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

by Ritchie, Charles

18 October 1963.

  Lunched today with Allan Dulles.16 I have been seeing something of him lately. He is not as impressive intellectually, or in force of personality, as his brother Foster or his redoubtable sister. His mind seems to jump about. When seen in the domestic setting it is difficult to think of him as the ruthless spy-master. This afternoon he was shambling around in his carpet slippers, fussing with his notes for a joint TV show, on the subject of American burial practices, with Jessica Mitford and Adlai Stevenson, a bizarre trio. I very much like Mrs. Dulles – she has such individuality and a touch of the unexpected. The other day when I was paying a visit to my beloved Phillips Gallery I saw Clover Dulles standing in front of that great Renoir of the dancing couples in summer sunshine. Her lips were compressed in a line of disapproval and her brow furrowed in puzzlement. When I came up to join her and made some conventional remark about the exhilarating beauty of the picture, she said, “I can’t agree. What is all this fuss about? Why do they look as though they were enjoying themselves so much? I can’t see why a lot of sweaty red-faced Frenchmen in straw hats prancing about with stout females is so wonderful. I’m certainly glad I wasn’t there myself.”

  Incidentally, one of the Klees at the Gallery has been stolen. These pictures are so small that they could almost have been slipped into the thief’s overcoat pocket. How I wish it had been my pocket.

  28 November 1963.

  “Less than a week ago,” we all keep repeating to each other in bewilderment and horror. Yes, it is “less than a week ago” since I was in Boston making a routine speech at some civic affair organized by the Mayor. When I sat down at the end of my speech the Mayor rose to his feet and, instead of the conventional thanks, he said, “I fear that I have some extremely bad news to announce. The President of the United States has been assassinated.” Sylvia and I walked out into the sunny Boston streets in a state of shock. People were standing at street corners or walking along the pavements weeping openly, a sight I have never seen before. Now the original shock seems buried under these shoals of tributes and eulogies pouring in from all over the world and the hundreds of shifting TV images of the assassination and its aftermath. What can one find to say? The adventure is over, “brightness falls from the air,” that probing mind, that restlessness of spirit, are snapped off as if by a camera shutter. We shall no more see that style of his, varying from gay to grim and then to eloquent, but always with a cutting edge.

  Now for the anticlimax – to L. B. Johnson. We have come from the hills to the plains.

  Bobby Kennedy remains untamed among the flood of public grief. His silence is significant of a deeper and different kind of grief.

  29 December 1963.

  Now at the year’s end I look back on this last year in Washington and try to sum up my impressions. In the first place, there is the life of the office, the management of the Embassy itself. Once a week I sit at the end of the long table in the Chancery library, with its panelled walls and Grinling-Gibbon-style carvings, where Sir Herbert Marler used to sit with such ponderous dignity when he was in my place and I was a young man. Down the length of the table are representatives of the various government departments stationed here in Washington, also of the armed forces and the Bank of Canada. The Ambassador is supposed to have overall authority for the multifarious activities of Canadian representatives here. It is an almost impossible task to keep track of so many and such varied specialized activities and to know and assess so many varied personalities. Our own people from the Department of External Affairs I of course know well. I have an extremely able No. 2 in Basil Robinson. The younger men from External Affairs on the staff I see very often and they are a very good lot. I manage to keep up with most of the current work conducted here by other government departments. All the same, a great deal escapes me. There are a multitude of direct department-to-department contacts between Ottawa and Washington between officials who have known each other, very often, for many years, while ambassadors have come and gone. Their contacts are close and informal, by telephone Ottawa–Washington, Washington–Ottawa, or by their frequent visits. The armed forces, of whom there are hundreds stationed here in Washington, have their own close relationship with their American counterparts. The Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve are in touch daily. Many of their conversations, which affect the whole economy of Canada and thus bear heavily on Canadian-American relations, take place on the telephone. Such conversations are not reported, except in the most general terms and not always then, to the Ambassador. All these direct relationships form a valuable ingredient in Canadian foreign policy. The Ambassador, however, is often hard put to it to obtain full knowledge and understanding of all the activities for which he bears a wide measure of official responsibility.

  Then there are the frequent visits by Cabinet Ministers and officials for bilateral meetings with the Americans, and each of these Ministers arrives with his own team of experts fresh from the Ottawa scene and highly conscious of the political power-struggles and intrigues going on at home. Sometimes the Ambassador finds himself occupying a figurehead position in such negotiations. This, for example, was particularly true during this year’s negotiation with the Americans over the Interest Equalization Tax, when I watched with silent admiration the superb and sustained diplomatic performance of Louis Rasminsky, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, in convincing the Americans, much against their previous stand, that the interests of the United States would best be served by granting us an exemption from the tax.

  What, I wonder, was a diplomat’s life like before the invention of the telephone? Ministers and officials, particularly of course officials of my own Department, are on the telephone to me almost daily, and so, quite frequently, is the Prime Minister. None of them seem to pay the slightest attention to the regulations supposed to govern the use of the telephone in the interests of security. Cabinet Ministers are particularly irresponsible in what they say, but then I should think, one way or another, the Americans know virtually everything that goes on in the activities of the Embassy if they are sufficiently interested to find out. Mike has never been particularly careful on this score. The fact that I have known him for so many years, however, makes it easy for me to pick up his meaning and intention from a half-phrase, sometimes even from the tone of his voice. In these recent years since he has been in politics I have been more and more struck by the tenacity with which he pursues his objectives. He does not proceed in a straight line, but crab-wise. If he meets an obstacle, he turns aside, even appearing to forget his intention, but he always comes back to what he was originally seeking. In his conversations with his American counterparts or in the days when, as Foreign Minister, he played such a part in the United Nations, he showed extraordinary facility in devising compromise, in finding a formula, often scribbled on the back of an envelope in the heat of debate. Indeed, his diplomatic footwork is amazingly nimble. One aspect of his character of which one has to beware, and which often leads the unwary into misunderstanding, is his acute dislike of any personal unpleasantness. Thus he often leaves the impression of agreeing to more than he intends to fulfil. People leave him with the impression that he has adopted their views when in fact he is simply trying to save their faces. Indeed, I have found that ready agreement on his part to any proposition is a negative sign. When I worked with him in the Department of External Affairs, I found that if he praised any proposition I put to him, it was speedily put aside. If, on the other hand, he poured forth a stream of objections and appeared to brush the proposal away, it was a sign that he was taking a serious interest in it. From the personal point of view it is, of course, a relief and a stimulus to me to be dealing with a Prime Minister who is also a friend.

  My relations with the State Department are also, of course, easier since the change of government, although they never were difficult on a personal basis. Apart from Rusk himself, I see a good deal of Bill Bundy, a very nice and very able man. He and his wife Mary are personal friends. In general, the State Depar
tment strike me as highly competent but extremely cautious in the expression of their views. I wonder whether this is a hangover from the McCarthy years and the attacks on the State Department for supposedly left-wing inclinations. American officials are less willing to discuss alternatives, less speculative and less forthcoming, than the Foreign Office in London. They also seem somewhat less individual in their views than our own people at home. They tend to run to a pattern. There are outstanding exceptions. One is George Ball, a forceful, original mind, very tough in negotiation but very civilized in conversation. (He shares my love and admiration for the novels of Anthony Powell.) Another outstanding exception is Averell Harriman.17 That old man is younger in mind and in spirit than many of his juniors, and has more political imagination; multi-millionaire, a former politician, he is totally without pomposity. Of the older men, Dean Acheson, now on the fringe of affairs, is my closest friend. I have known him and his beautiful and perceptive wife, Alice, since my early days in Washington. It stimulates one’s mind just to be in the room with him. He has such immense style, intellectual and social. His vanity is endearing. We often go during the weekend for lunch with the Achesons at their country house. He always runs up the Canadian flag when I arrive. He is a kind of Canadian himself by ancestry and in temperament. This makes for difficulties with him, as he feels perfectly free, as if he were himself a Canadian citizen, to launch into the most violent attacks on Canadian policy, and in particular on Mike Pearson, for whom he has conceived strong mistrust. Once at his house after lunch he attacked Mike’s reputation in such terms that I thought that as we were talking of my Prime Minister I should perhaps leave the house, after having in vain attempted to contradict him. However, as he then turned to an equally lively attack on most American political figures, I felt that it would be idle and absurd to make a scene and that my admiration and friendship for him were more important than anything he said.

  Then as to my dealings with the White House this year, there has been the pleasure and stimulus of working with Mac Bundy. His company gives me the same kind of pleasure as that of Dag Hammarskjöld or Isaiah Berlin – the quickness of his mind, that network of live intelligence. To some, Mac’s intellectual cocksureness might be putting-off, but then they are all cocksure here, all the leading officials – Ball, Acheson, Rusk, McNamara, and so on, right down the line. And at the top, in the Presidency, there is no humility, no self-doubt. The cast of thought in Washington is absolutist. It is true that there are a number of incompatible Absolutists, often in embattled struggle with each other, but all are Absolute for America, this super-nation of theirs which charges through inner and outer space engined by inexhaustible energy, confident in its right direction, the one and only inheritor of all the empires and the one which most fears and condemns the name of Empire, the United States of America, exhorting, protecting, preaching to and profiting by – half the world.

  I don’t know what I should have done since I came to Washington without my journalist friends. Some of my colleagues mistrust journalists, some are simply scared of them. I have always enjoyed their company. After all, I once tried to be a journalist myself – and failed. In Washington the top journalists wield more influence and have more access to the seats of the mighty than any diplomats. For example, Walter Lippmann. Walter is one of the most interesting minds I have encountered, also one of the most congenial companions. I have lunched with him at regular intervals this year and we go to the gatherings at the Lippmanns’ house where one meets some of the inner circle of Washington influence. Then Scotty Reston has proved to be as good a friend to me as he has to other Canadian representatives and to our country.

  As to the diplomatic colleagues, I have seen less of them than I used to do at the United Nations, yet we are often in and out of their Embassies and they are often here. David Ormsby-Gore, the British Ambassador, was the closest to President Kennedy of all the diplomats, although I don’t know how much British influence affected the major policy decisions taken in the White House. The same question arises about my opposite number, Walt Butterworth, the American Ambassador in Ottawa. Walt is an able and aggressive operator. He has known Mike Pearson since years ago when he was a junior in the American Embassy and Mike was in the Department of External Affairs, and he sees him very often on an intimate social basis. Again, I rather doubt that he influences Mike’s political decisions.

  Thank God we have many friends in this city who have nothing to do with politics (except that everyone in Washington, directly or indirectly, has something to do with politics). Sylvia likes it here very much. She has a lot of women friends and it is a great place for women’s group activities. She knows more Senators’ wives than I know Senators. I think she is thoroughly enjoying herself. As for me, what a fortunate day it was when she said she would marry me.

  I am lucky in having a lot of old friends here who date back to before the war. Some of these are actual born-and-bred Washingtonians, “the cave-dwellers,” who have seen the ups and downs of so many political reputations, the coming and going of so many confidential advisers to successive presidents. Since I came back to Washington this time we have made a lot of new friends. Yet someone remarked to me the other day, “In this town no one is missed when they go away and no one is forgotten when they come back.” Yes, Washington is a movable feast. Personally I am not in favour of capitals created purely for political purposes – Washington, Ottawa, Bonn. I think the capital of a nation should be in one of the great cities where the political process is not isolated. There is a claustrophobia about federal capitals.

  Well, goodbye 1963. It closes on the note on which it opened – politics, the fascinating, dangerous world on whose fringe I live and whose muddied waters I try to keep my head above.

  Here the diaries abruptly end, not to be resumed for nearly four years. What has become of the missing years? The volumes were perhaps lost in subsequent migrations from one diplomatic post to another? Left in the drawer of a hotel bedroom in Paris, London, or New York? Or did they ever exist at all – was I visited by one of those merciful intermissions when I abandoned the diary habit?

  Of my remaining years in Washington, till my departure early in 1966, only a few of my notes remain and these have mostly to do with the disastrous Vietnam War which was so soon to darken the Washington scene, to twist and distort political – and sometimes personal – relationships. As anyone who has lived through the last World War knows, a nation at war requires total support from its friends, not qualified approval, still less wise advice from the sidelines. Our Canadian support for the Americans over Vietnam was more explicit than we always recall in retrospect, but it did not meet the demand. As Ambassador in Washington I found myself once again representing a Canadian government that had not come up to American expectations. There was not the acrimony which had marked the Diefenbaker–Kennedy exchanges; the mood now in the White House and the State Department was one of disappointment, a “more in sorrow than in anger” mood, though the anger was to come later. My own official record of this period is embalmed in the archives of the Department of External Affairs. What follows is no comprehensive account of relations between Canada and the United States on the Vietnam War or on any other of the many subjects of negotiation between the two countries during that time. It was compiled from notes taken at the time.

  Lyndon Baines Johnson in his solemn hour lumbers to the podium to face his fellow Americans. The portentous utterances are lowered slowly into the waiting world. An impressively firm yet benevolent statesman enunciates the purposes and aspirations of the nation. The undertaker’s tailoring encases a hulking, powerful body, something formidable by nature but dressed up and sleeked down. The President is not to be mocked. His displacement – as they say of ocean liners – is very great. He is a man of Faith, a man of ideals and of sagacity, and above all a man of power. No greater power has been in history than in this incarnation. He is our nuclear shield, leader of the West, dispenser of aid, sender of satellites, spender
of billions, arbiter of differences, hurler of thunderbolts. The President of the United States of America! Foreign ministers and potentates gather at his gates. “How did you get on with the President?” That is the question, and woe betide the one who fails to pass the test. If the Jovian countenance fell into sullen furrows, then no more loans – no more arms. The chill spreads rapidly through the furthest confines of the administration. Lips tighten all down the line to the humblest desk officer in the State Department. What it is to be in the Presidential Doghouse! I have been there once or twice – or my country has. They are still civil in the government offices – civil and chilly – but give them a drink or two after dinner and it all comes out with rough frankness. Your government has erred and strayed from the way and the sheep-dogs are at your heels barking you back into line. Disagreeable it is at times – even offensive. Your Prime Minister may be harshly censured, but a word of criticism of the President of the United States of America and the heavens would fall with a weight appalling to contemplate.

  Even when the sun of favour is shining, there are outer limits for a foreigner to exchanges of thought with the Washington higher management. For one thing, the President never listens – or at any rate never listens to foreigners. He talks them down inexhaustibly. The phrase “consultations with allies” is apt to mean, in United States terms, briefing allies, lecturing allies, sometimes pressuring allies or sounding out allies to see if they are sound. The idea of learning anything from allies seems strange to official Washington thinking. The word comes from Washington and is home-made.

  When LBJ first came to power – in those few months when he counted none but well-wishers in Washington – that good friend of Canada, Scotty Reston expounded to me the pleasing notion that, as the new President was inexperienced in international affairs and as Mike Pearson was an international figure, there could be a fruitful and friendly working relationship between them. The President would turn to Mike for advice as a neighbour, one he could trust in a homely dialogue across the fence. It did not work out like that – perhaps it could never have been expected to do so. When Mike Pearson came on his first official visit to Washington there was little stirring of interest in the White House. The President had much to occupy him; the visit seemed treated as of marginal importance. The Prime Minister’s opening speech under the portico of the White House consisted largely in a heartfelt tribute to J. F. Kennedy – natural, inevitable so soon after the assassination, but not particularly heartwarming to the President. The President responded by a reference to our “undefended border.” At dinner at the Canadian Embassy the President seemed bored. The Canadian government’s gift of an RCMP English-type saddle brought a mumble that it “had no pommel.” One saw it relegated to the White House attic. Yet the Prime Minister was not easily discouraged. He was determined to break through the ice and melt it with his charm and humour. He succeeded – or appeared to succeed. Before the visit to Washington was over he had had a long, private talk with the President which put the two of them on a footing of frankness. The President was genial and gossipy.