THE INSIDE STORY
THE INSIDE STORY
A Life in Journalism
Anthony Westell
Copyright © Anthony Westell, 2002
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Copy-editor: Jennifer Bergeron
Designer: Jennifer Scott
Printer: University of Toronto Press
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Westell, Anthony, 1926–
The inside story: a life in journalism
ISBN 1-55002-375-6
1. Westell, Anthony, 1926– 2. Journalists — Canada — Biography. 3. Canada — Politics and government — 1935– I. Title.
PN4913.W48A3 2002 070’.92 C2002-901070-5
1 2 3 4 5 06 05 04 03 02
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.
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For Jeannie
who made my career possible
at the cost of her own
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Surfacing in the Gene Pool
Chapter 2: Growing Up in the Old World
Chapter 4: Funerals, Fleet Street, Family Man
Chapter 5: Getting Started in Politics
Chapter 6: Small Head, Big Feet Lead to Canada
Chapter 7: Good Times at the Globe
Chapter 8: Making a National Name
Chapter 9: The Last Days of Pearson and Diefenbaker
Chapter 10: Trudeau and Transition
Chapter 11: Sideways to a New Career
Chapter 13: The Rise and Fall of Canadian Nationalism
Chapter 14: Reinventing Canada
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The story of my life is in many ways the story of how the lives of others have touched and ordered my own. So I acknowledge my debt to everyone mentioned in this book, and indeed to hundreds more. But in particular I wish to thank three friends who read my draft, chapter by hesitant chapter, and offered advice, dissent, and, most important, encouragement: Jack and Marie Cahill, and Peter Carver. Without them there might have been no book, and certainly not this one. My wife, Jeannie, learned proofreading as a teenaged editor of a weekly paper in wartime Britain, and she read and corrected my manuscript, even when she disagreed with what I was writing or would rather I had not written it. My sister, Diana, provided early family pictures, and my niece, Gillian Westell, provided some of the research on the Smedley family. Professor Hari Sharma told me about early and revolutionary times at Simon Fraser University.
At the conclusion of Chapter 13 I suggest that Canadians may play a role in the American Empire similar to that of the Scots in the British Empire. I owe that powerful idea to Mark Lovewell, my colleague on The Literary Review of Canada.
The photo on the cover was taken by a friend, the late Jan Breyer. It shows me not as I am today but at mid-life and mid-career and reading a newspaper, which seems appropriate for a book about a life spent working in newspapers.
INTRODUCTION
I was 15 in 1941, Britain was at war, and it was time