A New Leader
(See Cover)
Whatever their politics, Canadians have grown heartily sick of politics. Subjected to four national elections in six years, they voted last week in their second in ten months. The two principal contenders were familiar faces, ranged against each other for the third time. There was the flamboyant old Tory campaigner, Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker, 67, a prairie trial lawyer at his best on the hustings and at his weakest in running the Government. Against him once again stood Nobel Prizewinner Lester Bowles Pearson, 65, an able man whose quick, shy grin could not conceal his distaste for campaigning.
Politics had become a strain on Canada's nerves; not apathy but impatience was its mood. The campaign crowds were big, and listened intently, but rarely demonstratively. Issues ran deep, and touched off demagoguery, anxiety, and an impressive civic concern. A country whose steadiness used to be taken for granted, a nation that prided itself on its placidity and caution, Canada had in recent years become a cockpit of frustrations. Its national unity was threatened by the pull of regional economic self-interest, its politics had become fragmented and quarrelsome, its economy was in need of a lift, its painstakingly put-together French-English partnership--the cornerstone of the confederation that will be a century old in 1967--was coming unstuck.
The Tense Week. The nation longed for a stable government that would set about putting things right. Two weeks before the election, the likelihood seemed to be another minority regime--a Pearson plurality, needing makeshift accommodations with splinter parties to govern. Instead, when a record 7,800,000 voters went to the polls last week, in a countryside where the last blasts of winter were still being felt in many places, the voters came within an ace of giving Mike Pearson the majority of 133 of the House of Commons' 265 seats. His Liberals won 128 seats to the Tories' 96, and the minor parties divided the remaining 41. Before the tense week was out, with the delayed soldier vote swinging two more seats to the Liberals, and with a pledge of support to Pearson by some members of the small Social Credit Party, Prime Minister Diefenbaker conceded defeat. Pearson would have the reins of power and Canada a new Prime Minister.
Canada was thus narrowly spared a continuing crisis. In the first hours after his defeat, Diefenbaker, a proud and contentious man, had shown a slow-motion reluctance to quit. Before long, every major newspaper in Canada, including the few that favored his reelection, urged him to step down. They knew his tenacity in coveting power: two months ago, three of his own Cabinet had left his discredited administration, unable to persuade him to step down. Instead, casting himself in the role of a northern Harry Truman, Diefenbaker had set out on the hustings again, hoping to revive the old magic, a cornered and dangerous fighter.
Standing under a banner marked CANADA: A POWER, NOT A PUPPET, a dignified rage in his deep-set blue eyes, Diefenbaker would declare: "There are interests against me, powerful interests." He had the Prairie Provinces solidly behind him, thanks to the Tories' $425.6 million wheat sales to Red China. To the farmers, the fact that the eastern financial and industrial interests, the big-city vote and all major Conservative newspapers but two were against him, made his candidacy only the more gallant.
Once again, by any innuendo he could conceive, or any indiscretion in Washington he could seize on, Diefenbaker tried to stir up anti-Americanism, a brew not so effective as it once was, but still heady. "Nobody pushes Canada around," he warned, especially not a nation that took 27 months longer than Canada to enter the Second World War. The Toronto Star accused him of talking like "some alcoholic patriot in a tavern."
Hoopla & Circus. Pearson, in the rhetoric of Kennedy (which has become the prevailing international style), promised to "get Canada moving again, moving forward economically and back into the councils of the world." Once he remarked: "It has been said that I am not able to move people to tears or excitement. Quite probably that is true." Unwilling to make hard, unqualified statements, ill at ease in the glare of klieg lights when he mounted a platform, quick and most effective in small groups, Pearson established little rapport with the voters, often projected a sense of thoughtful indecision. "The thing that terrifies me is demagoguery," he said. "The hoopla, the circus part of it, all that sort of thing still makes me blush."
A proposed TV debate between the competitors never came off. "I have no competitors," said Diefenbaker. And Pearson, in one of the best lines of the campaign, answered: "I would say to the Prime Minister, in the most kindly way possible, that he must not let failure go to his head."
Yet the issues that agitated the voters were profound--more profound than any that Kennedy and Nixon had fought over in 1960. The question of nuclear warheads, though it got most of the headline attention, was largely a sham debate. More basic was troubled Canada's need to set a new economic course, and along with this was what Pearson called "the major issue which faces all Canadians today"--the fissures that have developed between the one-third of the nation that is French, and the English majority.
In the campaign, Pearson promised to confront both issues. With his imminent accession as Canada's 14th Prime Minister, he had a chance to do so. After a lifetime in education and diplomacy, he had turned to the new trade of politics. Now he had the chance to prove that politics is the art of the possible.
Empty Bedpans. Until he entered politics, Lester Pearson had been something of a golden boy, a grinning, bow-tied diplomat liked by almost everyone who knew him, and admired for his talents for conciliation. He led the kind of life in which the breaks seemed to happen to him without vulgar effort on his part.
He was born in turn-of-the-century Newtonbrook, Ont., now swallowed up by an expanding Toronto. The second son of an itinerant $700-a-year Methodist minister, Pearson likes to say: "We were rich in everything but money." His father, the Rev. Edwin Arthur Pearson, who was known to his congregations as "the baseball-bashing parson," taught his sons baseball, hockey, football, and a firm sense of Methodist duty. Lester also learned something about politics from his maternal grandfather, who lost every time he stood for Parliament.
When World War I flared, Pearson joined the University of Toronto Ambulance Unit, and in 1915 shipped out with the British forces to Salonika. Recalls a comrade: "We pictured ourselves as doing deeds of heroism under enemy fire. We didn't realize that we would wash floors, clean people's backsides and empty bedpans."
Pearson switched to the fledgling Royal Flying Corps, where a senior officer looked him over, decided that Lester was "not a very belligerent name for training to be a fighter pilot," and decided to call him Mike. The name lasted; Pearson's flying career did not. On his first solo flight, after just 1 1/2 hours' instruction, he met a high wire in his landing path, tried to lift his skittery DH4 over it, stalled and crashed. Bruised and shaken, Pearson spent a week in hospital. He finished the war as a training instructor in Toronto.
"Good Glove Man." After taking his bachelor of arts degree with honors in history, Pearson briefly stuffed sausages in the Hamilton, Ont., branch of Armour & Co. (he was later to be accused by the Soviet news agency, Tass, of starting his career in an armaments factory). Saturdays, he played third base for the semi-pro Guelph Maple Leafs. "No batter," says Teammate Dink Carroll, now a Montreal Gazette sports columnist, "but a good glove man." When promoted to clerkship in Armour's Chicago fertilizer works, he applied for, and got, a scholarship to Oxford.
"An extraordinary young man, a tremendous idealist," recalls his tutor in history at Oxford's St. John's College. Pearson earned a high second degree, was star defenseman on a memorable hockey team that beat Cambridge 27-0, and won a bid to the British Olympics team. "Mike never picked a fight in a game," remembers a fellow player, "but he never backed down from anyone who picked a fight with him. He had guts."
Pearson returned to the University of Toronto as a history lecturer and part-time football and hockey coach. In 1925 he married the prettiest student in his history seminar, Maryon Elspeth Moody, a Winnipeg doctor's daughter. "I taught her for a year," quips Pearson, "and she's been teaching me ever since."
Changing Jobs. Until the 1920s, the British Foreign Office spoke for Canada in matters of state. But as the growing nation sought an independent voice, it augmented its dozen-man Department of External Affairs. A friend persuaded Pearson to take the exam for first secretary, and he walked away with top marks. Posted to London in 1935, and then reassigned to the U.S. as minister counselor and ambassador, Pearson quickly built up the best Washington contacts in the whole foreign diplomatic corps. A close set of intimates gathered nights around the Pearson piano, talking shop, singing and sipping rye. "We envied his ability to keep a foot in our embassy as well as in the State Department," recalls a British contemporary. "We naturally told him all, and so did the Americans."
A State hand remembers why: "He was one of the bounciest and most ebullient men I have known. There was never any side to Mike, and that was refreshing in the field of diplomacy." Pearson was frequently nettled by official Washington's offhand manner to sturdily independent Canada, but just as often amused--as when he left Washington, D.C., with President Harry Truman's farewell: "I don't know why the King doesn't leave you here."
Creating NATO. The King that Truman was not referring to--Prime Minister Mackenzie King--called him back to Ottawa in 1946. By then, Pearson had ' mastered the technique of the new internationalism. He helped to draft the U.N. Charter as senior adviser to Can ada's delegation, and chaired the U.N. interim commission on food and agriculture. He was one of several men mentioned for the post of U.N. Secretary-General, "a job I would have liked." Though the Russians agreed that Pearson had the qualifications, they insisted on a European, settled on Trygve Lie.
Pearson returned to Ottawa as deputy minister to External Affairs Secretary Louis St. Laurent, and drafted for him the historic speech that first suggested a North Atlantic treaty. "This treaty," Pearson said at the signing, "though born out of fear and frustration, must lead to positive social, economic and political achievements if it is to live." Though proud of his role in creating NATO, Pearson still finds a military alliance not enough.
At the U.N., he negotiated--and guided through the General Assembly--the plan that established the State of Israel (thereby earning Israel's Medallion of Valor). By now, Pearson had won such fame as a civil servant that the courtly St. Laurent, succeeding aging Mackenzie King as Prime Minister in 1948, brought him into his Cabinet as External Affairs Secretary--and into Parliament as a reluctant politician. Asked on the day he joined the Cabinet when he had become a Liberal, Pear son grinned: "Today."
Vodka & Mr. Dulles. It used to be said that when New Delhi wanted to talk to Washington, the call went first to Ottawa. As an interlocutor, Pearson attained a rare influence for Canada; Senator John F. Kennedy wrote that the Canadian Foreign Service for its size was "probably unequaled by any other nation." A colleague describes Pearson's talents as a negotiator: "He sits down with a person from another country without ingrained hostility or prejudice or superiority. He has a sense of humor that helps."
In 1951 Pearson ably demonstrated the technique of the international honest broker, though his interventions sometimes got him labeled as a neutralist in the U.S. When Red Chinese armies marched into Korea, and the U.S. proposed a hard U.N. resolution that Britain feared would extend the war, Pearson frankly told the U.S. that its policy was about "to go off the rails." Then he nudged Commonwealth Prime Ministers, meeting in London, closer to the U.S. position, and a compromise resolution was passed. Conceded a U.S. diplomat: "We would never have taken so much arm-twisting from anyone but Mike."
On the day Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, Pearson made a prescient speech that was all but ignored: "The days of relatively easy and automatic political relations with our neighbor are, I think, over." He was talking as much to Canadians as Americans, and urging a mutual realization that with a next-door view, Canada could speak up to--and for--U.S. leadership more usefully if its voice was more than merely an echo.
After sitting on the three-man U.N. committee that negotiated the Korean ceasefire, Pearson in 1952 was elected U.N. Assembly President. For his unruffled performance. Pearson was nominated by Denmark, with Britain and France, to succeed Lie as Secretary-General, once again was vetoed by the Russians. The job went to Dag Hammarskjold. In 1955 Pearson took off for Moscow at the invitation of Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov--something that no NATO Foreign Minister before him in the tense 1950s had done. Pearson talked trade with the Russians, "did my best to disabuse them of some of their ideas about Americans in general and Mr. Dulles in particular." On a memorable October day he flew to the Crimea and a first meeting with Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. After some 19 toasts and some hard talk on NATO, Pearson and three aides marched straight, heads up, to their car, noted with pride that they left their hosts in worse condition than they were.
When Friends Fell Out. Pearson's most anxious diplomatic hours came in November 1956, after Israel, Britain and France invaded Nasser's Egypt. The crisis split Canada, which had always loyally supported Britain in time of war, but now found itself ranged alongside the U.S. and most of the Commonwealth in disapproval. Pearson had long talked of a U.N. force. At a quiet conference with Dulles, during a late General Assembly session, Pearson brought his idea forward "to prevent the deterioration of the conflict into war, and give the British and French a chance to get out with some kind of honor." He got Dulles' approval, sold the idea to Hammarskjold. President Eisenhower had already impressed on the British that they must back down. The Canadian resolution calling for "an emergency international United Nations force" passed 57-0, with 19 abstentions. Within two weeks, the first U.N. troops were on their way.
Pearson's diplomatic derring-do won him the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for "his powerful initiative, strength and perseverance displayed in attempting to prevent or limit war operations and restore peace." It was a high point in his career, but Suez also cost him his immunity to criticism carried over from his years as a civil servant. The time for a national election drew nigh, and Tory Howard Green, who eventually followed Pearson as External Affairs Secretary, accused him of "knifing Canada's best friends in the back" over Suez. That was the first taste that Pearson had of the blunt world of politics. Within six weeks after the Nobel award, the high point of his life turned into a low.
Morning After. The Liberals had now been in office 22 years, and had become arrogant, tired and out of touch. Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was a kindly French Canadian, but ineffectual at 75. The nation began to listen to a new voice from the prairies, full of fire and Chautauqua rhetoric, John Diefenbaker, promising a fresh if vague "new vision" for Canada.
Canada woke up on the morning of June 11, 1957, startled to discover that the Liberals had fallen to second place, winning only 105 seats to Diefenbaker's 112. After five days of thinking it over, St. Laurent decided that the nation had obviously lost confidence in the Liberals, and resigned.
Seven months later, when Liberal fortunes were at their lowest ebb, the party's leadership fell to Mike Pearson. He had not fought for it, but the tax-free $38,885 Nobel Prize money had given him a small measure of financial independence, and he was willing to take a chance. He had barely begun his new job when he made an almost fatal political blunder.
On his first day in Parliament as leader, egged on by the more militant of the old Liberal pros, Pearson condemned a Conservative finance measure as wretchedly inadequate, and with uncharacteristic arrogance demanded that Diefenbaker hand over the Government without an election.
Diefenbaker rose with all the studied ire of a prosecution counsel and cut Pearson's arguments to shreds. Two weeks later, Diefenbaker called another election, and emerged from it with the most lopsided majority in Canadian history. 208 seats to the Liberals' 49. From that campaign. John Diefenbaker developed the theory, which he confidently clung to ever after, that he had an unfaltering political touch and a whammy on Lester Pearson.
Recalling his costly 1958 debut, Pearson makes no effort to shift the blame. "It was a very stupid move, and it made me look inept and incompetent just as I became leader."
In Parliament, Pearson became the bruised leader of a lonely little group. To the Liberal old guard, he was an apolitical do-gooder, with no instinct for the jugular. Pearson himself has described Opposition politicians as "the detergents of democracy," whose job it is to "cleanse and purify those in office. The good Opposition leader doesn't go around looking for belts so he may hit below them, or, on the other hand, looking for a parade merely so he may lead it."
Slowly, Pearson restored confidence in himself and in the Liberal Party, and mastered his new role. "His trouble," says Liberal Frontbencher Jack Pickersgill, "was that he wanted to solve the Government's problems for them." It was typical of Pearson that in seeking solutions, he called a thinkers' conference of "liberally minded Canadians" before trying to construct a new electoral platform. Slowly he rebuilt the party, collected the "Pearson team"--a brainy, intensely loyal shadow cabinet, including some of the young Liberals who propelled him into the party leadership. "There is a Pearson mystique in Canada," says a colleague, "that is something like the Stevenson cult."
Pearson likes to give the impression of operating with effortless ease; the reality is based on hard staff work and a 12-to 15-hour day of his own. "Mike is a prag-matist," explains a former aide. "He gets in the middle of a situation and feels his way around before he decides what to do." He relaxes with anything from The Age of Reason Begins to TV's Beverly Hillbillies, but prefers a hockey match or baseball game. "My tastes." he admits, "are not very high."
In four weary years of opposition, Pearson and his advisers gradually shaped a Liberal program, and Pearson became a more formidable parliamentary antagonist. For a time he had held back, in a conviction more appropriate to a historian than to an Opposition leader, feeling that the Diefenbaker Government was entitled, because of its vast popular vote, to an unhampered right to accomplish its promises. But when Diefenbaker proved surprisingly weak in office, moody and suspicious of his colleagues and subordinates, embroiling Canada with its old friend Britain over the Common Market and antagonizing its U.S. neighbor by its waffling on defense, Pearson satisfied himself that the Diefenbaker Government "has done a terrible job. These are mistakes the Government has made by itself. We didn't maneuver the Government into them."
Crisis in Confidence. In the spring of 1962, ten months before his five-year term was up, Diefenbaker called a sudden election. His Liberal critics accused him of timing it before the seriousness of Canada's coming economic crisis was recognized. But though Pearson was well-armed with ammunition, his dry campaign style was drowned in a gusher of Diefenbaker oratory. The divided Parliament that was elected mirrored a divided land. Diefenbaker lost 87 seats, but held power with 116 Tories, firmly anchored to the prairies, against Pearson's 100 Liberals, strong in the cities.
The Diefenbaker era was waning, but the public was not yet ready to return the Liberals. Instead, the result was a distressing proliferation of minorities. On the left were Tommy Douglas' 19 New Democrats and on the right a protest party of 30 Social Crediters, speaking mainly for a disaffected French Quebec in the frenetic accents of a rural Chrysler dealer named Real Caouette, who named Hitler and Mussolini as his economic heroes.
Though he tried, Diefenbaker could not wholly conceal Canada's economic difficulties during the 1962 campaign. Canada's dollar, at a high of $1.06 U.S., had long been a hurdle to Canadian exporters. Instead of devaluing it (as the Liberals urged), the Government had uncertainly talked it down. Investors started pulling out. During the five months preceding the election, Canada's foreign exchange reserves plummeted $560 million, reaching a crisis low of $1.1 billion--despite Diefenbaker's panicked mid-campaign devaluation and pegging of the dollar to 92 1/2 cents U.S. If the drain had continued an other three or four weeks, Canada conceivably would have become an international bankrupt.
Six days after the election, Diefenbaker announced a program of mild austerity at home and a massive borrowing from abroad, claiming that the crisis had become serious "only in very recent days.'' The U.S., Britain and the International Monetary Fund threw a line of credit and a loan for $1.05 billion. To cap his program, Diefenbaker slapped surcharges atop Canada's tariffs--in effect, punishing the neighbors that had bailed Canada out. But the flighty capital returned, and Canada's economy--aided by devaluation on the one hand and high tariffs on the other--turned in an impressive growth rate of 8% for the year 1962, higher than any other nation in the Atlantic Alliance.
Liberal Plan. The new Pearson Government is, by common consent, better staffed with Cabinet talent, and has a clearer view of the direction it intends to take than any previous incoming Canadian administration. It has thought out its position on defense, on foreign affairs, on biculturalism, and it has done its homework in economics.
Canada's economy, as every Canadian likes to say, is "basically sound." But its rate of unemployment (8.4% in February) is the highest of any industrialized nation in the West. Its fundamental trou ble is that it is a "branch-plant economy.'' Canada desperately needs a larger market than its 18.8 million home consumers.
Though Canada has a trade surplus with almost every nation but the U.S., the interest and dividends on U.S. investment in Canada--$570 million last year (boosted another $246 million by management services to mostly U.S.-owned firms) --make up by far the largest part of an annual balance-of-payments deficit that last year totaled $848 million.
Walter Gordon, 57, the professorial Toronto management consultant who is virtually certain to become Pearson's Finance Minister, cites the $200 million in parts that the Canadian auto industry imported last year from the U.S. Through tax incentives, Gordon hopes to encourage the industry to make more parts in Canada and export more of them to the U.S.
Part of Gordon's trouble is that decisions vitally affecting Canadian jobs are often made in Detroit, New York or Dallas. Absentee capital (80% from the U.S.) owns 73% of mining, 61% of manufacturing, 80% of Canada's oil industry--more than in any other industrialized nation in the world. Gordon hopes gradually to shift the emphasis from direct investment to bond capital, such as developed a U.S. industry largely free from overseas control. Pearson made a campaign pledge to establish a national development corporation that would draw capital from pension and insurance funds and individuals, and have as its eventual goal "buying back Canadian resources and Canadian companies." Gordon quickly adds: "We must deal fairly with people who have invested their money in Canada in all good faith and with full encouragement."
Defense. When they turned to defense, the Liberal Party planners decided that the issue involved was Canada's international word, a basic consideration to old Diplomat Pearson. "Nuclear virginity" is a favorite Canadian political stance, and Pearson was no more warmly disposed toward nuclear weapons than Diefenbaker was. But Diefenbaker agreed to play Canada's part in continental defense by acquiring Bomarc antiaircraft missiles and Voodoo interceptors, only to refuse the nuclear warheads for which they were designed. The Honest John artillery missiles with the Canadian Army Brigade on NATO duty in Germany were, to keep them balanced, filled with sand.
When General Lauris Norstad, retiring from SHAPE, dropped in at Ottawa last winter and allowed that Canada was not living up to its NATO commitments. Pearson, after a thoughtful week off, announced a switch in Liberal policy: since Canada had made a nuclear commitment to NATO and NORAD. it should live up to its obligations, and at a future time re-examine the rights and wrongs of the commitment.
Restless Quebec. Both for the narrowest of political reasons and the widest conception of national interest, the Liberals must do something to satisfy restless French Canada. They are in a better position to do so than the Tories. Under the new provincial leadership of Liberal Premier Jean Lesage. Quebec is at last emerging from a corrupt political history, a backward church-dominated educational system, and an unadventuresome economic structure.
The French dissatisfaction that Demagogue Caouette exploited was the feeling that French Canadians had been cheated out of their birthright. They thought, said Mike Pearson, that Confederation "meant partnership, not domination." but the result has been "an English-speaking Canada with a bilingual Quebec." In Ottawa, French-speaking civil servants are even required to write to each other in English--for ease of filing. Young French intellectuals bitterly call themselves the "white Negroes" of Canada. French Canadians outside Quebec, crusading for schooling in their own language, were recently told by a school trustee of one large Ontario city: "We have no good reason to spend vast sums of money to accommodate those who should have learned English 300 years ago."
Diefenbaker's answer to the subtle difficulties of biculturalism was to say: "There is only one state, one nation." This unalterable belief in unhyphenated Canadianism was anathema to French Canadians. Quebec's return to Liberalism and its whittling down of Caouette's strength were in part an answer to Pearson's promise of a royal commission to re-examine biculturalism. It was also a thoughtful agreement with his concern that if the nation does not return to the founding idea of "equal partnership, equal rights, equal responsibilities, then we may not succeed in preserving Confederation at all. It is as serious as that."
In the last week of the campaign, Pearson made an uncharacteristically emotional appeal to the voters, as he surveyed the fragile state of Canadian unity. "I am not concerned with power for the sake of pomp or power," he said. "I want to do what I can to make sure that my grandchildren will live in a united Canadian nation, in a world of security and peace. There is so much, so much to be done. Give me your trust. God willing, I will not let you down."
"Egghead Roll." Pearson now has that trust. "The very first thing I will do." he vows, "is to try to establish the climate of confidence." To rebuild swiftly Canada's crumbled reputation abroad, Pearson plans:
> A quick agreement with the U.S. to give the stingless Canadian forces the nuclear weapons they need to fulfill their roles in NATO and NORAD.
> A flight to London to discuss trade and Commonwealth relations with Harold Macmillan.
> A meeting with President Kennedy.
The last time Pearson and Kennedy met was at the White House dinner for Nobel prizewinners last spring, dubbed by Pearson "The President's Easter Egghead Roll." "I believe we can get back on a very friendly and cooperative basis without difficulty," Pearson says. "I know our relations are going to be complicated and at times difficult. The thing that matters is to accept our responsibilities."
At home, Pearson, despite his precarious parliamentary situation, hopes for a blazing "first 60 days" of legislation with a similar aim in mind: to give Canadians confidence in themselves. "Many of our problems, particularly in the economic field, are partly psychological," he says. "If I can at once establish the feeling that the country has a government which will last four years and is determined to get things done, it will go far toward restoring confidence."
Lester Pearson once said that his formula for life was: "To deserve success rather than to achieve it." He now has the chance to do both.
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