bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987) — Spring 1987 // Printemps 1987, p. 12
Having served two rather strenuous tours of duty as External’s Spokesman and Head of the Press Office — once in the early Fifties and again in the early Sixties — I thought I knew a fair amount about how to deal with the press and allied media of communication. But when George Cowley told me what he had to do to surmount a problem in press relations that confronted him in the mid- Sixties, I realized that there is always something more to be learned in plying this difficult trade.
Cowley was a junior officer in the Department’s Commonwealth Division at the time and one of his duties was to serve as Australian desk officer. At that time Paul Martin was our Secretary of State for External Affairs and, while attending a session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he had held some discussions with Australian External Affairs Minister Paul Hasluck. Mr. Martin urged Mr. Hasluck to make an official visit to Ottawa before returning to Canberra. Mr. Hasluck agreed.
A few days later Mr. and Mrs. Hasluck, together with a sallow individual who served as the Australian Minister’s confidential messenger and valet, flew from New York to Ottawa where, at Uplands Airport, George Cowley had assembled a welcoming party of high-level functionaries. But, as often happens in Ottawa, a considerable fog had moved in and the official greeters could hear the invisible plane circling the airport for a while and then fly away.
Learning that the plane was headed for Montreal’s Dorval Airport, Cowley prevailed upon the Department of National Defence to provide a car and driver to bring the Hasluck party on the two-hour drive back to Ottawa. The driver was instructed to bring the Haslucks to the VIP — west — entrance to the Chateau Laurier Hotel, and young
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Cowley and his cohorts took up positions there.
But the Army driver was not blessed with a sense of our capital’s geography and got lost in the environs of Ottawa. He finally made it to the centre of town and the Chateau Laurier Hotel, where he deposited the Canadian party not at the prestigious West entrance, but a dingy east door. That happens to be a service entrance to the bowels of the hotel, and without a doorman in sight.
There, the Haslucks and their sallow aide found themselves negotiating a cellar catwalk, heavy with all their luggage, through the boiler room, where Mrs. Hasluck lost the heel of one shoe. The dust and vapour from the Chateau’s odiferous furnaces did little to improve their first impressions of Canada’s capital. By the time the driver realized that they had used the wrong door and led them back outside and around to the West entrance, Cowley’s welcomers had drifted away leaving only him — a junior Third Secretary — to welcome Australia’s Minister of External Affairs and his wife, sprinkled with the Chateau’s soot and clutching her detached heel.
As planned, Mr. Hasluck next morning went over to Mr. Martin’s office for an exchange of views, but our Minister was delayed in a protracted Cabinet meeting. While Mr. Hasluck was waiting, his valet showed up with a pair of cuff-links that had been mislaid. As he started to leave, in walked Mr. Martin, who embraced the valet with “Oh, so good to see you here, Paul.”
Thereafter, the visit proceeded uneventfully — that is, until Mr. Hasluck informed Cowley that, before he left Ottawa the next afternoon, he would be glad to meet with representatives of the Canadian press. When Cowley sought to set up a press conference for the Australian visitor, he ran into an unexpected problem.
The Gerda Munsinger alfair, the sex-and-security drama of the decade, had broken wide open in the House of Commons and it immediately became a national cause-célèbre. Every journalist in the nation’s capital was glued to his seat in the jam-packed Commons parliamentary press gallery, riveted on the Question Period unfolding in the House. George Cowley soon found that he could arouse no interest whatsoever in a press conference with an Australian Minister for External Affairs.
The next day, when Cowley checked out the East Block conference room shortly before the press conference was due to begin, not a single journalist was in sight. Brooding over the impending debacle, he devised a scheme. He coralled half a dozen junior External colleagues and pressed them to show up with notebooks in the conference room, where they would pepper Canada’s Australian guest with questions on which Cowley would prepare them.
But what about TV? Cowley found that every TV crew in town was focussed on Parliament Hill’s sex drama, but he rose to this crisis, too. He prevailed on TV network friends who “owed him one” to send over an off-duty crew; they would have cameras grinding away, without film, but with their lights focused on the unwitting Australian.
But wouldn’t the Haslucks later not be watching the 6 p.m. news to witness the Minister’s debut on Canadian television? Not to worry, Cowley assured the network and his growing coterie of accomplices: the Haslucks would be winging their way Canberra-ward before the critical hour.
And what about the Australian High Commissioner’s Office in Ottawa? No problem. Cowley would bring those nice Australian chaps in on his dark little secret. They would have to be brought in anyway, since they would recognize the fake reporters at the press conference.
When Mr. Hasluck showed up to meet the representatives of the Canadian press, Cowley’s young External colleagues performed admirably, notebooks in hand, peppering the Minister with perceptive questions about Australia’s relations with countries of the Pacific Rim, South Pacific defence strategy, Chinese representation at the United Nations and the future of Taiwan, and the continuing war in Indochina. One of the “reporters” — junior Third Secretary Peyton Lyon — even showed up with green celluloid eyeshades and shirtsleeves held up with garters, in the best tradition of Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur’s great movie “Front Page”; today Lyon is a professor of diplomacy at Carleton University’s Patterson School of International Relations.
The following week Cowley queried Canada’s mission in Canberra on the Hasluck visit, as seen from the Australian end. He was not surprised at Canberra’s reply: the Australian Department of External Affairs had displayed a “curious reticence” on the subject. bout de papier readers will be familiar with Sidney Freifeld’s vignettes about the amusing and sometimes bizarre things that can happen to us or to our colleagues while working in the Canadian foreign service. Sidney would welcome any accounts from bout readers which might serve as a basis for future vignettes to be published in bout and possibly in the Toronto Globe and Mail or Montreal Gazette for which he writes. These can be addressed to him c/o bout de papier, Suite 1002-130 Albert St., Ottawa, Ontario KIP 5G4.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987) — Spring 1987 // Printemps 1987, p. 12. Read the rest of this issue →
