bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1993) — Fall/Winter 1993 // Automne/Hiver 1993, pp. 5–7
by John Edward Belliveau
The first time I met Mike Pearson was in Eugene, Oregon, where the state university was giving him another honorary degree and he would deliver a lecture on international affairs. It was in June 1953, and a Canadian election campaign was about to begin.
Even before he had won the Nobel peace prize, his diplomatic achievements had made him better known outside Canada than in. However, the powers who ran The Toronto Star wanted to change that. Notably influential with Liberal Party insiders, they had decided that the Minister for External Affairs, the Hon. Lester Bowles Pearson, should be the next party leader and of course future prime minister. So I was dispatched from the parliamentary press gallery to follow him across the country in the run-up to the election. And, incidentally … though this remained unspoken … to promote his candidacy through daily exposure of his campaign activities.
Most of the time during that summer we travelled alone or with a Star photographer. On occasion, his wife Maryon and Mary MacDonald, his special assistant who looked after his constituency affairs in Pearson’s northern Ontario constituency of Algoma East, came along. We started in Vancouver but concentrated in Ontario where the party organizers thought the diplomat’s prestigious presence would be most valuable.
At first, as we moved about the province, the party had provided a car and driver for the minister but Mike found this too formal and asked if we would mind his coming along with our photographer, Paul Smith, and me in Paul’s car. These were informal travels and no other media people were along so he would not be accused of being “in The Star’s pocket.”
Academics writing about Canadian leaders in public affairs, tend to concern themselves with matters of high policy at home and abroad, especially in Pearson’s case, and sometimes miss the more mundane human side. Now, I am reminded that, over all his apparent outwardness and joviality, in that summer of 1953 there had hung an air of mystery about Mike Pearson and his career intentions. Though he protested his innocence of domestic politics and never breathed of leadership ambitions, he was often piqued and sometimes angered by the casual way the Liberals at national headquarters were running things. Then, after he had experienced the heady atmosphere of campaigning for a while, he began to like it.
He was still much involved in international affairs as president of the UN General Assembly and from time to time would be notified on arrival at designated points that calls from New York or Washington were waiting for him. These, sometimes taken from country homes of local candidates he was visiting, were somewhat less than private.
This was at a time when President Syngman Rhee of South Korea was giving the United Nations a lot of trouble with their attempts to end the Korean war and Pearson was getting frequent calls from Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the UN. One such call he took in the country kitchen of Hugh MacKenzie, the MP for Lambton-Kent. We could all hear Mike’s end of the conversation and it sounded upsetting.
When he came back into the dining room to rejoin the group, he continued to talk about the local candidate’s problems as though the call had been from a neighbour asking the price of grain.
That same afternoon he was telling us about the problems of impartiality for a UN General Assembly Chairman and cited the occasion on which he was asked by the Indian delegation to say something of Josef Stalin’s death. “What could you say about a man who, when you had met him as I had, left you feeling as if you were strolling with a gorilla casually tossing a live bomb from one hand to the other as you talked?” Nevertheless, he managed a few well chosen words.
There was another day, on Manitoulin Island, when he was handed a telegram inviting him to spend a weekend at the summer home of John Foster Dulles on one of the Canadian Thousand Islands. Dulles had been unable to reach Pearson by telephone and so phoned the telegraph office nearest him and thus had to wire collect. Laughing about this, Mike said, “I’ll fix him. I’ll send a really long reply and make it collect.”
When we sailed across Georgian Bay on the ferry Norgama from Meldrum Bay to Thessalon, Mike overheard two American tourists say that the president of the UN was on board. “What’s he look like?” one asked the other. “Oh, ordinary, a little dumpy,” her companion had replied. In telling the story, the subject of their comments told us: “I don’t mind them discussing my abilities but I resent comments on my figure.” His never-failing wit made him a delightful companion and once I asked if it was a fact that he had written Mackenzie King’s speeches. Yes, he said, he had written a good many of them. Then, I said, you are responsible for King’s reputation of using 18 words when one should suffice? No, he replied, “I’m the fellow who got the 18 down to eight.”
The election campaign was dull. There was really no contest between Prime Minister St. Laurent and the Tory Leader George Drew. As John English writes in the biography: “In 1953, St. Laurent put on his grey felt hat and charmed the country once more.”
One day after we had spent time in Pearson’s own riding, we stopped over in Toronto and I went to The Star office to pick up mail. As I did, the managing editor spied me, came out of his office and said: “Been trying to reach you. We’ve just had a story on the wire about three men eaten by bears down on the Gaspé coast. It’s a pretty unusual story and you know that country. Jack Smith (a staff photographer) is on his way to Malton where we’ve chartered a plane. I think you should go along.”
I protested that I’d been assigned to Mr. Pearson for the campaign. “Well, there’s no news in that; you can catch up with him when you’re back.” When I relayed this news to Pearson from a phone at the airport, all he said was: “Gosh, Ned, I wish I could go along. Nothing could be as boring as what we’re doing. Besides, I’d like to see the Gaspé again. Maryon and I got to know it when we were doing the thesis on the Loyalists.”
The Gaspésian story turned out to be not about bears but about three men shot in the woods. It developed into the notorious Coffin murder case about which I would eventually write a book and in which Mike Pearson, as a federal cabinet minister, was himself peripherally involved. After all appeals, the hanging sentence for Coffin was before the cabinet for commutation; it was refused.
At any rate, I was back with Pearson to await results on election night in a motel suite at Espanola in his constituency. There were just the four of us there, the candidate, Mrs. Pearson, Mary MacDonald and I. As Liberals won riding after riding and the rest of us cheered, the man who would be leader grew gloomier and gloomier.
As he sank deeper into what seemed almost a morose state, I asked what was wrong. All he said was: “Well, that’s that. I’ll go back to foreign affairs; it’s what I like best anyway.” Then he added: “That’ll finish the Liberals next time around. It’s too much and Louis (St. Laurent) and C.D. (Howe) will stay on.” They had agreed to retire together two years after this election, he explained, “but now they’ll say ’the country loves us so much we can’t possibly quit.’ “ Later he added that, with such a huge majority, the Liberals would do themselves in before the next time around. They would have been too long in office and too arrogant. How accurate his prediction was proven four years later when John Diefenbaker led the Tories to a 1957 national turnaround and formed the government.
Of course, St. Laurent had stayed on to be defeated and depressed by the rejuvenated Tories led by Diefenbaker. He resigned his Liberal party leadership and Pearson became leader. That same year, 1958, I entered the public relations trade, working for the Liberals in Ontario. It was a weary four years before the 1962 general election came, when I was doing some work for the federal party in the Maritimes. There I spent some time with Mr. Pearson and he was not a happy warrior, tense and tired toward the end. His battle for election had become almost a crusade against Diefenbaker whom he had come to detest.
One day on a flight from Halifax to Moncton we were discussing Pearson’s reasons for pursuing the course he was on. He had taken the advice of Keith Davey and others running the campaign for the Liberals and it was advice that some of us did not consider suitable to Pearson’s style.
At one point, I asked him why he was fighting this campaign anyway since his heart did not seem to be in it. His reply was succinct and without elaboration. He said: “The main reason I’m fighting this election is to rid the country of that awful man (Diefenbaker).” This had been after one of the worst flubs of the campaign and he had been terribly embarrassed. Diefenbaker had linked him to “The Liberal Truth Squad” and held him up to ridicule. The “Squad” was a gimmick dreamed up by Davey and some of his co-workers, and consisting of a committee led by the redoubtable Judy LaMarsh, MP for Niagara. Its function was to do the footsteps of the Conservative leader, check on the veracity of his statements and confront him from the front rows of his party’s campaign meetings.
The group had first appeared in the Moncton High School auditorium and the national media had made a circus of it. Pearson, of course, had no part in it and seemed unaware of its creation. If he knew of it at all, it was only sub-consciously and when the media took it up he was furious.
When we got to Montreal, Pearson called in his press assistant, Dick O’Hagan, and me to berate us for not advising him. He was angry, literally red-faced as I had never seen him before, when we reminded him that we had done just that. Apparently, he had not paid much attention, perhaps not appreciating the political fall-out of what seemed to him to be a petty campaigning ploy. Davey had mentioned it in a phone call from Winnipeg, saying that Walter Gordon, the campaign manager, had approved the idea. I had thought that a “truth squad” pursuing a leader sounded like something out of a Scotland Yard “murder squad” story.
He didn’t win the election, but the minority Tory government was defeated in the House and a new election called in 1963. I was asked to cross the country as Pearson’s speechwriter and only then learned how badly disorganized the party was. There was little policy when the campaign began. For the kickoff speech in English-Canada, at Fredericton, I had only a single page of hand-written notes from the leader and a basic awareness of the party policy through Senator John Connolly, the party president, who was travelling with us.
As to platform, there was no platform, almost nothing to go on except daily memos from Jack Pickersgill back in Ottawa. We had been all through the Maritimes before there was agreement on what might be called an official speech pattern for the campaign touching most of the policy bases. Another writer took the Western end of the tour. Scraping through, Mike Pearson had at last become prime minister with a minority government.
The last time I talked to him, he had retired and was writing his memoirs. He was in a mellow mood and I asked him if ever he had been truly interested in fighting politics, the rough and tumble of campaigning. His words as preserved in my notes were: “All my earlier life was in the public service. I never once thought of politics. I knew nothing about it…. When I was in the cabinet and some possibility existed of Mr. St. Laurent’s retirement, some people told me I should be after the leadership, because it was my duty and responsibility. Matter of fact, I had thought Doug Abbott would become leader.” (The Hon. Douglas Abbott had been Minister of Finance.)
Then I asked him whether he had any ideas of leadership when he made his first national political tour in 1953. “No,” he replied, “unless it was subconsciously. I never really expected to be leader. Besides, the Liberals had been so long in office they had to go soon and when they did they might be out for 20 years. I didn’t want to be in opposition that long; I didn’t want to be in opposition at all. I don’t like opposition.”
The size of the 1953 Liberal majority had appalled him and, he said, “I was certain it would finish the Liberals in the next election.”
It did.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 10, No. 4 (1993) — Fall/Winter 1993 // Automne/Hiver 1993, pp. 5–7. Read the rest of this issue →
