Books in Canada
Rogue Tory:
The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker
Denis Smith
Macfarlane Walter & Ross
ISBN 0-921912-92-7
Trumpets and Drums:
John Diefenbaker on the Campaign Trail
Dick Spencer
Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN 1-55054-462-4
Saturday's Child:
Memoirs of Canada's First Female Cabinet Minister
Ellen Loucks Fairclough
University of Toronto Press
ISBN 0-8020-0736-8
In 1969 and 1970 Dennis Smith tried to work with John Diefenbaker on
the preparation of his memoirs. His efforts were frustrated. The three
volumes of Diefenbaker's banal and unreliable One Canada
came out with the assistance of a different amanuensis from 1975 to
1977. The quarter century that has passed since Smith abandoned his
first effort to set down the Diefenbaker record has allowed the writing
of an altogether different class of book. Coming out shortly after
Diefenbaker's one hundredth birthday, Rogue Tory
is finely written, thoroughly researched, superbly organised and
scrupulously fair. It rivals Donald Creighton on Sir John A. Macdonald
as the best biography of a Canadian Prime Minister.
Smith
came to Diefenbaker as something of an academic Red Tory and
nationalist. After giving up on him, he published three other books. Bleeding Hearts.Bleeding Country
(1971) is an impassioned attack on Trudeau's handling of the October
Crisis, and more broadly on Trudeau's anti-nationalism, which, Smith
argues, led to the invocation and abuse of the War Measures Act.
At the time, he was one of the many English Canadian intellectuals who
expected Quebec to become independent within a decade. Gentle Patriot
(1973) is a very sympathetic study of an alternative nationalist hero
and a distinct failure, Walter Gordon, who co-operated fully with
Smith, making his papers and draft memoirs available (before publishing
the memoirs himself in 1977). In Diplomacy of Fear
(1988), Smith looked in early Cold War diplomacy for the roots of
Canada's dependence on the United States. But as a careful and honest
scholar, he could only find Canada playing a creditable role as a
bridge between Europe and America in the founding of NATO.
By
the time he returned to Diefenbaker, the national issues on which his
government foundered could be seen in a long historical perspective.
Smith writes without bias and his account of Diefenbaker is clear and
balanced.
And yet the paradoxes of Diefenbaker's career
remain. By some measures he was an enormously successful politician.
His 1958 sweep will likely remain the greatest general election victory
in Canadian history. He was the first Conservative leader since
Macdonald to lead his party to victory in three general elections. Even
after the collapse of his government in 1963, he was able to win a
plurality of seats in English Canada and keep the Liberals from a
majority in two more general elections. But by any measure he was an
unsuccessful prime minister, letting his government drift from the easy
generosity of his first minority government in 1957 until its
melodramatic defeat in the House of Commons in 1963. He was resentful,
paranoid, a cultivator of enemies and had a low regard for the truth.
Despite his failure, and his real nastiness, he was never hated by
Canadians as several of his predecessors and at least two of his
successors have been. His memory has been fading, but it has generally
been affectionate. Smith tries to resolve the paradoxes by
distinguishing between the man and the legend: the man a disappointed
failure, the legend a triumphant underdog. But the man and the legend
were one. It was because he saw himself as an underdog and determined
early on the triumph that he was capable of such bitterness and
destined to fail.
Diefenbaker had a rootless childhood, his
family occupying at least nine different homes in Ontario and
Saskatchewan before he was fifteen. His father seems to have had an
undistinguished career as a teacher and was an unsuccessful
homesteader. Diefenbaker described his mother as "the much more
determined personality". Smith suggests that she was "dour,
intimidating, prejudiced, ignorant and wilful". Smith is circumspect
about psychological speculation. With the best of sources it is a
dubious resort. For much of Diefenbaker's childhood and youth he has to
rely on Diefenbaker's own account, something he does perhaps too
readily in light of the unreliability he demonstrates when alternative
sources become available. But such an unsettled childhood would
naturally set him out on life as an outsider. His only early bond was
with his ne'er-do-well younger brother Elmer, to whom he remained loyal
and who fully, if ineffectually, repaid his loyalty until Elmer died.
Diefenbaker's sense of himself as an outsider remained with him
throughout his life and was at the root of his ambition. He seems also
to have conceived a resentment of those more fortunate than himself
from earliest childhood. He and Smith see in this the root of his
populism and such sense of social justice as he had, but it seems to
have been an largely negative sentiment.
Smith demonstrates
that Diefenbaker's story of being invalided from the army as a result
of an injury from a trenching tool while training in England was a lie.
He speculates sympathetically that he suffered from a psychosomatic
illness. He had enlisted for officer training in April 1916 and sailed
for England in October. He seems to have had plenty of time for
sightseeing and going to the theatre in London before returning to
Canada in February 1917.
Called to the bar in 1919
Diefenbaker set up practice in the village of Wakaw, midway between
Saskatoon and Prince Albert. He was able to make a decent living,
buying the first of a series of smart new cars in 1920, and, more
importantly, making a name for himself. He moved his practice to Prince
Albert in 1924. He was not a brilliant lawyer. But in the prairie world
of the twenties lawyers were held in respect and any substantial trial
gained some public attention.
Diefenbaker's father was a
Liberal. How he became a Conservative is unclear. The Liberals were
apparently interested in recruiting him as a candidate as late as March
of 1925. But by August 1925 he was the Conservative candidate for
Prince Albert for the general election expected in the Fall.
Conservative prospects in Saskatchewan were poor, as Diefenbaker's five
political defeats before his election to the House of Commons in 1940
confirmed. Chance and personal contacts perhaps made him a
Conservative. He never liked being called a Tory. Both parts of the
title of Smith's book would annoy him. Perhaps he sensed that his long
term prospects in the weaker party would be better. This proved true.
As a Liberal he might have made it no further than the provincial
cabinet. He was never a party man and beyond his rhetorical populism
had no discernible political convictions. When he finally ran
successfully in Prince Albert in 1953, it was practically as the
candidate of the Diefenbaker Clubs, though he was officially the
Progressive Conservative candidate. He demanded unreserved lifetime
loyalty as the party leader. But he was a loner in the caucus before he
became leader and secretly relished Tory failure when he was no longer
leader.
What Diefenbaker loved in politics was the rhetorical
combat in campaigning and the House of Commons and the recognition
exemplified in main-streeting. His career is full of tales of rousing
campaign speeches and devastating attacks in the House of Commons. Even
as Prime Minister his successes in the House of Commons were attacks on
the opposition. Election campaigns revived his spirits after the
crisis of 1963 and after two years of fractious opposition in 1965. The
legend says that he was a great orator. But there is no Diefenbaker
speech worth reading. He was incapable of the substance, eloquence and
force of Meighen, whose speeches collected in Unrevised and Unrepented
are still eminently readable. His most important speeches were often
put together from scraps from his staff and his own jottings. He was
not well read. An old fashioned education and a few good books at home
were enough to give him a sense of the grand style. Trial advocacy
developed a kind of theatrical talent. He had a sense of his audience
and was quick witted and shameless. This was enough to equip him to
capture audiences when the public still went to political meetings in
the hope of being given a good show. By the sixties and seventies he
was an anachronism and even a figure of fun, but he could still
entertain.
Diefenbaker's long record of defeats might have
discouraged someone less determined and more interested in government
than campaigning. But he was still relatively young and established
himself in both local and national Conservative circles. Perhaps his
most bitter defeat was as the forlorn leader of the provincial
Conservatives in the Saskatchewan general election of 1938. He could
only field candidates in 23 of 50 ridings and the party took only 12%
of the popular vote, coming fourth behind the Liberals, the CCF and the
Socreds. He complained at the lack of support from the national party
and Eastern Canadian business; an odd complaint as transfers from
national parties and out of province contributions are now illegal in
most provinces.
In the small Conservative caucus from 1940 to
1956 and by running for the leadership in 1942 and 1948 Diefenbaker was
able to make himself into a national figure. He was, despite
widespread reservations in the party, the natural successor to George
Drew when he resigned in 1956. How far he was necessary to defeat the
Liberals in 1957 it is difficult from this distance to judge. Their
defeat was not expected, but after twenty-two years in power, under an
aging Prime Minister and under the impact of the Pipeline Debate, the
time might seem to have come. What cannot be doubted is that the
triumph of 1958 was Diefenbaker's. The extraordinary enthusiasm whipped
up by his campaign - people swarming to touch him and breaking down the
doors of halls to hear him - was all for Diefenbaker.
Having
won the highest prize in the game to which he had given his life
Diefenbaker had no idea what to do with it. He was a telling example of
the general problem of democratic politics: that the contest by which
our leaders are chosen neither attracts nor produces leaders. He
enjoyed his foreign trips and greeting foreign visitors. He made
countless speeches and collected dozens of honorary degrees and various
other honours. When it came to the real work of government he wanted to
do good but had little idea what to do. He simply drifted along when
he was not distracted by prejudice and suspicion or paralysed by
conflicting opinions.
Diefenbaker's interest in "the Vision
of a New Canada of the North" went little beyond its rhetorical
usefulness in the 1958 election campaign. In the minds of his young
economics adviser Merrill Menzies and his Northern Affairs Minister
Alvin Hamilton it promised an active big spending government investing
in the infrastructure of the North. Some roads were built to resources.
But for good perhaps rather than ill, Diefenbaker was not interested in
supporting the vision against the advice of a fiscally conservative
cabinet. Piecemeal, politically pragmatic free handedness and a
recession left him with little margin for spending on the vision.
Diefenbaker was characteristically proudest of his introduction of the Canadian Bill of Rights. It was more a piece of rhetoric than legislation. Had it not been superseded by the Charter,
the ambitious and increasingly ingenious and disingenuous courts might
have made something of it. Its status as simply one statute of Canada
among many meant that it could never have had an important impact.
Diefenbaker was not interested in the political complications of trying
to make it a constitutional enactment. Bora Laskin and F. R. Scott
suggested that it could be added to the British North America Act
by Westminster on the request of the Parliament of Canada, thus making
it binding on the national government and parliament, but even this
relatively simple proposal was ignored. Whether or not some vague
regard for the sovereignty of parliament made Diefenbaker reluctant to
subject parliament to the the supervision of the courts, on which
Laskin would soon sit, we cannot know. He does not seem to have thought
about such issues. Tens of thousands of copies with his corny "I am a
Canadian" pledge over his signature, were distributed across the
country and he was content.
Diefenbaker was reputed to be a
great man for rights. As a criminal defence lawyer rights were tools of
his trade, though not so much as they have become since the Charter.
Beyond that rights were for him little more than rhetoric. He accepted
with complacency the R. C. M. P.'s arbitrary purges of the civil
service on security grounds. In his attacks on the King government's
use of orders-in-council to deport Japanese Canadians and in the
Gouzenko affair his concern was as much for the rights of Parliament as
for the rights of individuals. The constitutional, legal and, still
more, the philosophical issues through which rights have developed were
simply beyond his interests.
Nor was he interested in
economics. A big deficit was a political embarrassment, though not as
much as a tax increase, but he was always vulnerable to political
pressure for spending, particularly from farmers. The chief economic
controversy during his time as Prime Minister was most significant
politically. Nearing the end of his term, the Liberal appointed
Governor of the Bank of Canada gave a series of speeches vaguely
outlining a comprehensive and mildly nationalist economic policy
implicitly critical of the government. It is usually supposed that
James Coyne and the government were at odds over monetary policy. But
while some ministers wanted easier money, as some always do,
Diefenbaker and his Finance Minister, Donald Fleming, never did quarrel
with Coyne's monetary policy. As Coyne's speeches became a political
embarrassment, however, the cabinet resolved, with less than a year
left in his seven year term, to get rid of him. It fixed on his pension
arrangements as a ground for his dismissal implying that he had taken
advantage of his position for personal gain. A one sentence bill was
introduced in the House of Commons declaring the governorship vacant.
The debate in the House, lead by Diefenbaker, was vitriolic, with Coyne
from the sidelines demanding a public hearing and describing
Diefenbaker as the evil genius behind the affair. Blunderingly refusing
to have Coyne before a Commons committee, where a Conservative majority
could have grilled him, the government left him the chance to appear
before the Liberal dominated Senate Banking and Finance Committee like a
victim of persecution. The whole Senate defeated the bill and Coyne
immediately resigned claiming vindication. The government suffered
severe political damage. Diefenbaker's suspicion of Liberals and
vindictiveness contributed to turning an embarrassment into a disaster.
Some embarrassment over his German name made Diefenbaker a genuine
advocate of unhyphenated Canadianism in One Canada. Those who would be
loyal to him, of whatever sort or condition, were his friends. Those
who would not were his enemies. He had no other discrimination. This
was the best of him. His ultimate success opened up Canadian politics.
But his legacy has been largely subverted by multiculturalism.
Hyphenated Canadianism is now practically required by law.
Diefenbaker had one prejudice, against what he would call Bay Street
Tories, a mixture of his personal resentments and Western alienation.
The myth of the Bay Street Tories was largely a Liberal creation when
Bay Street, being nothing if not opportunist, was largely Liberal.
Diefenbaker's prejudice would not allow him to see the variety and
popular appeal of Ontario Conservatism, denying him support when he was
struggling to the top and when times were tough.
Diefenbaker
still has a reputation as a nationalist done in by the continentalist
Liberals with help from Washington. As such he figures as the hero of
George Grant's Lament for a Nation.
Smith effectively demolishes the myth. Diefenbaker had a real
attachment to the Crown and the Commonwealth and other un-American
traditions. He could not make much of these and raged against their
decline in the flag debate. He was not paranoid about creeping
republicanism. It was a conscious policy as Pearson admits in his Memoirs.
But Diefenbaker was not naturally anti-American and as a staunch
anti-communist accepted American leadership of the Western alliances.
Within days of taking office his government had approved the extension
of an agreement allowing U. S. aircraft to carry air to air nuclear
armed missiles while flying over Canada. Within weeks it had approved a
joint operational air defence command in NORAD making Canada the junior
partner in the joint defence of its air space.
The crisis
that lead to the defeat of his government in 1963 did not result from a
refusal of Diefenbaker to countenance nuclear weapons on Canadian soil.
That was a position he only affected in the rhetoric of the 1963
election campaign. It was his failure to decide, his inability to lead
when the cabinet was divided over whether to take the nuclear warheads
to which the purchase of the BOMARC missile had already committed
Canada that lead to his fall. Any decision he might have taken would
have lost him a couple of ministers. Any decision could have been
defended. Indecision left him vulnerable. Though Leader, he could not
lead.
Diefenbaker liked and admired Eisenhower. He was a
certified great man, the sort Diefenbaker thought should be his friend.
Kennedy was just a successful American politician and everything was
against their getting on: on the one side age, insecurity and a humble
upbringing; on the other youth, self-assurance and a background of
wealth and power. To make matters worse, by 1963 Canadians preferred
Kennedy's style to Diefenbaker's. The anti-Americanism of his 1963
campaign was badly timed.
Diefenbaker's successes in holding
the Liberals to a minority in 1963 and 1965, when his predecessors as
Conservative leader never won more than sixty-seven seats in the
general elections from 1935 to 1953, helped him cling to the
leadership. They were campaign triumphs as each time the Progressive
Conservative vote on election day was more than 10% above the polls
when the elections were called. But Diefenbaker was helped by Pearson,
who was a lousy campaigner and a weak Prime Minister. He handled that
scandals that tarnished his government in its first years poorly.
Diefenbaker got to Pearson and the frantic ex-diplomat allowed the
descent of the House of Commons into partisan slanging in which
Diefenbaker and his close supporters were more than a match for the
Liberals.
Diefenbaker seems never to have seriously
considered resigning as leader. He floated the idea of resigning in the
wild meetings of February 1963 as a means of embarrassing his
opponents. However obvious the necessity of his retirement was after
his 1963 defeat, he could not bear the thought of leaving the stage.
Political drama had become his life. He would give it up when he died.
The nastiness of the fight to get rid of him he brought on himself. The
wonder is he could have had so many supporters to the end. That a
seventy-one year old twice defeated leader should have thought he had
the right to continue indefinitely as leader was absurd, as even the
teenage Sean O'Sullivan should have seen. All parties have taken care
to provide for leadership review in their constitutions to avoid
another Diefenbaker trauma.
What brought Diefenbaker down was
his loss of Quebec. His fifty seats in Quebec in 1958 gave him a golden
opportunity to restore the Conservatives in the province to a position
they had not held since Macdonald's death. But Diefenbaker thought
introducing simultaneous translation in Parliament and nominating a
French-Canadian Governor-General showed ample understanding of Quebec.
He chose few and undistinguished ministers from Quebec and gave them
minor portfolios. In choosing ministers outside of Quebec he had little
choice but to include those who had risen to prominence before he
became leader. As he put it to Ellen Fairclough: "it looks as if I
shall have to form [the cabinet] largely of my enemies." He took his
"enemies" from Quebec, Leon Balcer and Pierre Sevigny, but he never
took the trouble to get to know his Quebec caucus and bring on its very
considerable talent.
Dick Spencer met Diefenbaker first in
1963 when he was a young Prince Albert alderman and school teacher. He
worked with him in the Prince Albert campaigns from then until his last
campaign in 1979 and served as riding association president from 1965. Trumpets and Drums
is partly a political biography of the mature Diefenbaker and partly
an account of the local Prince Albert campaigns from Diefenbaker's
first return to the riding in 1953. The sources are not always clear,
but it is in part Spencer's own political memoirs and is used as a
source by Smith for Diefenbaker's last years. Spencer writes well
enough in a casual, rather pleased with itself style. The accounts of
the local campaigns, the bulk of the book, are almost comically
tedious. The campaign itineraries are run through again and again:
Torch River, Codette, Nipawin, etc., etc., etc.: the numbers at the
meetings are recounted; the banal ritual of main-streeting is repeated:
"Hi, John, remember me?" "Hello, hello, good to see you.". We are told
a lot about food: here date loaf and cheddar cheese, there buns with
egg or salmon salad, always more ice-cream. The names of scores of
campaign workers are recalled and they were all great characters.
What interest the book has is in the latter part when the collapse of
his government and his ejection from the leadership brought out the
worst in Diefenbaker. It was all betrayal and deceit and the diabolical
Dalton Camp. This is the time when Spencer knew Diefenbaker. He became
a young crony. He saw the worst of his idol, acknowledging that he
wanted to hurt the party after his loss of the leadership and
recounting his glee at Conservative losses in the 1968 general
election. Even looking back fifteen years after Diefenbaker's death
Spencer cannot get beyond the emotional extremes of the divided party
in the sixties. His opponents were nasty, yelping, young hyenas,
cowards and fools. Among prime ministers Macdonald, Laurier, King and
Diefenbaker were in a class by themselves and Diefenbaker was the
greatest of the four. Spencer asks us to take Diefenbaker as his own
fantastic evaluation. With the whole sad band of uncritical loyalists,
the only people who could long escape his enmity, Spencer encouraged
his faults.
Ellen Fairclough's account of her year's in
Ottawa takes up little more than a third of her memoirs. Though her
place in history is as Canada's first woman cabinet minister, her
account of her life as Saturday's Child, "who works hard for a living",
in modest, provincial Hamilton is as interesting as her account of her
years in Ottawa. She was a secretary, accountant, businesswoman and
municipal politician before her election to the House of Commons at 45
in a by-election in 1950.
Her life as a minister seems to
have been largely travel (a quarter of a million miles, mostly by
train), speechmaking and campaigning. Perhaps this is what she
remembers best, forgetting the tedious days of office work. But like
most of her male colleagues she does not seem to have done much, partly
because of the inertia of government and partly because there was
nothing in particular she wanted to do. She served as Secretary of
State, the closest thing then to a minister of culture, with
responsibility among other things for the Dominion Carilloneur and
instituted July 1 ceremonies on Parliament Hill. She was Minister of
Immigration for four years during which immigration levels fell as
Europe became more prosperous relative to Canada and the government
moved slowly to make education and skills the chief criteria for
immigration. She became fairly cynical about the political pressures
for and against immigration and would have preferred not to have the
power to make exceptions to the rules at Diefenbaker's insistence or on
the importuning of immigrants. She was Postmaster General for less than
a year before the government fell.
Fairclough's experience
of Diefenbaker was typical. She had been at odds with George Drew early
in her political career, but they became good friends. She agreed with
the other woman Tory M.P., Margaret Aitken, not to support any
leadership hopeful in 1956. Diefenbaker accused her of supporting
Fleming and classed her among his enemies. He demanded her loyalty and
got it. But she seems never to have been taken in by him. She was on
the sidelines for the nuclear weapons debate in cabinet, prepared to go
along with whatever consensus emerged. Shortly before the government
fell her brightest idea was for a Royal Commission on the Great
National Purpose.
Diefenbaker's funeral was the grandest in
Canadian history and was planned by him to confirm his place among the
greats, not just of Canada but of the world. The Diefenbaker Centre in
Saskatoon, next to which he is buried, is a unique effort in Canada to
preserve a politician's memory and reputation. The supposedly
anti-American Diefenbaker is the only Canadian to have something like a
presidential library. But Diefenbaker's memory is already fading.
There is no ill will and some affection for him among those who first
became aware of Canadian politics when he was waging his battles. He
sense of drama at least made politics entertaining. He could be funny.
Smith's book will not be superseded. No significant sources have
escaped his attention. He makes good use of the British and American
diplomatic sources, which are insightful and generally fair. All the
drama of his rise and fall is revived. The impression left in the end
is of a rather shallow life and democratic politics reduced to
posturing. The man is dead. The legend is fading. Dennis Smith had
found Diefenbaker's place in history.
