The enigma of Robert Reguly

The late journalist Robert Reguly made his living with words, but left very few behind to explain how he succeeded so spectacularly and crashed so tragically.

A new book on his career by his son says Reguly quit writing a personal memoir, after just 1,000 words, about reporting the Viet Nam War in 1967. He also declined offers from publishers to write an autobiography.

Sadly, he had a troubled, remote relationship with his family. Eric Reguly’s Ghosts of War: Chasing My Father’s Legend Through Vietnam begins with a prelude in which the father punches his young son powerfully in the chest, after Eric had snuck into the bedroom to welcome dad back from overseas.

Robert was a classic absentee father and husband during his stellar career with the Toronto Star. He appears to have talked very little with his son about his exploits, though was sharply critical of Eric’s first efforts in journalism.

The result is that Robert Reguly remains a cypher, both to Eric who must string together scraps of information to make a narrative, and to the reader who never really learns about the man’s motivations and demons.

When I was a young journalist in the early 1980s, I knew Reguly as a legend in the profession. At some danger to himself, he found the elusive thug Hal Banks in Brooklyn in 1964. Banks was a union-busting criminal who had dodged the RCMP and FBI since 1962.

In 1966, Reguly tracked down Gerda Munsinger, a Soviet informant who had slept with a Canadian cabinet minister. He located her in Munich, even though officials claimed she was long dead. Reguly also reported on the bloody ground war in Viet Nam, far from the safety of posh hotels in Saigon where many less daring journalists hunkered down.

But the Reguly episode I recall most vividly was the disaster that effectively ended his swashbuckling career in 1981. A story at the Toronto Sun, which he had worked on with a careless, hotshot reporter, turned out to be wrong and libelous. He was effectively exiled from the profession, forced to take public relations jobs with the Ontario government, and to freelance articles for an outdoors magazine.

I remember my own shock at this turn of events. Thereafter, I never relied on any colleague’s research for a story. I avoided joint bylines, and triple-checked my sources before writing investigative pieces.

Eric Reguly structures his book around his 2018 return to the places his father reported on in Viet Nam. It’s a framework that doesn’t quite work, as Viet Nam has changed so dramatically that even his fixers didn’t know about the country’s dark past. At one location, he spots a modern bridge where once his father dug into the muck. He is later dissuaded from wandering the banks of a river because of the dangers of unexploded ordinance.

Eric Reguly is honest enough to tell us about the journalistic lapses his father accepted. Such as firing an M-16 rifle in a battle he was supposed to be covering, not fighting. And the checkbook journalism around securing the Munsinger story for money against other newspaper interlopers.

In the end, I found myself much more empathetic to Eric than to his father. Eric is a respected journalist, currently posted in Rome for the Globe and Mail. His career may lack the pizzazz of his father, but I would argue it has more enduring value. Journalism is not just about flash, but about the hard work of understanding complex subjects and explaining them in a careful, balanced way. My empathy is also about his growing up with a difficult, alcohol-loving father who disregarded his family, especially his long-suffering wife Ada.

Which is not to dismiss or denigrate Robert Reguly. He was some kind of adrenalin junkie, a brave man who faced danger square on. But in this book, he remains a type, never fully explained, so much like other war correspondents and photographers who seek out life-threatening conflicts at the expense of normal lives. We owe them our gratitude, but they are not the pinnacle of journalism. They are a branch. Much of the best journalism is about the dull, repetitious slog of getting facts right, writing clearly, and with no hope of a National Newspaper Award.

May 11, 2022