No. 2 Man

When the Queen Elizabeth slipped her hawsers at Manhattan's Pier 90 and moved through the grey morning toward the open sea, she carried the Justice Minister on his greatest assignment yet. As head of Canada's five-man delegation,* Louis Stephen St. Laurent was London-bound to speak for his eleven and a half million countrymen, and to guard their interests, at the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization (see INTERNATIONAL).

St. Laurent's new job was another milestone in an amazingly rapid career. A year ago he was almost a total stranger to the complexities of international affairs. Four years ago only a handful of Canadians had even heard his name. Now, in the opinion of many a careful appraiser of politics, he was Canada's No. 2 man--the man most likely to succeed Prime Minister King on an interim basis, until the Liberal Party could get around to electing a younger, permanent leader.

Two Tongues. St. Laurent was born 63 years ago at Compton, Quebec, near the Vermont border. He is a polished, flawless bilinguist by inheritance: his father was a French Canadian merchant, his mother a first generation Irish Canadian. ("I didn't know at first there were two languages in Canada. I just thought there was one way to talk to my father and another way to talk to my mother.")

He got his law degree at Quebec's Laval University, went to work in 1905 in the law office of Quebec's famed Louis Philippe Pelletier, onetime Postmaster General. By 1923 St. Laurent had his own law firm. By the mid-'30s he had grown into Quebec's legal giant.

To his own and Canada's surprise, he was drafted into politics in December 1941 as Mr. King's choice to succeed the late Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe. At his first press conference, Minister St. Laurent told reporters: "I know nothing at all about politics." In his first election campaign, he proved it by telling his ultra-isolationist constituents in Quebec East that he would vote for conscription. But he was elected with a whopping majority. He scored another tremendous victory in last June's election.

Unlimited Assets. As a parliamentarian, he has great legal know-how. On the floor of the House of Commons, he is elegant of manner, incisive, painstaking, enduringly tactful. Most masterful performance: his expert steering of the United Nations Charter through the House of Commons when he was serving as Minister of External Affairs during the Prime Minister's absence last summer.

One of St. Laurent's greatest political assets is the fact that he is English-speaking Canada's conception of the perfect French Canadian. Handsome, dapper, with close-cropped hair that has turned from black to grey since he entered the Cabinet, he looks like a storybook Frenchman. Yet not even the most suspicious outsider can find in him the slightest trace of Quebec provincialism.

* Other delegates: Agriculture Minister James Gardiner; Secretary of State Paul Martin; Hume Wrong, Under Secretary in the External Affairs Department; Vincent Massey, High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

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