Lord Conrad Black, the former chairman and CEO of media giant Hollinger International, was sentenced yesterday to 6 ½ years in prison after a July conviction on three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. He is appealing the verdict. Before his sentencing, Black was out promoting his book Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffiars). PW caught up with Black for a brief interview.
PW: What makes you write?
CB: It's very satisfying if you compose a few sentences that actually resonate or express something original, it is very satisfying. Secondly, it is tremendously effective diversion from other matters. It has been quite a nice escape from it. I don't mean escape in the sense of running away from it, but putting them temporarily aside.
PW: As far as a writer, what do you contribute to your readers? What do you bring to them that you may not have already known?
CB: I am not competent to, or in many cases, embarrassed to comment on my writing style. I mean it seems to be well received and certainly compared to most historians, but not all, I think I make an effort to bring in humour of sort into the subject. On the larger point, I've only written four book, only two of them published in the United States, but in both cases with Roosevelt and Nixon, I did contribute a new view point that had not been, in my opinion, presented before, which I believe to be fundamentally accurate. I think if you produce something original but rigorous in a reasonably interesting way, about a subject that is of some interest, then some people will read it.
PW: Why Richard Nixon?
CB: I knew him a bit in his last five years and felt that he had been such a subject of cant and emotion, and so controversial, that in effect he had been treated as sort of morally freakish person, who by some by malignant accident, got into the White House and was eventually scorched out by the courageous press. I thought that he had to be put into the continuity of America's political history. He was elected to national office four times; right to the end, he had a huge following and might well have been cheated out of the 1960 election. It is not clear who won that election anymore than it is clear who won in 2000. He couldn't simply be dismissed. I became suspicious of the prevailing wisdom about Watergate because the more you get into it, the harder it is to disagree with the widespread European view that Watergate was a tempest in a tea pot.
That said, I don’t whitewash Nixon. There were some very undistinguished aspects to his administration and the atmosphere when he was with his entourage on these recording was disappointing for the Oval Office, but he should not have been singled out as a uniquely odious president and that’s what has happened.
PW: Do you see any parallels between yourself and Nixon?
CB: I get asked that a lot. First of all, he was a great historic figure and I am just who I am. Secondly, he was not a gregarious man and he was in many ways a pessimist with some paranoiac tendencies. I am actually reasonably affable, rather optimistic; Otherwise, I could never have gone through this nightmare of the last four years and am not paranoid. I think anyone can identify with his overcoming adversity; If you consider just how unstoppable he was. He had his depressive attacks and even physical illnesses, but I thought Kissinger put it well when he said that Nixon “just never gave up”. Even his enemies had to respect that
