At last count, there were about half a dozen books devoted entirely or partially to the life and deeds of Rupert Murdoch. But none explore a crucial mystery: how and why the mild-mannered, somewhat progressive Australian newspaper publisher of the 1960s came to be the right-wing crusader and scourge of the left wing that he is today. Since I was there at the creation, so to speak, let me give my version.

I first met Rupert in Canberra in 1965. I was a refugee from an Australian Foreign Ministry that had decreed the Vietnam War to be Chinese aggression, with Beijing using Hanoi as a proxy to advance into Asia. Murdoch was using Canberra as the editorial headquarters for launching a brand-new national newspaper called The Australian. The idea was that being based in Canberra, then an overgrown village of some 60,000 souls, would give him national credentials. Some friends introduced me to his progressive-minded editor, Adrian Deamer, who then arranged for me to meet Murdoch.

Others have written about how Murdoch, as a student at Oxford, had embraced left-wing causes. When I met him he was still that way inclined. He was keen to see his newspaper as the one voice of progressive opinion in Australia’s very conservative society. He and Deamer gave me space for a series of articles criticizing Canberra’s Cold War attitudes and predicting U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Later, they were to give me a lot of space, and some editorial support, to float what I called the “enclave” solution to the Vietnam War – to partition off an area where the anti-communist Vietnamese could regroup and hope to repeat Taiwan’s success. (That idea got nowhere fast. It was taken for granted that U.S. victory was assured, provided it continued to drop bombs.)

In mid-1969 we were to meet again, this time in Sydney where he had had to move his editorial headquarters. When in Canberra his paper may have been able to boast national credentials, but he had no printing facilities there. This meant that plates prepared in Canberra had to be rushed to Sydney for late-night printing, with newspapers then put on early morning planes for distribution around Australia. The slightest hiccup – fog at Canberra airport, for example, forcing a mad four-hour dash by car to Sydney – would cause printing chaos. These, after all, were the days when even fax machines did not exist. Being in Sydney at least avoided the fog problem.

But other problems remained. Deadlines were still cramped and budgets crimped. In much of Australia, readers had to wait till midday or even later to receive the paper. And the paper still lacked national credentials. Deamer had recruited me to be Tokyo correspondent for the paper (one of their problems was being scooped on reporting from Japan, and one of my problems was being blacklisted by Australia’s conservative academia). I had been brought to News Ltd.’s grim Surry Hills headquarters in Sydney to learn something about newspapers. It was to be was a very bumpy learning curve.

Creating a national newspaper for a country the size of Australia and with only 12 million people (at that time) would be hard enough at the best of times. Even today, the U.S., with its much larger population, has problems. Each state had to be given a page or two for its own local news. They had to bring in enough foreign news to justify their claim to be national. They had little access to local advertising. And even national advertising was hard to get; most of it was still going to the established provincial newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Age, especially. Circulation remained low. Murdoch was bleeding red ink with each edition.

Even so Murdoch battled on. At times, he seemed tempted to go the populist route to try to boost sales. But even as late as 1969, the paper’s progressive tinge was still fairly unsullied. Things only began to shift later, and I remember the night when it might have all started.

Through constant chipping away at deadlines and printing schedules Murdoch had just managed to overcome his main circulation problem: the need to secure early-morning delivery nationwide. But the leeway for getting the paper to Sydney airport in time for the last evening flights to other state capitals was paper-thin. And the left-wing printing union knew this. Over the months, management had bowed to every concession they demanded, hoping to keep them happy and keep printing schedules intact.

But finally the union went too far – a demand that they should only work three days a week. Management had to say no. The union retaliated. Exactly at 6 p.m., right on deadline time, they would call a strike. Management would then have to dragoon all non-union labor – executives, journalists, typists, yours truly – to go down to the printing room and put the blocks into the plates ready for printing, hopefully to be at least in time for the flights the next morning.

On this occasion even Murdoch had been roped in. As we pushed the lead type into the plates, I could see the iron being pushed into Rupert’s soul. “So this is how the left wing treats the one newspaper owner who tries to put out a progressive newspaper,” he would mutter. Soon after, the paper began to cut back on progressive contributors. Deamer was gradually pushed out. A year or so later, with Madame Thatcher praising Rupert for his Wapping victory over the British printing unions, Murdoch was in full right-wing flight.

True, shifting a paper with a strong progressive image to becoming the hard-line right-wing trumpeter it is today could not happen overnight. But soon the paper was trying to imitate the blaring headlines and inflated trivia of Rupert’s London scandal rags. Hyped-up editors were sent in from London to reform us. When they asked me to start filing for London’s Sun from Tokyo, and to write something about mistreatment of Australian racehorses in Japan, I realized it was time to move on. Meanwhile, Rupert was also moving on – to even greater heights as global right-wing kingmaker determined to trash the Left, and complete the extermination of the left-wing printing unions that had made his life so miserable in the past.

Surprisingly, I was to meet Rupert again during his financial troubles of the early ’80s. He had brought a team with him to Tokyo to try to borrow funds in the hope of a tie-up with one of the big Japanese media groups. I was pulled in as adviser and we would caucus mornings in the coffee shop in front of the Akasaka Tokyu Hotel (they could not afford anything more expensive).

My suggestion that they should first try the Nikkei quickly backfired; Nikkei was not interested in any “yellow-press” connections, I was told. Rupert’s people had a better reception (but not much money) from Yomiuri and Sankei. Eventually they were to be rescued at the last minute by Western bankers.

About a decade later I had my last contact with him. A friend whom I had introduced to the News Ltd. people in London when they were seeking technical links with Japan was, in typical News Corp. fashion, being jettisoned, without promised reward, as soon as she had created the links they wanted.

I put in a call to Rupert at his Aspen, Colorado, resort, hoping he would put an end to this atrocity. He came to the phone and promised heartily that he would look into the situation. Predictably, nothing happened. ❶