Conrad Black Interview

Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian has interviewed Conrad Black about his new Nixon book. Excerpts relating to Nixon:

The fact that Black has chosen this moment to publish a biography of Nixon is extraordinary but you do not need to know all that much about the former Telegraph and Spectator owner to see that it is entirely characteristic.

Nor should it come as a shock to learn that Richard Nixon: The Invincible Quest is a work of rehabilitation, portraying the disgraced president as brilliant, brave, and misunderstood. It's hard not to see the book as a straightforward act of Freudian projection - or, failing that, as a tribute from one wronged man of history to another. Look what happens, it seems to say, when scandal-hungry journalists and envious rivals try to bring down a successful maverick.

Black bristles at the comparison, partly out of deference to Nixon - and partly out of deference to himself. "I feel terribly presumptuous comparing myself to so exalted a person," he says in his Canadian baritone. On the other hand, Nixon did behave in a "terribly tawdry" manner over Watergate, even if he's far less guilty than believed....

Black's book is a persuasive defence of Nixon, crediting him with steering America steadily in the world, avoiding isolationism but also knowing when not to get involved in "quixotic or presumptuous" missions abroad. Even the Watergate cover-up emerges as shabby, rather than grandly criminal: Black's point, convincingly made, is that Nixon doesn't deserve to be in a special category of badness, worse than all other presidents, before or since.

"The US simply can't pretend that this guy was some aberration, some kind of mutant, who ran on furry feet into the White House and hid his real nature, until the brave people of the Washington Post pulled back the shower-curtain one night, saw the cloven hooves, and threw him out."

Still, blame for Nixon's downfall must ultimately rest with the president himself, Black argues: he lacked something - some internal mechanism of self-correction - that might have held him back from the precipice. "He did not seem to have the ability to see when he was crossing the line into absolutely sleazy and outrageous things," Black says....

The Nixon book is another salvo in the conflict [surrounding Black's trial]. "I'm sending everyone a message. I'm saying: this is war ... you'll be aware of these stories that I was living in Toronto as some kind of Howard Hughes, my hair to my navel. So I thought this could be my way of demonstrating to my tormentors that they hadn't even prevented me from writing a book."...

A significant chunk at the end of Black's Nixon biography is dedicated to the disgraced president's life after resignation. It is one of the book's most absorbing stretches; the biographer seems fully to enter the mind of his subject. Nixon's fall from grace was steep and painful - but, as Black tells it, he soon began to recover, gradually gaining a role of behind-the-scenes influence in American political life. The lesson of his book, Black says, is: "Be careful about any rush to judgment." There is something "still there, gnawing away at the conscience of the country, saying 'wait a minute. Are we sure we didn't mistreat this guy?'" He drains his coffee cup and glances at his watch. It is time to leave: he has a court case to win.