Only a national psychologist could explain this fully, but I believe that one of the reasons why so many Canadians came to dislike Brian Mulroney, viscerally, in his role as prime minister is that he enjoyed it too much. This star “presidential” role — and you can think of Brian Mulroney beaming alongside Ronald Reagan onstage in Quebec City, their Irish eyes-a-smiling — played very badly in a country that liked the idea of Marion Pearson mending the curtains at 24 Sussex Drive. We want our prime ministers (unless they’re named Trudeau) to reflect the great cares of office, and to do so with humility.
By contrast, Mulroney was the guy who beamed his way through events, loved leaping out of limos in his Gucci shoes (and you remember how controversial his Gucci shoes were?) and was delighted and proud to be where he was, a Hollywood prime minister. I fear that the cover we chose played to that unpopular image and prompted the emotional response: “Oh yeah, Mulroney — I never liked that guy.”
On reflection (and I did suggest this at the time, knowing that it was a long shot) I think that on his Memoirs we should have run a cover showing Brian Mulroney as a little boy — shy, squinting at the Brownie camera — back in Baie Comeau.
I first met Brian — and he was always Brian, just as Diefenbaker was always Mr. Diefenbaker — in Montreal. I was in the city and had arranged to meet him in his office at Ogilvy Renault, in a glass and steel skyscraper on McGill-College Avenue in the heart of downtown. And what, you may wonder, is a celebrity lawyer’s office like, once you penetrate the reception area, then the corridors with lines of filing cabinets and doors leading to conventional lawyers’ offices, with English and French both floating in the air, and are ushered in by Francine, his assistant? Why, a comfortably furnished room with a couch and the sort of informal yet expensive furniture that you’d find in the living room of a well-to-do family’s modern cottage. There are even framed, signed photographs from old friends like Teddy Kennedy, and what with the comfy couch and the armchair, it’s more like a relaxed living room or den than an office — even if Francine is only a few steps away.
That was where we first met, and where I had my first fun with him. At the time, Brian’s hated nemesis, Jean Chrétien, was going through very hard times in Ottawa, his leadership threatened by the Martin forces baying at his heels. Putting on a concerned expression, I suggested to Brian that it was terrible what was being done to poor Mr. Chrétien, implying that as a former PM and party leader, he must be sympathetic to Mr. Chrétien’s plight.
He gaped at me. Then, seeing the grin break out on my face, he started to relax, laughing and saying in, almost, these words: “That son of a gun, it couldn’t happen to a better guy” — and we were off to a good start. And we were to remain on good terms, with only one major fight ahead of us.
He is such a controversial figure that dozens of people have asked me: “What was it like, working on his book with Brian Mulroney?”
There is often an unspoken hostility behind the question, so my reply often surprises people. “I enjoyed working with him, and I like him.”
Let me explain first how we worked on the book. He would write it, chapter by chapter, in chronological order, and Francine would send the neatly-typed chapters to me, usually in hard copy. If it came electronically, I would print out the pages (there was no electronic “track changes” wizardry on either side of this author-editor relationship) and then I would edit them, making changes, shifting paragraphs, and so on, as seemed appropriate. Then I would hand these edited (and thus very messy) pages over to my trusty editorial assistant, Aruna Dahanayake, at M&S, and he would produce a clean copy. I felt that, psychologically, this was very important. That was what went back to Brian, along with an explanation of the changes I’d made, if they were not obvious. He would see that version, and both there and later, when they checked the proofs, he and the tireless fact-checker Arthur would have a chance to amend the text to their satisfaction. As always, the author — the man with his name on the cover — had the privilege of having the final word.
And this process went really smoothly. I have a lot of time for an author who will carefully handwrite his book at great length, working hard at every stage to get things right, yet take the advice of the expert, which in this case was me, on the line-by-line writing.
Two stories about the process. First, the book contains no fewer than forty pages of photographs of his life, from old family photos from Baie Comeau, through campaign shots (and Robert Bourassa, no novice at the game, once said admiringly, “Brian, c’est un maudit bon campaigner,” a damn good campaigner), through posed shots involving other leaders like Thatcher and Reagan and Kohl and Clinton and Mandela, all the way to the last shot of him and Mila leaving Rideau Hall, hand in hand, on their way to private life. To select, and lay out in order, and label with proper captions, such a wide range of photographs requires a lot of space, and the Gibson dining room table was pressed into service. After some weeks, this was causing domestic pressure — hell, we had abandoned our summer holiday plans, in order to get the book through — so I asked Brian to get me the last missing photos as soon as possible, on the grounds that “Jane wants her table back.”
“Tell her I’ll buy her a new table,” he joked, and when he met her for the first time at the Toronto launch of the book he was able to tell her instantly, “The new table’s on its way!” Politicians are good at that sort of instant connection; he was great at it.
Secondly, his passion for accuracy (and for trying, dammit, to mention all of his friends in the acknowledgements) meant that he was making changes to the book right up until the last minute. I told him that Thursday was absolutely the last drop-dead day for making changes, since the final version was going off to the printer on Friday.
On Friday Arthur Milnes was on the phone, asking me to make one more change. “Absolutely not!” I said. “It’s too late. Brian knows that.”
“Yes,” said Arthur, clearly not relishing his role as middleman. “I told the Boss that, and said that you’d refuse to make the change. And he said” (and here, dear reader, you can hear the deepening Mulroney voice), “‘Tell Doug that I know that he’s the finest editor in the country, and I know that he would never let a book go to press that contained a mistake that he had a chance to fix.’”
It was shameless. And it worked.
I swore, then ran through to the typesetting department, where we were able to insert the change before the text went off to the printer by courier, ten minutes later.
As you can see, I found that he was a genius at what you might call, in my case, man-management (and note the role he got Arthur to play here, too). In his political life, the success he had in keeping together the fractious Tory caucus, made up of perennial outsiders with high malcontent potential, even while the party was sliding in the polls, was astonishing — and unbelievable to all those who had never been exposed to the Mulroney charm. He was tireless in reaching out by phone to potential allies, day or night. I gather that even opposition MPs found that when tragedy — a son’s car accident, a spouse’s cancer, a parent’s heart attack — struck their family, one of the very first phone calls offering sympathy, or help, even the name of a doctor, came from Brian Mulroney. Of course it was good politics; but maybe it was something more, some unspoken recognition that we’re all in this thing together.
The journalist L. Ian MacDonald was a close friend who worked over the years with Brian. In the National Post he summed up this quality: “With Brian Mulroney it is always personal.” He went on to tell the story of a friend who had just split up with his wife and was staying with his infant daughter in a hotel. The PMO switchboard tracked him down to allow Brian to try to console him.
The conversation went on for about half an hour, the friend later recounted. “You have more important things to do than this,” the friend finally told him, “You have a country to run.”
“Nothing is more important than this,” Mul
roney replied.
This attitude also meant that if you became his enemy, it was going to be a long, bitter business. “His time will come” was one of the phrases colleagues remember him using, nursing his wrath to keep it warm. And both his book and his private conversations were full of references to the enmity of the media. At one point he writes (cleverly using a member of the media to make his point): “It is hard to operate, year after year, in what columnist George Bain described as an atmosphere of unremitting antipathy, cynicism and disrespect. In my experience, things became so bad that I felt the press was not just filtering our message (an appropriate function) but actually blocking it.” His private references to the CBC and the Toronto media were much less printable.
But if you were his friend, then everything was possible — and, famously, his administration suffered from old friends who took advantage of his instinct to help out an old buddy, the way you would in Baie Comeau.
In 2009, the CBC radio political program The House was interested to hear that I was starting to write this book, and wanted to interview me about it. It was a kindly interview and when the admirable Kathleen Petty broached the subject of Brian Mulroney’s 1,100-page Memoirs, she threw me a softball lob by asking me how much larger this book would have been if I had not been there to edit it.
My reply surprised her. I explained that if anyone found the book too long, I was the one to blame. For as the early chapters about his life in Baie Comeau emerged and proved to be quite lengthy, he and I had a meeting in that Montreal law office/cottage living room.
He asked me: “Look, I’ve written a lot about growing up in Baie Comeau. Should we cut all that out, or cut it way back? Are people really going to be interested in that stuff?”
“Yes, they are,” I answered decisively. “In fact, it’s so interesting I wouldn’t cut it back at all. It explains who you are and — in the fullest sense — where you come from. So keep it. And keep going at the pace you’ve established. And if that means that we end up with a long book, that’s fine — we end up with a long book about a long career.”
So, blame me for the fact that the book is so long. Conversely, blame me for the fact that after 1,100 pages the book ends when Brian Mulroney leaves office, in 1993. The book had to end somewhere, and that seemed to me a sensible end point, although I had a further reason for ending the book there, as I will reveal.
In this chapter’s subtitle I call Brian the “Boy from Baie Comeau.” I believe that the phrase helps to sum him up, and to tell us a lot about his complex personality. If Abraham Lincoln was “the Log-Cabin president,” Brian Mulroney was the blue collar kid who made it all the way to the top. Before the book came out, few people knew that he grew up in a house so poor that for a spell he and his brother had to sleep in the basement beside the oil burner, to make space for a paying boarder. Think of that!
And think of the fact that his father, who worked at two jobs, would sit, exhausted, at the end of a long summer day, worrying about the family finances — which young Brian was boosting with his summer job. His father would say hopefully, “We’re almost over the hump,” and on the way, he implied, to the Promised Land of Financial Security. Financial security, at last.
When his father died after a long illness at home (“In the evening I would take him in my arms like a child — he was losing weight very quickly — and carry him downstairs”) Brian stepped in, as a very young Montreal lawyer just starting out, to look after his mother and to see his younger siblings through their education. He had promised his father that he would, although money was really tight.
In his biography, Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition, John Sawatsky has suggested that we should see Brian Mulroney as essentially a French-Canadian with an Irish name. It’s an interesting thesis, and there’s certainly no doubt that his bilingual background left him totally at ease with Quebecois friends, joyfully at home with them.
My own suggestion is that, even more important, Baie Comeau left him with a deeply engrained concern about money, and a sense of being an outsider, on the periphery. His memoirs record what a major expedition it was to drive the “fourteen-hour odyssey” to Quebec City, an ordeal for his father and the family car. The North Shore roads are better now, but even halfway, as you cross the Saguenay by ferry, you are very conscious of the hours of rough country that lie between you and the city lights.
So perhaps he was always the kid from the poor little mill town far away, who, like the hero in some novel by Balzac, was determined to make the city sit up and notice him. A story from his early days in Montreal, when he was starting to spread his wings, seems to back up that idea. In the 1970s Bob Lewis (later to become the respected editor of Maclean’s) was a young, Ottawa-based journalist. He had lunch with an up-and-coming Montreal lawyer-businessman named Brian Mulroney, and in the course of the conversation asked Brian where he was living now.
“You know the mountain in Westmount?” he replied. “Right at the fucking top!”
Bob saw the reply as significant, and remembered it. Balzac certainly would have approved of it.
In those days Brian was a drinker, and not always a good one. Which leads me to another quality that I liked immensely as I worked with Brian. He had the guts to be honest. How many other Canadian politicians’ memoirs would contain a whole section — three and a half pages long — that begins with the words “It is time to talk about my drinking”?
After an account of his drinking history, he tells of falling ill on a visit to Romania, and being flown home. “As I slowly recovered, I had some welcome free time to reflect on my life. That was when I realized that I would have to come to grips with the fact that I had developed what could only be described as a serious drinking problem.”
So, he explains, on June 24, 1980, “I quit drinking.” Cold turkey. He has never had another drop. He knows that he can’t handle it; and he goes on to hope that “this account will help others to combat this tough disease.” One of the most moving moments in the book is when a prominent journalist, caught up in the same personal struggle, sends him a note in 1990 from that anonymous community, saying “. . . you continue to be an inspiration to all who fight the battle day by day. God bless you — we’re all rooting for you.”
It’s important to recognize just how far the kid from Baie Comeau went. Somehow the money was found to send him to university, then he became a lawyer, and then a very successful businessman (running the Iron Ore Company of Canada), who was fascinated by the world of politics. Against all the odds, this young guy from Quebec — a Conservative from Quebec! — who had never held elected office outside his St. Francis Xavier University model parliament days, rose to become the leader of the eternally fractious Tory party.
Let me tell you a story that shows just how bitterly divided the Tories were, a story that involves the Royal York Hotel, John Diefenbaker, and Flora Macdonald. In 2009 Flora, by then a distinguished former cabinet minister under Mulroney, was the guest of honour at the St. Andrew’s Ball, and I spent time with her in the hospitality suite haunted by Olive Diefenbaker’s hat, and then got to whirl her around the floor in “The Gay Gordons.” She is an inspiring example to us all with her work — in her eighties! — in Afghanistan, sleeping in her sleeping bag on rough floors, among rough people. Not as rough on her, however, as her old enemy within the Tory party, John Diefenbaker. Once, when she was running for the party in the constituency of Kingston and the Islands, he publicly “endorsed” her by stating that she was “one of the finest women ever to walk the streets of Kingston.” Ho. Ho. And remember, she was running for his party. Cynics say that in those days Conservatives tended to be all in favour of circling the wagons because it brought their targets much closer.
That was the sort of party that Brian Mulroney inherited in 1983, having contributed his portion of bitterness by ousting Joe Clark. Yet, with the help of the ever-gracious Joe, who buried a number of hatchets in his own ha
ir, he managed to turn it into a winning electoral machine; he ran the most successful election campaign in Canadian history, winning 211 seats and taking office in September 1984.
Now that Mulroney’s historical reputation has taken a hit, it’s important to remember that millions of Canadians voted for this man, and voted for him again in 1988, in “the Free Trade election.” By the time he stepped down in 1993, he had been one of Canada’s longest-serving prime ministers. His time in office had seen major events at home — Free Trade, the introduction of the GST, the failed Meech Lake and Charlottetown agreements (and the book has a very full appendix, giving a blow-by-blow account of the Meech Lake negotiations, still a source of disappointment to him). And “disappointment” does not begin describe his disgust at the betrayal of his old friend Lucien Bouchard, who abandoned him to create the Bloc Quebecois. It is no accident that the book’s photos include a shot of Bouchard’s wedding reception . . . held at the home of his old friend Brian, at 24 Sussex Drive.
Outside Canada, he had to steer us through major world events such as Tiananmen Square, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he played a role in bringing down the Apartheid regime in South Africa, to the fury of Margaret Thatcher. He even successfully pressured his old friend Ronald Reagan to do something about acid rain.
But for many observers his greatest achievement was his leadership of the Tory caucus, which supported him through thick and thin. After the GST was brought in and the economy also hit trouble, the record-low ratings of public approval of both leader and party made for very thin times indeed, later demonstrated by the Conservative MPs being cut to two — two — in the next election. But the caucus stuck with him to the end. He seems to have been a genius at keeping them onside, taking caucus meetings very seriously, involving the caucus in election planning, keeping them busy and out of mischief (although he never uses these words). Then there were the invitations for a chat at Sussex Drive, and the phone calls when they hit personal difficulties. I know that in his phone calls with me he was always amazed by Jean Chrétien’s difficulty in keeping the support of his caucus, and it brought him much pleasure.
Stories About Storytellers Page 29