Oliver's Twist (23 page)

More shocking was the knowledge that leading businesspeople, journalists, and Catholic clerics silently and in some cases actively supported these crimes. I realized how ignorant I had been of the realities in a country proud of its cultivated ways but permeated by fear. A lawyer invited me to his home for dinner and behind closed blinds and in a voice barely above a whisper confessed his agony over what was happening to his country. He was a sophisticated, well-educated man who explained that everyone he knew was afraid to speak out against the military bosses. He provided eye-opening and invaluable grist for our reports back home.

Like caricatures of Chaplin's
Great Dictator,
in riding boots
and elaborate uniforms, the junta leaders could have stepped straight out of a comic book, but they were far more dangerous. Their florid televised speeches about blood and honour echoed the excesses of the Third Reich. Indeed at informal social gatherings, I frequently heard opinions expressed that were strongly reminiscent of Nazi and Fascist propaganda. People spoke of a cancer eating at their society. Just as surgeons must cut out not just the tumour but all the flesh surrounding it, so too was it necessary to eliminate undesirables to save the body politic.

In the days before hostilities erupted, Argentinian officials worked to win the sympathies of the foreign press corps. I went to cocktail parties with known killers, suave in their monogrammed jackets and ties. On one occasion I attended a house party with a man I had met at a government social function. I was surprised to find myself the only foreigner at the event and thus the centre of considerable attention.

Talk naturally turned to the imminent battle. Who would triumph? Some of the guests were silent, but most agreed with my host who, using the conflicts in Vietnam and Northern Ireland to buttress his opinion, declared that soldiers from democracies were drawn from the lower classes; like their leaders, they lacked the moral fibre to fight for a cause they believed in.

A young man wearing a naval coat of arms on his jacket pocket challenged me to predict the outcome. My view was that the Argentinian conscripts, however brave, could be no match for the professional British troops, among the toughest and besttrained infantrymen in the world. I said the challenge would be much more difficult than taking on a few hundred sheep farmers and added that no one could remember the last time Argentina's forces had done any serious fighting. We had been speaking
English, but the young man exploded into angry Spanish. I retreated to another part of the room, leaving behind me shouts and the sound of a struggle. Two of the fellow's companions were restraining him from inflicting physical damage. The person who brought me rushed us down the elevator and drove me back to my hotel in silence. I was lucky. Within days, men in civilian clothes driving the infamous Ford Falcons were picking up foreign correspondents off the street. Reporters were roughed up and dumped naked in the barrios to intimidate the rest of us.

None of us seriously expected open warfare, perhaps anticipating that a show of force by the British would bring a negotiated resolution. Instead an amphibious assault recaptured South Georgia Island and a British submarine sank the Argentine cruiser
Belgrano,
taking 323 lives. That night I sent out my report on the sinking, and afterwards a friendly hotel waiter suggested it might not be wise to go out at night thereafter. Our Argentinian translator and those who worked for other networks suddenly quit, and the locals shunned us. Getting reliable information became difficult, especially since any material given out by the army was laughably inaccurate. Sometimes they would provide the same photo, claiming it to be two different locations, or a bit of film that obviously predated the damage caused by British attacks.

After a second month, I was ready to return home to Washington and my day job covering the Reagan administration. Toronto sent a replacement who had advertised his intention to become a full-time foreign correspondent. I got him settled, briefed him on the most useful contacts and the best bars, and waited for him to get to work. But he wouldn't leave his hotel room. Every time I tried to drag him out, he
went into a cold sweat. Days passed while he dithered. Finally, he told me that he felt his life was threatened, that the danger was too great. It was getting a little rough on the streets, but the war itself was a thousand miles away. The poor guy confessed to me that perhaps he was a coward. In fact I think he was a highly intelligent person with a too-active imagination. You can't cover war up close if you dwell on the personal risks. Inevitably, he demanded to be sent home. We hired a security man to accompany him to the airport.

The next candidate was the indefatigable Pamela Wallin, then host of
Canada
AM
.
Don Cameron had hired her from the
Toronto Star
, where she was a reporter in the Ottawa bureau. Wallin remained on the scene until the Argentinians surrendered. A photograph of her covering the fiery postwar riot in the square facing Government House is a tribute to her courage. I suspect she even enjoyed her first taste of tear gas. Cameron had warned Wallin that she was a test case; the network had not often sent women into wars. She did her gender proud. Nothing demonstrated Wallin's talents as more than a drawing room anchor than her performance under literal fire in Argentina and elsewhere. Soon afterwards, she was named the network's Ottawa bureau chief.

Waiting for my plane out of Buenos Aires, I sat in the airport bar and considered how such a highly cultured nation could have slipped so easily into barbarity. When the country returned to democracy after the junta was defeated, Argentinians made little effort to examine what had happened. Germany faced its sins and learned from the Nuremberg trials; South Africans did the same with their reconciliation courts. In Argentina trials were few, and later on the worst of the
convicted killers were pardoned in the interests, citizens were told, of national unity.

In 1989, I took the most expensive airport taxi ride of my life, from the terminal in Panama City to my hotel, paying five hundred dollars for a journey of roughly twelve miles. I arrived just days before the American invasion that ousted President Noriega, once a U.S.-supported strongman but recently accused of international drug trafficking. The Panama Canal could not be allowed to fall under the control of a narco state, and the Americans were mobilizing to bring down Noriega.

Fighting had already broken out downtown, and the route from the airport was littered with burning tires and evidence of shooting. Not unreasonably, the cabs were refusing to take passengers, and only the promise of a hefty fee got me to the hotel. There I found the power cut off and had to make my way up fourteen storeys by candlelight. No sooner had I located my room than the Toronto newsroom telephoned, asking for a voice report. That story was written and read by stuttering candle flame.

A discouraging number of young Americans with military haircuts were staying at the hotel, obviously members of an advance intelligence unit preparing for the invasion. But their presence made all of us North American reporters seem like marked men to the Noriega gang. Sure enough, as the crew and I were returning from a late dinner, armed men pulled us over in our car. They were in civilian clothes, which was a bit worrying. Again, as in El Salvador, it was out of the car, arms on the roof,
and guns pushed into our ribs. And, thankfully, once again, when they learned that we were Canadians, we were allowed to go without further trouble. Shortly afterwards, the Americans invaded, a brief spate of intense fighting took place in the city centre, and it was all over.

We did a few reports on the dismal outlook for Pineapple Face, as the acne-scarred Noriega was called, and then quit the scene. A nice, neat little war. Great rum, good restaurants, and nothing to contribute to sleepless nights.

7

RETURN
TO THE
RIDEAU

Pierre Trudeau had submitted his second and final resignation from the leadership of the Liberal Party while I was in Washington, and I admit to watching those events with less than professional detachment. Constant rumours of his possible retirement had circulated for several years, a period that marked a widening gap between dispirited party members and their preoccupied standard-bearers in Cabinet, yet no one (except perhaps William Casey) could discern the prime minister's intentions.

By January 1984, party president Iona Campagnolo felt it necessary to report on the state of the party to its leader. The party's constitution provided for such a report, but Keith Davey refused to allow it, and the faithful Prime Minister's Office staff blocked every attempt to arrange a meeting between Trudeau and Campagnolo. Finally, Ted Johnson scheduled a lunch for February 28. It was snowing when Campagnolo arrived at the prime minister's residence, precisely on time. She and Trudeau sat down to a salad lunch during which they discussed each of the party's regional organizations. She told him that there was a general sense in the ranks that the Liberals would lose the next
election and the party recommended he leave office before, rather than after, such a defeat. He should go out as the champion, not the vanquished, as had happened in 1979. The party desperately needed rebuilding, but Trudeau had no interest in that task. It followed that he should consider resignation at a time of his own choosing, but soon.

After lunch, Trudeau and Campagnolo travelled back to Parliament Hill together in what had become a full-blown storm. Before they parted, she told him that Canadians would expect some sort of drama to be attached to his decision, and he said he would let her know his thinking by morning. That was the night of the famous walk in the snow. Campagnolo also took a stroll in the wintry capital, agonizing over whether she had been too candid and blunt in relaying the feelings of party members. Promptly at ten o'clock on the morning of February 29—a leap year day and hence the element of drama Campagnolo had anticipated—Trudeau's letter of resignation was delivered to her by hand.

Not long after, Trudeau was in Washington to accept an award and invited me to his hotel for a visit. I told him I could not travel without a camera. Obviously he wanted to get a few things off his chest because he agreed to be interviewed during our get-together. He was miffed that the Turner-led Liberals were starting to blame his stewardship of the country and party for all their problems. “If they don't shut up,” Trudeau declared, “I will come back and run against them.” After that remark was broadcast on the national news, his detractors stopped complaining.

Trudeau was gone, but unlike so many pensioned-off politicos, he was not one to fade away gently. He never lost his ability to influence the country. In 1987, he came out of the shadows
to campaign against Mulroney's Meech Lake constitutional deal and was instrumental in turning the country against it. Around the time he made a brilliant anti-Meech speech to a special House and Senate Committee, I met him at a gathering of the canoe group and told him I thought he was mistaken. I believed Meech might head off an inevitable and painful confrontation with Quebec. He shot me a hard look and got a laugh from the others by announcing that his friend Oliver was in need of remedial reading on constitutional issues. I'd hoped Meech and new leadership might bring closure to those endlessly perplexing issues.

Years of covering American politics and the Reagan administration, its good and bad features, had taken the edge off my youthful convictions about progressive politics, and although I was no late-blooming Republican, I was intrigued to see how far to the right Mulroney might try to shift my own country. But I was content to follow it from afar, even when Don Cameron asked me to replace Pamela Wallin as chief of the Ottawa bureau in 1988. She was returning to Toronto as a national correspondent and occasional news anchor.

As happens to all Canadian reporters who live and work there, Washington had expanded my horizons. The thought of returning to the often-suffocating nitpicking of Parliament Hill did not inspire me, but Cameron dispatched Tim Kotcheff, my canoe partner (as Don well knew) and his senior news executive, to deliver an ultimatum. Business was business, after all, and the message was come home or ship out. Tim and I talked during a long and well-fortified dinner in Georgetown until he committed to a generous financial offer, putting it in writing on a paper napkin. When I received my first paycheque, the
figure did not jibe with my fuzzy memory of the amount specified, and either I had misplaced the paper napkin or Tim had carefully retrieved it. The matter remains unresolved to this day.