Richard "Dick" O'Hagan and wife Wanda.George Pimentel Photography / Courtesy of the Family.
Dick O’Hagan was feeling proud and pleased with himself as he strode into the elegant sixth floor dining room of the Parliamentary restaurant for lunch in December, 1960. Liberal leader Lester Pearson had just named the 32-year-old as his press secretary and the one-time journalist and ad executive had made the front page of The Globe and Mail. Then he came face-to-face with Judy LaMarsh. The outspoken Liberal partisan, who had just been elected as an MP in a by-election, castigated Mr. O’Hagan for remarks in a Canadian Press story that portrayed him as a professional communications expert with only a passing allegiance to the Liberal Party of Canada. “For the next half hour,” Mr. O’Hagan recalled in his unpublished memoirs, “I was serried, riddled and stripped as I had never been before. So I was ‘the Madison Avenue genius sent to save the Liberal Party.’ How did I plan to go about it, ‘by trotting out an old marketing plan for breakfast cereal or soap flakes?’ And if I wasn’t a Liberal, as I said in the newspaper, what the hell was I?”
So there. Rarely in his next 37 years as an adviser to two prime ministers, two bank chief executives as well as a host of blue chip clients and personal friends – did Mr. O’Hagan attract such personal attention or vitriol. Working discreetly behind the scenes in Ottawa, Washington and Toronto, he practised the quiet art of making connections, boosting public images and smoothing troubled waters. He was the grand master of strategic communications. After his death this month, there was an outpouring of anecdotes from around the country from people Mr. O’Hagan had inspired and helped. For many, it was the offer of a first job, for others it was a career-charting reference or a reassuring call during a setback.
But inside the ropes, Mr. O’Hagan spoke truth to power, typically while turned out in a Savile Row suit and a stunning tie from Drake’s in New York. From his roots in the Saint John River Valley, however, he retained a small-town connection to ordinary life and operated with a sense of social justice. That was evident in his confidential advice to Bank of Montreal chairman and CEO Matthew Barrett in 1996. At the time, Canada’s big five banks were eyeing global expansion and mergers. Noting that banks were “a convenient whipping boy,” Mr. O’Hagan laid out the challenge in a memo to Mr. Barrett that read like an angry left-wing newspaper editorial: “Not to put too fine a point on it, we are seen as greedy, self-serving omnivores with rapacious, apparently insatiable appetites that gobble up everything in their path.” He then detailed a three-point action plan to cultivate support among politicians and the public, including visits to Ottawa and a tour of branches. Mr. Barrett’s image soared under the tutelage of his senior adviser.
L. Richard O’Hagan was born on March 23, 1928, in Woodstock, N.B, a town of 5,000 on the Saint John River near Fredericton. It owed its roots to United Empire Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution, then to immigration from Scotland and Ireland. His father, Lawrence, was a CPR conductor, which afforded the family reasonable comfort from the deprivations of the Depression. His mother, the former Lillian Jeanette Burden, was of Presbyterian stock, but upon marriage converted to the Catholic faith of her husband.
For the first five grades, young Richard attended the convent school run by the Sisters of Charity in the parish hall. After high school, he studied communications at St. Mary’s College and Fordham University in New York. While he did not wear his religion on his sleeve in later life, Mr. O’Hagan was a regular churchgoer and supporter. After he collapsed of cardiac arrest at his Toronto home on Dec. 9, he received the last rites in hospital. He was 90 and, unknown to most acquaintances, had been in failing health. He was predeceased by a younger brother, Edward, and leaves Wanda, his wife of 67 years, daughters Anne O’Hagan and Christina Valentine, son Peter and six grandchildren. As Wanda O’Hagan observed, his swift passage was a “blessing.” She added: “We had so many wonderful years.”
Mr. O’Hagan always said that the savvy – and better organized – mate he affectionately called “Isia” was the key ingredient in his success.
His start in journalism came during high school in Woodstock, N.B., where he was a basketball columnist for the Woodstock Press. After returning from his studies in New York he landed a job as a general assignment reporter with the Toronto Telegram in 1949. It was there that he met and wooed the trilingual Wanda Bonar, who fled Hitler’s advance on Poland with her family at the age of 10. They married on Valentine’s Day 1954, both aged 25.
It was the heyday of yellow journalism in Toronto: The paper once assigned him to interview a mother after her son was hanged on death row; she was so taken with the 24-year-old’s report that she sent him a pair of her son’s woollen socks since he “no longer had any use for them.” As Mr. O’Hagan wrote, “I kept them for a very long time, though I never wore them.” The young reporter soon tired of “the make-news-at-almost-any cost journalism” and sought more respectable employment.
He volunteered to help the Liberals in the 1956 New Brunswick election – a lost cause – then went to work for MacLaren Advertising Co. Ltd., in Toronto. The firm’s major clients included Imperial Oil, General Motors and, as a hedge for future government advertising, the Liberal Party of Canada. That was when he met Mr. Pearson for the first time. The agency was trying with mixed results to help the diplomat-turned Liberal leader master the art of TV. The effort included reducing the number of words containing "s" or "sh” in his prepared speeches so as to limit a lisp-like sibilance in his speech.
At Mr. O’Hagan’s suggestion, MacLaren volunteered his services and he joined the Prime Minister’s Office in Ottawa, his salary covered by the agency. Mr. O’Hagan was an important part of the team that financier Walter Gordon recruited to help rebuild the Liberal Party, including Keith Davey and Jim Coutts. He became, in effect, the first U.S.-style press secretary in Ottawa, acting as a spokesperson and troubleshooter. When Mr. Pearson incurred the wrath of President Lyndon Johnson by calling for a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in a 1965 speech, Mr. O’Hagan went before the Canadian news corps assembled in Washington in an attempt to minimize the extent of the private tongue-lashing LBJ had delivered to Mr. Pearson. It was not his most convincing performance.
When the Davey team began disbanding, preparing for Mr. Pearson’s retirement, Mr. O’Hagan went to Washington in 1967 with the specific assignment of promoting Canada as minister counsellor in the Canadian embassy. In a posting that lasted eight years, he cultivated a wide circle of contacts and oversaw the launch of a magazine promoting Canada. He and Wanda also became friends with Walter Mondale, then a senator from Minnesota, and his wife, who were their neighbours in the comfortable northwest suburb of Cleveland Park.
Pierre Trudeau and Richard "Dick" O'Hagan on Parliament Hill.
In 1975, Mr. O’Hagan was back in Ottawa to provide much-needed communications strategy for the government’s troubled “6 and 5” anti-inflation program. The next year he returned to the Prime Minister’s Office, leading an effort to burnish Mr. Trudeau’s sagging image in the face of a looming election. According to Patrick Gossage, Mr. O’Hagan’s deputy, the basic ground rules for the staff were: return all calls promptly from reporters and never tell a lie.
In 1979, Mr. O’Hagan moved to the Bank of Montreal as senior vice-president of public affairs. Under the hard charging chairman William Mulholland, Mr. O’Hagan led the communications strategy. When Mr. Barrett assumed the chair, Mr. O’Hagan became a very special adviser indeed. Soon, Mr. Barrett seemed to be everywhere, meeting reporters for briefings, attending cultural events, meeting staff across the country and giving speeches on national unity. That was no accident. Behind the scenes, Mr. O’Hagan had established what former staff member Patrick Doyle called “a private, bespoke communications shop for Matt” that made him one of the best briefed and scripted CEOs in the country. Importantly, Mr. O’Hagan helped with the creation of the chairman’s international advisory council of notables on world issues.
There was a private Dick O’Hagan and a long list of good works on boards: the Toronto film festival, the Writers’ Development Trust, the Canadian Journalism Foundation, and the Walrus magazine and foundation. During his professional days he was often an absent father. But, as his eldest child Anne put it, “I always knew I didn’t have a standard-issue father. He always loved the family environment.”
He had a special relationship with all his grandchildren. Madeleine, the eldest, recalled “Hoppa’s” trademark, an “incredibly loud, room-shaking, full body, tongue-sticking-out” laugh, and his helpful career advice. There was Dick, the family patriarch who loved the raucous family dinners at home or at Sursum Corda (Lift Up Your Heart), their treasured Muskoka retreat on Mary Lake. Mr. O’Hagan would hold forth with strong views on the issue of the day. He was so well-informed and well-read, said his son Peter, a New York investment banker, that “you had to topple the whole edifice if you were going to win. It was exhausting.” And for legions of admirers, there was Dick the loyal friend. As John Macfarlane, editor emeritus of The Walrus, said in an elegant eulogy: “This was no fair-weather friend. He leaned in, the first to raise a cheer when you won a fight, the last to leave your corner when you lost. He was both a mentor and a mensch.”
Bob Lewis’s book Power, Prime Ministers and the Press: The Battle For Truth on Parliament Hill is on the long list for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize.