bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2009) — Summer/Fall 2009 // Été/Automne 2009, pp. 41–42
Although it is well understood that Canadian diplomats never succumb to temptation — other than those indulgences specifically authorized and funded by the Foreign Service Directives — the following documents are reprinted as an educational service for those members of PAFSO who may be appointed as heads of post now or in the future.
This timeless topic seems appropriate as the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (formerly the Department of External Affairs) marks its centenary. As well, the correspondents involved both made significant contributions to Canada’s diplomatic history as well as to other aspects of Canadian life.
Jules Léger, for whom the valuable yet oft-threatened library of the department is named, had a distinguished career before and after his appointment as Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. He had been editor of Le Droit before the Second World War, then a Professor of Diplomatic History and Current Affairs at the University of Ottawa while also serving as an Assistant Press Censor before finally joining DEA as a Third Secretary in July 1940. At his first posting in Santiago, Chile, he was twice promoted and then, after more than a year as chargé d’affaires, he was assigned to Canada House in London as First Secretary. After working briefly in the Prime Minister’s Office, he was named an Assistant Under-Secretary in 1951, and then appointed as Ambassador to Mexico two years later. His appointment as deputy minister followed in August 1954. Later ambassadorial assignments included NATO (then in Paris), Italy and France (where he had to contend with Charles de Gaulle), before he returned to Ottawa for a second term as Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs from 1968 to 1972. His final diplomatic assignment was as Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg in 1973-74. In January 1974, Jules Léger was invested as Canada’s twenty-first Governor-General. Six months later, he suffered a stroke, which impeded his speech and paralyzed his right arm; even so, he resumed his duties soon after, ably assisted by his wife Gabrielle. They are generally credited with modernizing the office of Governor General and enhancing the role of viceregal consort. After his death in 1980, Gaby (as she was known to their friends in DEA) donated his personal library to the department. Before a series of “rearrangements” of the space and holdings of the departmental library (named for this distinguished diplomat and public servant), that beautifully bound collection was displayed in elegant cabinets near the entrance, with a commemorative plaque honouring Jules Léger placed beside the doorway. Today, both the Léger collection and the beautiful shelving which housed it are in storage.
Escott Reid had served as the National Secretary of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and briefly as an Acting Professor of Government and Political Science at Dalhousie University before he joined DEA in 1939. He had postings in Washington and London before he was named as an Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs in 1947 and then Deputy USSEA from September 1948 to November 1952. The latter assignment included significant periods as acting deputy minister. He then served abroad as High Commissioner to India and Ambassador to Germany before leaving DEA to work for the World Bank from 1962 to 1965. In 1965, he was named as the founding Principal of Glendon College of York University in Toronto, a position he held until 1969. Before his death in 1999, Reid wrote several books about aspects of his career, including an autobiography, Radical Mandarin, whose title alluded to his well-earned departmental reputation as a gadfly.
One diplomatic temptation not mentioned by either correspondent, but to which Reid succumbed at his cost, was that of mentioning publicly (including to the press) a pending assignment. In another letter from Léger to Reid in the spring of 1957, the deputy minister informed his colleague that the minister, then Lester B. Pearson, had approved his nomination as Canada’s permanent representative to the United Nations. After word of that appointment leaked out, the new Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, cancelled it. Instead, Reid went to Bonn. This information may be found in an article by my colleague, Greg Donaghy, which appears in a collection of essays about Reid which he co-edited with Stéphane Roussel, Escott Reid: Diplomat and Scholar.
The letters reprinted below may be found at Library and Archives Canada in the Escott Reid Papers (MG31 E46), Volume 34, file Leger, Jules
New Delhi, India,
December 8, 1955.
Jules Leger, Esq.,
Under-Secretary of State
for External Affairs,
Ottawa.
Dear Jules,
Some time when you wish to relieve your irritation at the behaviour of Canadian Heads of Mission and Heads of Mission in Ottawa, you might like to spend a little time adding to the following list which has occurred to me of temptations of diplomats. You might then like to circulate the list to our Heads of Mission asking them to add their comments and to retort with their own list of temptations of under-secretaries.
The first temptation of a diplomat is, I think, to try to make his own job appear more difficult than it is. Almost everybody likes to surround his job with an aura of mystery. Because of the traditional mystery which has surrounded diplomacy, ambassadors and High Commissioners are peculiarly susceptible to this temptation.
A related temptation is to underestimate the difficulties which your predecessors in the job faced. By underestimating his difficulties in relation to your own, you minimize his achievements and either exaggerate yours or provide yourself with a good excuse for failure (Malcolm MacDonald’s thesis since coming here is that the honeymoon period in Indian-U.K. relations has ended).
Another temptation is to believe that because you were able to work some dodge successfully in some other post it will work in the post you are now stationed at. (Some people say that George Allen found at one point in his successful career in Yugoslavia that he surmounted one crisis by going to Tito and banging on the table, and that he tried the same dodge here with conspicuous lack of success.)
The despatches of newspapermen are published and they, therefore, are under a grave temptation to prove themselves consistent by fitting future events into some pattern that they forecast. Since the despatches of diplomats are not normally published until they are dead, diplomats should find this temptation easier to resist. I doubt, however, that they do. I am afraid that many of them, once they have committed themselves to a line, force subsequent facts into a Procrustean bed. (The French Ambassador here said that India would be forced into the arms of the Soviet Union if the Americans made a military aid agreement with Pakistan. Since then, every six months he has stated that the marriage between India and the Soviet Union is about to take place.)
I leave to the end the most obvious and common of all, and that is to exaggerate the importance of the post at which you are stationed.
Christmas Greetings,
Yours sincerely,
[stamp on copy] Escott Reid
OFFICE OF THE UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE
FOR EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
CONFIDENTIAL
OTTAWA
March 30, 1956
Escott Reid, Esquire,
Canadian High Commissioner,
New Delhi.
Dear Escott,
I should like to answer your letter of December 8 in some detail but Iam afraid we would have to agree first on the definition of “temptation” and whether it is a good or a bad thing. For the time being, there is only one temptation that comes to mind which is not mentioned in your letter, i.e., the temptation to go native. It may well be that it is the only real temptation of a diplomat (and for that matter of an Under-Secretary), all the others being but by-products.
Personally I am rather attracted by diplomats who go native; I feel it is up to the home office, if necessary, to remind them that they might be seeing things in too friendly a light. As for the Under-Secretary, I presume that the role of heads of mission is to remind him that the searchlights of national interest may be too crude for foreign eyes.
Thank God you and I are sure that we will never fall into the temptations herein described.
Yours sincerely,
Jules
Jules Léger 2
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2009) — Summer/Fall 2009 // Été/Automne 2009, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
