The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister
By Peter C. Newman
Random House Canada, 462 pages, $37.95
On a day in June six years ago, Brian Mulroney and George H. Bush sat in a hotel penthouse in Montreal musing about life, politics and friendship. The prime minister and the president had left office within five months of each other, but they would tend to their legacies in vastly different ways.
When Bush, who had been defeated for re-election in 1992, was asked if he would write a memoir, he shook his head. His wife, Barbara, had published a book on life in the White House. That was enough. Unlike most former presidents, he had no need for self-justification. "Let the historians figure it out," he said.
Mulroney, for his part, would write his memoirs. He had to clarify things, you see. He wanted to ensure that his achievements, particularly free trade, were recognized in Canada. In repose, Bush had found the well-earned equanimity of indifference; he simply didn't care any more what anyone thought. But Mulroney couldn't move on. He did care, to the depths of his Irish soul. He had unfinished business.
So it is no surprise, really, to wade through The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister and find, on every page, the exquisite agonies of Brian Mulroney. Here are the same instincts, writ large, of that conversation in 1999: the vanity, the egomania, the insecurity, the need for appreciation. We see it here, as we saw it every moment of his 10 years in politics.
This book is a descent into a politician's purgatory. Our Virgil is Peter C. Newman, the celebrated historian, journalist and memoirist who rose to prominence describing another feverish, self-pitying prime minister. As John Diefenbaker never recovered from Renegade in Power, Newman's withering portrait of ineptitude, Brian Mulroney may never recover from this one.
But caveat emptor: The Secret Mulroney Tapes is a different animal. It isn't the felicitous mix of reportage, psychoanalysis and poetry that revolutionized Canadian political letters four decades ago. While the book has lyrical touches and the memorable phrases we expect from Newman, this is fundamentally and irredeemably an oral history. Drawing on 303 interviews, 98 with the man himself, this is all Mulroney, all the time, the tale of anger, betrayal and braggadocio so loud and lewd that "unguarded" and "confession" are an understatement (perhaps the first time in history "understatement" has been associated with Brian Mulroney).
When he agreed to let Newman chronicle the government he led between 1984 and 1993, he said that he didn't want "a puff job. I find myself so goddamn frustrated, as a student of modern history, wanting to know, what was this guy really like? Did he get laid? Did he look after his family? Did he swear? Did he get drunk?"
Trusting Newman, whom he had known since 1961, he gave him access to his papers providing that he would not publish the book until after he had left office. He also talked often to Newman, who recorded their conversations. Looking back, Newman calls Mulroney "the most radical prime minister in Canadian history" — a "backwoods combination of Machiavelli, leprechaun and Dr. Phil" who won two consecutive majorities, secured free trade with the United States, recast the tax system and tried to change the Constitution.
His Mulroney is a reformer, who wanted to do big things, unlike that "political thug" Jean Chrétien, who was a custodian: "Instead, [Mulroney] behaved like an obsessive beekeeper, patrolling the buzzing apiary that Canada had become, punching holes into every hive he could find. More often than not, the liberated bees stung the man who set them free."
Mulroney wasn't the first leader to confide in journalists. Harry Truman talked to Merle Miller. John Kennedy dined with Ben Bradlee. Lester Pearson spoke to James Reston and Lubor Zink. They were probably as artlessly frank, but their confidences were recorded in diaries, not on tape. Like Richard Nixon, Mulroney lost control of the tape recordings — he now claims that some were made without his knowledge — but worse, he lost control of himself. He is profane, prophetic, paranoid, vainglorious and imperious, as well as funny, sentimental and vulnerable.
