href="#litres_trial_promo">20 Some interpreted his reticence as shyness, an inferiority complex or a sense of inadequacy concealed by his remarkable vocabulary. Others, like the journalist Hubert Bauch, were unsympathetic. ‘Black’s the most arrogant, obnoxious man I ever met,’ said Bauch.
In March 1970, Black awoke to a massive anxiety attack. Sweating profusely, hyperventilating and racked by apprehension about his fate, he was on the verge, some believed, of committing suicide. The accumulation of his loveless childhood, his academic failure and his social insecurity had become an intolerable burden. He sought help in psychoanalysis. Over the next two years he consulted W. Clifford M. Scott and Vivian Rackoff in his efforts to examine what he called ‘my altruism and the dark side’. Subsequently, he also attended the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto for help to cope with his demons. One diagnosis suggested a narcissistic personality disorder – defined as an exaggerated sense of one’s own self-importance and uniqueness. The sufferer, according to experts, has a propensity to take advantage of others in the interest of self-aggrandisement. Others diagnosed Black’s problems as arising from his loveless, dysfunctional home. Intense psychiatry cured Black of his immediate self-destructive urge, but several personality traits remained, including a sense of his entitlement and a lack of conscience. He frivolously described that combination as the ‘Nietzschean philosophy’ that ‘all that does not kill me makes me stronger’. The mention of Nietzsche, the German philosopher whose anti-Christian arguments in favour of the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘superhuman’ made him attractive to the Nazis, revealed the essence of Conrad Black as a self-important hunter for celebrity.
By 1972, Black felt that all his ‘guiding principles were in place’. He believed in God, and in human and economic freedom, and condemned those who prospered from the high taxes paid by others.21 Echoing his father, he regarded trade unionists as ‘self-seeking frauds who cared little for the workers and often were gangsters or Communists’. Union leaders he characterised as ‘corrupt Luddites’ and ‘advocates of feather-bedding’. Pertinently, he was silent about honesty, respect for the law and help for the disadvantaged.22 Fixed firmly on the right wing, he was on the losing side of the Conservatives’ defeat in Canada’s 1972 general election by Pierre Trudeau, a popular Liberal who, as Black saw it, campaigned against America and capitalism and in favour of the East European Communist states. In Black’s opinion, Trudeau, ‘more than anyone, turned Canada into a people of whining, politically conformist welfare addicts’.23 Cut off from Canada’s mainstream politics, Black felt surrounded by Quebec’s aggressive nationalists and anti-Vietnam war deserters from America, whom he scorned as ‘insolent and contemptible’.24 Conventional and right-wing, Black focused his support on the conservative rich. Supporting minority causes appealed to a man who identified his own plight with underdogs. In a reflection of his own unpopularity at school, he sought to discover the goodness in other disliked personalities. That quest presented a contradiction. While venerating Roosevelt, Lincoln and Napoleon, he also pleaded for the understanding of charlatans, especially those symbolising the tradition of Huey Long, the notoriously corrupt but populist Governor of Louisiana in the 1920s and thirties.
Searching for other lost causes, Black alighted on the life and career of Maurice Duplessis, the dominating political leader of Quebec from 1936 to 1959. In popular opinion, the former Attorney General and Premier was condemned as a rude, drunken, corrupt dictator who ruled the province as a quasi-fascist in alliance with the Catholic Church. To resurrect Duplessis’s reputation, and in the process to rescue his own appalling academic record, Black registered at McGill University after finally graduating in law to produce a thesis for an MA degree about the rogue’s life.
Diligently, Black obtained exclusive access to Duplessis’s private papers, and fleshed out the background of the era by interviewing Duplessis’s contemporaries. In pursuit of the truth he travelled to Cameroon to meet one of them, Cardinal Paul-Émile Léger, an eloquent French Canadian missionary. For days they sat in the African bush discussing religion, poverty, life and the fight against disease. Entranced by Léger’s intellect, self-denial and altruism, Black could have been influenced by his understanding of morality, the poor and society. Instead, while he found a new hero, whom he would nominate for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize (it was won by Henry Kissinger), he rejected the purity of Léger’s philosophy. The encounter in Africa was nevertheless a turning point. Inspired by Léger, and with the help of Bishop Carter of London, Ontario, he witnessed the power of the pulpit. Rather than being the enemy of authority, Black was transformed into a man of authority himself. The confirmation of his conversion was the conversation he began with God. In this continuing dialogue, Black would consult the Almighty and be reassured that whatever course of life he decided upon – any plan, ruse or conspiracy – would improve mankind. How far, he would ask, could he go without becoming unstuck? ‘If I go so far, will you still love me?’ His Maker’s approval was crucial if Black was to face down those who vilified him. And God always gave His approval. The integrity of Black’s credo was the life of Duplessis, who had also suffered personal abuse. Through that corrupt leader’s life, Black sought the answers to his own purgatory, and he was rewarded. His vilifiers, God assured him, would have to answer for their lack of faith in Himself.
On his return to Quebec from Africa in 1971, Black began his attempt to restore Duplessis’s reputation. ‘Much of what his critics decried as dictatorship and corruption was really a puckish love of farce,’ wrote Black, who credited Duplessis’s authoritarianism with building new roads and power plants. ‘Maurice Duplessis had too great a sense of the farcical to be arrogant,’ he added admiringly about a politician who accumulated an estimated C$100 million from corrupt payments. In an exhaustive seven-hundred-page text, Black suffocated the reader with endless quotations intended to support every argument in Duplessis’s favour. Unable to focus on the essential facts and crystallise both sides of the argument, the reader was exposed to a tidal wave of prejudice.
After reading Black’s thesis, Ramsay Cook, McGill University’s external examiner, criticised the apparent rehabilitation of Duplessis. He brushed aside the smokescreen of Black’s elephantine effort, and identified the flaws in his scholarship and the fallacy of his conclusions. Black’s belief that history was determined by leaders, not by mass movements or a battle of ideologies, was, Cook declared, as unconvincing as his undisguised admiration of dishonest power-brokers. In particular, Cook was unsettled by Black’s excusing of Duplessis’s criminal character, and he was minded to block the award of the MA. In order to secure his degree, Black had no alternative but to make the necessary alterations, although his anger about Cook’s ‘offensive’ opinions and ‘fairy-land view of Quebec’ reflected his intolerance of criticism. In 1976 the thesis would be published as a 684-page book.25 Inevitably, Cook was asked by a newspaper, the Toronto Globe and Mail, to write a review. Unhesitatingly, he expressed his dislike of the book’s unstructured length and verbosity. ‘Anyone,’ he wrote, ‘who can endure this ramshackle volume to the end will likely conclude that though … Duplessis triumphed rather easily over most of his enemies, he has finally come a cropper in the hands of an admiring biographer.’ Black was incensed. ‘A slanted, supercilious little twit’, he called Ramsay, after personally confronting the newspaper’s publisher. Black’s modest manner hid violence towards anyone questioning his work; he damned anyone who questioned his sympathy as a ‘quasi-fascist Jesuit myth-maker’ or an ‘illiterate bootlicker’.26 His self-esteem led him to neglect compromise in his arguments. To prove his superiority he even bought substantial quantities of his book in order to conceal its sluggish sales.
Similar aggression was directed against the Quebec nationalists after the Liberal Robert Bourassa won the 1970 election to become the province’s Premier. Contrary to his election pledges, Bourassa abolished English as an official language, discriminating against English Canadians.
