February 22, 2004

Lord Black of Crossharbour suddenly tumbled into a deep financial hole a few weeks ago. One moment he was standing in the middle of a Toronto bookstore, plugging this new biography. One telephone call later, he was in the mire.

But the wonder of what happened next is that, rather than shiver and head back to Wall Street or the shelter of his twin Telegraphs at Canary Wharf, he carried on plugging. What book could possibly be worth such devotion? Here, 1,328 pages long and weighing in at a walloping 3lbs 8oz, is a doorstop of an answer. Other outward and visible portents aren’t entirely propitious, either.

Henry Kissinger, perhaps on behalf of the whole Hollinger board, finds it ‘thoughtful and readable’ — ‘comprehensive’, too. George Will declares it a ‘delight’ on the same dust jacket and gets thanked inside by Conrad for his ‘invaluable suggestions’; as does Sir John Keegan, whose Telegraph review dealt in adjectives such as ‘monumental’ and ‘affectionate’. Vanity publishing doesn’t come much vainer.

Yet the sniggering stops there. Is this the best book ever written by a fully-fledged newspaper baron? Conrad Black researches and writes with unflagging energy. His prose may sometimes turn a trifle lumpen, but he marshals a decent narrative (especially about Roosevelt’s complex excursions in New York politics) and puts his judgment firmly on the line. This is proper history, tended with proper academic care. The only mystery is where Black found the time.

Why FDR, a superficially curious choice for a Canadian-American-British republican turned monarchist Tory? Why not Ronald Reagan, spouting the kind of old-time religion dear to Telegraph hearts? That one is easily dealt with. It’s Roosevelt because George Weidenfeld asked him to do it, and because Black professes to revere the supreme New Dealer for seven easy reasons. Because he helped save Western civilization from Hitler; because he mobilized American public opinion to achieve that salvation; because, after the Depression, he reinvented America; because he was a winning war leader; because he exported tolerant democracy to a ravaged Europe; because he was a master politician; and because he conquered and made puny his physical disability.

Not a bad list, especially when Black’s abiding fear (a nightmare he shares with Rupert Murdoch) is of a transatlantic alliance ruptured beyond repair. If the memory of Roosevelt seems to possess above-average resonance in European salons, then his positives can be accentuated and any perceived negatives, such as economic illiteracy, glossed over. Deal away much of the New Deal and Roosevelt, it is gently insinuated, could have been a Telegraph reader, too. History gets another prism.

Fair enough? Up to a point, Lord Crossharbour. There was nothing fundamentally liberal about the early FDR. Adversity — his own physical plight and the blight of depression — redefined him. He did what he had to do and found his greatest role as a principled and brilliantly informed war leader. He was a champion neither of the Right nor the Left, but of the best American values. So his story, retold from start to finish with plenty of detail and lashings of quotes, is a service to Western understanding in the age of Bush.

Of course, there are some feats that can’t be pulled off, even in 1,328 pages. One is the intimacy of personal observation that Robert H. Jackson (FDR’s attorney-general and friend) brings to a memoir undiscovered for half a century. When you play poker late at night and eat breakfast with ‘that man’, you can portray him with unforced honesty for what he was: a poor administrator as well as an inspiration, a trimmer as necessary, a survivor as well as a saint.

Conrad Black can’t pretend to patrol such territory. He assembles rather than observes. But think of his Roosevelt as a broad canvas on which the memoir writers can display their more miniaturist skills and one book goes well enough with another. If the call from the Securities and Exchange Commission hadn’t rudely interrupted his promotional touring, then we would surely have been admiring his seriousness and diligence, talking about a rarer breed of newspaper tycoons. Eat your heart out, Richard Desmond.

And some of that, absolutely inevitably, lingers as you stay this course. The author didn’t mean to be the story behind his own work, except that he couldn’t erase himself from the action. He had Weidenfeld and Will and Kissinger playing admiring chorus. He was out to strut his academic stuff. He could expect more flattering profiles in rival papers, more fawning attention as the intellectual that Rupert could never be, a suitable candidate for Fleet Street canonization. All that has gone in an instant. The Black who chronicles FDR isn’t a black-hearted fellow, but a man moving on, showing his paces. He believed there was nothing he couldn’t do if he set his mind to it, and devoted all the time in his world.

Time again. Had he grown bored with business schemes and ad rates and newsprint prices, the detritus detail of empire? Had he grown too absorbed with his researches to ponder the difference between owning a private company and running a public one? This Roosevelt speaks to the wish for a different Conrad Black, to a giant respected for what he thinks, not the money he makes. If only the old deals didn’t keep blotting out the new. — Dawn/Observer News Service

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom
By Conrad Black
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN 0297646311
1,328pp. £30

That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt
By Robert H. Jackson
Oxford University Press
ISBN 0195168267
320pp. £30

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