You Can't Print That (Excerpt)

by Charles Lynch

Over the years, I have covered seven prime ministers and written millions of works about them, without ever really knowing them. Two — John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson — were treasured and admired friends before they became parry leaders. We called them “John” and “Mike, “but all that ended when they reached the summit, and both of them wound up their political careers damning my name.

Besides the prime ministers, this book is about many more ordinary folk, whom I hope the reader will find as extraordinary as I did. And what it‘s chiefly about is me. After all these years, it‘s hard to break the habit, even by the dodge of pretending to write about others.

There‘s a lot of journalism here, too, and quite a few journalists. We used to say it was fun being in the newspaper business, because you met such interesting people and they were all in the newspaper business. That was true in the days before celebrated reporters who retain a degree of perspective, but many are caught up in the syndrome pioneered by old friend and colleague Lionel Shapiro, who once said, "I’ve talked about myself long enough. Now you talk about me."

Some of the newspaper people in this book were people in the full sense, though they may have suffered from the great failing of the business, which is that we don‘t know our subjects all that personally, and we don‘t get to know anybody else very well either. But we do get to exchange banter with the greats...