Oliver's Twist

by Craig Oliver

  Champ was a famously hard worker, but he had a habit of disappearing on assignments, which always worried the news management. After one AWOL episode, Cameron ordered me to fire Champ. Reluctant to do so, I summoned him to a meeting with Cameron and me, at which Champ offered an unexpected alibi: He had never left the office. He was at the table of a week-long poker game in the cavernous basement of the CTV headquarters at CFTO and had been available to the assignment desk at a moment’s notice. Cameron docked Champ a week’s pay and told him he did not want to see him in his office again. “At these prices, I can’t afford to be here,” Champ declared, sweeping out the door.

  We were far more seriously concerned, however, when we lost touch with Champ in the chaos surrounding the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Until a few days before North Vietnamese forces had overrun the city, Champ was filing regularly. His sudden silence was ominous; we knew many had died in the final American retreat. There was relief when Associated Press sent out a wire photo of a desperate crowd of Vietnamese trying to board a U.S. embassy bus to the airport. At the door of the bus, struggling to keep the mob at bay, were Henry Champ and a U.S. marine. Champ was fending off a crush of people attempting to climb aboard and likely topple the overloaded vehicle; the scene was frenzied and no doubt dangerous. We had every expectation that Champ had made it.

  The critics of commercial television always fear that sponsors will interfere with news coverage or attempt to influence it in some way. In all my years at the private network, I experienced only one attempt to do so, and it happened early in my tenure as assistant director of the news service.

  One of my responsibilities was the public affairs show W-5. In mid-1973, OPEC imposed an international oil embargo and energy prices escalated alarmingly. North American oil suppliers were accused of taking advantage of the shortages by jacking up prices more than necessary. To improve their image with a skeptical public, the oil companies launched a multi-million-dollar advertising campaign of which CTV was a major benefactor. The Big Oil ads presented a series of so-called facts in defence of their pricing practices. At the same time, W-5 produced a carefully researched documentary laying bare the many falsehoods at the core of the slick campaign.

  Before the item could be broadcast, management, in the person of Tom Gould, killed it on the grounds that it was libellous. I protested, going so far as to obtain a written opinion from the network’s own lawyers that the story was acceptable for broadcast. No dice; again, a few senior executives refused to let the item run while the W-5 writers cried foul. I found myself caught between intransigent management and a staff in revolt. I had either to lead or to step aside—the latter course ensuring that I’d be forever branded an ethical coward. I refused to axe the piece and asked for a meeting with Murray Chercover, the network president. My immediate boss, Cameron, was off on a binge and not to be found.

  By now the Toronto newspapers were picking up rumours, and management likely considered firing me for insubordination. But that was not an option after a number of high-profile colleagues lined up behind the cause of editorial freedom. To my surprise, senior correspondent Jack McGaw, host Carole Taylor, and producer Mike Maclear all threatened to quit if I was thrown overboard.

  Both sides faced off at an uncomfortable meeting in Chercover’s office. Chercover was nervous, as he always was when confronting a tough decision. He loved the glamour of the television business, but he hated having to deal with intractable issues, including squabbles among his employees. I made my case, but failed to consider the matter strategically. In my inexperience, I had left no room for compromise or a face-saving escape route for either party.

  Chercover came down on the side of the W-5 documentary, which ran unedited the next Sunday. He had done the right thing, backing his editorial staff over his advertising sales department, and the ads never reappeared. But I knew there would be fallout from our stand on principle, and it was not long coming. A reorganization of the news department was announced soon after: Don Cameron, who had surfaced in time for the session in Chercover’s office, was demoted a notch. I was banished to the snows of faraway Ottawa. My superiors decided Ottawa bureau chief Bruce Phillips needed support in managing his three-person operation on Parliament Hill. Apparently, I was expected to resign after the humiliation of being busted to what was in essence a bookkeeping job. Cameron reminded me that pride cometh before a fall, and we decided to hang in together and scheme for his return to power rather than quit the field.

  In fact, the timing was propitious. Being a department manager had lost its appeal and I saw in Ottawa a chance to return to my first love, political reporting. On the personal front, it was likewise time for a change. The woman I had been living with in Toronto took her leave while I was on a northern canoe trip, cleaning out the apartment but forgetting her guitar. When I returned, I put the instrument in the fireplace, finished the last of the rum in my backpack, and fell asleep in my Arctic bedroll to the sounds of snapping guitar strings.

  In the winter of 1974, I pointed my rusting Volkswagen Beetle in the direction of Ottawa, where I was not wanted nor much needed. Bruce Phillips certainly felt that way. For years, he had been one of the country’s outstanding print reporters and television commentators. He had a well-tuned critical mind and ample credibility with viewers. But organizational skills and respect for deadlines were not in his makeup. He was not lazy; he simply believed there were better things to do with his life— playing golf, for instance—than work fourteen hours a day.

  His three Ottawa reporters—Gail Scott, Mike McCourt, and Eric Malling—were experienced pros. During my stint in CTV management, I had hired the tenacious Malling from the Toronto Star. Scott, to the network’s credit, was the first female network correspondent on Parliament Hill. McCourt’s skills eventually took him to ABC as a foreign correspondent. All three were frustrated by the daily uncertainty of not knowing who would be covering what story or when. The assignment desk in Toronto was similarly exasperated by the bureau’s unpredictability and disarray. So I seized the opportunity to take charge or at least bring some order to the chaos. I also broadened the loose mandate I had been granted to get myself back into political reporting and connect with the men and women who made things happen in those exciting years. The Liberals had regained their majority the previous June and appeared to have the momentum and talent to accomplish great things.

  Bruce Phillips and I soon came into conflict over who should have final say on what we would file for the evening’s national news broadcast. Phillips’s friends and contacts were largely drawn from the business community and the Conservative Party. I felt the focus should be on the Liberals who were, after all, the folks in power. One of our disputes concerning coverage became so heated that he invited me to the parking lot to settle the matter. He was the bigger man, but I had been competing in marathons and believed that if all else failed, I could outrun him. Usually we managed to compromise, mediated by a Scotch or two.

  As the months passed, a factor in my favour was Phillips’s frequent absence; he had almost a second career as a board member and then president of the prestigious Royal Ottawa Golf Club. When at the club, he left instructions with his secretary for any callers from the Toronto office to be told he was in a meeting and would call back. He often did so from the fairway. Increasingly I made the decisions about what stories would be covered and by whom (including a few I snagged for myself), and when it became clear that head office was satisfied with the on-air results, Phillips was content to enjoy the credit as bureau chief.

  In those days, before press gallery members had offices off Parliament Hill, everyone worked together in a crowded, smoky room on the third floor of the Centre Block. It had been the “hot room” for generations of parliamentary reporters whose photos, dating back to the nineteenth century, adorned the walls. Since we worked cheek by jowl, everyone knew what everyone else was saying, rendering the media’s coverage of the Hill even more uniform than today. Reporters who had not bo
thered to cover certain events often borrowed others’ “dupes,” carbon copies of filed stories. Sometimes they stole them out of the trash if colleagues wouldn’t hand them over.

  We had a blind pig, an illegal bar, and when the filing was done for the day, the cry went out for Scotch and beer, which gallery staffers hurried to us at twenty-five cents a pop. It was a zoo of a place. Here the rise and fall of politicians was decided and agreed upon, or so we believed. There were critical opinions freely exchanged, occasional trysts in the backroom, and now and then fistfights between competing newspapermen. The Toronto Star was an influential voice during this time, with John Honderich serving as its Ottawa bureau chief, and Richard Gwyn’s column attracting an avid readership among those seeking a glimpse into the latest thinking of Liberal power players.

  Members of the Cabinet, and even the prime minister, sometimes visited the hot room. Plenty of Opposition members wandered up from the Commons chamber just below, joining reporters for drinks and the indiscreet trading of rumours and secrets about friends and enemies. There was a famous incident involving one of Diefenbaker’s ministers, an over-the-hill ladies’ man who had been denying for weeks that he had had an affair with Gerda Munsinger, the German-born prostitute and suspected East German spy. One of the reporters showed another minister, George Hees, a picture of the woman naked and asked if he thought it had been doctored. “The eyes are wrong,” he said, “but everything else is right.” What was said and done in the hot room was off the record, reflecting a cozy relationship between reporters and those they covered. Today such camaraderie is no more than a distant memory, which is just as well in many respects, but it was the norm when I arrived.

  One of my first calls was to a lifelong friend from British Columbia, Iona Campagnolo. We had grown up together in Prince Rupert and at one time I had dated her sister. Iona had worked her way up the political hierarchy from school board to city hall to national politics, winning a federal seat in our hometown riding of Skeena. By the time I landed in Ottawa, she was an admired member of the Trudeau Cabinet and a rising star in the Liberal Party. Trudeau took advantage of her popularity by making her a Cabinet minister shortly after the 1974 victory.

  Being a woman in politics is difficult at the best of times, but Iona was also strikingly beautiful and unmarried, which caused no end of gossip and speculation. Trudeau could do all the dating he wanted as a single man, but in those days the same standard did not apply to female public figures. Iona needed a tame and easily explained escort for various social events, and I was pleased to fill the role. We were never romantically involved; then as now, we enjoyed a friendship grounded in mutual trust and loyalty.

  Our relationship gave me an entree into the political and bureaucratic corridors of power that I could never have achieved on my own. I was introduced to Cabinet ministers, made personal friends among senior mandarins, and above all, enjoyed frequent contact with Pierre Trudeau. We discovered a mutual passion for paddling and the North, and he later included me among his guests at official and unofficial functions.

  The city’s social scene was energized by any event Trudeau attended, although the most coveted invitation, with or without him present, was dinner at Allan Gotlieb’s. A deputy minister and later undersecretary at External Affairs, Gotlieb and his wife, Sondra, had made of their home a sort of intellectual salon, and the city’s political and bureaucratic elite routinely gathered there. My life in those days was a blur of cocktail parties hosted by the Gotliebs and others, dates with women who worked for Cabinet ministers, and endless hours at the office.

  In the process of becoming an Ottawa insider, I inevitably compromised myself. It was a delicate balancing act to broadcast a hard-hitting story on the government’s failures one evening and then face the principals at a cozy dinner party the next. In time, I reached a stage where I knew too many things that could not be reported because I had learned them in confidential circumstances. This made me increasingly uncomfortable, especially in the company of two or three Cabinet members who chatted freely about Cabinet affairs, heedless of my presence. More than once a minister who was having difficulty getting Trudeau’s attention asked me to intervene with “the boss.” I attempted it only once. Trudeau himself was discretion personified and never divulged a crumb of newsworthy material, even as we shared canoeing adventures on some of the country’s more treacherous rivers. Perhaps that too was compromising, though I have no regrets about time spent in that extraordinary man’s presence.

  In half a century of covering national politics, I have often speculated about the nature of charisma. Politicians either have it or they do not. It cannot be learned but it can be burnished. It is the flame that draws us to individuals whose causes may be good or evil.

  Charisma is not defined by gender. Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Eva Perón, even Golda Meir, had it; so too do Kim Campbell, Belinda Stronach, and Iona Campagnolo. Nor is it necessarily connected to physical appearance. Think of the wizened Albert Schweitzer; Charles de Gaulle, with a nose that earned him the nickname “Cyrano”; Winston Churchill, a dumpy gnome; or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, helpless in a wheelchair. Charisma asks for discernible intelligence and a generous spirit, both traits exhibited by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Barack Obama. Though sometimes attached and Preston Manning missed out. Brian Mulroney possessed it briefly; Stephen Harper remains a charismatic in waiting.

  In my experience, charisma comprises an absolute certainty about oneself and an aura of power held in reserve. It is as old as the mysticism of the medieval sorcerer and as alluring as any siren. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was Canada’s only truly charismatic leader. He never understood why he was so blessed and once told me he never so much as wanted to lead a Boy Scout troop. But he knew he had charisma and he used it.

  Trudeau was not one to allow close relationships with men or women, and his own sons often found him distant. He kept himself aloof and did not show his cards until others had revealed themselves and their intentions. Above all, he valued his privacy and believed others must feel the same. When one of his most admired Cabinet ministers, Don Macdonald, was in emotional pain over his wife’s cancer, Trudeau said nothing. Macdonald feared that his circumstances might affect his work and wanted Trudeau to understand. A colleague asked if I would raise the issue with the PM and solicit a few words of support for Macdonald. Trudeau declined to offer them, regarding any gesture as a gross interference in the man’s most personal affairs.

  He expressed similar sentiments to me after the death of Terry Fox, a national hero who attempted to run coast-to-coast in aid of cancer research. Although Trudeau greatly admired Fox’s bravery and determination, he was reluctant to participate in a special CTV fundraising broadcast. I encouraged him to recognize how Fox’s odyssey had captured the nation’s heart. He protested that he would simply appear insincere, as if pandering to public opinion and exploiting a young man’s tragic demise. I argued that if he expressed his genuine feelings, he would give voice to the nation’s sentiments and be appreciated, not condemned, for doing so. In the end he relented, but not happily.

  Trudeau’s discomfort with open displays of emotion was well-known and perhaps he most feared any spill of personal feeling. There was a revealing moment during one election campaign stop in Newfoundland. The advance man took Trudeau on an unscheduled visit to a community centre for children with mental and physical handicaps. The prime minister was visibly moved, even close to tears, as he circulated among the stricken but cheerful kids. He made a graceful-enough tour and exit, but in the parking lot afterwards, he turned on the aide in a fury, “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

  A complex childhood, caught between a flamboyant, risktaking father and a stern, somewhat disapproving mother, plus a Jesuit education, no doubt formed his essential character. An amateur psychologist might see Trudeau’s life as a struggle between two contradictory natures battling to dominate his psyche. As a young man, Trudeau had been hopelessly smitten with a Montreal wo
man who was his intellectual equal, but the relationship foundered. Later, his romancing of actress and singer Barbra Streisand gave the sheen of Hollywood stardom to Trudeau’s early years as prime minister. Few knew that the Streisand affair became a serious attachment. Friends who spent time with the couple were struck by their mutual admiration and obvious enjoyment of each other’s company. But Streisand knew better than Trudeau that their lives were incompatible, and it was she who ended the romance.

  Many of the same friends were stunned at Trudeau’s surprise marriage in 1971 to Margaret Sinclair, the daughter of James Sinclair, a former Cabinet minister in the governments of Louis St. Laurent and Lester Pearson. In fact, she and Trudeau had been dating in secret for some time. In her, Trudeau found the kind of woman his mother most likely would have warned him against but who no doubt would have fascinated his father.

  Although Margaret was anything but an old-fashioned girl, Trudeau decided to observe an old-fashioned custom. Before the marriage, the prime minister sought parental consent from the father of the bride. According to a Trudeau intimate, he and James Sinclair met alone in the den of Sinclair’s Vancouver home. Sinclair had no idea what Trudeau wanted, but expected the prime minister to ask his advice on some government matter. Trudeau caught him unawares by announcing his desire to marry one of his daughters. Which one? Sinclair inquired. When Trudeau replied that his choice was Margaret, Jimmy was not encouraging and suggested instead that another daughter would be much more suitable as a prime minister’s wife.