine, they never quite made the march, did they? [chuckle] CB: And they tried three years in a row, and they burned this town down, parts of it, but then we burned Buffalo, we let the Indians, the Native people, burn Buffalo down, and then we burned Washington down. And Mrs. Dolly Madison fled with Gilbert Stewart's painting of George Washington under her arm, and the President had to flee on foot because his horse threw his shit. And this is not the best remembered element of American history. I think that in fact, the British and Canadians did damn well to hold the borders of this country. Jackson defeated the Duke of Wellington's brother-in-law at New Orleans after the war ended, but that had nothing to do with us. Our generals up here, Brock and so forth, wouldn't have conducted that battle but Pakenham did. But the Americans proved that they were a serious country and had to be taken seriously. CB: But I don't think that was any more than we proved here that this border was not so easy to cross and occupy the other side, but any more than it had been in the days of New France under Champlain and Frontenac, or during the American Revolution under Sir Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester. This country has never been conquered any more than the United States has. We can all be proud of it, but it was a draw. I'll tell you this though, the Americans were lucky that they got that peace, because if they hadn't, then we would have had the Duke of Wellington and his Peninsular Army, the Army of Waterloo here in Canada. The Royal Navy could've got them here in one month, they wouldn't have conquered America, but they would have knocked General Jackson and General Harrison, and Winfield Scott and the rest of them for a... To put it in cricket terms, a boundary. S?: I'm conscious of time, but I would pause it since the battle of Waterloo happened six months later, it was fortunate for the British that they gained peace in Ghent on December 24th, because otherwise, they would have seen their entire army over in the Americas, when Napoleon was knocking on their door. CB: I like this guy. Okay, last question please. [laughter] CB: Knows his stuff, we like that. Last question of the night, thank you. S?: I'm not nearly that sophisticated. [chuckle] I'd like you to just comment on the question I'm about to ask or the opinion, and it relates to Canadian and US voter population. And in Canada, while it's admirable that we can have more than one or two political parties, often our votes are diluted and at any given time, one-third of the population is really supportive of whoever is in charge, therefore making it difficult on provincial and federal level to get things done, important policies passed et cetera, versus the US system of just two parties in charge. And arguably, at any given time, at least half of the population is in support of any policies that the government proposes. What are you're thoughts on the way Canada's being run now? CB: I think a two-party system is a better system, but you can't legislate that, you know. You've gotta let it happen. I think we're actually moving towards it. I think for the Bloc Quebecois to have been eliminated in favour of the NDP is a move in that direction. It may not seem like it, but it was, because it did eliminate one of the four parties, essentially. It's not for me to say whether the Liberals and the NDP should merge or not, or whether the Liberals come back to being the official opposition. There might be a temptation for a realignment of it, between the centre right and centre left party. I think that would be the best thing to do, if it could be done, but you'll just have to see if the desire to win is strong enough for some of these groups to actually fold up their party the way the Reform Party finally did. They made their gesture and they couldn't win an election, but they certainly prevented the Conservative... They taught the Conservative Party something of a lesson I think and effectively, believe veterans of the Reform Movement are running the Conservative Party now. But there's this... And by the way, the Americans have had their share of, to use Steven's favourite word, fisciferous politics. [laughter] CB: Ross Perot cost George H. W. Bush the election in favour of Clinton. I mean, they have third parties too sometimes. They don't tend to last but they pop up from time to time. I think that's a better arrangement if you can do it. There is a danger in Britain of the third party becoming stronger than it has been for a long time. Not the Liberals, I think the Lib-Dems are not doing well, but right now, you've got a four-party system there and it does tend to destabilize things. We don't wanna get like Italy or something, you've just got too many of these parties. S?: Thank you, I appreciate that. SP: It's been a memorable night. I know you all wanna join me in thanking Conrad Black for coming here this evening. [applause] SP: Thank you very much. CB: Thank you. SP: Most enjoyable.