The Record Holder

One evening in 1900, a round-faced young Canadian named William Lyon Mackenzie King walked alone on the Palatine hill in Rome. He was threshing out a personal problem. A graduate in arts, law, economics and political science from three universities (Toronto, Chicago, Harvard), he had accepted an appointment from Harvard as a lecturer. While he was in Rome a cable had come from Canada offering him the job of helping to organize a Department of Labor in the Canadian government.

It was an event of some consequence in Canada's history that young Willie King decided that night to switch to government service. Before he had been on the job many months, his skill as an executive and organizer caught the eye of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Within nine years he moved out of the Civil Service and into Laurier's cabinet as Minister of Labor. When Laurier died in 1919, King took over as head of the Liberal Party.

Politics & Statecraft. King's record as a political leader was the most uniformly successful of any democratically elected leader in modern times. Under him, the Liberal Party won five national elections. He was Prime Minister for 21 years, five months and five days, the longest term in power of any Prime Minister in the history of Britain and its Commonwealth.*

King's success as a Canadian statesman was equally solid. Under him, Canada, which had had difficulty proving its right to sign a World War I peace treaty independently, became one of the richest and most important small nations in the world. From the outset, King insisted that Canada's foreign policies should be decided in Ottawa instead of London. Under his leadership Canada began to sign her own treaties and send her own ambassadors abroad. King's pattern of independence helped change the whole structure of the British Empire. By the Statute of Westminster in 1931, all the Dominions got the autonomous rights that Mackenzie King demanded for Canada.

Tactics & Techniques. King used Canada's new freedom of action in foreign affairs to draw his country closer to the U.S., integrating Canadian and U.S. defense systems and their wartime economies. Through all the changes in Canada's foreign relations and in the strain of World War II, he contrived to keep the divergent French-speaking and Anglo-Saxon parts of Canada together behind him. Of all his achievements, King rated this preservation of the country's unity as the greatest.

Away from Parliament Hill, he spent most of his time at Laurier House, a homely old mansion willed to him by the widow of his predecessor. In the attic study hung a lighted picture of his mother, the only woman in King's life. On a nearby wall was a framed copy of a public notice offering -L-1,000 reward for the capture of William Lyon Mackenzie, his grandfather and namesake, who led a rebellion for responsible government in Canada in 1837.

It was to Laurier House that Mackenzie King retired two years ago when he gave the Liberal leadership over to Louis St. Laurent and resigned the prime ministry. Although his doctor warned him that his heart was weak and he needed rest, the old Prime Minister turned resolutely to the task of writing his memoirs. But historians will have to finish the work. Last week, at 75, at his summer home outside Ottawa, death came to William Lyon Mackenzie King.

*Previous record holder: England's Sir Robert Walpole, who retired in 1742 after completing 20 years, 10 months and 10 days in office.

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