Darren Calabrese, The Canadian Press/AP Photo
Conrad Black walks past the media while arriving for his hearing at the Ontario Securities Commission in Toronto, October 10, 2014.
I’ve been doing these columns all year, but starting in January, I’ll be doing them no more: I’m going solo with a Substack and podcast called “Rickipedia.” One more errand to attend to first, however. Back in April, I wrote about my adventures at the home of venture capital magnate Marc Andreessen, reporting his gratitude that Oxycontin exists to keep the rabble in line. I promised it as Part One of a three-part series on “billionaires I have known.” Forthwith: Part Two.
For this one, I cheat a bit. I never actually met the former newspaper owner Conrad Black in the flesh. I was in New York, sitting at a table in CNN’s studios for a July 2016 episode of Fareed Zakaria GPS with two other historians, for a panel on “what will history tell us about what we can expect” at Donald Trump’s upcoming nominating convention. “Will there be violent protests, like 1968 … floor fights, like 1952?” (According to cable news, adjudicating whether some present event is or is not exactly like some past event is why the profession of history exists.) Black appeared on-screen from Toronto, on a big monitor set up as if he were sitting beside us.
Senior fellows from the Institute for Blah Blah Blah and the Center for Yack Yack Yack gave their takes on an attempted coup attempt in Turkey and a Bastille Day terrorist attack in France; then Zakaria recorded his irritation at a recent suggestion of Newt Gingrich’s to ask every Muslim in the U.S. if they believed in Sharia law, and, if they said yes, strip them of citizenship and deport them: “Look, it is a dangerous and complicated world out there. Let’s hope that over the next few days in Cleveland, during the Republican National Convention, we’ll hear from some people who actually understand that complexity and can stop the pandering and bigotry, and get serious …”
Oh, for those hopeful days of yore.
But back to our time capsule. “As the saying goes, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes,” said Zakaria. “So, on those rhythms of history, our distinguished historians …”
Zakaria asked Sean Wilentz of Princeton if there was any precedent for Trump. He laughingly observed, “We’ve never had a reality TV mogul run for the presidency,” though he saw some parallels in the “degree of racial and ethnic discord” brought to the 1968 campaign by George Wallace. Then me, in my wedding suit. Zakaria wanted to know if there was an analogy with Barry Goldwater in 1964, but I instead pointed out a contrast: The Republican establishment now “have proven themselves a more craven organization than they were in 1964. In 1964, no one spoke on Goldwater’s behalf in the general election, except Richard Nixon, because he, kind of, calculated that the Goldwater forces had taken over the party. Here, we see Republicans lining up, like joining the bandwagon. He’s the guy with the power, and we’re going to follow the power.”
This was almost but not quite right. If you know my book Before the Storm, you might recall that right-wing activists won Goldwater the nomination with norm-breaking stealth; then in the general election, almost no party leaders fully backed him, many covertly supporting President Lyndon Johnson or denouncing Goldwater outright as a dangerous extremist. Forgiving the exaggeration, my point was accurate enough: Back then, the man who would give us Watergate was the exception when it came to craven Republican power-lust. By 2016, he was the norm.
Conrad Black would not have it. At my and Wilentz’s interpretation, he was livid.
Out of respect for the life peerage which he forfeited his Canadian citizenship to receive in 2001, I suppose I ought to refer to him by his formal title: the Right Honorable Lord Baron Black of Crossharbour. Born in 1944 to an industrial magnate and the granddaughter of the co-owner of the London Telegraph, after an academic career that included two expulsions (for selling stolen exams and for insubordination) and one flunking-out, Black took control of his father’s holding company in 1978, sold off all its non-newspaper holdings, and fashioned himself a press baron. He became increasingly conservative, and though he only officially joined the Catholic Church in 1986, according to Wikipedia, “He had a dispensation to receive the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, from Cardinals Léger and Carter, starting in 1974.” I have no idea what that means, but I doubt such an option is available to those who don’t own newspapers. Pope John Paul II invested him as a Knight Commander for the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great, an honor reserved for “gentlemen of proven loyalty to the Holy See who, by reason of their nobility of birth and the renown of their deeds or the degree of their munificence, are deemed worthy to be honored by a public expression of esteem on the order of the Holy See”; ditto.
By then, Black’s company Hollinger International owned some 300 newspapers, second-most in the English-language world, including The Jerusalem Post, the London Daily Telegraph, and his own creation, Canada’s National Post, where he appointed himself star columnist. He also bought the Chicago Sun-Times, making the op-ed pages of both of my Democratic hometown’s daily newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, vectors for the Republican right. He published many books. According to the BBC, he has been “described as everything from ‘very arrogant’ to a ‘bombastic megalomaniac’ … In political debate or business, he liked to eat his many rivals for breakfast.”
It delighted me to read all that just now, being one of those rivals, if not in business then in political debate. For this panel was also, as I’ll be explaining later, something of a rematch between us, from a fight he started. So I was eager to give this ridiculous man his comeuppance.
YOU HAVE TO PAY TO WATCH, but here’s the transcript for free. Zakaria, addressing Lord Black as “a conservative and supporter of the Republican establishment,” asked if he could “imagine this all working well.” Black responded, first by identifying himself as “bipartisan in American matters” and “a very admiring, though not uncritically so, biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt” and “not that conservative,” framing his interlocutors as frothing partisans by contrast. It was his last smart rhetorical move.
He grew brittle: “I would say that the Republicans shouldn’t necessarily be accused of cravenness for attempting to support their apparent nominee. Obviously, I think, if Trump says completely outlandish things, replicating some of the ill-considered reflections he’s had up to now, then there will be a lot of problems. But I don’t think we should chastise that party for not simply throwing their candidate out like a J Cloth …”
[J Cloth: proper noun, 1. proper name for cleaning tissue brand. 2. (Canadian) generic name for cleansing tissue. “Since 1966, Canadians have known and trusted J Cloth … in the bathroom, laundry room, garage, garden, beyond—J Cloth is there.” See: Kleenex.]
“… and delivering a huge majority to the other side.”
Zakaria nodded and turned to Wilentz’s Princeton colleague Nell Irvin Painter, one of America’s great historians of racism, and asked if she saw useful parallels with the Southern “Dixiecrats” who walked out of the 1948 Democratic convention to run their own, segregationist candidates after Harry Truman’s party passed a platform endorsing civil rights; she did. Racial backlash was “the template … I don’t think we would have Donald Trump without President Barack Obama.”
Zakaria endeavored to introduce a new subject—“what happens to conservatism after Trump”—but Lord Black wasn’t done. “Well, first of all,” he pronounced indignantly, “we’re going too far, despite his infelicitous statements at times, in assimilating him to racists like George Wallace … Donald Trump has been an equal-opportunity employer … I think we have to make a distinction between grievances, however demagogically or flamboyantly presented, about illegal immigration, and racism in the sense of describing or disparaging anyone who isn’t …”
As he continued dribbling into incoherence, I am proud to say I interjected.
“Mr. Black, Trump has proposed the largest ethnic cleansing in the history of humankind. This isn’t just the cherry on top, this is the whole sundae. It’s a colossal human rights obscenity.”
(A chyron appeared onscreen: “Perlstein: Trump has proposed the largest ethnic cleansing in the history of humankind.” Sometimes I love my job so very much.)
“He’s, he’s—I’m not defending it.”
“You just did.”
“I think his comments about expelling illegal—I did not, I said you make a distinction between segregating Black and white Americans and citizens”—sputtering, almost shouting—“and opposing the illegal entry of 12 million people into the country. That’s what I said”—his eyes took on a steely squint—“and I don’t wish to be misrepresented … That doesn’t mean I whitewash what he did, or what he says …”
I was not able to follow up with the point that a Black person interposing their body into a white space in Alabama was no more or less illegal in 1963 than a Mexican one walking over a border to fill a job opening in Arizona, so there really is little distinction to make. Zakaria directed Black back to his original query about Trump and conservatism, to which he replied, “I just don’t understand why MoveOn.org and these far-left groups are so hostile to Trump, he’s the closest thing they’ve had to a Rockefeller Republican,” knowing I need not utter another word to prevail in the weird battle he had started between us all the way back in 2008, when I had just published my book about Richard Nixon and he was so angry at a positive review it received in one of his newspapers that he responded to it from prison …
OH, RIGHT, THAT. I FEAR I HAVE buried the lede: This billionaire was also a felon.
After the last commercial break, Zakaria said, “Conrad, I have to ask you, since it is in the news, the issue of whether the American criminal justice system is unfair”—this was in the thick of the fourth year of Black Lives Matter—“do you find yourself more sympathetic to some of the views of the people who say the criminal justice system is unfair?”
At that, the billionaire broke out in hosannas for a socialist: “Yes, I thought Bernie Sanders was the best of the candidates on that issue, and I am deeply disappointed that the Republicans are so relaxed upon it … It is an evil, rotten system, and it is a cancer in this country, and it’s going to morally destroy the country if you don’t do something about it.”
I wonder that I didn’t break out laughing with the camera on me. I certainly laughed rewatching it today.
In 1996, Black’s Hollinger International got itself listed on the New York Stock Exchange. An ill-starred decision, according to a retrospective in the Toronto Star: Going public meant “exposing Black’s empire to America’s more rigorous regulatory regime and its more aggressive institutional shareholders.” One of those shareholders, the investment firm Tweedy, Browne, grew suspicious about questionable compensation practices. That led to an investigation revealing how Black had looted as much as $51.8 million from his shareholders, via “non-compete agreements” and “management fees” laundered through a tiny weekly community newspaper in Mammoth Lakes, California, population 7,093, which Black apparently purchased for the purpose. In one cinematic detail, in 2005, with federal investigators hot on his tail, Black was caught in security footage absconding with 13 boxes of records from his Toronto office.
Six months later, the Baron of Crossharbour was charged with eight counts of fraud. He served 37 months in prison. He spent some considerable portion of that time, apparently, thinking about little ol’ me, burning with resentment that I had stolen something that properly belonged to him: attention as a respected interpreter of Richard M. Nixon.
MY BOOK NIXONLAND CAME OUT in May of 2008. It received a review that month in the New York Sun, a venerable newspaper published between 1830 and 1950 and relaunched in October of 2001 by a group of conservative investors, including Black. The Sun’s reviewer, Christopher Willcox, was no hack up in some Brooklyn garret but the retired editor in chief of Reader’s Digest, the most widely circulated magazine in the world, with some 49 international editions. The piece was not uncritical (“Like most liberals, Mr. Perlstein labors under the misapprehension that Nixon was a political conservative”: I didn’t say that in the book, even if I believe it to be so now), but also was somewhat kind (“interesting and even engrossing … remarkable research”).
And Conrad Black was not having that—not for one instant. From prison, he apparently ordered his very own newspaper to publish a second review: his own. Freedom of the press, like they say, ultimately belongs to he who owns the press.
You see, Black had published his own, fawning Nixon book during his incarceration, in 2007. Perhaps between sets in the prison weight room, he set down for poor benighted Sun readers what was what:
There has been a good deal of comment on “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein, a pastiche of journalistic highlights of the tumultuous years between Lyndon Johnson’s immense landslide over Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Richard Nixon’s comparable burial of George McGovern in 1972. The country effectively rejected the right for the center-left, and then the left for the center-right, similar responses, bracketing the heavy Vietnam involvement.
Does that last sentence make any sense? I leave that to the reader to judge. I can confidently say, though, that Black piled up factual error after factual error. He lists a number of biographical signposts he claims are “unexplained and almost unmentioned” in my book, which suggests he missed its first two chapters. “Nixon receives no recognition at all for the key role he played in disposing of Senator McCarthy”; perhaps a censorial guard ripped out the first two pages of Chapter Three. Then: “almost no credit from Mr. Perlstein for the greatest political comeback in U.S. history”; remarkable how he managed to miss the whole point of pages 95 through 354. Etc.
He concludes, “Nixon is portrayed as a mutant who snuck into the White House and remained there until the Washington Post, New York Times, and CBS pulled back his shower curtain and revealed his cloven feet.” Problem being that Nixon “remained there” until 1974. My book ends in 1972.
Click for the first review here, via the Wayback Machine, and here for the second. This will save you from having to “join” the Sun to read them either at the $250 “Sun Reader” level or $2,500 as a “Sun Founder.” (The Sun shuttered again, and was refounded in 2022.) A Sun Founder membership fetches you “Weekly briefings from senior editorial staff, monthly invitations to exclusive VIP events, and limited-edition signed memorabilia,” [sic]. Money makes this world go ’round; in the world of vanity right-wing newspapers, and to an excruciating degree, in every other world as well.
The world of media: I mean, why does someone like this get to go on TV and get presented as an authority, other than because of the absurd elite theory that someone must be smart because they are rich?
And, of course, the world of politics. I’m not sure, ontologically speaking, whether the Right Honorable Lord Baron Black of Crossharbour, Commander for the Pontifical Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great, also still must also bear “felon” as part of his title, because, in 2019, Donald Trump pardoned him for his crimes—which “has not,” as Gabriel Schoenfeld observed in The Bulwark, “deterred Black from incessantly smearing American criminal justice as ‘a fascist system’ that is ‘frequently and largely evil,’ with the additional ugly amplification that the prosecutors who sent him to prison were ‘Nazis.’”
Perhaps Trump did it because he admired how Black handled his archive boxes. Or maybe, just maybe, because he established himself for all time as one of the world’s great biographers with his 11th book, entitled Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other, published in 2018, which an Amazon reviewer who goes by “GG” judges “the best Trump book so far. The author explains why President Trump’s business career prepared him so well to be president. Black … is really and truly a gifted writer with a keen ability to link cause and effect.”
Next time: We study the link between cause and effect in the case of my last billionaire encounter, a man who stands all canons of ordinary accountability on their head in a manner that is breathtaking to behold.
