bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 41–42
A Rich Broth: Memoirs of a Canadian
Diplomat by David Chalmer Reece, Carleton
University Press, 1993, 221 pp., $00.00.
Reviewed by J.H. Taylor
This book can be read with interest and amusement both by those who are familiar with the Foreign Service and those who are not. Those familiar with diplomatic life will enjoy the opportunity to compare notes; those not familiar with it can find out a good deal about what the life is like. “What do you actually do?” is a question people in the Foreign Service are often asked. The question is understandable. Diplomats are few in number. At any one time, those of them not struggling with “in” baskets in our isolated capital are somewhere abroad. Whereas in most communities doctors, lawyers, business executives and teachers are near enough and numerous enough to be known quantities, diplomats tend to be known only by hearsay, as people who follow an unusual, even eccentric, occupation. For the general reader, David Reece’s memoirs, leavening as they do substance with light-heartedness, are a painless way of seeing the diplomatic profession in better perspective.
The author was born in Winnipeg in 1926 and grew up there. He studied at the University of Manitoba before and after serving in the Navy in 1944-45. Pursuing further studies in Law at Cambridge, he was called to the Bar of the UK in 1951. He joined the Department of External Affairs the following year, and served abroad in India (twice), Malaysia, Germany, Britain, Trinidad, Ghana, Jamaica, Zambia and Malawi, as well as at the United Nations in New York and the MBFR talks in Vienna. He retired in 1990 after 38 years’ service, including five appointments as Ambassador or High Commissioner.
David Reece’s career reveals a great deal about the Foreign Service as it became during the rapid expansion of the postwar generation. But his was by no means an average career. Apart from anything else, it was and is rare for an officer to serve five times as the head of a diplomatic mission.
It is clear that he preferred to serve abroad. This may seem an odd observation, since people who join the Foreign Service presumably do so in the first place because they want to serve abroad. But circumstances change, and as Churchill is supposed to have remarked to an officer who expressed a preference for serving at home, “Ah yes: power is at the centre!” Certainly the cafeteria legend — whether or not it is borne out by statistics — is that promotion comes faster to those who stay at home, whereas “les absents ont toujours tort”. Yet service abroad has powerful compensations, and these were attractive to David Reece: the satisfaction of doing what he had signed on to do; the chance to be his own boss; and the pleasure — instantaneous communications notwithstanding — of keeping headquarters at a distance. The references to Ottawa in these memoirs are few and most unflattering: “chicken feed” dismisses one home assignment; and at the end of his career “stodgy memories of past jobs” in a city “too cold [and] too full of civil servants] led the author to prefer retirement near Kingston, Ontario.
It is clear also that David Reece preferred bilateral to multilateral diplomacy, and liked the assignments that allowed him to pursue this preference. This too was not necessarily the fashionable option. Multilateralism runs deep in Canadian diplomacy, and the so-called “Golden Age” of ’40s was associated with it.
The author acknowledges that he was drawn to the service by the accomplishments of this period; and as a young officer, he was trained by some of its finest representatives. But multilateral work at the United Nations, when he had his taste of it in the late 1960s, did not appeal to him greatly, nor was it likely that his four years as ambassador to the glacially-paced MBFR talks would have changed his mind. “How did you stand it?” he reports Mr. Trudeau as inquiring. The author’s final reflection on this aspect of his experience is realistic but bleak: “Much multilateral diplomacy is very labour-intensive and often provides meagre returns for great effort.” Bilateral diplomacy was his choice. Toward the end of the book, he describes a typical day in his life as an ambassador — in this case, drawing on his time in Jamaica. This section not only neatly answers the question, “What do you actually do?” it reveals David Reece happily and constructively employed at the kind of work he liked best.
In the preface to his book, the author excuses himself for adding to the pile of diplomatic lives. He need not have been so modest: the number of books that belong in the same category as these memoirs is still relatively small. It is true that most of the great figures of the Golden Age have either written their own memoirs, or had their biographies published, or both. One distinguished member of that generation has said flatly, “There never was a Golden Age.” Whether one accepts such demolition or not, the kind of career that figures in books on men like L.B. Pearson and Norman Robertson was a thing of the past by the time David Reece entered the service. What is striking, indeed, about his career is that the greater part of it was spent in the developing countries of the Commonwealth, which only Escott Reid of the previous generation would have known from the direct experience of having served there.
In this sense, these memoirs invite reflection on the remarkable process by which Canada, geographically isolated in North America, built up a set of world-wide connections in the space of a few postwar decades. This was only yesterday, yet Canadians have assimilated the experience almost without noticing how remarkable it was. At the outset of the period of de-colonization, Canada had almost no interest of the traditional kind in the developing world, except in the Caribbean. Yet suddenly — not because of interests, but because of the historic accident that we had been a French and then a British colony — the country acquired a set of potential ties with all the former members of the two largest colonial empires in the world: ties, if we wished to develop them, with 90-odd newly sovereign states. The work David Reece describes in his memoirs is part of the history of how these ties were developed
Reflections of this kind are rare in these memoirs, however. As their author observes, he has not written a textbook. He proceeds chronologically and anecdotally, giving full play as he goes to that ridiculous edge of international life on which diplomacy often seems to teeter. David Reece’s rich broth of characters includes all the Canadian Prime Ministers from L.B. Pearson onwards. They are glimpsed in these pages along with Commonwealth greats like Indira Gandhi and Kenneth Kaunda and many others, all described with the sympathy and detachment of an experienced observer. When he had to, the author was obviously capable of playing the role of “Mr. Ambassador” to the hilt, with all the zest of a man who regrets that he has but one liver to give to his country. But he never suffered from delusions of ambassadorial grandeur, and the eye that casts its look back in these memoirs twinkle with quizzical amusement.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1993) — Summer 1993 // Été 1993, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
