In Defense of Conrad Black
Conrad Black - the Strands of Honor
Remarks by the editor of the Sun, Seth Lipsky, to the newspaper's staff.
Given the news from Chicago, where Conrad Black has been convicted on federal charges, I thought it would be a good idea to get together here at the newspaper he helped found. I don't mind saying that it is a sad turn. In my view, Conrad Black is one of the greatest newspapermen of his, or any, time — and, in my own career, he has been an inspiring partner and a friend.
I am not suggesting that the crimes of which he has been convicted are not serious. They are felonies. He was found guilty — albeit partly on testimony that an admitted swindler gave in exchange for a lighter sentence — of mail fraud and obstruction of justice. From what I know of the circumstances, I would have voted to acquit. We live, however, under a constitution that requires deference to juries, even when the verdict goes against our hopes.
After the verdict was brought in, the prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, gave a press conference in which he said that the jury's verdict sent a message. The message is that for those who take liberties and break the law with other peoples' money there will be consequences. It is an important message, one that all of us who are dealing with other people's money must always take to heart.
Yet it's no small thing that Conrad Black was exonerated on most of the charges brought against him. These include what his attorney has called the central charges and also include headline making accusations. Not guilty on most of the noncompete agreements. Not guilty of spending on his wife's birthday party, not guilty on the trip to the South Pacific, not guilty on the sale of his apartment here in New York. Not guilty of tax evasion. Not guilty of racketeering, which means, in simple terms, that Conrad Black was cleared of the charge that he ran Hollinger as a "kleptocracy."
Conrad Black's attorneys have stated that they are going to appeal the conviction on the four counts on which he was found guilty. There have been a number of cases, including here in New York, where white-collar defendants have been cleared on appeal, and I will be rooting for him. But the betting around the courthouse is that Conrad will be cast into prison, and it is no longer too soon to say that if he is, there will hardly be a day that I will not think of him.
I met Conrad Black in the early 1990s. My wife and I were having dinner in Brooklyn with Paul and Marigold Johnson. When I mentioned my efforts to raise capital for the Jewish Forward, Paul responded that if I would come to London, he would have a dinner party and include the press magnate who owned the Daily Telegraph so that Black and I could have a "chinwag." So I flew to London for the dinner, after which, in Johnson's study, I made to Black an impassioned pitch for the Forward and how it might fit in with his holding in Israel, the Jerusalem Post.
Black was extremely gracious, but it was no sale. I didn't hear from him again, save for a brief note, until a decade later, after my partners and I sold our interest in the Forward and Ira Stoll and I laid plans to start a daily. In the summer of 2000, I found a voice mail message that said: "This is Conrad Black in Toronto. I heard you are thinking of starting a newspaper in New York. I have some experience in that line, and if you think it might be worth our having a conversation I'd be happy to hear from you."
We discussed the Sun for nearly a year. It was during that period that Black wrote his famous letter to the editor of the Spectator, a magazine he owned, chastising its columnist Taki, himself one of Conrad's fast friends, for his negative comments on Israel. It still stands as one of the most eloquent defenses of Israel ever to appear in the secular press. The incident gave a glimpse into how invested Black was in our common struggle.
In the spring of 2001, Black and I met in his office on Fifth Avenue. I had been nursing the dream for a new daily in New York for years, and the idea was at a moment of truth. For months, the key investors had been paying Ira and me to work on our project, and, in principle, we had most of our capital lined up. But a number of investors were waiting to see what Conrad Black was going to do, and I had asked for a meeting to tell him that.
What Black told me is that he'd been hoping to make me a larger, counter-offer, but he was unable to do it at the moment. Hollinger, however, was prepared, in principle, he said, subject to its review of the business plan, to make a minority investment of $2 million. Though that was only a small portion of the capital we had raised, that was the moment I knew that we would have a paper. Eventually, after Black was ousted as Hollinger's chairman, Hollinger sold its interest in the Sun. But I will never forget the bet Black had placed on us.
It was Black who proposed expanding the Sun from the six-page broadsheet that Ira and I originally proposed. He urged a paper with at least 16 pages, including sports and business, that could be what he called a "stand alone" paper and a "primary read." He wanted us to capture not only the serious news but the culture, the fun, and the fizz of New York. He was not the only one of our financial backers who made brilliant editorial suggestions. But he was early in articulating our vision, and as we steered for it, our prospects turned for the better.
When the controversy that would bring him down was first surfacing in the news, a number of people, including some total strangers, approached me and said, "What are we going to do about the Jerusalem Post?" It is an important paper, but I always asked: "What about the Telegraph?" Under Black's proprietorship, the greatest of the London broadsheets stood off the coast of Europe like a vast fleet defending freedom and security for Britain, America, and Israel, against a gathering list of enemies. In my view, the right move was a fight to keep Black's empire intact and him at the helm.
As Black's plight worsened, Bob Tyrrell and I flew to Toronto to take Conrad Black to dinner. We stayed in his home, which once belonged to his father, who chose a magnificent setting. Conrad enlarged it, but the house is neither garish nor outlandish in scale. Its main features, apart from its handsome Georgian style, are the model warships, each of whose history he can recite, and the library, whose thousands of volumes are lovingly shelved.
The library contains a vast writing table, where Conrad wrote his biography of FDR and was at the time working on his new biography of Nixon. It gives onto a little courtyard, where Conrad constructed a private, Catholic chapel. It is both spare and elegant. It has a side room filled with tomes on Judaism — a symbol, he explained, of his marriage to Barbara Amiel. She has been, during this ordeal, much mocked in the press, though she herself is a brilliant journalist.
When one visits them one can comprehend that they are devoted to one another. She must be one of the few individuals in the hemisphere who can, day after day, keep up with him intellectually and vice versa. No doubt their relationship helps explains how Conrad could receive visitors, as he did Bob Tyrrell and me, at a time when he was under such pressure without appearing distracted or exhibiting self-pity. When we went to dinner, there was only passing mention of the pending trial. The talk was mainly of history, presidents, war, statecraft, newspapers, and the friends he cherishes.
Last month, after his defense rested its case but before the verdict, I went out to see Conrad again — this time to Chicago. We met at his hotel where he gave me a copy of his new book on Nixon, just published in Canada under the title "The Indomitable Quest." It says something about a man that he could, while on trial for what amounts to his life, turn out a masterful biography of more than 1,000 pages of beautifully crafted prose.
Before dinner, we went for a walk along the front of Lake Michigan. We talked a bit about the trial, but, as in Toronto the year before, in only a glancing fashion. Conrad said he believed he would be acquitted and was full of optimism. He expressed great appreciation for the friends who had stuck with him. At dinner, the focus was on FDR, Nixon, Adenauer, Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan.
When I started to quote the first sentence of De Gaulle's war memoirs, Conrad lit up and offered another sentence from the opening paragraph, the one about "the Madonna in the frescoes" and the following one, where De Gaulle wrote of his feeling that Providence created France "either for complete successes or for exemplary misfortunes" and of how if "mediocrity shows in her acts and deeds, it strikes me as an absurd anomaly … " The sentences, I suddenly thought, could have been about Black himself.
At a few points during our meal, Conrad talked of his hopes for reclaiming control of what was left of his empire and getting back in the fray. That is unlikely to happen now, unless he is acquitted on appeal. If he fails on appeal, those of us who love the newspaper life and who are invested in the struggle for America and the West, we will have lost a champion. Let us work all the harder to put out the kind of high quality newspaper that he always inspired when he was at the top of the newspaper world.
When he lost his chairmanship, I gathered a small dinner party for him here in New York. Bill Buckley and a few of the Sun's partners and friends were present. I presented Conrad with a slim, long out-of-print book. The volume was of dispatches from France during World War I, written by Rudyard Kipling and printed in two papers, the Daily Telegraph and The New York Sun. It was to me, and I hope to Conrad, a reminder not only of how large are the events that we cover but how long are the strands of honor.
There have been many such strands in the life, so far, of Conrad Black, even with the defeat he has just suffered. If he does go to prison, I hope he will be able to send us some columns. I don't know whether he will want to or be permitted, but the invitation is out. And to those of you who might handle his copy here at the Sun, I say this: Please treat any of his dispatches as coming from a man who made your newspaper possible and, when you edit his prose and put it into print, remember that the honor is ours.
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