NEW YORK—Ulysses Grant was at one point the greatest American of the 19th century: he defeated the Confederate forces, ending the Civil War and saving the Union. Things were pretty much downhill from there. Grant won the presidency, only to be remembered for scandal: as PBS notes in its round-up of presidential history, “His Treasury secretary collected illegal taxes, his secretary of war took kickbacks for patronage jobs, and his vice president defrauded government contracts through a dummy railroad corporation.”

Well, nobody’s perfect. But it gets worse. After the Republicans refused to nominate him for a third term, Grant moved to New York to retire near his son, who worked there as a banker. The son started a brokerage firm, Grant and Ward, in which his father invested his entire savings. Unfortunately, the firm’s other partner was stealing the money that Grant and his son were collecting from investors; when the firm collapsed in 1884, the former national hero was left embarrassed and bankrupt. He died of cancer a year later.

History reserves a special sort of comeuppance for high achievers. Winston Churchill was defeated in a landslide barely two months after British troops helped take Berlin. (He came out better than George Patton, who led the American Third Army into Germany and then got killed by a truck.) Tony Blair, the young saviour of the Labour Party, left office under a cloud of acrimony and contempt. Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled what was perhaps the most vicious and oppressive state apparatus in history, and was a hero for but a moment, at least among Russians. Helmut Kohl united Germany, but a decade later left politics in disgrace after accepting illegal donations. You could call it the Icarus club. And as of this week, Brian Mulroney is a member.

Mulroney’s claim to greatness is stronger than he gets credit for. Free Trade, Meech Lake, the GST; these things marked us as a country, for good or bad, depending on your politics. But they were not the product of a second-rate mind or mediocre ambition, and they outstrip by far the petty, myopic aims of our current government. Mulroney and his legacy shaped Canadian politics, and do still; to that extent he achieved the status of a great figure.

This week, as the Schreiber affair shudders closer to its ugly conclusion, that status seems all but gone. There are few things less becoming a former prime minister than to defend himself by pleading destitution. “Mr. Mulroney is not a wealthy man,” Mulroney’s spokesman, Luc Lavoie, was quoted as saying — explaining, if that’s the word, Mulroney’s decision to accept an envelope of cash from Karlheinz Schreiber while he was still in office. “He doesn’t come from a wealthy family … Whatever savings he had he had spent while he was prime minister.”

Whether that’s true is certainly irrelevant to the ethics of the case: nobody ever got excused for impropriety on the grounds that they needed the money. The public-relations angle is equally unpromising. Mulroney’s pleas for understanding will be hopeless if the coming inquiry finds that he broke the law; a man whose public image is defined by arrogance and aloofness should be more careful about playing the sympathy card.

Rather, the significance of Mulroney’s defence is to trace the outer edges of a very long fall. The man who won back-to-back Conservative majorities has been reduced to the most pedestrian of sins: taking money he shouldn’t have, because he was broke. Let the inquiry find what it does. It hardly matters. Mulroney’s real punishment will be ignominy.

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Posted on Saturday, November 24th, 2007 at 4:15 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.