by Conrad Black
6. The Disintegration of the Diefenbaker Government, 1962–1963
In 1958, Diefenbaker’s minister of defence, Victoria Cross–winning veteran George Pearkes, had agreed to rearm Canadian forces in NATO and NORAD with nuclear weapons. Canada could easily have become a nuclear-capable military power, as it had the scientific capability and was the premier supplier of uranium to the early atomic development programs. By the late 1950s, the world was frozen hard in the Cold War, and yet the Commonwealth was trying to maintain some solidarity with Nehru, who was touting the benefits of disarmament. In these circumstances logically inexplicable notions flowered of unilateral disarmament as a rational tactic for the encouragement of peace. Professedly idealistic youth, singing songs lamenting the violences of war, joined hands with the mothers of military-age sons and the veterans of terrible far-off wars, all decrying nuclear deterrence and often the concept of defence itself. Diefenbaker and even Pearson, of the First World War generation, were strangely susceptible to this sort of appeal, and the ranks of their partisans were infested with such people. In all except the nuclear countries (which now included France and soon China), it was a temptation to engage in such nostrums as a method of trying to assert influence where there was no real ability to do so. Canada was of no military relevance to anyone; its territory was, but the United States had assumed the defence of that territory in 1938, with Roosevelt’s address at Kingston, and retained it. Agitating for nuclear disarmament was a method of acting on idealistic, envious, and even spiteful impulses; the problem with it was that it was not sensible, was an irritant to the defensive nuclear powers, and a service to the Soviet Union, where no such dissent was tolerated. The argument arose that acceptance of nuclear bombs or warheads by Canada would be complicity in, and an expansion of, the Damaclean nuclear threat.
Diefenbaker’s first external affairs secretary, the president of the University of Toronto, Sidney Smith, was not successful in that role, and died in office. He was replaced by veteran British Columbia MP Howard Green. The undersecretary was the durable Norman Robertson, former clerk of the Privy Council and minister to Washington and high commissioner in London. First Robertson and then Green succumbed to the virus of unilateral disarmament, Robertson, as often happens in the parliamentary system, where the deputy ministers have much greater job security than the ministers and tend to lead them, being the chief agent of this change. In Robertson’s case, it is likely that his frustration at the absence of Canadian influence anywhere, and what he, as an old Liberal, would regard as the appalling brinkmanship of the Cold War rhetoric of Dulles and the conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats who controlled most of the U.S. congressional committees, caused him to recoil when he regained the righteous pastoral somnolence of Ottawa after his tours in Washington and London. With Green, there was more of a susceptibility to the evangelical quest for goodness and purity of method as well as motive. John Diefenbaker, resentful of the United States and a fervent Baptist, was vulnerable to approaches on both counts. Pearson wasn’t, but he was vulnerable to the views of Robertson, his old friend and soulmate from the days of O.D. Skelton, and the Liberal Party always had a left wing entirely capable of buying into such an idyllic Weltanschauung.
Pearkes had retired as defence minister in 1960 and been named lieutenant-governor of British Columbia. He was replaced by Douglas Harkness, another much-decorated officer, an artillery colonel from the Second World War. Diefenbaker deferred the deployment of nuclear warheads and told the United States that domestic public opinion had to be prepared. John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960. (In fact, Nixon won the popular vote if the Democratic votes cast for an independent southern segregationist candidate in Alabama are allocated properly, and may well have won the election, but he generously declined Eisenhower’s urgings to challenge the election, as he thought it would immobilize the government in the thick of the Cold War.) Diefenbaker was five years younger than Eisenhower, who became a world-historic figure when Diefenbaker was still a freshman MP, and Eisenhower was from Kansas and a Protestant background and had been twice elected president when Diefenbaker became prime minister. He was a man Diefenbaker was bound to treat respectfully (as had even Stalin). Kennedy was twenty years younger, and of Irish Boston/Hollywood and speculation-tainted big money backgrounds, which were equally part of America but very difficult for Diefenbaker to identify with or even understand. Suddenly, everything was youthful image-making and affected, smiling, touch-football-playing dynamism, energy, and American pushiness, and John Diefenbaker, as his own political horizon narrowed, found it confusing, unnerving, and irksome.
In May 1961, Kennedy made what was now the routine early visit to Ottawa of a new American president, and it seemed to be cordial enough, but Kennedy left behind a memorandum of points to raise with his host. These were unexceptionable: that Canada join the Organization of American States and cooperate with the American Alliance for Progress in assisting non-communist developing countries in Latin America, but the paper invited the president to “push” Diefenbaker on these points. This was precisely the sort of expression that inflamed Diefenbaker’s inborn tendencies to convenient paranoia. Instead of returning the document, he put it in his “vault,” as he breathlessly later identified the depository for such incendiary state papers as he imagined this to be, as if “push” meant advancing Patton tanks across the international Peace, Rainbow, and Ambassador bridges into Canada, and not just, as it did mean, asking Canada’s support in a normal diplomatic way. The Kennedy administration quickly came to regard Diefenbaker as a kook filled with a neurotic animus who could not possibly be representative of public opinion in such a sensible place as Canada. A year later, Diefenbaker was scandalized to see Kennedy entertaining Pearson to dinner at the White House and took it as a personal affront, even though the dinner was for Nobel Prize winners. He threatened the U.S. ambassador, Livingston Merchant, with the publication of Kennedy’s memorandum, and Merchant was told to advise Diefenbaker that there had been no official report of the matter, thus, in diplomatese, preserving the ability to make direct contact between the two leaders. Canadian-American relations had suddenly sunk to their lowest depths since the Alaskan boundary affair of sixty years before (in which the Canadians were blameless).
Pearkes and Harkness both considered that Canada was committed to accepting nuclear warheads under a dual-national fire control system; that is, the high command of both countries would have to approve use of the weapons. The Arrow had been replaced by Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles, which had to have small nuclear warheads, and in order to be aerodynamic, pending the fitting of the approved warheads, would have to have sand in their nose cones. It was an increasingly ludicrous state of affairs, as Harkness became steadily more concerned and annoyed at the indecision of the prime minister and the cabinet in the face of Howard Green’s passionate argument that Canada would be increasing the chances of “global suicide” if it honoured its NORAD commitments. This was how matters stood when Diefenbaker dissolved the House of Commons for new elections, which were held on June 18, 1962.
Given the Progressive Conservatives’ huge majority, it was unlikely that the Liberals could come all the way back, but it was clear that Diefenbaker’s Conservatives had seriously disappointed the freakishly large torrent of supporters it had attracted in 1958. In Quebec, Duplessis’s chosen and much admired successor, Paul Sauvé, had portentously announced that “désormais” (henceforth) changes impended, and much was expected, but he died after 118 days as premier, at the beginning of 1960, and was succeeded by the unfeasible labour minister, Antonio Barrette. Barrette was not of the stature or acuity required to keep Duplessis and Sauvé’s conservative-nationalist coalition together, and Jean Lesage led the Liberals to victory in July. But it was a Quebec Liberal Party unlike Godbout’s and had attracted many of the more ardent – that is, not conservative – nationalists, including popular Radio-Canada news commentator René Lévesqu
e. In fact, désormais, Quebec-Ottawa relations were going to become infinitely more complicated, and as a starter Diefenbaker could be confident of the disappearance of most of his Quebec caucus. On the night, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives lost 92 MPs and 16.4 per cent of the popular vote, but still had 116 MPs and 37.2 per cent of the vote. The Liberals rose from 48 MPs and 33.4 per cent of the vote to 99 MPs and 37 per cent. The CCF had renamed themselves the New Democratic Party, and their leader was former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas. The new party raised the previous CCF vote from 9.5 per cent to 13.6 and the parliamentary deputation from 8 to 19.
But the greatest shock of all was that in the vacuum in Quebec created by the decline of the Union Nationale after the sudden death in office of two leaders and the victory of Quebec Liberals not at all dominated by Ottawa for the first time since Taschereau, Réal Caouette’s Créditistes took twenty-six Quebec MPs, and Social Credit jumped from 2.6 per cent of the popular vote to 11.6 per cent, and from no MPs to 30, and for the first time became the principal party of the unofficial opposition. The Social Credit leader was Robert Thompson of Red Deer, an articulate Albertan Manningite, but Caouette really held the whip in the unofficial opposition. Douglas was defeated in his own district in Regina and successfully sought entry to the federal House in a by-election in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The country was entering uncharted waters with an unstable government riven by internecine disagreements, an unsteady official Opposition officially committed to a more radical reform program than the country wished for or knew how to implement, and without having recovered its former Quebec base. The federal Quebec Liberal leader was a distinguished but far from a new face, Lionel Chevrier, a former Franco-Ontarian MP from Cornwall. Douglas was a reasonable man of the social democratic left, but Caouette was one of the greatest wild cards of Canadian history, a powerful orator of rustic French-Canadian inflection, but a sort of Poujadist of visceral petit bourgeois and traditional tastes who was effectively incomprehensible in most policy areas.
In an odd way, Diefenbaker strengthened his government. George Nowlan replaced the much-browbeaten Donald Fleming as finance minister, who was knocked down to justice, bumping Davie Fulton to public works. The capable Wallace McCutcheon, a member of the control group of the influential holding company Argus Corporation, headed by King’s and Howe’s friend E.P. Taylor, came in as a minister without portfolio to assist in economic matters. Harkness was proving a more effective defence minister than Pearkes, and his replacement as agriculture minister, Alvin Hamilton, a more effective holder of that office than Harkness had been. Apart from Diefenbaker and Green, it was a fairly competent government, given that it was a party that had been out of office for twenty-two years, but Diefenbaker misread the election result. He was now in transition from a prime minister to a tenacious and strangely inspired leader of the Opposition, convinced that he had been discommoded by “sinister forces and powerful interests,” specifically the United States government, Liberal Party quislings, Toronto high finance, and ethnic and sectarian bigots who objected to his attempted de-hyphenization of Canadianism (and he effectively included the French Canadians as another ethnic minority more than a co-founding, co-equal race, which, of course, is not how they regard themselves).
In April 1961, Kennedy had authorized a hare-brained plan for the liberation of Cuba from Castro’s communist and Soviet-supported government of Cuba by fifteen hundred refugees armed by the CIA and supported by inadequate numbers of aircraft known to be inferior to those provided to Cuba and its twenty-five-thousand-man army by the Soviet Union. The Cubans smashed the invasion, and all but about two hundred of the invaders were captured or killed. Kennedy and Khrushchev, now installed as the undisputed Soviet strongman, met in Vienna in May 1961, and Kennedy and his entourage felt that Kennedy had not been adequately strong in rebutting Khrushchev’s very aggressive threats and bluster. In August, Khrushchev began construction of the wall separating East and West Berlin, officially the Anti-Fascist Defence Barrier, to stop the flow of 3.5 million East Germans who had fled to the West through the practically undivided city of Berlin. The next phase of escalation of the Cold War was on October 16, 1962, when Kennedy learned from aerial reconnaissance that there were offensive Soviet missile launchers in Cuba. Kennedy was faced with the stern choice of removing the launchers and missiles by force, though that might lead to a direct exchange of fire with the Soviet Union, possibly escalating to Germany and to atomic weapons, or proposing an exchange for a withdrawal, or simply acquiescing in this dramatic change to the correlation of forces in the Americas, where the United States had long been accustomed to the complete absence of any serious challenge within the hemisphere. The last was not a serious option. About a third of Kennedy’s National Security Council advocated an invasion, but Kennedy doubted the CIA assurance that there were no nuclear warheads already in Cuba, was concerned about direct combat with Soviet forces, even though the United States certainly could crush anything in Cuba, and feared a Soviet response in Germany, where atomic weapons would have to be resorted to to counteract Soviet conventional military superiority. The rest of the National Security Council divided between various versions of offering a quid pro quo to Khrushchev to desist.
America’s allies, as in Korea and most phases of the Cold War, were largely irresolute and full of peevish misgivings. Kennedy sent former secretary of state Dean Acheson to brief de Gaulle, who declined to look at aerial photographs and said he had always accepted the word of Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower in matters of such gravity and had no hesitation in doing so with Kennedy and that he would inform the Soviet ambassador of France’s complete solidarity with any course the U.S. president laid down.* Diefenbaker, unlike Macmillan and some other allied leaders, was not consulted at all. Kennedy addressed the United States on the crisis on October 22, announcing the imposition of a complete sea quarantine on Cuba. On October 28, Khrushchev undertook to remove the Soviet missiles and have that verified by United Nations inspectors. In return, Kennedy guaranteed that Cuba would not be invaded and secretly added that NATO missiles in Greece and Turkey would be removed (contrary to the wishes of those countries). The crisis ended and was generally judged a victory for Kennedy. It was in the sense that subsequent information revealed that, unknown to the CIA – which was no more efficient at finding out what was happening under its own nose in Cuba than it had been at detecting the Anglo-French preparations for the invasion of Egypt in 1956 or the Chinese infiltration of North Korea in 1950 – there were two whole Soviet divisions in Cuba and short-range missiles with atomic warheads already in the country (though not warheads for the intermediate range missiles). The short-range missiles and warheads would have been available to repel an invasion and to blast southern Florida. But it was not a success in the sense that at the start of the crisis there had been NATO missiles in Greece and Turkey and no Soviet missiles in Cuba and no assurance that the United States would not invade Cuba, and at the end of it there were no NATO missiles in Greece and Turkey, a guaranty of no U.S. invasion of Cuba, and still no Soviet missiles in Cuba. Discerning observers, including Charles de Gaulle and Richard Nixon, considered it an American strategic defeat.
In Ottawa, Harkness was outraged at Diefenbaker’s refusal to support the American quarantine and put Canadian forces on a higher state of alert at the most tense period of the standoff. Diefenbaker allowed Howard Green to be the chief advocate of this quasi-neutralist policy, which did not reflect Canadian public opinion at all, until four days after Kennedy’s October 22 address, and too late to be counted as a serious ally, when the prime minister came round to the view of Harkness and most of his colleagues and endorsed the naval quarantine. But the defence minister now had grave misgivings about whether he belonged in such a vacillating and unreliable government. He soon required that Green be overruled and that the Bomarc atomic warheads be accepted by Canada under the dual-national fire control system so that the $700 million spent replacin
g the Arrow with otherwise useless missiles was not completely wasted. (In that scenario, the money would certainly have been better spent in the Canadian aerospace industry on the Arrow, whether it was a commercial success or not.) Diefenbaker’s official pronouncements to this point were to the effect that nuclear weapons would be acquired if needed, but the suddenness of the Cuba crisis showed what piffle that was, and the divisions within the cabinet grew deeper each week.
On January 3, 1963, the retiring forces commander of NATO, General Lauris Norstad, gave a press conference in Ottawa and confirmed that of course Canada had committed formally to the acceptance of nuclear weapons, though on a joint authority for use of them in action. Though apparently a routine assertion by the general, it flatly contradicted Diefenbaker, who had been claiming the decision had not been irrevocably made (contrary to the beliefs of Pearkes and Harkness, who had been admirably restrained in their public comments). At this convenient moment, in the highest Kingsian tradition, which did not come naturally to him, Mike Pearson announced a volte-face and declared that a Liberal government would accept and deploy nuclear weapons in accord with the country’s alliance undertakings. In some respects, this was a return to the ancient Liberal Party proximity to the United States as practised by Sir Wilfrid and King. In others, it was naked opportunism, as the Liberal Party strategists knew well in the gossipy hothouse of Ottawa how precarious the ministry had become after all Diefenbaker’s convoluted waffling and procrastinating.
