Some names are as good as a guarantee. During Richard J. Doyle's years as editor (1963 to 1978) and editor-in-chief (1978 to 1983) of this newspaper, his name was a hallmark for integrity, for the newspaper's duty to earn the reader's trust and own up if that trust was broken. By his death yesterday, he had lived another life as a senator, tackling injustice in the Red Chamber as he had at The Globe and Mail; but it is as an editor that we remember him here.
He wore two hats. As overseer of the editorial operation, he took chances on untried writers, allowed great leeway to experienced writers and fought for the freedom of voices within the pages of the newspaper to disagree with each other. On the editorial board, where his control was necessarily tighter, his causes could be whimsical at times, but his central passion was magnificent: the fight for civil liberties and the principled defence of those liberties even when -- especially when -- it meant defending the weakest reeds. He lived and breathed the counsel of the 18th-century British letter writer who, signing himself Junius, composed the line that has appeared at the top of this page since 1844: Submit to no arbitrary measures.
He fought that fight often in the editorials on this page, though the most memorable battle occurred elsewhere. In 1964, the newspaper squared off against the Ontario government, which proposed to give Draconian powers to the Ontario Police Commission to question people in secret, without access to legal counsel, under threat of indefinite imprisonment. On March 20, the newspaper ran a front-page editorial attacking this assault on freedom.
The government backed down. Mr. Doyle's only regret was that he had run the editorial on the front page, since it implied that the editorial page wasn't authoritative enough in its own right to carry so important a message.
Dic Doyle was a man of firm loyalties (he would not hear a word spoken against the Queen or the monarchy) and idiosyncrasies (he would quote at the drop of a hat from Alice in Wonderland and had a soft spot for Judy Garland).
He was also an extraordinary writer and editor. He might arrive at the board table with a fully formed view of the day's events, and proceed to outline his position so articulately that whoever took close dictation would emerge with an editorial that needed no further work. He could alter most of the sentences in a writer's piece and leave that writer barely noticing the changes, except to marvel at how well the piece suddenly read. And every writer could have learned from his injunctions against purple prose and against showing off to the detriment of the argument.
We were lucky to know him, and salute his memory.