bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 8–9
[J.W. Pickersgill and Escott Reid both enjoyed illustrious careers as public servants. Pickersgill at the right hand of Prime Ministers Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent before he became a Minister of the Crown, and Reid through 25 years at External Affairs. Now 86, Jack Pickersgill reflects on their parallel lives prompted by the publication of Radical Mandarin: The Memoirs of Escott Reid (University of Toronto Press). Editor]
Escott Reid and I were born in 1905, he a few months before I was. We each joined the public service of Canada in the Department of External Affairs; Escott on 1 January 1939, some 15 months after I did. I had entered by the front door through the civil service examinations; Escott by a side door as a “patronage” nominee of O.D. Skelton, the then Under-Secretary. This short cut was not criticized because Escott had already had six years’ experience as National Secretary of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA) and demonstrated a deep knowledge of world affairs through a number of learned publications.
It might have been expected that, working at the same time in the same department, we would have actually worked together on some of the same issues. That did not happen, however, because I was transferred over to the Prime Minister’s Office and never returned afterwards to External Affairs. My diplomatic career had been aborted before Escott arrived. The prime concern of my working life became domestic affairs, whereas Escott became an increasingly influential representative of Canada in the wider world — a diplomat par excellence. Neither of us reached the peak in our chosen fields, but we did live close to the peak for most of our working lives.
Though we never worked together, our careers were largely parallel and we almost always shared a similar perception of what was Canada’s real interest. Our views on Canada’s position in the world were similar to those of Skelton and Loring Christie, then the senior officers in External Affairs. We believed there was a balance of power between Britain and France on one side and Nazi Germany on the other. Assessing that Canada was not needed to maintain that bout de papier Vol.
European balance, we believed Canada should avoid political involvement. We were nationalists who believed Canada should avoid committing itself one way or the other in European matters. We were nationalists who considered that Canada’s policy should be based on our country’s “real” interests.
When France and Britain went to war with Germany, we recognized that the political reality existing in Canada had made intervention inevitable. However, it was not until the Low Countries and France actually collapsed in 1940, and the future of Britain was clearly at stake, that each of us realized that the security of Canada was also threatened and that our national interest lay in defeating Nazi Germany. That realization was parallel, not concerted.
Radical Mandarin is Escott’s personal account of a career that spanned the world. He started at our Legation in Washington in the last few months of 1939 before the war began and served there for two years with unexpectedly heavy responsibilities. The illness of Loring Christie, Minister of Political Affairs at the mission, left Escott often as the main spokesman for Canada during that tense period of Canadian-American relations after the real war on the European front had started in 1940. He acquitted himself in Washington so effectively that Skelton’s successor, Norman Robertson, brought Escott to Ottawa to succeed Hume Wrong, who was one of the Department’s most senior officers. In Ottawa and at the Chicago Aviation Conference, he performed a key role in the creation of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
Escott was assigned back to Washington between 1944 and 1946 when Pearson was first Minister, and later had the loftier position of Ambassador. He worked closely with Pearson on the preparatory work for the United Nations Charter, and in San Francisco on the establishment of the UN (for which he did not share the high hopes of many others).
When Pearson came back to Ottawa as Under-Secretary, and later as Secretary of State, Escott was at his side. The period between 1946 and 1952 was the most constructive of his career. Escott was one of the architects of NATO, and it was during this period that he also became devoted to Louis St. Laurent.
In 1952, Escott Reid went to India as Ambassador for five years. These years seem to have been for him the most satisfying period of his public service career. India became his second “country” and greatly enlarged his appreciation of the non- European world.
In 1958, he began four years as Ambassador to West Germany, his last diplomatic post. He felt, however, that Canada lacked influence on continental European issues and found the posting an anti-climax after his time in India.
In 1962, he left the department for a senior position in the World Bank where he became absorbed with the problems of the Third World and the importance for the rest of the world in their solution.
His last position was as the founding Principal of Glendon College at York University. His prime objective was to make Glendon a fully bilingual liberal arts college. He encountered many obstacles and found the experience strenuous but still retained his confidence that the college would survive and flourish. His experience at Glendon underlines another parallel in our lives. Both of us have done our utmost to see that Canadians, whose mother tongue is French, are treated equally with those who habitually speak English. I was surprised that Escott had never learned to speak French, but his work as the first Principal of Glendon College makes that lack more forgivable.
Reading Escott Reid’s memoirs has been like viewing my own life through a double mirror. Our lives were parallel in our working years but also, even more strikingly so, in our early years. Our family backgrounds were basically Tory. Escott’s father was an Anglican parson who had been born in England and his maternal grandmother was descended from two leading United Empire Loyalist families. My link with England was more distant; my grandfather Pickersgill was born there but came to Canada in 1841 at the age of six. He was a successful Ontario farmer. My mother’s ancestors were all living in North America before 1800 and all but one family were also Loyalist. Escott’s Loyalist forebears were at the very heart of the Family Compact at York, the capital of Upper Canada. Mine were in the humbler Family Compact of the Long Point settlement on Lake Erie. Of our Loyalist ancestors, two of mine and one of Escott’s first settled in New Brunswick, and then joined in the earliest trek from the Maritimes to Upper Canada.
The Toryism of my parents was more partisan than that of Escott’s family. I was even given my middle name, Whitney, after the first Tory premier of Ontario, who had been elected in 1905, the year we were born. Our parents were never affluent — theirs was a genteel poverty; a little more genteel, than poor, in Escott’s case and a trifle poorer, and less genteel, in my case. For both families, the real wealth lay in a love of books and a passion for learning.
We were both brought up in religious homes, and we both lapsed at about the same age; Escott into what he describes as “wistful agnosticism”, while as for me, I would substitute “respectful skepticism”.
Escott’s early life was spent on the higher road and mine on the lower. For example, we both contracted lice in our hair while at school. The discovery of lice drove Escott’s family to seek a better school: avoiding lice for me consisted of having my hair clipped to the scalp every spring, while continuing in the same one-room school.
The outbreak of war in 1914 was a big (and well-remembered) event in both our lives. We were each certain that “our side” would win and were filled with patriotic fervour, though our “country” at the time was the British Empire and not just Canada.
Escott’s perception of Canada as being a “distinct society” came earlier than did mine, as did his partisan evolution. He had described himself as a socialist when he entered the University of Toronto in 1923. I was still a partisan Tory in 1925 and became a Liberal only in 1926. Escott describes himself as a perfectionist; I describe myself as a pragmatist. Perhaps that is why I became active in domestic politics, while Escott’s prime objective was, and still is, the security of a peaceful world.
During our university vacations either in Toronto or Manitoba we each had contact with really humble lives. I taught for two summers in one-room schools located on the very margin of settlement. Escott worked one summer as a track-man on the railway and taught the workers English in the evenings under the auspices of Frontier College. He said the workmen had called him “Scotty” as the name Escott was too difficult. He reflected that if he had had the sense to keep the name “Scotty”, it might have concealed his arrogance as, being called “Mike” had helped Pearson to disguise his ambition.
Escott and I owed our university education, both in Canada and at Oxford, mainly to scholarships. We both arrived at Oxford in 1927 — Escott as a Rhodes Scholar and I as a beneficiary of the IODE. He emerged with a first class degree; I had to be content with a second. At Oxford also studying with us runethoman honutiful mind from ma enhanl class in Manitoba: Ruth Herriot. I admired her from a distance; Escott married her.
Escott stayed at Oxford for three years; Ileft in 1929 after two, luckily for a job as a lecturer in History at Welsley College, Winnipeg, which lasted for eight years. When Escott came home in 1930, he was fortunate enough to win a fellowship which allowed him to make a systematic study of the organizations of Canadian political parties and which confirmed him in his earlier socialist bent. He shared in drafting the “Regina Manifesto” of the CCF. He continued to support the CCF, as he has its successor, the NDP. I had been a rather lukewarm Liberal until the 1940s when I became one of the main authors of the post-war program for the Liberal party.
In 1932, Escott Reid became the National Secretary of the CIA at about the same time as I joined its Winnipeg branch. We both became warm admirers, and later friends, of J.W. Dafoe, the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press and of Edgar Tarr, a Winnipeg businessman and one of the finest and most liberal students of Canada’s international relations.
From the time we entered the public service we both worked very hard. Escott writes that he “sacrificed Ruth and our children to my work” and that “Ruth bore much more of the responsibility for bringing up our children than was fair.” My wife has often made the same judgment of me. Luckily, in neither case do our children seem to have suffered and they have been devoted friends of their parents. One factor which contributed mightily to the family life of the Reids was the farm they bought in the Gatineau in 1946; in my family’s case, the summers spent every year in Newfoundland from 1954 onward served a similar purpose.
Radical Mandarin describes Escott Reid’s memory of his first 84 years. They are recalled with complete honesty and written in beautiful English. His share in the creation of the North Atlantic Alliance and his active association with the early years of the independence of India are his most cherished experiences and his two heroes are St. Laurent and Nehru. I share one of them. For me, St. Laurent was the greatest Canadian of our time. However, in my case, my second “country” is France and thus my second hero is Jean Monnet, the prophet of European unity.
I can not say which of our working lives will be judged by history as the higher road, but Escott’s has certainly been the longer road, stretching as it did around the world.
I consider that Radical Mandarin makes an indispensable contribution to the history of a peaceable country by a Canadian who, all his life, has been a peacemaker.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1991) — Fall 1991 // Automne 1991, pp. 8–9. Read the rest of this issue →
