Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  Roley is lying asleep in a deck-chair on the damp lawn, looking like Sylvia’s sketch of himself. Sylvia and Bunny are making cucumber sandwiches because the Misses Odell are coming to tea. They are Cranfordian, genteel spinsters, unpopularly invited by me. My mother has taken to her bed, totally exhausted by her family. My niece Eliza8 has simply gone off the air. A dull Sunday afternoon, but not repulsive. As a family we are happy together, glad to be together, enjoying each other’s company more than that of other people, though tomorrow we give our first – and last – cocktail party. The matter of the list of guests has given rise to reproach from my mother because we have not invited a certain couple whom the other guests do not know and may consider socially inferior. The argument for not inviting them is that they would not enjoy coming as they would only be uncomfortable and incompatible. My mother treats this with scorn, as being nothing but snobbery. I am alone on her side.

  26 August 1962. Washington.

  I have just returned from Ottawa, where I was summoned to attend Dean Rusk’s visit. I flew back here with him in his private jet and had a long talk with him on the plane about all outstanding Canadian-American problems. As on previous occasions, when we are alone and he is out of the office, he talked to me very frankly and told me what was worrying him about our relations, dropping the cautious politeness which he used in his presentation to our Ministers. He talked to me as if we were two officials who shared common assumptions, rather than a Foreign Minister and an Ambassador. If I encourage him in this I cannot complain of the bluntness of his language, but I must not give him the impression that I am detaching myself from the position of our government. It is sometimes a fine line to walk.

  Is there something sly about Rusk, a demure slyness like an unfrocked Abbé? Yet I respect his ability and enjoy his company.

  28 August 1962.

  The Department of External Affairs is becoming more and more a branch office of a huge expanding bureaucracy. Our Foreign Service is becoming more and more like other Foreign Services. This is inevitable, but it does not suit me. I loved the old, small, ramshackle Department where eccentricity was tolerated and where everyone was a generalist who flew by the seat of his pants.

  The Victorian Gothic of the East Block was the perfect setting for the Department as it was in those days. The building makes no concessions to efficiency and is a standing rebuke to progress. How many of the waking hours of my life I have spent there; how well I know the dark attics with windows at floor level, one of which I shared as a junior with Temp Feaver and Alfred Rive, and later, on my progress upward in the Service, the spacious rooms with their monumental fireplaces, which were reserved for senior officials. How often have I trod those echoing stone-floored corridors and caught the dusty, musty smell that lingers there from the 1870s. How often have I paused, leaning on that ironwork balustrade that looks down on the pit of the entrance hall, trying to pull together my thoughts before an interview with the Minister or the Prime Minister of the day in his office in the corridor beyond. And how often, too, have I paused there again on my way back after the interview, to curse myself for being talked out of the point of policy that I was trying to make.

  I thought I knew every inch of the old place, yet the last time I was in Ottawa I made an unfortunate mistake. Hurrying on my way to see Mr. Diefenbaker about the current crisis, I darted into what I mistook for the men’s WC. What was my horror when I heard outside the toilet closet the sound of women’s voices! Fortunately, my presence was concealed by the swinging door that screened the closet – screened, but only to knee level. I determined to stay there until the coast was clear, and tucked my trousered legs around the toilet bowl on which I was seated, to avoid identification. The wait seemed interminable. I had had no notion of how much hair-patting, nose-powdering, and lipstick touching-up goes on among females in these places. No sooner would one leave than another arrived; there was no empty interlude. As to the chat among them, it became positively embarrassing when I heard one of the secretaries giving a living imitation of one of my more tiresome colleagues dictating one of his long-winded memoranda. At last I could stand it no longer. I was cramped from the position in which I was seated, and I was apprehensive as to what more I might overhear – perhaps an imitation of myself. So I swung open the partition and walked through them, without looking from left to right lest I should have the awkwardness of recognizing someone whom I might afterwards encounter in a corridor or office. An astounded hush descended on the ladies at my appearance. What they said afterwards I shall thank God I never knew.

  31 August 1962.

  I rang up Vincent Massey yesterday and said that I wanted to call on his “experience and imagination” in developing our academic and cultural relations with the United States, as I am very conscious that this side of things is being neglected and that being Ambassador to the United States should mean more than just negotiating in the old civil-servant way with government departments. But I have no capacity for launching a project of my own in this domain. Vincent, I thought, sounded a little cool and dry and said, reasonably enough, that he had no ideas “out of the blue” but invited me to stay with him later in the autumn so that we could talk the matter over.

  I saw in the National Gallery today a Crucifixion by (I think) Matthias Grünewald. Christ’s body on the cross is in a state almost of dissolution; the face and position of the head show a collapse beyond the pale of sustained suffering. This is the mortal body that dies in corruption. It brought me with a shock to understand that Christ’s becoming Man meant that he too came to this subhuman stage of collapse, so different is this picture from the noble, consciously suffering figures on the cross in most renderings of the Crucifixion. Also there is in the Gallery a curiosity of a picture – Christ in limbo among the lost souls. One somehow forgets about that period when Christ “descended into Hell.”

  29 September 1962.

  I have just come back from New York. Yesterday I was walking along Fifth Avenue in the air and light of early-October New York, with the women passing in their newly fashionable bowler hats, and I was on my way to vodka martinis at the Côte Basque with my pocket full of money. The sun shafts lit on a pansy designer’s window full of flowers in baroque vases and it looked as gay and artificial as the designer’s dream of it. Men whistled in the street, middle-aged women smiled ineffably, construction workers in scarlet- and wasp-coloured helmets squatted together munching midday sandwiches. In the Central Park pool the seals drifted lazily, half under water. No one for the moment was being robbed or raped or thinking of jumping from fourteenth-floor windows. It was benign October in the well-loved, over-praised city.

  Oh, how have my contemporaries attained their self-esteem, how have they added, brick on brick, to the stable structure of a personality that can be turned inside out, public and private, and look the same? Oh, to have principles, to have faith, to have grandchildren, to grow up before you grow old.

  30 September 1962.

  The Canadian government has certainly made it abundantly plain that we are against nuclear arms as one is against sin, and this moral attitude is shared by the most sophisticated (Norman Robertson) and the least so among Canadians. It is exemplified in the figure of Howard Green. It is not only a moral attitude, but also hygienic; the two often go together in Canada. Fallout is filthy in every sense of the word. This reaction, strong in many parts of the world, is particularly strong at home. It is from this soil that our disarmament policy grows. That policy may not be rational, but it is very Canadian. Don’t forget that for most of our history we were protected by the British navy and now we are protected by the United States’ nuclear bomb. All this may be peculiar, it may be unjustifiable, it may be irrational, it may be irresponsible – but no political leader of any stamp is prepared to go to the Canadian people and tell them that they must have nuclear arms or store nuclear arms. This may change with a change of government; if so, gradually. This is a deep policy difference between us and the United Sta
tes. At any rate, so long as the present government lasts, (a) we will not fill the Bomarc gap; (b) we don’t want nuclear arms for the RCAF overseas; (c) we will not store nuclear weapons; (d) we are against the resumption by the United States of nuclear tests. The United States wants all four of these from us. They are exasperated by our attitude, but so far they are holding their hand. It remains to be seen how long they will resist the temptation to bring pressure upon us of a kind that might bring about a change of government.

  As it turned out, the diarist did not have long to wait to witness both American exasperation and American pressure. The precipitant was the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The Canadian government resented the United States’ delay in informing them that the Russians were installing offensive weapons with nuclear warheads in Cuba, all the more so as Canadian forces were an integral part of NORAD, the defence organization of North America. The Prime Minister considered that, at this moment of crisis when the issue of peace and war was at stake, Canadian support had been taken for granted without adequate consultation. The President was involved from day to day, indeed from hour to hour, in the most testing crisis of his career. The handling of the crisis involved speed, accuracy of timing, and secrecy. In view of the reluctance of the Canadian government to be involved in any action likely to be provocative to the U.S.S.R., it is hardly to be wondered at that the Americans did not wish to become embroiled in discussion with us of the daring moves that they were contemplating to meet the Russian threat. Their reluctance to consult no doubt seemed to them justified when Ottawa hesitated to put Canada on a state of alert, only finally doing so on October 24. Even then, further friction arose when the Prime Minister asserted that the President had asked him to declare a state of emergency in Canada when no such state had been proclaimed in the United States itself. The atmosphere of mutual recrimination that followed between Washington and Ottawa made this a difficult time for the Canadian Ambassador. I regarded the subject matter of the dispute and the high degree of security involved as excluding it from my private diaries. At the time, it was my task, and by no means an easy one, to expound our position over nuclear arms and to explain that we could not go along with any decisions of theirs which might risk a nuclear war without the opportunity to make an informed and independent judgement. Our government had its own responsibilities to the people of Canada. This point of view was represented in Cabinet most tenaciously by our Minister of External Affairs, Howard Green, who in addition had staked his international reputation on his opposition in the United Nations to nuclear testing and at home to nuclear arms on our soil. As to the Prime Minister, I doubted whether he had deep conviction on the nuclear issue, and thought him more influenced by his resentment at Canada’s being taken for granted by the United States. The split in the Cabinet over the issue resulted in the resignation of the Minister of National Defence, Douglas Harkness, who favoured the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Canadian armed forces.

  In January 1963 General Norstad, the American retiring NATO Commander, visited Ottawa and at a news conference stated that Canada would not be fulfilling its NATO commitments if we did not acquire nuclear warheads. I found it impossible to take seriously the American official explanation that he was speaking not as a U.S. representative but in his former NATO capacity. This was another American turn of the screw to bring down the Conservative government. In that same month Mike Pearson reversed his previous stand and in a public speech advocated the acceptance of nuclear weapons by Canada.

  16 December 1962.

  Dined last night with Bill and Mary Bundy. Bill is now in the Defense Department9 and Mary is the daughter of Dean Acheson, and very much his daughter too. They are New Frontier and so a welcome change from the collection of ex-ambassadors, Republican businessmen with jewelled wives, and outdated hostesses whom I have been seeing lately. Mary says that her parents are “the gazelle and the lion” – Alice beautiful, gentle, retiring; Dean proud, active, and lord of the jungle – but that now in old age their roles are changing. Her mother sits on Democratic committees while her father more and more loves writing, reflection, and pottering in his potting shed.

  At the Bundys’ were the Winklers of the French Embassy and the Geylins, he a journalist and his wife, Sherry, an auburn-haired romantic beauty. The Winklers are the only diplomats in Washington who seem universally acceptable. They glide unemphatically from coterie to coterie, welcomed and cherished by all, and are leaving shortly, without any excessive regrets, to return to Paris.

  Elizabeth [Bowen] is here. I said to her today that the chilly exhilaration of her new book, The Little Girls, must spring from revenge. “Oh yes,” she said, implying “you don’t know the half of it.”

  Looking about at the people in the room she remarked, “God has not made enough faces to go round.”

  19 December 1962.

  Lunched with Scotty Reston. I like him very much as a friend and an enjoyable companion. Underneath his Americanism is a Scottish subsoil very down-to-earth. I also find him invaluable as a barometer of the political temperature in this city. It is not only that he is extraordinarily well informed, but he has a flair not only for news but for the changing moods, psychological as well as political, of this volatile country. He can sniff a shift in the wind quicker than anyone I know. At the moment he talks in terms of the New Frontier pragmatism. Its practitioners like to think of themselves as tough, young, and hard-headed. McNamara is their hero. I admire them, within limits, but mistrust the application of the business computer to international affairs, particularly when it is allied to power and the love of power.

  22 December 1962.

  When I woke this morning and saw sun on the melting snow I closed my eyes, pulled the eiderdown over my head, and wished that I lived by myself in an isolated autumnal château in France with high walls round it, with books, a fire in the library, the smell of leaf mould in the garden outside. It was last night’s dance that did me in. The guests were all old friends, my Washington pals – twenty-five years later – bringing out into society some their daughters and some their granddaughters. Conversation was a ghostly echo of old jokes and flirtations. Some have been friends or lovers of others; now their children dance together into another generation. Standing in the doorway of the ballroom, beside two ex-young men of my former dancing generation, I was overwhelmed with such a sense of strangeness to think that this grey-haired old guy was I, that youthful eyes travelled over me with that total unseeing indifference which one reserves for lampposts. I did not feel sad, only almost dizzy with the impact of time, hit in the solar plexus by it.

  But time stood still when I saw the eternal Tony Balásy waltzing, waltzing in the style he learned in Budapest before the First World War. Gentle, sociable, herbivorous Tony, a gentlemanly giraffe, now nearly seventy. He was the friend of my early days in Washington when he was in the Hungarian Legation, then during the war in London. When Hungary entered the war on the Nazi side he had the courage to resign from his country’s diplomatic service, and now has some minor job in Washington and lives in bachelor solitude in a hotel here. Is there something spectral about Tony? A phantom is he? with his elongated, fleshless figure and those bony hands that grip one at the elbow as his mild voice murmurs, “ ’Allo, Charlie old man.”

  27 December 1962.

  If only one could discard the wardrobe of stale thoughts, concepts, habits, desires, fancies – bundle them off to the old-clothes man. Perhaps that is what Heaven is, to be rid of this accumulation.

  A completely still, completely colourless day, of a desolating dullness. It reminds me of some day in my childhood, when I stood alone in the melting snow in a mouldering backyard, wondering what on earth to play.

  Only the greedy, ill-tempered little birds are alive in the still garden, engaged in competitive pecking at the food which Sylvia has hung in a bird’s hors-d’oeuvre tray from a tree. I am like the old man in Byron’s Don Juan, trying to get through a long day – “at sixty I wait for si
x.” Damn it, I had forgotten that 350 people are coming to this house this very afternoon to swizzle and guzzle, and the cook is preparing prodigies in the kitchen while Colin, the butler, sets up trestle tables and bars and clears the room of obstructive furniture.

  I must stop scribbling and work on my notes for tomorrow’s meeting with the State Department on the Nassau Agreement.

  28 December 1962.

  Had lunch with an old State Department friend in the gloom of the Cosmos Club, surrounded by dreadful portraits of dreadful old men. He is mourning the death of his ninety-nine-year-old mother. (He himself must be nearing seventy.) Apart from intervals of diplomatic travel he has always lived with his mother and her death has shattered him. His friends find it hard not to find something comic in his stricken state of bereavement. His sister has sensibly – or cruelly – insisted on selling the family home, dispersing the old servants. Now he finds himself exiled to a world of clubs and dependent on luncheon invitations from dowagers. He talked to me today of his lucky escapes all his life from emotional entanglements. He has indeed escaped everything – except Mother. But who is to say that in his love for her he hasn’t had as full a life as his contemporaries who married, begat, and took chances?

  Reading Genet at disturbing intervals. Am I an existentialist without knowing it? He writes that to utter the words “we doctors” (or “we diplomats”!) shows that a man is in bondage, that that “we” is a parasitical creature who sucks his blood. Perhaps this is what one senses in one’s friends who have “improved” with age – that in improving they have diminished from fear of freedom.