Raymond Heard

Raymond Heard (born 1935) is a Canadian-South African journalist, editor, media executive and political strategist. He is President of Toronto-based Heard-Cosgrove Communications, whose clients include some of Canada's largest companies.

A white South African by birth, Heard, whose parents, George and Vida Heard, were prominent liberal journalists, was a political reporter for the Rand Daily Mail from 1955 until 1960. In 1960,he graduated with a BA Hons. in political science at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and then spent a year at Harvard on a Frank Knox Fellowship, where his teachers included Henry Kissinger and J.K. Galbraith. While there, he wrote an article on the political situation in his homeland for the Harvard Crimson in which he described apartheid as "a combination of hatred, fear, and ignorance."

An opponent of the apartheid regime, he left South Africa in 1962 and immigrated to Canada where he found a job with the Montreal Star. He served as the Star's White House correspondent, and a correspondent for The London Observer and the South African Morning Group, from 1963 until 1973, when he became Editor of the London Observer's Foreign News Service. In 1976, he returned to the Montreal Star as Managing Editor, with responsibility for all content, and remained with the newspaper until it closed in 1979 after a crippling 11-month printers' strike. Heard then moved to the Global Television Network where he served as Vice President, News and Current affairs, until 1987 when he accepted a position as communications director for Liberal leader John Turner. During the 2008 federal election he endorsed his friend Conservative Peter Kent's winning candidacy for Parliament.

From 1990 until 2000, Heard was the senior adviser, media and speech-writing, to two Chairmen and CEOs of Royal Bank of Canada, Allan Taylor and John Cleghorn. As the adviser to Cleghorn during the abortive effort to merge Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal in 1998, Heard played the role of devil's advocate, warning that the merger would be denied by the Liberal government unless the banks did more to explain why the merger would benefit customers. In 2000, he launched Heard-Cosgrove Communications.

Heard was responsible for making Nelson Mandela, whom he had covered as a young reporter in South Africa, an Honourary Canadian, in 2001, the first living person to get this honour.

In 1965, the Royal Humane Society honoured Heard, an avid surfer since boyhood, for saving the life of a woman bather at Land's End, Cornwall.

In early 2010, a consortium made up of Heard, Jerry Grafstein, Beryl Wajsman and Diane Francis announced a bid to purchase the National Post, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette from the floundering CanWest media conglomerate.

Heard is married to the Canadian journalist, Gillian Cosgrove and they have a daughter, Jennifer, a 2010 political science honours graduate from Guelph University. He has two children, Josephine Robson of London, and Antony Heard of Ottawa, from his first marriage to Susan Lewis (now Lady Susan Steyn).

Heard's younger brother, Anthony Heard, remained in South Africa and served as Editor in Chief of liberal The Cape Times for many years until he was dismissed after breaking the apartheid laws in 1986 by publishing his interview with Oliver Tambo, the exiled leader of the African National Congress (ANC). When Nelson Mandela became President of the new South Africa, Anthony Heard became an adviser in The Presidency, serving until 2010.

Heard's father George was a popular radical journalist in the 1930s, who exposed pro-Nazis in the government. He served in the SA Navy, and disappeared in full uniform in Cape Town after VE Day in 1945. It was later discovered that Heard, who was apparently number two on the death list of the Afrikaner Broederbond underground, had been kidnapped and murdered to prevent him from launching a post-war newspaper that would advocate a new, non-racial country.