bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2010) — Summer 2010 // Été 2010, p. 41
THE CONSTANT DIPLOMAT: ROBERT
FORD IN MOSCOW, by Charles A. Ruud.
Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2009, pp xix, 304, index
and bibliography, $39.95.
Robert Ford joined Canada’s foreign ministry – then the Department of External Affairs – in July 1940, when being a diplomat, especially a Canadian diplomat, still mattered. It was a simpler time, or so it sometimes seems in retrospect, when diplomacy was a vocation not a job, and young diplomats were sent abroad with a vague promise, as Ford was, that “you will get instructions from time to time.” Tucked away in obscure corners of the globe, Canada’s representatives beavered away on a steady stream of despatches and telegrams that were eagerly awaited in Ottawa, and were said to shape the views of under-secretaries and ministers, and even, for the lucky or the wise, prime ministers. Ford’s career, as historian Charles Ruud describes it in his new biography, The Constant Diplomat, largely conformed to this happy stereotype.
Ruud begins his study by rooting Ford’s success as a diplomat and as a leading Western observer of the Soviet Union during the Cold War to his historical training and poetic sensibilities. Educated at Cornell University under American historian Carl Becker, Ford embraced his mentor’s “rationalism” and his views on the long-lasting impact of historical “currents of opinion” on contemporary developments. Just as important, continued Ruud, Ford’s poetic voice, which emerged strongly in the 1950s to win him a Governor General’s award, sharpened his political perceptions. Through history and poetry, The Constant Diplomat contends, Ford and his diplomatic reports focused on “words as keys to the psychology of the speaker and to the climate of opinion that had influenced it.”
There was one other vital influence that defined Ford’s life and career: Thereza, the volcanic Brazilian diplomat whom he married in 1946. Permanently weakened by the nervous illness that afflicted him as a young man, Ford relied on his wife to push him out into Soviet society. According to Greg Donaghy
Ruud, Thereza “urged him on” and “enlarged Ford’s capacity to serve.” Indeed, the author hints that the diplomat’s wife played an even more fundamental, and ambiguous role. Comparing Thereza’s diary notes with Ford’s despatches, Ruud argues convincingly that Ford presented “copious” amounts of her work as his own, noting that “the essential observations of Thereza became the observations of the ambassador.”
With the influence of Thereza, as well as history and poetry as its points of reference, The Constant Diplomat tracks Ford’s professional and intellectual progress through the ranks of External Affairs. From an initial wartime posting in Windsor, where he helped oversee cross-border traffic, Ford moved to Brazil (1940-44) and then on to Moscow, where he eventually served as chargé d’affaires from 1951-54. Ford’s timing was impeccable, and when he returned to headquarters in the fall of 1954 to become Head of European Division, he was exceptionally well-equipped to meet the demand in Ottawa for a comprehensive analysis of the changes stirring the Soviet Union in the wake of Stalin’s recent death.
That long memorandum cemented Ford’s reputation as one of the Department’s foremost Soviet experts for the rest of his career. It, and the many other writings that Ford produced over the next quarter century, explored a troika of related themes. First, and perhaps most strikingly original in the intolerant Cold War context in which he first wrote, Ford insisted on the continuing influence of Russian history and the country’s longstanding geo-political preoccupations on Soviet behaviour. Second, he underlined the debilitating economic and political limitations of the Soviet system of totalitarian communism, which depended on force for its very survival and sapped the country’s vitality. Third, the Canadian diplomat was fascinated by the psychological constraints on the Soviet leadership, poor in quality and notoriously self-interested
Ruud races through Ford’s stints as ambassador to Colombia (1957-58), Yugoslavia (1959-61), and Egypt (1961-63) to focus on Ford’s role as Canada’s representative to the USSR from 1964 until 1980. This is the heart of Ruud’s biography, and he uses Ford’s despatches to follow the evolution of Canadian-Soviet relations through an era of evolving détente and then renewed Cold War. His principal argument is one made by Ford himself in his own memoirs: that dynamic Canadian diplomacy in the 1960s, culminating in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s visit to Moscow in May 1971, cleared the way for more fruitful U.S.-USSR exchanges under United States President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Ford himself was left bitter at seeing Canada’s stature in Moscow (and his own) reduced by the Soviet-American rapprochement and he resented Trudeau’s failure to exploit Canada’s early successes with the Soviet Union.
Ruud, who has worked long and hard on this biography, clearly admires Ford. Unfortunately, this study, which fails to exploit fully the richness of Ford’s life and career, does not do complete justice to its subject. Despite the expectations he has created, the author makes insufficient efforts to explore Ford’s poetry, or to relate his poetic sensibilities to his diplomatic work, beyond asserting that it eased Ford’s access into Soviet intellectual life. Perhaps it did, but that case is still unproven, and the relationship between Ford’s verse and his diplomacy remains obscure.
Ford’s value and significance as a diplomat is also largely hidden in this study. In part, this is because The Constant Diplomat relies heavily on Ford’s own papers and Ruud’s interviews with the subject for much of its material. Ruud seems to have had only very limited contacts with Ford’s Russian and Canadian colleagues, who might easily have provided the frank assessments that Ford merited even though he may not always have welcomed them!). The diplomat’s impact is obscured too because Ruud unaccountably fails to follow Ford’s despatches and telegrams into the Canadian archives to see exactly how and where they contributed to the evolution of Canadian policy. This failure to calibrate Ford’s contribution carefully against final policy outcomes leaves the reader struggling with too much Ford and not enough context.
Finally, and perhaps most important, The Constant Diplomat ducks the toughest issues. Robert and Thereza Ford were imperious managers of Canada’s missions abroad, and they enjoyed a complex relationship with their staff. This was especially true of their relations with George Costakis, the Moscow embassy’s long-serving fixer who “helped” the Fords assemble their legendary collection of modern art. Astoundingly, both this unique and valuable collection and Costakis are studiously ignored in this biography, leaving one of Ford’s principal legacies unexplained and undefended. bout de papier Vol.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2010) — Summer 2010 // Été 2010, p. 41. Read the rest of this issue →
