bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 31–32
Basil Robinson, who died on December 21, 2012, at the age of 93, entered the Department with the classic background for a foreign service officer of his generation. Although born in England, he grew up in Vancouver, where his parents settled in the year of his birth, 1919. A talented athlete, he graduated from the University of British Columbia in history and classics and in 1940 was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. At this time, however, Canada was at war, and he deferred going to Oxford in order to join the Canadian Army, serving in the United Kingdom and as an intelligence officer in the Netherlands. In recognition of his service there he was made an officer of the Order of Oranje- Nassau. At the end of the war he joined the Department as a foreign service officer, but almost immediately was granted educational leave to take up his Rhodes Scholarship, returning to the Department in 1949 after studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Thus began a career of high achievement in the foreign service, culminating in his years as undersecretary from 1974 to 1977. At the same time he was a family man, and that side of his life was very important to him. In 1950 he married Elizabeth Gooderham, his wife of 62 years, and they had four children, Katharine, David, Brigitte Ann and Geoffrey. As he rose through the ranks in the foreign service, his hours of work became increasingly long, but he did his best to find time for his children and make it worthwhile. “We didn’t have much time with him,” his son David told The Globe and Mail, “but it was quality time.”
After serving in Ottawa for about a year and a half, Robinson was posted to London in October 1951 as a second (later first) secretary, and in January 1955 he was cross-posted to Paris. These assignments, he observed in a family history he wrote in his retirement, This Family Robinson, “served as an apprenticeship in the diplomatic trade.” The time in London, however, turned out to be more than that. One of the subjects on which he reported to Ottawa was Britain’s policy in the Middle East and Iran, a file that became highly topical as a result of the Suez crisis in the autumn of 1956. In November of that year, Robinson was recalled to Ottawa on a week’s notice to head the department’s newly created Middle Eastern Division. “Those,” he recalled, “were exciting days in the Department.” The pressure was intense, but the experience was valuable, not least for the opportunity to observe the minister at work. “It was,” Robinson wrote, “an education to see the last-minute improvements Mike Pearson made in our drafts of speeches and replies to parliamentary questions.”
The opportunity to observe Pearson at work was short-lived, for the Liberals were defeated in the election of June 10, 1957 by the Progressive Conservatives under John Diefenbaker. One problem that emerged from the change was lack of communication between the prime minister and the Department of External Affairs. His party having been out of power for 22 years, Diefenbaker, like many Conservatives, regarded the public service as a Liberal creation, and External Affairs as especially suspect because of its long association with Pearson. The prime minister therefore sought foreign policy advice from a variety of outside sources, often keeping his findings to himself rather than sharing them with officials responsible for actions taken on his behalf. A similar problem arose from meetings, without officials present, with important callers, an early example being a visit from the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, at the end of July 1957. With no one from the Department in the room when the two met, the External Affairs record had to be based on information from the US ambassador. This situation was troubling to the Clerk of the Privy Council, Robert Bryce, who recommended the appointment, for the first time, of a senior liaison officer in the Prime Minister’s Office. The choice was Robinson, who joined the PMO at the end of August 1957. The arrangement initially was considered to be experimental, and Bryce had other names to suggest if Robinson did not work out. Those names proved to be unnecessary, for Robinson remained with the Prime Minister until July 1962.
As he gained Diefenbaker’s confidence, Robinson was recognized in the PMO as the channel of communication on matters related to foreign policy. He kept in close touch with the Department, thereby avoiding misunderstandings. He also provided advice on how best to meet the Prime Minister’s requirements and was frank when he considered that the Department had not done so. He was, for example, critical of material prepared for Diefenbaker’s world tour in the autumn of 1958. “Mr. Diefenbaker,” he noted, “went from major speech to major speech rather than from one official conversation to another and I sometimes had the feeling that he could not understand why so much trouble had been gone to in telling him what to say to other Prime Ministers when what he really needed was some meat to put into his speeches.” Despite such problems, however, the relationship between the PMO and the Department improved — notwithstanding Diefenbaker’s fondness for referring to members of the foreign service as “Pearsonalities” — and Robinson had the satisfaction of seeing it accepted as the most reliable source of information and advice on foreign policy. Speech writing, meanwhile, turned out to be an important part of his job. This could be an arduous process, involving numerous drafts from numerous contributors, all pulled together by Diefenbaker at the last minute. The last person to talk to the Prime Minister before a speech was given, Robinson noted, often had the most influence on what was actually said, and he therefore tried to stay as close as possible to the Prime Minister when a major address was on the agenda.
In August 1962, after five years with the Prime Minister, Robinson was posted to Washington as deputy head of mission. This was not an easy time, because of the difficult relationship that had developed between Diefenbaker and President Kennedy, but Robinson found it nonetheless “constantly fascinating,” because of the “fresh, optimistic and energetic quality” of the administration. The atmosphere improved after Diefenbaker’s defeat in the election of 1963, for Kennedy was an admirer of the new prime minister, Pearson. Robinson had the opportunity to observe their relationship taking shape, as the note taker at the meeting between Kennedy and Pearson at Hyannisport in May 1963. The President’s assassination in November, however, brought this promising development to a tragic end. The Johnson administration was less friendly, but Robinson did not have to deal with it for long in Washington, since he was recalled to Ottawa a few months later on appointment as an assistant (later deputy) under-secretary. In 1970 he was named deputy minister of Indian affairs and northern development, and five years later he returned to External Affairs as undersecretary, an appointment that he had neither sought nor anticipated.
Robinson was widely admired in the Department, and his appointment, Arthur Andrew (one of his assistant undersecretaries) wrote, was greeted with “general rejoicing.” The transition, however, was not easy. The previous under-secretary, Ed did not take place until December. This was outside the normal posting cycle, which meant that it was not until the latter half of 1975 that he was able to complete putting together his own management team. He meanwhile had to refamiliarize himself with the Department, which had grown substantially since he left, and he was taken aback by the amount of time he had to spend on administrative and personnel matters. He also had to deal with a very different operational structure, for Ritchie had carried out a major reorganization that made it less hierarchical and increased the burden on the under-secretary. Reversing these changes inevitably brought objections from those who feared losing access, but Robinson succeeded in restoring the hierarchical structure that was more suited to his management style and also was favoured by the minister, Allan MacEachen. As he had done with Diefenbaker, Robinson worked hard on the relationship and adapted to the minister’s requirements, limiting his demands on his time, focussing their meetings on MacEachen’s priorities, and encouraging the Department to provide concise and timely written material. This worked well, and Robinson remembered his time with MacEachen as a high point of his career.
In a cabinet shuffle in September 1976, MacEachen was named Government House Leader, with the External Affairs portfolio going to Don Jamieson. This was not a change that MacEachen wanted, and to sweeten the arrangement Prime Minister Trudeau agreed that he should keep responsibility for the Canadian International Development Agency. Robinson and difficult to coordinate foreign and aid policy. They mounted a vigorous campaign against the proposal, and in due course Trudeau withdrew the offer.
By now it was time to move on. In the spring of 1977 Robinson accepted the position of commissioner of the Northern Pipeline, a subject he knew well from his time at Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Subsequently, he served as a special assistant to the under-secretary and as principal of the Public Service Management Centre. He retired in October 1982. His public service was recognized when he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1990.
An important project of Robinson’s retirement was the preparation of his account of Diefenbaker’s handling of foreign affairs, Diefenbaker’s World: A Populist in Foreign Affairs, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1989. Meticulous in research, fair-minded, and written with grace and humour, the book is the standard work on Canada’s international relations during the Diefenbaker years. It also stands as proof of the commitment of the public service to nonpartisanship. Because of his closeness to the prime minister and the sensitivity with which he handled his responsibilities, Robinson played a key role in developing a productive relationship with the politicians during a severe testing time for the public service. This was perhaps the greatest of his many achievements in the service of his country.
John Hilliker retired in 2003 as head of the Department’s Historical Section. He is co-author, with Donald Barrv, of Canada’s
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2013) — Autumn 2013 // Automne 2013, pp. 31–32. Read the rest of this issue →
