by Conrad Black
On August 23, King received Earl Mountbatten, former viceroy of India, who told him and Alexander that “no words could describe the hate which the people of India had of Britain.”145 King made his last overseas visit, arriving at Cherbourg on the Queen Mary on September 20 and travelling to Paris by train with General Vanier, his ambassador. He had excellent conversations with the French and then in London with the British leaders, and everyone, including King, was more robust and reassured than they had been a year before. American leadership in the West was clearly effective and appreciated. King found Jawaharlal Nehru, the new Indian prime minister, “reminded me a little of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in his fine, sensitive way of speaking, using his hands, etc.”146 King came down with influenza and fatigue and asked that St. Laurent come and take his place at the Commonwealth Conference, and he did so. King was taking advice from Churchill’s rather eccentric and indiscreet doctor, Lord Moran, formerly Charles Wilson, who diagnosed his problem as heart strain. King received a stream of the most exalted visitors in his suite in the Dorchester Hotel (named after Britain’s greatest governor of Canada), and St. Laurent would explain to him at the end of each day the goings-on at the conference. King George VI himself arrived on October 21 and had a very cordial chat with his longest-serving prime minister. The king had told Nehru and the Pakistani leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to meet and compose their differences. King, like the ghost of the conference, reached the apogee of his social prestige in London as visitors, telephone calls, and messages poured in to his hotel suite: the queen, Lady Astor, Mrs. Chamberlain, Mrs. Churchill, Rockefeller, culminating in a visit from Winston Churchill on October 29.
Churchill and King reminisced, and King ceremoniously asked him one question: “I asked if, during the time I had been in office, he had ever asked for anything that it was possible for our government to do which we had not done or if I had failed him in anything. He instantly said: ‘You have never failed. You were helpful always. There was nothing that you did not do that could be done.’ … I referred to his great services to the World and to freedom … and I said, ‘God bless you,’ as he was leaving. He came to my bedside and his eyes filled up with tears.… He was restraining feelings of emotion. We could not have had a pleasanter talk together.”147 Distinguished journalist Bruce Hutchison claims that King said he asked Churchill to kiss him,* and that Churchill did, but there is no record of it in his diary.148
Pearson arrived, and King thought he “had a fine intellectual and spiritual look. One could feel he had been participating in a campaign, which gave him a commanding look.”149 Pearson was now MP for the Ontario riding of Algoma East, and was about to be secretary of state for external affairs, and King was bringing the premier of Manitoba, Stuart Sinclair Garson, in as justice minister (the seventh provincial premier he had elevated to the federal ministry). Mackenzie King left London the next day and returned to Ottawa via New York on the Queen Elizabeth. (He was now almost a frequent passenger on the two great Cunard Queens.) King learned with delight in mid-Atlantic that Truman had been re-elected, an upset, as King feared that, with the Republicans, government by big business and “a certain jingoism” would have prevailed.
King was back in Ottawa on November 7 and took to his bed, where he received the governor general. He had arranged his resignation for Monday, November 15, and agreed with St. Laurent on the elevation of Robert Henry Winters to the cabinet from Nova Scotia. (Winters would be the runner-up contender for the Liberal leadership, and the post of prime minister, to succeed Pearson nearly twenty years later.) King attended upon the governor general at the appointed hour to tender his resignation and began a cascade of minor ceremonies as he withdrew from his great office, broadening down to addresses to office and household staff. He professed relief and happiness, but it is almost certain that his illness in Paris and London and its recurrences over the next twenty months were at least in part a psychosomatic response to giving up the position to which he had in every sense been wedded for decades, and to the pursuit of it for decades before that. He soldiered grimly into retirement.
William Lyon Mackenzie King would live on quietly for eighteen months. He died on July 22, 1950, aged seventy-six, following a heart attack, at his country home at Kingsmere. Many thousands filed past his casket in the Parliament Buildings, and he had a state funeral at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Ottawa, which he had attended quite faithfully for decades. He was buried with his parents in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, where wreaths from followers and admirers still frequently appear on anniversaries.
The evaluation of King is a challenge; it is easier to record what and who he was not. No one – the voters, his colleagues, other statesmen – really knew what to make of him, and his acute insecurities forced him to invest excessive and contrived satisfaction in awards and deferences and ovations in the absence of a certainty of his own greatness or believably spontaneous attestations to it. The day he died, his long-time close colleagues Norman Robertson and Jack Pickersgill were unmoved. Robertson said, “I never saw a touch of greatness in him.” Pickersgill felt no sadness. He was never a galvanizing or bold leader, nor a great orator. But he was always there, and it was assumed that he was there (at the head of Canada) because he was extremely competent. It must be said that he was. He won five terms as prime minister, drew one election, and lost one, and served longer in that office than any holder of an analogous position in a serious democratic country in history. He was never involved in a really serious scandal, unlike Macdonald, as the Beauharnois affair did not personally implicate him, and Lapointe and Cardin prevented him from cracking down as hard as he would have liked in the Customs scandal of the 1920s. He never made an administrative error on the scale of Laurier’s commitment to the Grand Trunk Railway, nor a political error on the scale of Macdonald’s hanging of Riel or Laurier’s approach to separate education in the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta.
The most striking version of the dismissive case against King was made by the author of the Regina Manifesto and dean of law of McGill University, Francis Reginald (F.R.) Scott, who largely abandoned his attachments to the left in later years and had no particular aptitudes as a judge of political men and events, but was a perceptive and waspish observer. In a poem called “W.L.M.K.” Scott wrote,
How shall we speak of Canada,
Mackenzie King dead?
The Mother’s boy in the lonely room
With his dog, his medium and his ruins?
He blunted us.
We had no shape
Because he never took sides,
And no sides
Because he never allowed them to take shape.
He skilfully avoided what was wrong
Without saying what was right,
And never let his on the one hand
Know what his on the other hand was doing.
The height of his ambition
Was to pile a Parliamentary Committee on a Royal Commission,
To have “conscription if necessary
But not necessarily conscription,”
To let Parliament decide—
Later.
Postpone, postpone, abstain.
Only one thread was certain:
After World War I
Business as usual,
After World War II
Orderly decontrol.
Always he led us back to where we were before.
He seemed to be in the centre
Because we had no centre,
No vision
To pierce the smoke-screen of his politics.
Truly he will be remembered
Wherever men honour ingenuity,
Ambiguity, inactivity, and political longevity.
Let us raise up a temple
To the cult of mediocrity,
Do nothing by halves
Which can be done by quarters.150
This was a witty sendup and there is much truth in it. But it doesn’t explain King’s su
ccess and gives no credit to his accomplishments. The fact that he was as successful politically as he was despite not being a gregarious and charming rascal as Macdonald was, nor an august and mellifluous bicultural tribune as Laurier was, must be counted as adding to his achievement in imposing himself on events so improbably and for so long. Unlike those men, who generally enjoyed the loyalty and affection of their colleagues and much of the public, but who allowed the quality of their cabinets gradually to run down, King maintained and renewed his cabinets, and his government was more talented after twenty years in office than in the early years. He did not have the magnificent vision of Macdonald, which led to a unique Confederation and the almost miraculously ambitious railway, and he did not have and personify, as Laurier did, the ideal of a bicultural country. But again, the fact that he was not particularly a visionary or an inspirational leader, or even an evidently courageous one, makes him something of an anti-hero. Thus his success, which surpassed Laurier’s and came close to Macdonald’s (who served twenty-eight years as prime minister of Canada and premier or co-premier of the Province of Canada, and won nine of eleven general elections and did found the country, though he didn’t have to govern in the Great Depression or through a world war), enlarges rather than diminishes King’s stature. The country never really warmed to him, and he lost in his own constituency four times while serving thirty-three years in Parliament, against Macdonald’s loss of his constituency once in forty-seven years as a legislator, and never in forty-eight years for Laurier.
King has been much reviled for surrendering economic sovereignty to the United States. Prominent journalist Charles Lynch noted the centenary of his birth in 1974 by denouncing him as “a compromiser, an appeaser, a sort of fat Neville Chamberlain, with guile,” responsible for transferring us “from the bosom of the British Mother onto the bony lap of the American Uncle.”151
In fact, in the desperate year of 1940, King’s initiative and Roosevelt’s broad-mindedness vastly strengthened the prospects of embattled Britain and the security of Canada and its postwar prosperity. The task of assuring Canadian independence of the United States was something that was rightly put over to a less fraught era, when the survival of democratic government in the world would not be under mortal threat from an unholy alliance of Nazism, communism, and imperialist Japan.
Between 1937 and 1956, the share of Canadian exports that went to Britain declined from 40 per cent to 17 per cent, but that was because of American wealth and proximity and British economic decline.152 The alternative wasn’t more exports to Britain, it was Canadian economic stagnation. Canada’s domestic market is too small to be autarkic; the country must deal with its problems as they arise and did so very effectively throughout King’s long tenure as prime minister.
Above all, King understood the essential thread of Canadian history, the necessity of keeping the double majority of French and English Canadians together, and of balancing British and American influences while steadily enhancing the strength and independence of Canada. This was what began with Champlain’s faith in a viable French entity in the northern part of the Americas, evolved into Carleton’s vision of an Anglo-French colony, then Baldwin and LaFontaine’s goal of an autonomous Anglo-French jurisdiction, and Macdonald’s of a transcontinental, bicultural country autonomous of and allied to the British and Americans. Like Macdonald and Laurier, King understood and was fundamentally loyal to and protective of that vision of Canada, in its past and its future, and he led the country a very long way forward and left it in safe hands that directed it for most of the twenty years following his retirement.
He took over a country that didn’t have authority over its own halibut fisheries and left one in close cooperation with the United Kingdom and the United States at the highest levels. While he was a less formidable as well as a less important statesman than Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he did not have the influence on or intimacy with them that he tried to imply to his electors, he was also never altogether overawed by them. It is true that he was somewhat snowed by Hitler at their one meeting, but so, to a degree, were many people; Hitler was a satanically cunning man, and King was quickly disabused. He was also quick to see the great merit in people such as de Gaulle and Eisenhower and Truman before their greatness was generally recognized, and to identify undiscovered talent, such as St. Laurent, Howe, and Pearson. He was very devious, unlike Macdonald, who was merely an expert with a ruse when conditions required or commended one, and he was rather bigoted toward Jews and non-whites, but violently disgusted by barbarism such as even Mussolini’s police exhibited, not to mention the atrocities of the Third Reich. He sincerely espoused and advanced the cause of the disadvantaged and those of modest means, but was never hostile or envious toward the highly successful. No one will ever know or have a reliable insight into the full psychological story behind his lack of romantic success and his ancestor worship and spiritualism. But they are not strictly relevant to his accomplishments. He was cautious to a fault, but never terminally so, was never impetuous, and steadily broadened and deepened Canadian life and union for a whole generation.
His mastery of the war effort was his greatest achievement, and he was, undoubtedly, and despite his quirks, a great prime minister. The continuity of purpose: the pursuit of French-English conciliation, the balancing of British and American influences, and the growth of Canadian sovereignty and importance in the world that had motivated and been successfully pursued by Macdonald, Laurier, and King had been the constant themes of the governance of the country for almost a century. Macdonald was the Conservative leader from 1856 to 1891, and Laurier and King between them led the Liberal Party from 1887 to 1948, ninety-six years between the three, only four overlapping, and sixty-five of them at the head of government and the rest at the head of the official Opposition. Of course, there had been eight other prime ministers in the other twenty-seven years of the ninety-two. But in the same period, from 1856 to 1948, Great Britain had seventeen prime ministers leading twenty-nine separate governments and the United States had nineteen presidents and twenty administrations. The stability, continuity, and dexterity provided by John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier, and William Lyon Mackenzie King had brought Canada from a semi-autonomous congeries of disconnected colonies which need not have been more than a bargaining chip between the British and Americans, to one of the world’s twelve or so most important countries. The position of Canada still had many ambiguities, as the personality of its recently retired prime minister reflected and amplified, but it was a remarkable achievement by three consecutive leaders, who performed a feat of continuous national leadership unequalled by contemporaries in any other country.
* Winston Churchill, Parliament of Canada, December 30, 1941.
* Its enemies imagined sixty years later that they could attack the United States in terrorist assaults not connected to any sovereign country and hatched in failed states where there was no functioning government, but that is less threatening than an assault by a great nation vested with the sinews of war like Germany or Japan, and cannot ultimately succeed.
* King had endured considerable criticism for maintaining his diplomatic representation (under Pierre Dupuy) in Vichy, but only did so in response to a request from U.S. secretary of state, Cordell Hull, to provide cover for the American mission there, under Roosevelt’s World War I crony, Admiral William D. Leahy.59 The distinguished General Georges P. Vanier, King’s minister to France, 1939–1940, was minister to Free France and the French Resistance, 1942–1944, and to the restored French government, 1944–1953. In a typically thoughtful gesture, King personally visited the Vichy representative to Canada, Rene Ristel Lueber, whom he had allowed to remain in Canada, on Christmas Day, 1942. (Mackenzie King Record, p. 429).
* King envied Roosevelt’s mastery of the Washington press, who recited, every time King appeared before them: “William Lyon Mackenzie King never tells us a Goddamned thing.” (Conversation with David Brinkley.)
&nb
sp; * He was conducted around the Normandy sites by his future literary executor, Colonel C.P. Stacey, who found his French “excruciatingly bad,” and King personally “most affable,” but thought his conversation banal, like “any old gentleman in the back of a Toronto streetcar.”124
* King also claimed to have kissed Roosevelt at their last meeting, on March 20, 1945. “I bent over and kissed him on the cheek. He turned it toward me for the purpose.” This must be read with caution. (Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, p. 1094.)
PART III
Realm:
1949–2014
Louis S. St. Laurent (1882–1973) and Maurice L. Duplessis (1890–1959). St. Laurent, minister of Justice or External Affairs 1942–1948, and prime minister of Canada 1948–1957, was an elegant and distinguished and altogether capable successor to Wilfrid Laurier and Ernest Lapointe. Duplessis was Quebec’s longest serving party leader (1931–1959) and premier (1936–1939, 1944–1959). Though controversial and much denigrated by historians, his time was one of unprecedented economic growth, rising prosperity, and investment in schools, universities, social services, public works, and highways. An anti-separatist decentralizer, he was portrayed by St. Laurent and the Liberals as a reactionary when they should have made durable constitutional arrangements with him. (The other person whose hands are in the photograph was Ontario premier Leslie Frost.)
