by Denis Smith
Reassuring appearances were kept up, but all was not well for long. In February 1950 Diefenbaker wrote to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the fashionable rest-cure centre founded by Dr John Harvey Kellogg of breakfast cereal fame, apparently seeking treatment for his wife. The sanitarium promised a “cheerful, wholesome atmosphere” in “the congenial company of guests … from all parts of the world and all walks of life … Our physicians, dietitians and physical directors arrange a plan of health reconstruction including treatment, diet, exercise and rest according to each patient’s individual requirements. There is also arranged for the pleasure of our guests a varied and enjoyable daily program of lectures, demonstrations, concerts, health question-box talks, and a variety of indoor and outdoor sports.”152
This was nothing like Homewood, but neither was it home. It was a place of “health reconstruction” for wealthy neurasthenics - or as one writer has described it, “a temple of positive thinking, abstention and wise eating.”153 If John was planning a sojourn there for Edna, his judgment (and perhaps his medical advice) must have pointed, as in 1945, to depressive or psychosomatic ailments rather than physical ones.
For three months the record reveals nothing of Edna’s life. Was she a patient at Battle Creek, more distant and secret even than Homewood had been? In April, in a letter to John, Mary Diefenbaker mentioned receiving a letter, a news clipping about the Royal Family, and a gift from “Ollie” - the nickname of Diefenbaker’s youthful friend Olive Freeman, then a widow living in Toronto. “I knew where you would be last week end,” Mary tells her son, “when she told me where she was.”154 Had the MP, so dependent on womanly support, sought out the comfort of his old Saskatoon acquaintance when Edna again needed hospital care? Diefenbaker’s mother, who was privy to most of his secrets, wrote familiarly of a friendship he would not easily reveal to anyone else, least of all to his possessive wife. Edna’s very clinging possessiveness might have been part of the problem, as he struggled to diagnose it and cultivated another attachment.
By early June, Edna was certainly in Ottawa again with John. Mary Diefenbaker offered hope that Edna “is feeling better.”155 The parliamentary session stretched out through the summer, and the couple were together only briefly during July and August in their Prince Albert house. Edna entertained and travelled with John to constituency meetings as though nothing had changed, but friends noticed that she tired easily and that there were signs of swelling in her face and neck.156 By early September they had returned to Ottawa. Diefenbaker wrote to Herbert Bruce: “Both of us are in the best of health. In fact, as far as she is concerned, she has never been better throughout her entire life.”157 In retrospect, that reassurance looks more like gentle deception, or self-deception. The couple looked forward to visiting Washington, DC, at mid-month, where the first joint meetings of the Canadian and American Bar Associations were to take place. Superficially, the trip was a success: for John, as an annual chance to cultivate his widespread legal-political network; for Edna, as a happy autumnal jaunt to the eastern seaboard and beyond the limits of her Prince Albert-Ottawa life.158
But privately, Washington marked a point of anguish that called forth all of Edna’s stoical reserves. There she sought a second medical opinion about her illness, which was confirmed during her brief return to Ottawa. She was suffering from acute and untreatable leukemia. She confided this to her friend Patricia Fulton, but perhaps not to her husband, who was about to depart on a major overseas journey to Australia and New Zealand as a delegate to the conference of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.159 On November 11 Diefenbaker left Vancouver by plane, professing to believe that Edna was still in good health.160 There were doubts, however, about his mother’s condition, and he assured her from Auckland that he could return within two days “if you are not feeling too well.”161 (That could have been, too, his tacit signal that he worried about Edna and would return at short notice if necessary.) Before his departure, John and Edna exchanged fantasies about a rendezvous in Hawaii in December. But immediately on his arrival in New Zealand, John told his mother that he had arranged to return directly to Saskatoon before Christmas.162 There was no plan for a Hawaiian vacation.
For four weeks Diefenbaker hobnobbed timorously with the mighty, taking care to instruct Elmer and Edna to supply the Saskatoon and Prince Albert newspapers with the details. He had two speeches to make, and it was all a little heady: “I am (as you will see) the only non Honorable in the group. I hope that I do all right. I will try … It is amazing all the peoples that are here - colors and races.”163 He reported smugly that the Quebec delegates (René Beaudouin, Adélard Raymond, and Daniel Johnson) were “ill-treated” and resultingly “annoyed,” apparently because they missed out on some of his own privileged invitations.164
Despite rising at four in the morning to write one speech, Diefenbaker was mostly indulging himself: “I think this is going to be a real vacation … Too much playing around and eating. (I have gained … 7 (Yes, seven) pounds! I will have to diet soon.)…I am so fat that I cannot even bend down.”165
On December 22 he returned to Prince Albert to find Edna “most critically ill” in the advanced stages of acute lymphatic leukemia.166 The doctors advised immediate entry into St Paul’s Hospital in Saskatoon; instead, the family spent Christmas at Mary Diefenbaker’s, and on Boxing Day John took Edna to hospital to begin a six-week vigil at her bedside. No one expected her to leave; since there was no acceptable treatment, the hospital could provide no more than palliative care. John booked an adjoining room, while Edna’s mother, Maren, boarded close to the hospital.167 This time John had no wish to conceal the seriousness of Edna’s disease, and word of her illness spread quickly. Diefenbaker was missing from his seat on the front bench when the House reopened late in January.
Edna’s friends rallied with an extraordinary and spontaneous flow of encouraging cards, letters, flowers, visits, and telephone messages. Members of the small parliamentary press gallery set up a message centre for Edna, and one reporter wrote to her: “As I walked into my place in the Gallery today I instinctively - or automatically - turned my head to see if you were in the public gallery behind us. And I know that others here also missed you. Please get well and come back to us. We are all rooting for you.”168 David Walker, like others, could not conceal the sadness in his praise:
So Johnny will miss those de luxe home cooked meals for the time being. What a housekeeper you are! What a cook you turned out to be! Edna, my dear, I couldn’t have believed you were such a mistress of the culinary art! To see is to believe! And after sampling your cooking at Ottawa, I wasn’t too surprised at the delectable morsels produced at Prince Albert. What a wonderful time we all had last July, didn’t we? How you shine in your own home! What a grand crowd of friends you have in P.A.! How well-liked you are by them! And why shouldn’t you be? For you in your heart are kindly disposed to nearly everyone. Yes, Edna, you are doing a good job out there. You are a great wife for John.169
Both of them knew that this was a letter of affectionate farewell.
When Paul Martin, the minister of health and welfare, learned of Edna’s illness, he inquired of medical friends about treatments for leukemia and arranged to import supplies of an experimental drug from New York for use by Edna’s doctors. The treatment was unsuccessful, but Diefenbaker was everlastingly grateful for this act of kindness. “Diefenbaker’s gratitude rather embarrassed me,” Martin wrote. “I had done very little, but he seemed to handle me a little more gently thereafter.”170
While Diefenbaker was in New Zealand, a Canadian troop train carrying soldiers on their way to the Korean War had collided head on with a CN passenger train at Canoe River, British Columbia. Several wooden railway cars had telescoped between newer steel cars, and twenty-one passengers, most of them troops, had been killed. The railway soon pointed to human error as the cause, and attention centred on a young telegrapher, Jack Atherton. In early January, 1951, he was formally charged with manslaughter in th
e death of an engine fireman, on the allegation that he had omitted two words from the dispatcher’s order to the troop train, thus misdirecting it into the path of the passenger train.
Atherton had grown up in the village of Zealandia in Lake Centre riding. With charges pending, his father turned for support to his member of parliament, the renowned criminal defender John Diefenbaker. Diefenbaker was inclined to accept Alfred Atherton’s claim that his son had sent the dispatch correctly, but he would not take the case. Edna was too ill to leave; parliament had the next call on his time; and he was not a member of the British Columbia bar where the case would be tried.
Atherton knew Edna’s reputation as a persuasive influence on her husband, and in desperation he talked his way to her room in St Paul’s Hospital at the end of December. She sympathized, was convinced, and promised to intercede. When she told John, he protested that he would have to pass the BC bar exams and pay his bar admission fee. Edna pleaded that the telegrapher was an innocent victim and a scapegoat. She asked John to take the case for her sake, and he could not resist this last claim of sentiment. He made a promise to Edna, met with Jack Atherton, and agreed to act in his defence.171
In early February 1951 Edna Diefenbaker died, with John at her bedside. The outpouring of tribute was unique. Arthur Laing, Howard Green, and Jimmy Gardiner broke precedent in the House of Commons with eulogies to an MP’s wife; press gallery reporters and columnists spilled out affection for this “unelected member of parliament,” this “gay and lovable personality”; the Prince Albert Daily Herald spoke of her “quick instinct” for friendship towards “those who were in desperate need of its qualities.”
In the press gallery, and in the ranks of those who work on the fringe of parliament rather than as members, there are many who remember the friendship of Mrs. Diefenbaker as the force which brought meaning back to the lives that were becoming badly mangled - had gone badly astray.
For the bruised spirit, there is no healing agent so wonderful as understanding which grows naturally out of an undemanding impulse to friendship…
There are other things to be remembered, too. She was, of course, a partner in and contributor to all those attributes of greatness that have found expression in her husband’s career - helped shape them and give them effect in senses that can be recalled by every Ottawa observer.
Still, those were not things apart. They came, too, out of the same inner loveliness, recognized by all who knew her best, which gave Mrs. Diefenbaker the greatness that was her own.172
The First Baptist Church in Saskatoon overflowed with mourners for Edna’s funeral service, which was conducted by three ministers from Saskatoon, Prince Albert, and Calgary. The congregation included several railway porters, friends of Edna in the companionship of long Canadian rail journeys east and west. When she was buried in the Diefenbaker family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in northwest Saskatoon, an engine and caboose waited on the line beside the graveyard, the crew standing, heads bared, for the burial service. They too knew Edna and the Brower family from years of travel. Perhaps they had heard as well of her dying intercession in the Atherton case. This was a rare kind of recognition typical of pioneering Saskatchewan.173
John Diefenbaker was stricken and unbalanced in his grief. At First Baptist Church he insisted that Edna’s coffin should lie open in the entranceway. When he entered the church with Edna’s brother and sister-in-law, Jack and Susan Brower, he approached the body and “ran his fingers through her hair as she lay in the coffin,” lamenting that it had been parted on the wrong side and that he had been abandoned.174
John had promised Edna that he would eventually rest with her at Woodlawn, so her coffin was lowered four feet deeper than normal to allow space for a second coffin to lie above.175 The deep grave was filled with earth and mounded with flowers that froze in the February snows.
CHAPTER 6
The Big Fish
1951-1956
JOHN DIEFENBAKER DID NOT RETURN TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS UNTIL April 1951, when he made a brief appearance for the budget debate. During March he paid the British Columbia bar admission fee of $1500 and took his provincial bar exam in Vancouver - which proved to be a pro-forma, two-question oral. Diefenbaker then appeared for Jack Atherton at his preliminary hearing for manslaughter in Prince George, BC, and early in May he returned for the trial. For him the case was emblematic. The defence of a common man, possibly victimized by authority, was something uniquely suited to his instincts. For the prosecution he faced the deputy attorney general of the province, an ex-colonel in whom the defence attorney sensed hints of a haughty military manner. Here was something to be exploited.
Diefenbaker was by now well briefed in the intricacies of railway telegraphy and was assisted at the defence table by his partner Roy Hall. In the courtroom he had a watcher, the son of his House colleague George Pearkes, playing the role so often filled by Edna: listening and reporting on lay reactions to the evidence as a way into the minds of jurors.1
Despite his preparation for the case, Diefenbaker was still distracted and suffering deeply. Hall recalled that “he was in a state of shock at the preliminary hearing,” and at the trial “he seemed at times to be in a trance … he was acting from instinct rather than through normal concentration.”2 Nevertheless, his old courtroom guile remained. He had decided to call no evidence or witnesses. He knew that there had been a heavy snowfall the night before the crash, which might have left traces of snow on the telegraph wires. He claimed to have found one precedent for a broken telegraphic transmission, when a seagull had dropped a fish on snow-covered lines and interrupted a message. “This example was not well authenticated,” he wrote, “but it was all I had… I hammered home my one example of the bird and the fish.”3
Diefenbaker’s other, more telling approach was calculatedly subversive. The charge concerned the death of a railwayman, not any of the soldiers. But he was determined to plant a germ of doubt about the railway company’s indifference and irresponsibility towards its passengers in the accident. So when a CNR official took the stand to testify on technical matters, Diefenbaker asked: “I suppose the reason you put these soldiers in wooden cars with steel cars on either end was so that no matter what they might subsequently find in Korea, they’d always be able to say, ‘Well, we had worse than that in Canada.’ ” Crown counsel objected; the judge said it was a statement rather than a question; and Diefenbaker responded with sarcasm: “My Lord, it was made clear by the elevation of my voice at the end of the sentence that there was a great big question mark on it. This man is an intelligent man. Right up at the top of the hierarchy. It’s a long question, but it won’t be difficult for him. He’ll be able to break it down.”4
The judge debated whether the comment was admissible, until the impatient crown attorney fell into Diefenbaker’s trap: “I want to make it clear,” he told the court, “that in this case we’re not concerned about the death of a few privates going to Korea.” As Diefenbaker could see, what he meant was that the specific charge related to a railwayman rather than to the soldiers. But his words conveyed an attitude, and Diefenbaker would not spare him. There were murmurs on the jury benches. “Oh,” said Diefenbaker, “you’re not concerned about the killing of a few privates? Oh, Colonel!”
According to the mischievous account in his memoirs, for the rest of the trial Diefenbaker feigned deafness. “It did not matter what question the Colonel asked, whether favourable to me or to him, I would say, ‘I didn’t quite hear you, Colonel.’ Every time I said ‘Colonel,’ the reaction of the jury was not such as would have been judged entirely warm towards the Crown or its case. The jury acquitted after a very short consideration of the case.”5 Diefenbaker had won a popular victory, redeemed his promise to Edna, and endeared himself for life to Jack Atherton and his fellow railway workers. The case was celebrated in the press and became one of his major political assets.
THE LIBERAL GOVERNMENT RETURNED IN 1949 TO ITS CENTRALIST, NATION-BUILDING mission with
a fresh assurance edging towards arrogance, confident that the Canadian public would grant it an indefinite mandate. A chastened George Drew faced the inevitable press speculation about his retirement, and still deeper reservations in the caucus; but he proved his mettle by leading the party steadily and courageously in the new House, and quickly put the leadership issue to rest.6 By the end of May 1950 the opposition had been cheered by three by-election victories in Ontario, restoring J.M. Macdonnell to the front bench and bringing in George Hees and Ellen Fairclough. A year later there were four more Conservative gains, and in 1952, another four. Hees was a handsome businessman, athlete, and veteran with a brash and exuberant manner; Fairclough was a former Hamilton city councillor. Tory morale was recovering for the next electoral assault, but Liberal self-confidence was barely dented.