Page 70 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

keep your government in one room and lock the door you’ll have no problems. The problem with
government is that they all fly off on their own, they have their own allies, their own journalistic
contacts. Controlling the cabinet is going to be the hard part.’
Tony was receptive to that message. In any position of power there is fragility. If you’re leading the

country there is vast responsibility and a certain loneliness that I could relate to. I would sit in my
office in the afternoon, with my work complete, wanting company. There is a vacuum attached to the
job that people don’t want to break into. Tony was a young man going into that position.
In his memoirs he wrote that he had asked my opinion on sacking Gordon Brown when he was
prime minister and Gordon was next door in No. 11. My recollection is that Tony wasn’t specific
about Gordon. His question was about superstars and how I dealt with them. My answer was: ‘The
most important thing in my job is control. The minute they threaten your control, you have to get rid of

them.’ He did say he was having problems with Gordon but didn’t ask me specifically what I thought
he should do. I kept my advice general because I didn’t want to get into personality issues.
I’ve always found that you have to take the hard road all the time, whether it’s popular or not. If
you have a worry about one of your staff, that tells you straight away there is a problem. It never made
sense to me to go to bed every night worrying when you could do something to cut the problem away.
Power is useful if you want to use it, but I don’t think it resonates with footballers, who are mostly

working-class men. But control was my aim. I could use my power if I wished, and I did, but when
you reach the station I attained at United, power came with it naturally. The big decisions you make in
those jobs are usually seen by outsiders as exercises in power, when control is really what it’s about.
Labour politics and the great vineyards aside, America was the source of my main intellectual
interests. JFK, the Civil War, Vince Lombardi and the great American ball games: these were among
my escapes from the pressures of football. New York was my entry point to American culture. We
bought an apartment there, which all the family used, and Manhattan became the ideal venue for short

breaks when the international calendar took the players away from Carrington.
The States always intrigued and inspired me. I fed off America’s energy and vastness, its variety.
My first trip there was in 1983, when Aberdeen won the European Cup Winners’ Cup. I took the
family to Florida, for a routine kind of holiday. By then, though, America and its history had already
entered my blood. The killing of John Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 left its mark on me from the day I
heard the news. Over time I developed a forensic interest in how he was killed, by whom, and why.

I remember the day that shook the world. It was a Friday night and I was shaving in the mirror, at
the bathroom sink, before going to the dancing with my mates. My dad, who was a bit deaf, called out:
‘Is that right that John Kennedy has been shot?’
‘Dad, you’re deaf. You’re imagining it,’ I called back, and dried myself off, thinking nothing of it.
Half an hour later the news flashed up. He had been taken to Parklands Hospital.
I always remember, at the dancing, at the Flamingo, near Govan, hearing the song that went to No.
1: ‘Would You Like to Swing on A Star?’ The atmosphere was muted. Instead of dancing we sat

upstairs and talked about the murder.
For a young lad like me, Kennedy captured the imagination. He was a good-looking boy and there
was a certain spark about him. It resonated that someone as fresh and dynamic as him could become
president. Though he stayed in my consciousness, as a defining figure, my interest in the assassination
developed along an unexpected route when I was invited to speak at a dinner in Stoke by Brian
Cartmel.

Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen were both present, along with Jimmy Armfield, and I
remember thinking: ‘What am I doing here, with all these great players? Surely they’d prefer to listen