bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2011) — Winter/Spring 2011 // Hiver/Printemps 2011, p. 30
John MacLeod Fraser was born in Montreal in 1935 — in the depths of the Depression. In 1944, at the end of the school year, the family moved to Ottawa to follow our father, Blair, who had gone to work for Maclean’s. In 1952, John went to McGill, where he was editor of the McGill Daily, and in 1955 he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford, and worked summers for The Observer. John returned in 1958 and, despite offers of jobs in journalism, joined External Affairs. He was fascinated by the shades and nuances of diplomacy.
His first posting was to Belgrade, where his interest in the Balkans and socialism took root, and where he learned Serbo-Croat. This was followed by a posting to Hong Kong where he was the designated China-watcher, and then to Warsaw. John’s dispatches shone; it was a source of great pride to my father, who thought John was the best writer in the family, that External Affairs officials would tell him how John’s cables were passed around in admiration.
In 1968, our father died, and when John came back for the funeral, he was assigned to prepare for negotiations with China on recognition.
In the fall of 1969, I was a reporter for The Toronto Star at Toronto City Hall, and received a phone call from John. “Graham, what I am about to tell you is absolutely off the record. Do not repeat it to anyone.” “O.K.” “Tam going to Stockholm for a few weeks, but will be back for Christmas.”
A year later, John was in Peking setting up the Canadian Embassy as Chargé d’affaires and Barbara and I were in Florence, when we got a postcard from him. It read something like this: “Dear Graham and Barbara: If discussions do not progress, the Canadian Ambassador and staff will spend four years living in a hotel. This would be completely unacceptable! Hope you are enjoying Florence, love John.” As he said later, at that point he was sending a message to Chinese authorities every way he could Not long afterwards, he reconnected with Deborah Hartley, whom he had first met in Belgrade, and they fell deeply in love. They were married in 1974, and their love for each other never faltered.
John’s career involved a series of dramatic incidents. He was in China for the re-opening of Canada’s relations; he was in Washington during the Watergate crisis. Back in Ottawa, he was head of Middle Eastern Division when the government decided — and then decided not — to move the embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
In 1980, John became Ambassador to Poland and arrived in Warsaw in the midst — of the tensions between Soldarnocz and the Polish government. It was there that John’s observational skills and writing ability became more widely known and admired in the department.
The central insight, I think, that John drew from his observation was that the widespread Western denunciation of the imposition of Martial Law by General Jaruselski was short-sighted. John was convinced that Jaruselski had little choice; if he not taken action, he believed, the Russians would have invaded. He was impatient with simpleminded, black-and-white views of events and regimes. “The Polish government will not act at our behest in ways they consider suicidal,” he wrote later.
From Warsaw, John went to Belgrade — and was able to present his credentials in Serbo-Croat. He had great affection for the former Yugoslavia, its spiky independence from the countries of the Iron Curtain, and the paradoxes and contradictions of Yugoslav federalism which meant that Yugoslav officials understood Canada better than most.
When Bernard Landry was coming to Belgrade, there was some concern that he might refuse to allow John to accompany him on his official visits. This turned out not to be the case, but when John raised the issue with his Yugoslav counterpart, he was told “Well, if you can’t be part of Mr. Landry’s delegation, you can be part of ours.”
John’s interest in the Balkans led him to teach on the subject at Carleton as a diplomatic visitor and, after his retirement in 1994, he continued to teach a course on the Balkans and worked as an intelligence analyst on the Balkans for the Privy Council Office until 2009.
John had a strong and independent intellect. Just as he rejected what he felt was simplistic moralizing in the denunciation of martial law in Poland, he felt that the Serbs had been unfairly demonized as the only villains in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. He was exasperated by international posturing (he called it “gunboat diplomacy without the gunboats”) and he was angered by the decision to bomb Belgrade, feeling that peace talks had been abandoned too quickly. “If you think Bosnia is bad, wait for Kosovo,’ he once remarked.
John could be extremely stubborn. He hated exercise, and had little patience for bureaucracy; he loved cats, martinis and wines from Eastern Europe. He was a connoisseur of crime and espionage fiction. One of his few regrets — aside from his disappointment that he did not get one last posting to Eastern Europe — was that his own international thrillers were never published.
In general, he felt that management was, as he put it, “part of the background noise”; that his real job was reporting on the state of the country he was paid to understand. John was horizontally ambitious: he was shrewd and strategic about doing interesting work —which did not include rising in the hierarchy of Foreign Affairs, which had what he called a “decades-long obsession with management”.
I can’t help thinking that he died the way he had hoped he would: gently, quietly, at home — with the woman he loved nearby.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 4 (2011) — Winter/Spring 2011 // Hiver/Printemps 2011, p. 30. Read the rest of this issue →
