by Denis Smith
In the summer of 1976 Joe Clark had replaced Robert Stanfield as leader of the Tory party. Clark was on Diefenbaker’s blacklist as an exponent of the leadership review in 1966, and the Chief’s distaste for him never wavered. But Diefenbaker was also increasingly alarmed by what he saw as the authoritarian and centrist tendencies of the Trudeau government. After some delicate probing by the Prince Albert constituency association about the Chief’s intentions, Diefenbaker let them know in early April 1978 that he wished to stand again for parliament. On April 19 he was nominated at a small convention that was addressed by one of his younger party favourites, the Toronto mayor David Crombie. Diefenbaker delivered a strong speech full of sarcasm towards the Liberal government - and then waited a full year for the general election.56
The Chief had outlasted many of his old Prince Albert cronies. By 1979 Art Pearson, Ed Topping, and Fred Hadley had passed on. Dick Spencer was left to run his campaign, along with Max Carment, Glen Green, and Harry Houghton. This time Diefenbaker imported another young acolyte from Ottawa, Michael McCafferty, who faithfully did his chores and endured the old man’s frequent rages. John Munro, Diefenbaker’s ghostwriter and the prospective director of the Diefenbaker Centre, was also present from time to time. Mary Carment and Lily Spencer managed the committee rooms. Spencer tried to keep Diefenbaker close to home and under careful watch, “so that he could be assisted and protected.” He was often confused and seemed to manage best in short discussions of single issues or in face-to-face encounters with individual voters.
Early in the campaign, disaster struck. During the night of April 13, 1979, Diefenbaker apparently suffered a small stroke, fell from his bed, hit the bedside table, and blackened an eye. McCafferty, hearing the disturbance from the next room, struggled to get him back to bed. Next day he could not rise, and went through spells of jumbled and senseless talk. Dr Glen Green cared for him, and the confusion soon passed. Green and McCafferty told the press Diefenbaker was suffering from flu, had fallen in the night, and would spend the weekend in bed, but a Canadian Press report from Ottawa asserted that Diefenbaker was in a coma and would leave the race. Green vehemently denied the story. Spencer continued his account: “By Monday night Dief had regained normal awareness and began a steady recovery. Diagnosis of the malaise was no longer relevant. Our problem was now a political one. If John Diefenbaker did not recover completely, we would be running a candidate ‘without all his marbles,’ as one reporter harshly put it, or we would be forced to withdraw him, risking incredible damage to his legend.”57
For five days Diefenbaker’s four close friends cosseted and sheltered him from the press and the curiosity seekers, feeding him light foods until one of them complained that “this god-damned squirrel food isn’t enough!” and Diefenbaker himself took “a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast, jam and coffee in the hotel dining room Tuesday morning.” The next day he was out on the street campaigning and putting the lie to all the gossip about a wild and incontinent interlude. He told a press conference he had had “a touch of flu” and a good rest. Now he wanted to talk about Pierre Trudeau again.58
For the rest of the campaign his aides watched him solicitously as he suffered repeated spells of anger, panic, and despair. The campaign did not pick up pace, and the NDP offered a firm and convincing challenge in the person of Stan Hovdebo, a young farmer and teacher. Diefenbaker’s team began to fear defeat and humiliation, and stepped up their advertising under the slogan “Diefenbaker, Now More Than Ever.” At the end they brought in the premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, for a crisp final rally attended by - among others - Peter Newman. (“I’m glad he came along,” Diefenbaker commented afterwards.) The rally gave new confidence to the team. Diefenbaker remained tired and distracted: “His shakes had increased. His darting eyes and thin wisps of grey, wavy hair shooting out from above his ears gave him an amazed and comic look.”
On election night the Tory campaign rooms in Prince Albert overflowed with national reporters and television crews, all there to observe Dief’s last hurrah. As Joe Clark’s Conservatives claimed a national minority victory, John Diefenbaker won his own seat for the thirteenth consecutive time, with a majority of more than four thousand votes. Diefenbaker spent the early evening in his committee rooms, and thanked his audience one last time: “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be here. It’s my last campaign. I really mean that. I’m glad I stayed this time.” Then he went upstairs to his room for a glass of beer with a friend, and declined the usual invitation to a late election-night supper at the Glen Greens.59
Diefenbaker returned to Ottawa for the swearing-in of the new Conservative government in melancholic mood. He was glad to see the Trudeau Liberals gone, but he could not rally much enthusiasm for Joe Clark and his team of young upstarts. Old grudges lasted forever. Flora MacDonald had sat next to him for much of the time in the House after her entry to the chamber in 1972, but he had not spoken a word to her since her firing from the national office in 1966. At the governor general’s garden party following the swearing-in ceremony - where MacDonald had become secretary of state for external affairs - Diefenbaker responded to her efforts at reconciliation: “You! You! He should never have made you foreign minister! Minister of health, perhaps, or postmaster general; but never foreign minister!” He turned and stomped away, never to speak to her again.60
The House did not sit that summer. Diefenbaker returned once more to Prince Albert and came back to Ottawa in the heat of late July. He fussed with further changes in his funeral arrangements and his will, and arranged for a series of formal portraits in the House of Commons and his parliamentary office. On August 1 he wrote to his assistant Keith Martin and his friend Senator David Walker, assigning general responsibility for the funeral arrangements jointly to them and offering his latest thoughts on the display of his open casket at stops along the route of his final journey by train across the nation.61 But he was planning a trip to the Yukon in late August for the opening of the Dempster highway, and in September to the People’s Republic of China. On August 15 he appeared for a whimsical ceremony at the National Press Club to shoot the first ball on a new snooker table. On August 16, 1979, in the early morning, he died alone in his study at home.62
Diefenbaker and Donald Fleming lost the 1948 leadership contest on the first ballot to George Drew, the premier of Ontario. On the platform, from left to right, Diefenbaker, Edna, George Drew, Fiorenza Drew, Donald Fleming.
Diefenbaker maintained his law partnership in Prince Albert, mostly in absentia, with John Cuelenaere and Roy Hall until the mid-1950s. (Saskatchewan Archives: Star-Phoenix Collection)
In December 1956 Diefenbaker easily won his third run for the leadership against his parliamentary colleagues Donald Fleming and Davie Fulton, shown here raising the victor’s hands in triumph. (World Wide Photos)
Olive Diefenbaker was at John’s side to celebrate his election as leader of the party. (Canada Wide)
Following the 1957 general election victory, Diefenbaker took three reporters to Lac La Ronge for a day of fishing.
From left: Mark Harrison of the Toronto Star, Diefenbaker, Clark Davey of the Globe and Mail, and Peter Dempson of the Toronto Telegram. (Canada Pictures Ltd.)
On October 14, 1957, Queen Elizabeth II presided over a ceremonial meeting of her Privy Council for Canada before opening parliament that afternoon. (National Film Board)
On April 1, 1958, Elmer and John posed happily as the telegrams poured in after Diefenbaker’s overwhelming general election victory.
In Ceylon during his 1958 Commonwealth tour, Diefenbaker briefly took a ride on an elephant.
Bringing ashore the marlin, January 1961. This catch became the object of half-serious repartee between President Kennedy and Prime Minister Diefenbaker in February and May 1961. (Roy Bailey)
Diefenbaker received the Freedom of the City of London during an early interlude in the 1963 Canadian general election campaign. (Central Press Photos, London)
Diefenb
aker turned on the party president, Dalton Camp, to accuse him of betrayal at the 1966 annual meeting of the Conservative Party. At this meeting, the party agreed to hold a leadership convention in defiance of Diefenbaker’s wishes. (Canada Wide)
At Maple Leaf Gardens in September 1967 Diefenbaker made his last stand as leader of the party, challenging the phrase “deux nations” as the translation of “two founding peoples” in a convention resolution.
The House of Commons was not in session when Diefenbaker posed for his last formal portrait shortly before his death in August 1979. (Canadian Press)
CHAPTER 15
A Burial on the Prairie
THE CASKET WAS MOVED WITHOUT CEREMONY TO THE HALL OF HONOUR OF parliament during the evening of Thursday, August 16, 1979. There John Diefenbaker’s body lay in state in an open casket throughout the day and evening on Friday and Saturday, and again on Sunday morning, August 19. Ten thousand Canadians filed silently past the bier. At Diefenbaker’s insistence, both the Red Ensign and the Canadian flag were draped on the coffin, the Red Ensign overlapping and obscuring the bottom of the maple leaf flag. On the day of his death the leader of the opposition, Pierre Trudeau, told reporters that Diefenbaker “had a vision of Canada that animated him and that gave him the ability to communicate with the people of Canada … I was struck by his vigorous defence of human rights and individual liberties. The Bill of Rights remains a monument to him … We were friends because we understood each other.” The NDP leader Ed Broadbent commented that Diefenbaker was “the outstanding character in the House of Commons … Throughout his life he never forgot his humble beginnings.”1
On Sunday afternoon the funeral cortege formed under the Peace Tower and the casket, borne by RCMP pallbearers, was carried through the great doors to a general salute. With a mounted RCMP escort, two fifty-man contingents of ceremonial guards, two military bands, and forty-nine honorary pallbearers, the procession slow-marched for almost a mile from Parliament Hill to Christ Church Cathedral for an interfaith service for the dead. Twelve hundred mourners in the body of the cathedral, and several hundred more in an adjoining hall, heard Psalms 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd”) and 121 (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills”), Ecclesiasticus 44 (“Let us now praise famous men”), John Bunyan’s great hymn “To be a pilgrim,” the Russian “Kantakion of the departed,” and Mendelssohn’s “Then shall the righteous shine forth,” sung by Diefenbaker’s Prince Albert friend Jon Vickers. The service closed to Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the departing strains of Handel and Bach. At the cathedral door there was another general salute, a piper’s lament, and a nineteen-gun salvo from the guns of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery.2
From the cathedral the cortege moved to Ottawa railway station, where there was more band music and another nineteen-gun salute as the special train (three engines, the funeral car draped inside in black, five passenger cars, a lounge car, and a diner) pulled away to the west. On the train were eighty-four passengers, including an official party, family, friends, security staff, and thirty-eight journalists. Ceremonial stops to view the closed coffin had been planned for Sudbury, Winnipeg, and Prince Albert; but as the train moved west it was greeted everywhere by crowds along the tracks, and additional stops were added on the way, at Kenora, Melville, and Watrous. In Prince Albert, as the train pulled in on Tuesday afternoon, the overpass bridge was crowded and several thousand citizens filled the station square behind a guard of honour of the North Saskatchewan Regiment.
“Two nights and two days across three provinces,” wrote Joan Hollobon of the Globe and Mail, “in a train that became an isolated world of memory and compressed emotion, have produced a new portrait of John Diefenbaker. He is still a man of many contradictions, but it is a kinder, gentler, even nobler portrait than that of the jowl-shaking thunderer of political vituperation.” It was a portrait painted by Canadians along the journey’s path. “Workmen holding hard hats in their hands as the train went by. Old men standing at attention. Women waving. Young people. They all saw John Diefenbaker as a fighter for the underdog, an honest man sincere in his convictions and in his vision of Canada.” On the train were his personal staff, Bunny Pound, Betty Eligh, and Keith Martin, “in whom he inspired a fierce, protective loyalty” despite all his fits of temperament. “No one was fooled. Both the public and those close to the Chief recognized the flaws - the egotism, the flamboyance and histrionics, the long, bitter political memory. But we all have flaws, they seemed to say. They simply chose, for these few days, to honor the best that was as real a part of the man as the worst.”3
From Prince Albert the funeral train moved slowly down the familiar railway line, the population of farms, villages, and towns spread out in quiet honour along the right of way, waving, smiling, crying, saying goodbye for the last time in what had become a long festival of national communion. At Saskatoon there was more ceremony as the draped casket was carried to a lying-in-state in Convocation Hall of the university; and then, on Wednesday, August 22, another procession on foot carried the coffin to graveside on the hilltop above the South Saskatchewan River. Olive’s coffin lay draped in black for reburial beside John’s, his own still covered with a maple leaf flag overlain with the Red Ensign, and, cushioned at the foot, the medal of John’s Companionship of Honour. Indians from the Mosquito Band sang a wailing honour song, a piper played another lament, and a trumpeter intoned the last post. Prime Minister Joe Clark delivered the eulogy at graveside, his voice carrying gently into the prairie wind. He called John Diefenbaker “the great populist of Canadian politics,” a man deserving celebration for “the frontier strength and spirit of an indomitable man, born to a minority group, raised in a minority region, leader of a minority party, who went on to change the very nature of his country and to change it permanently,” the advocate of social justice and human dignity for all Canadians.4 In the late afternoon, John and Olive were committed to the prairie earth.
There was talk across Canada in those days - as John Gray of the Ottawa Journal reflected - about the death of John Diefenbaker. “They talked,” he wrote, “in offices, on the street, over store counters.”
It was not grief or remorse which animated them; it was more a kind of affection. They talked casually about John, or the Chief, or the Old Man, as though they had known him for most of their lives, which in a way they had.
With the exception of a few special policy initiatives, nobody will ever hold up the Diefenbaker government as a model of governance.
For all his virtues, the man himself could be vindictive and vengeful. He operated largely on intuition and had little consistent or coherent political philosophy.
But he had a passionate idea and ideal of the country and he was a fervent if sometimes erratic nationalist…
In the end, his stature flowed from what he was personally, or what he seemed to be (in considerable measure the image he assiduously created), rather than from any record of achievement…
To the outsiders of the world, and most of us are, there was something splendid about a man who held on. He seemed blessed with a kind of fearless independence, and people trusted that.5
What was his legacy? Diefenbaker broadened the Conservative Party and restored it as a national movement representing all regions of the country. He offered Canadians, briefly, an expansive sense of collective possibilities. He established compassion, fairness, and equal justice as principles of national policy. But his political career ended in failure. His one great talent - as a platform performer of undeniable genius - was also a seductive deceiver, both of himself and of his audiences. It disguised his weaknesses of character and political skill - his insecurity, indecisiveness, lack of trust, erratic and uncontrolled temperament, disorganization, unreflectiveness, and unrestrained zeal for power. His legend was bigger and more generous than the man. For Diefenbaker himself, it seemed finally to offer a substitute for the failures he could not face. Yet he had a stubborn pride, and his long life turned into
epic. For Canada at mid-century, it was an undoubted act of virtue to embrace the legend of a leader who preached dignity and equality for all its citizens.
THE GRANITE GRAVESTONE CHOSEN BY JOHN DIEFENBAKER LIES FLAT ON THE GROUND and bears only his own and Olive’s names and dates of birth and death. By Diefenbaker’s choice, it is identical in style to the simple gravestone of Sir Winston Churchill at Bladon cemetery in Oxfordshire.6
The costs of the state funeral were estimated by staff in the secretary of state’s department at from $200,000 to $500,000. Another federal official gave a figure of $485,000, including $100,000 or more for the special train. By any reckoning this was the most lavish of all Canadian state funerals, far surpassing in cost those of Georges Vanier in 1967 ($14,000), Mike Pearson in 1973 ($15,000), and Louis St Laurent in 1973 ($32,000). Three previous state funerals had involved the use of funeral trains: for Mackenzie King, to Toronto in 1950; for Georges Vanier, to Quebec City in 1967; and for Vincent Massey, to Port Hope in 1968. Pearson’s casket was carried twenty-four miles by hearse to his burial ground in Wakefield, Quebec.7
