bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 7–9
Diefenbaker’s World — A Populist in
Foreign Affaires by H. Basil Robinson,
University of Toronto Press, 1989, 384 pp.,
$29.95.
Should, heaven help us, there remain any Canadians not convinced of the turbulence of our times, or the speed with which events and issues pass and change, a contemporary retrospective of the era of John Diefenbaker’s stewardship of this country is a bracing tonic. His 1963 defeat is little more than a quarter of a century behind us, yet many of the compelling and crucial foreign policy issues of his day appear now so indistinct as to be of interest only to the devotees of crossword puzzles and Trivial Pursuit: Quemoy and Matsu, the EEC odyssey of Edward Heath and Duncan Sandys, the Christmas Island termination of the atmospheric nuclear test moratorium, the Columbia River negotiations, Patrice Lumumba and the Congo agony, the Berlin stand-off, the labyrinthine struggle of Souvanna Phouma with Souphanouvong and the Pathet Lao. Even the recent re-visiting of the Cuban missile crisis by the original Soviet and American participants somehow failed to impress today’s population with the atmosphere of imminent peril and deep fear that marked those dramatic days.
Why is this? Twenty-five years, after all, is not long even in the lives of young men and women, Previous generations, surely, were able to hold on to the recent past with a more certain grip. Are we the products of a television age of image-overload, has the nuclear spectre converted us into fatalists with a day-to-day attention span, or is the momentum of events really such that the recent past rapidly loses both focus and relevance? Whatever the reason, our peril is the greater if Canadians assume either that a serendipitous attitude is adequate or that we are doomed to be ineffective players whatever our effort. Cynicism is not the noblest of qualities, nor is it even marginally effective as an agent of change.
Those were important events then and many remain important still. They were events which were part of Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s world and they proved, in sum, to be more than he could handle. That John Diefenbaker was an enigma is well accepted; that his record should be disregarded as a result is surely unreasonable. His period in office deserves much more careful scrutiny than it has received thus far. One of the obstacles to that scrutiny is surely Mr. Diefenbaker himself. It is difficult to measure his record partly because of the intemperate and indefensibly selective nature of his own personal memoirs. Accounts much more balanced and much more dispassionate have been badly needed. It is to this end that Basil Robinson has painstakingly produced his valuable book. In the result, not only journeymen in the foreign affairs trades should be grateful, so should John George Diefenbaker, for here his heroic pretensions are reduced, and sympathetically, to human proportions. In the result, he is a more understandable, perhaps even a less controversial person.
Diplomats must be more
The reader should be forewarned, however, that the author does not presume to assess in global terms the Diefenbaker performance. That, after all, is the role of the historian. What Robinson has done, and done superbly, is to chronicle this period from the perspective of a wise and attentive professional diplomat. While Mr. Diefenbaker dominates every page, as was characteristic of this extraordinary individual, the book’s sub-theme is clearly that of the travails of the Department of External Affairs. One becomes as much acquainted with the Department’s efforts to adjust (virtually for the first time in its history) to an “outsider” Prime Minister, as with the education of a Prime Minister broadly unrehearsed for an international role. Only the most casual observer of the period will be surprised to find that the leaving curve was not particularly steep on either side.
The principal reason, of course, was the extraordinary egotism of a man who consistently refused to acknowledge — seemingly even to himself — his own lack of preparedness, his deep personal insecurity, his inability to function as a member of a team with all the necessary delegations of authority and expressions of trust that this entailed. Much more than any Prime Minister in Canadian history, Diefenbaker was a solo performer. As Professor Denis Smith has observed “If John Diefenbaker had had more control of the character he created, he might have been a better Prime Minister. But then, of course, he might never have come to power at all. That was a romantic triumph which probably required…concentration of ambition,…narrowness of interest [and]…self-centredness…
It was the fate of Basil Robinson to have been thrust onto this inhospitable scene as the Department of External Affairs liaison officer in the Prime Minister’s Office. It was a daunting assignment. He found that Foreign Service Officers were suspected of being either Pearson co-conspirators or Cold War wimps, or both. In addition, he was expected to serve the Prime Minister yet be answerable to the Department. In retrospect, I remain convinced that no one could possibly have discharged those responsibilities more professionally or more constructively. For a brief interlude in this drama, I played a minor, but intimate role. It seemed to me then, and still, almost impossible that one could act with such genuine and (to me) consistent courtesy as did Basil Robinson, whatever the pressures bearing upon him from either or both of his two masters. I had come to Ottawa from Alberta as an admirer of John Diefenbaker; I left on posting as a devotee of Basil Robinson.
Anyone not personally exposed to the forcefulness of Mr. Diefenbaker in full fury might be tempted to belittle the quandary in which Basil Robinson found himself on a daily basis, or to be less than aware of the Prime Minister’s disdain of the Department. Such persons need look no further than the Diefenbaker memoirs to realize their error. Speaking of Department officials, he wrote: “Their general attitude was that the only course worth following internationally had already been established. Most of the personalities in External Affairs fit Churchill’s description: “There but for the Grace of God goes God.”” Again, referring this time to speech preparation, he described his frustration at successive texts and, finally, his instructions: “This is what I’m going to say. I am not going to accept your version of what I should or should not say. Now get to work. I do not want any more of the pussyfooting or dilly-dallying that has characterized Canadian external affairs in recent years. You will prepare what I want.”
This insistent tirade is touched upon in several instances by Mr. Robinson, and one cannot but be infected with the frustrations he felt from a succession of abuses: continuing references to officials as “Pearsonalities”; accusations that the Department was passing to Mr. Pearson classified materials including accounts of the Prime Minister’s discussions with other leaders, allegations of naivety and absence of backbone in representing Canadian interests; and more. Partisanship and inexperience notwithstanding, these delusions were surely self-destructive. One can only question Mr. Diefenbaker’s common sense in his refusal to seek or to entertain the advice of such wise individuals as Norman Robertson (Peter Newman wrote that the Prime Minister consulted with him only twice between 1957 and 1963) or John Holmes (a superb example of Holmes’ intellect is quoted by Robinson at p. 28).
Not unexpectedly, these attitudes of the Prime Minister, compounded by indecisiveness and an almost demonic dedication to personalities at the expense of issues, literally guaranteed the policy confusions which came to dominate, and finally to defeat, the Diefenbaker Government. The volume is full of candid illustrations. A Canadian reader is spellbound, for example, by Diefenbaker’s paranoia over such an inconsequential matter as the infamous Rostow briefing note for President Kennedy, yet instinctively understands the Prime Minister’s fury during the Cuban missile crisis when not consulted by the Americans before they altered significantly the U.S. air defence forces DEFCON (which increased dramatically the war preparedness of Canada’s NORAD partner and sent strong signals to the Soviet Union). One learns more of Diefenbaker’s unquestioning acceptance of the perspective of Canada’s ethnic communities and is tempted to assume that in his own behaviour he often confused theatrics for courage. (As fascinating as any single incident recounted in the book is the Prime Minister’s conscious avoidance of an opportunity to confront General Secretary Khrushchev in the delegates’ lounge in the U.N., an incident described in totally different fashion in the Diefenbaker memoirs.)
A Department long-accustomed to a relationship with incumbent governments based on mutual confidence understandably found this Prime Minister a hard study. He seemed incapable of reading his briefing materials, chose not to share with the Department undertakings he had given to other heads of government, dithered interminably over the content of public statements, and insisted that his cultural background and his political instincts were more than adequate preparation for negotiations with even the most experienced and powerful of world leaders. As Robinson summed up in the autumn of 1959, the Prime Minister “had very little inclination or talent for negotiation in the substance of foreign policy. He did not appreciate the environment in which others were operating, and was not willing to give in search of compromise…for those who wanted a creative, resourceful role for Canada in the world, Diefenbaker was not the answer.”
Notwithstanding disappointment and annoyance, the hubris of the Department was not about to self-adjust and must, on occasion, have appeared to the Prime Minister to have been deliberate defiance or, at best, a less than enthusiastic willingness to serve him. As one example, Diefenbaker regarded his speech to the General Assembly on September 26, 1960 as the most important of his international career. The Department thought otherwise. “From the point of view of the Department of External Affairs, the speech disposed entirely of any surviving naive hopes that Canada under Diefenbaker might still play a role of peacemaker in East-West or UN affairs.” The “prevailing view” in the Department in late 1961 “was impatience with the absence of substance in the Prime Minister’s speeches…. The Department had not fully adjusted itself to the realities of serving a Prime Minister whose priorities were so different — so much, as it were, closer to home.” The Department was resigned to “doing the best we could with the current management.” To be regretted more than anything else, perhaps, was the early retirement from the foreign service in this period of a number of senior careerists. Their brilliance should have made their retention an issue of considerable concern to both the government of the day and the public service; instead they were adopted as totems by the Diefenbaker loyalists on the one hand, and the foreign policy establishment on the other.
To even the most experienced and competent practitioners of international relations, the period 1957-1963 was one that presented challenges of immense importance and unprecedented complication. It was a period dominated by giant figures who surely must have inhibited Diefenbaker (as, we now know, they inhibited one another): Macmillan, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nasser, Nehru, Mao, Khrushchev, Hammarskjöld, Spaak. The Cold War was at its most ominous, Western Europe was endeavouring to broaden its institutional base, the tragedy of Indo-China was beginning to unfold, the decolonization process was picking up steam, the People’s Republic of China remained beyond the pale, the theology of disarmament was as yet no match for the grand designs of the nuclear strategists, the role and function of NORAD were both in their infancy, the evolution of the Commonwealth was far from understood, and the reputation of the United Nations was far from secure. Circumstances of this complexity would have proved challenging to a Canadian government of any stripe. In the face of all this, one is tempted to write off as simplistic most of the Diefenbaker responses. That would be an error, however, and Robinson is not guilty of following that course. After all, some of Diefenbaker’s concepts —- food banks, open skies, and declarations of principle — possess enduring merit and continue today to be of value.
It is all the more tragic, therefore, that Canada’s 13th Prime Minister was so totally incapable of directing a team that could implement his ideas; that he was himself so egotistical to believe that opposition to his proposals from any source must be part of a Central Canada/Liberal Party/Big Business conspiracy to deny him and his long-suffering followers their hard-won right to reverse the indignities and inequities to which they had so long been exposed
Of the tragic result there can be little doubt. In measured language, Robinson recites account after account of the plummeting reputation of Canada in the eyes of its friends and allies. What was at the beginning questioning and confusion turned later to bitterness and consternation. Even as loyal a supporter as then Secretary of State for External Affairs Howard Green reported to Cabinet that “Canada now amounted to very little in the NATO picture.”
There are hard lessons in Basil Robinson’s study, and they deserve attention well beyond the Diefenbaker persona. One is that diplomats must be more understanding of the domestic elements in foreign policy and prepared fully to deal with them, not simply either to ignore them or to cave in to them. A second, and equally important, is that politicians must become aware of the domestic consequences of virtually every off-shore event and more prepared to explain these in clear and honest language to their Canadian constituents. The world is now too complicated and too perilous for either ministers or officials to engage in double-speak. One shudders at Diefenbaker’s trumpeting of the quantum and untied “purity” of Canadian developmental assistance, while in parallel he was insisting on increased volumes of Canadian wheat and wheat-flour as a component. At the same time, one sympathizes with him in his quandary over the extraordinarily sensitive and complicated issue of nuclear warheads and the contradictory pressures being brought to bear upon him by both ministers and officials. I have not the slightest doubt that history will vindicate the correctness of John Diefenbaker’s policy instinct, even as it vilifies — and properly — both his failure fully to understand those issues and the hopeless confusion of his endeavours to postpone decisions. Those led to negative consequences of long duration.
In the quarter-century since the defeat of John Diefenbaker’s Government, the underlying tensions which threaten a peaceful and stable world may have changed somewhat in content, but certainly not in their potential for damage. If Canada, indeed if the industrialized countries generally, are to contribute constructively to a functioning international community, there must be greater evidence of humility, clearer acceptance of interdependence, and a surer dedication to problem-solving. Citizens of the democracies must demand that their leaders exhibit some minimum degree of competence and intellectual honesty, and must assume more responsibility themselves to understand issues. In these respects, the Diefenbaker years can serve as a valuable learning experience for Canadian electors, for politicians and for the public service. Important as was his contribution 25 years ago, Basil Robinson’s remarkable and insightful volume is of much greater value. It is an enduring contribution to students of Canadian governance, as well as the followers of international events. I earnestly hope that it will be read and studied as widely and as carefully as it deserves to be.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1989), pp. 7–9. Read the rest of this issue →
