A needy man, caught on tape

Among the many sins that might be laid at the feet of Brian Mulroney, the worst is surely his appalling choice of friends. There’s Lucien Bouchard, of course, a chum since law school days whom Mr. Mulroney elevated to cabinet, only to see him use the office as a launching pad for the Bloc Quebecois, and for his own career as separatist superstar. There’s Michel Cogger, another law-school buddy whose expensive tastes were such as to induce Mr. Mulroney to appoint him to the Senate -- to keep him out of trouble, he says. (It didn’t work.) There’s Karlheinz Schreiber, the global arms dealer/lobbyist wanted by German authorities on fraud and bribery charges, although he’s perhaps better described as a former employer.

And then there’s Peter C. Newman. Mr. Mulroney confesses to feelings of betrayal that Mr. Newman should have published, without permission or warning, the contents of his many recorded conversations with Mr. Mulroney over the years. There is a suggestion, which Mr. Newman denies, that some of the tapings were made surreptitiously. But really, what did he expect? Yes, yes, yes, they are old friends. Mr. Mulroney was even the best man, as it was noted in the Post yesterday, “at one of Mr. Newman’s weddings.” Which is suggestive: Mr. Newman is, by his own account, a serial betrayer. Marriages, careers, friendships -- all were expendable, according to his memoirs, in the higher interests of Peter. Were, and it appears are.

And, after all, Mr. Mulroney was no stranger to the well-placed knife himself. One of the more amusing passages in Mr. Newman’s new book has Mr. Mulroney complaining bitterly that Joe Clark never had him over for dinner. It got so he began to suspect the former Prime Minister “profoundly disliked me.” Gosh, I wonder why?

Not that there’s anything terribly newsworthy in all this, either in what Mr. Mulroney had to say or that he would be so incontinent as to say it. Can anyone claim to be surprised that Mr. Mulroney considers himself the greatest Prime Minister ever, next to Macdonald? That he feels abused by the media? That he swears like a sailor? For that matter, self-estimations aside, few of Mr. Mulroney’s bon mots could really be called controversial. Kim Campbell was a vain and erratic leader who spoke bad French and blew the 1993 election? That sounds about right. Jean Chretien is a “mean and dirty bastard”? No argument there. Ottawa is a sick, incestuous place, the press gallery mostly “mediocre, indolent [and] self-serving”? Uh, yeah.

What jumps out most of all, of course, is the insecurity, the constant need for self-affirmation in the absence of others’ approval, the burning resentment of those more favoured in this light, above all of Pierre Trudeau. It isn’t just the tape recordings that make you think of Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, Mr. Mulroney rose from hardscrabble origins to the very pinnacle of power, on the strength of great talent, relentless drive and utter ruthlessness. And as with Nixon, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t power each man craved, but respect.

I once remarked to a very shrewd person I know how often Nixon mentions John F. Kennedy in the Watergate tapes, how unfair he felt it was that Kennedy should have been so lionized, while he was so reviled. “Yes,” she mused. “It just shows you how naïve Nixon was.” Nixon really thought that all of his viciousness and double-dealing would be rewarded in the end, that whatever moral compromises they required, his achievements would at least be acknowledged. And, indeed, they have been: many historians rank Nixon’s presidency ahead of Kennedy’s, just as they may one day conclude that Mulroney was a greater Prime Minister than Trudeau. Alas, it is not achievements the media admire, but glamour, especially the effortless sort that comes with membership in a certain class: the kind that Kennedy and Trudeau had, the kind their humbler successors lacked. And it was the media, not dusty academics, whose opinion mattered most to both men. Why else would they have been so contemptuous of it?

I don’t think Mr. Mulroney was hugely different from other politicians in this regard: just more palpable. The showy profanity, the self-congratulatory cynicism, the obsession with polls and press clippings -- these could describe most of this country’s political class. Mr. Mulroney was but one in a series of largely interchangeable types that have governed us in recent years, alike not only in their surface similiarities -- millionaire lawyers from Quebec with ties to the Desmarais family -- but in the type of politics they practice. It’s just that in him it showed: the neediness, as much as the venality. And it was the neediness, above all, that was his undoing.

People tend to see Mr. Mulroney in absolute terms, as they do Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Chretien: all good, or all bad. Both interpretations are surely wrong. As Prime Minister, his record was mixed, as it is for most. He will be celebrated, and rightly so, for his economic accomplishments, notably the free trade agreement and the GST. (I would include the conquest of inflation in that group, since without the government’s support John Crow could never have persevered as he did.) But he cannot erase the stain left by his government’s many ethical lapses, the patronage, the pork-barrelling, or what is truly unforgiveable, forcing the country through the Meech and Charlottetown ordeals, of which his foul personal attacks on Clyde Wells, caught on Mr. Newman’s tape, are an unpleasant reminder.

Was he unjustly reviled? Yes, indisputably. Could he be justly reviled? Oh yes.