Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  CHAPTER 7

  On the New Frontier

  1957

  THE VICTORY WAS SATISFYING, A BALM FOR PREVIOUS DEFEATS AND REBUFFS, A proof of his capacity to inspire and to persuade. John Diefenbaker had brought to his side many new enthusiasts who sensed in him a zeal, a determination for battle, and a sympathy for the complaints of the common man that had long been missing from the Conservative Party. His election to the leadership was proof that the party could lift itself beyond its old Ontario base. Although he had won with the support of the caucus and the Ontario party, that did not make him their prisoner. He would be no one’s prisoner. In his eyes, they had at last recognized the talents they had long ignored. They had given him his due.

  For eight years he had secretly nursed and brooded on a grievance he could not forget. Now, in victory, his thoughts returned to the evening of George Drew’s triumph of 1948. Early in the morning of December 15 he summoned Dalton Camp to his hotel room. There, in the half-light of a winter dawn, the blinds still drawn, Diefenbaker sprawled on a bed in his dressing gown while Olive sat nearby.

  Then he began to talk about Drew; my senses were now alerted and I could hear Olive rustling in her chair. He was only interested in the unity of the party, he was saying, and bringing everyone together. It had not been that way with Drew, back in 1948, at the last convention.

  Nor was he blaming Mr. Drew, he said, his voice tinged with the memory of his private sorrow; perhaps Drew was not to blame. But after the balloting, at the 1948 convention, he had come to Drew’s suite - right here in this hotel - and knocked upon his door to congratulate him personally and offer him his loyalty and co-operation.

  When he stepped into the room, the celebrations had stopped and everyone fell silent. Then he spoke to Drew and left, because he was not invited to stay. And when the door had closed behind him, he heard the room erupt in laughter. Laughter, you see: they were laughing at him, mocking his gesture, his decent gesture to Drew.1

  Camp was puzzled by this recollection, and took it to Drew when he saw him later that day.

  When I repeated Diefenbaker’s account of the night of the 1948 convention, Drew seemed genuinely shocked. To the contrary, he said, he had made every effort to be conciliatory and had invited Diefenbaker’s company in the evening celebrations, but Diefenbaker had begged off. There certainly had been no scene in the suite as described by Diefenbaker.

  Eight years ago it had happened, or not happened. I persuaded myself that perhaps both men were right. A deeply sensitive and defeated man, such as Diefenbaker, could easily be wounded by the mere sight of Drew’s forces in jubilant celebration, and he could as easily have been slighted or ignored by them. Or perhaps Drew, who had changed a good deal during the eight years of his luckless leadership, from the crusading, conquering hero of the Ontario Tories to this presently spent and uncertain man preparing to leave Stornoway - perhaps, eight years ago, he might have affronted the man he had defeated, even without being aware he was doing so.

  If none of this had happened, why would Diefenbaker have told me? If he did not believe it himself, why did he want me to believe it? I decided I did not know, but that sometime, later, I might find out.2

  This was a strange, private beginning, made more confusing by events of the previous day. After Diefenbaker’s victory, Donald Fleming had visited Diefenbaker’s entertainment suite at the Château to offer congratulations and support to the new leader. “I was accorded a very warm welcome,” Fleming recalled. “Dief hailed my visit as the proof of party unity behind his election. I recognized many of my friends in caucus in the excited throng. Thus the leader’s crown passed to the brow of John Diefenbaker. He had achieved a high goal, one that he had long and ardently and openly pursued. Having succeeded, he turned on those who had denied it to him sooner.”3 Fleming could see no commitment to reconciliation, to “the necessary and urgent task of cementing unity within the party.” Perhaps that would come; or perhaps, for Diefenbaker, reconciliation could only mean loyalty - complete loyalty - to him.

  The convention reminded Diefenbaker that he had severe critics in the party. The acting leader, Earl Rowe, and the national president, Léon Balcer, who should both have maintained a scrupulous neutrality among the candidates, had publicly rebuked him. His age, his health, his temperament had been questioned from the platform. There had been a walkout. As the convention adjourned, William Rowe had submitted his resignation as national director of the party. If Diefenbaker’s triumph was tarnished, wasn’t that, in some measure, the fault of his foes? Who now deserved the benefit of the doubt?

  “In victory: magnanimity.” This maxim is a practical rule of prudence, a means of restoring trust. Within a political party, with other opponents to fight, it is a double necessity. It makes the real battle possible. Diefenbaker knew that, and he would strive for it as much as he could. But his wounds and his distrust were deep, the products of a lifetime as an outsider, and there would be turmoil as he struggled to overcome them.

  Although he had gained the support of much of the parliamentary caucus under Gordon Churchill’s leadership, he was conspicuously opposed by most of the front bench. Diefenbaker made peace with his two challengers, Fleming and Fulton, and assured them they had his trust. He knew them well enough to sense the genuineness of their loyalty. But he could not embrace his other opponents, Earl Rowe, Jim Macdonnell, Dick Bell, Léon Balcer, Roland Michener - and he showed his distaste.4 The feelings of antipathy were mutual. On the night the convention ended, Richard Bell told his wife: “I’m through with politics. If we can do something as evil as that, I don’t want anything further to do with it.” George Drew expressed his private dismay: “The party’s finished,” he told Bell. “It won’t be more than three months before Diefenbaker has lost control. He gets his eye on one thing, and he concentrates on it, and he gets it up and makes a speech on it. Then he goes away for two weeks to recover. The party needs people around to pick up the pieces afterwards.”5 The Globe and Mail reflected editorially on “a stubborn, unreasoning prejudice” against Diefenbaker among Quebec delegates to the convention, “accompanied at its lower levels, by accusations of quite incredible malevolence. All around Ottawa this week, anti-Diefenbaker yarns were circulating which would be funny if they were not so vicious.”6 Some of that talk originated with the party’s Ontario fundraisers, who recognized that Diefenbaker would win the leadership. Dalton Camp quoted one of them: “ ‘If Diefenbaker wants it, let the crazy son of a bitch have it.’ It had become a philosophy for the reconciled -Diefenbaker could not be stopped. Though he would be difficult, if not impossible, as a leader, and a failure, after one election he would retire and the party could find a younger, abler man. Diefenbaker had been around a long time, so let him have it. The Grits would win the next election anyway.”7

  That was also the comforting assumption among Liberals. Their view of Diefenbaker, as the Globe’s George Bain noticed, had been transformed. Before the convention, Diefenbaker had been the Liberals’ favourite Tory, the one robbed of the leadership in 1948 by the party machine, someone associated with liberal causes, a man of the people. Now he had become, according to Liberal sources, “indecisive, temperamental, a lone wolf too long accustomed to going his way to get the caucus to pull together and, therefore, not a good leader. Also, he passed his peak, lost much of his appeal to the electorate, and even became a less sought after orator. In fact, between September and December he became pretty much of a dead loss … the Conservatives made a terrible mistake. They aren’t going to win the next election anyway, and for the long pull they want a younger man.”8 Dismissive Liberals said what jaundiced Conservatives thought. Could Diefenbaker prove them wrong?

  The new leader had assets as well as liabilities. He had long courted the press and had strong friends in the press gallery: Arthur Blakely of the Montreal Gazette, Patrick Nicholson of Thomson Newspapers, Judith Robinson and Peter Dempson of the Telegram, Charles Lynch of Southam Press, and Richard Jackson of t
he Ottawa Journal, among others. For everyone in the gallery he was good copy. His popular appeal was proven and it went beyond party. He was the challenger of power, the crusader in good causes who had at last, by sheer determination, faced down and overcome the old guard. With his election as leader the ground had shaken inside the party; it was now his task to transmit those tremors outwards into the country. Sympathetic responses to the opposition campaign on the pipeline, the recovery of the Conservative Party in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba, and the early signs of a general stirring against the boredom of prosperity and Liberal complacency suggested that the time was ripe.

  Diefenbaker’s very limitations as a party man might now be his political strengths. That seemed immediately obvious in Prince Albert, home of the Diefenbaker Clubs, where he and Olive returned to an all-party victory banquet on December 28. Eight hundred celebrants dined with the Diefenbakers in the Armouries under the chairmanship of Liberal mayor Dave Steuart, who offered the new leader a silver key to the city. Diefenbaker accepted the honour of this “family gathering” with pride still touched by disbelief. “As on the night of his first election victory in Prince Albert in 1953,” wrote one observer, “eager, happy supporters approached him with affection, yet with a kind of deference and reserve. They did not grab him or slap him on the back. They shook his hand and tried to say something polite and timely. ‘You’ll be prime minister, John.’ ‘This is only the beginning.’ ”9

  But inside the party, in December 1956, the results of his triumph were anything but clear. The new leader remained suspicious of staff in the party’s national office, despite William Rowe’s early departure as national director.10 Diefenbaker muddled for weeks over a successor while Allister Grosart, Gordon Churchill, and Dalton Camp separately attempted to manage the party offices and protect their long-serving occupants. George Hees hovered in the background, also hoping for a leading organizational role. At the end of January 1957 Grosart, Churchill, and Camp signed a temporary agreement assigning duties among the triumvirate and giving Churchill effective dominance. Camp began planning for an election campaign but met frustration. “Churchill dithered. He could not be prodded from his House of Commons office. To Gordon a discussion of a problem was indistinguishable from a decision; memoranda became plans in progress; a private understanding was immediately assumed to be a wide consensus; he would not answer mail, all communication was verbal. Gordon spent his days confronting his problems and considering the possibilities; at the end of the day, nothing had been untouched and everything had come under the close scrutiny and the intense, frowning gaze. Yet nothing was decided, nothing achieved.”11

  After three weeks, Camp wrote to Churchill setting out his comprehensive thoughts on an election campaign, suggesting an urgent need for decisions on funding, advertising, platform, and timetable. Shortly afterwards, Diefenbaker announced that Churchill would take charge of Tory headquarters and organization, while George Hees would tour the country to prepare for the national campaign. The arrangement lasted a few days, until Churchill gave up his role without warning, apparently to be replaced by Allister Grosart. This prompted Camp’s resignation as director of publicity. Diefenbaker, who had not spoken to Camp since the convention three months earlier, met him three days later, by accident, at the annual press gallery dinner, embraced him, and demanded: “What is this?…What is that letter all about?…I have not read it, you understand? I have not received it. It does not exist … Now, I want you with me. Do you understand? I want you with me, and that’s all there is to it!” Out of the confusion, Grosart emerged as national campaign manager while Camp took charge of national advertising and campaign control in the Atlantic provinces.12 This chaos, eventually given shape by nervous energy, a convincing cause, the leader’s inspiration, and public sympathy, somehow produced a powerful national campaign.

  Across the country, party nominations went forward for a spring election. Conservatives attended their constituency conventions in untypical numbers, with fresh convictions and new glimmerings of hope. From Ottawa, Diefenbaker sought out a few leading candidates on his own - three of them unsuccessfully. Eugene Forsey, the feisty research director of the Canadian Labour Congress and connoisseur of the rules of parliament, who had fought the 1948 by-election for the CCF against George Drew, declined the leader’s invitation on personal grounds. Charlotte Whitton, the equally feisty mayor of Ottawa, seemed to want into the race but could not decide on a suitable constituency; and when she engaged a city councillor in a mild fistfight she killed her chances.13 Pierre Sévigny, the party’s contact with Premier Duplessis, pleaded to Diefenbaker that he was already overworked and underappreciated as an organizer in Quebec, could not find a winning constituency, and “would much prefer to run in a by-election sometime after the June balloting.”14

  Before the vote there was one more session of parliament. It would be short, commencing in early January. The Liberal government remained confident despite its mauling over the pipeline. Louis St Laurent courteously informed the new leader of the opposition in February that he would dissolve the House in April for a general election on June 10. The government had a minimal program for the session: finance minister Walter Harris’s budget, a modest scheme of hospital insurance, and legislation to create the Canada Council, which would be endowed with the windfall proceeds of $100 million from two large estates. The Harris budget was a cautious affair, predicting continued growth in the economy, holding the line on taxes, projecting a surplus of $152 million, and offering a modest increase of $6 a month (to $46) for old age pensioners.15

  Confident and unflamboyant leadership, the assumption of federal predominance, a gradually emerging scheme of social welfare, a respected place in international councils: these were the marks of the postwar Liberal regime. They were familiar, generally satisfying, and unexciting. By 1957 they were tinged indelibly with complacency. The party had ceased to generate policy, and its electoral organization had withered. Members of the government - and many, even, among the observant public - judged that the Liberal Party, with its inheritance of Mackenzie King’s genius for caution and sound administration, had found the keys to everlasting power. Comfortable administration seemed to have replaced politics. Few Liberals believed that Canadians would be so foolish as to turn them out. Yet the pipeline debate had left its residue of unease, not so much over policy as over the government’s heavy-handedness. The regime’s self-assurance was troubling, and the Conservative message that Liberal cabinets had usurped the House’s powers - and thus, perhaps, the country’s liberties - struck popular chords.

  In 1957 John George Diefenbaker was the ideal person to exploit the country’s unease, to revive the national political duel. After years of calm, the voters were ready for some turbulence, some stirring of the blood. Diefenbaker was soon being referred to familiarly as “Dief” and “Dief the Chief”: the formerly private nicknames quickly took their place as icons beside the image of “Uncle Louis,” which now seemed old-fashioned, quaint, decrepit, tired like the man. Besides affectionate informality, Diefenbaker’s nicknames came to symbolize the evangelistic reformer thundering from the platform as from the pulpit, decrying the sin of pride, offering leadership on the way to the promised land. His excitement was electric. In the early winter of 1957 he crisscrossed the country testing and refining his message.

  During this short session Diefenbaker spent less time than usual in the House. After a brief respite over New Year’s at Lord Beaverbrook’s home in the Bahamas, he was back in parliament to speak in the opening debate in January.16 He moved a Conservative amendment on supply in February. He attacked the Liberal budget in March for its overtaxation, its lack of generosity to pensioners, and its failure to assist the poorer provinces. He embarrassed the government by supporting proposals in the preliminary report of the Gordon Commission on Canada’s economic prospects to limit the effects of foreign investment. He lectured the cabinet on its indifference to farmers. Above all - with an electio
n approaching - he gave Conservative MPs fresh energy and confidence, sustaining the initiative that had built up during the pipeline debate of the previous year.

  Diefenbaker’s performance in the House was practised and melodramatic. When parliament met in January, the country faced a national railway strike that gave the new leader his theme: the country was drifting under a government that was tired and smug. Patrick Nicholson described the scene.

  He had pushed aside his chair in his familiar gesture, clearing a little space of floor between desks and chairs. In this corral he paced like a caged lion while he denounced the government, now angry, now hectoring, now pleading and now questioning. With right hand on hip, in his familiar stance holding back the imagined counsel’s gown, he asked innocently: “What does the government do?” Then the accusing forefinger shot out towards the Prime Minister, and he charged: “It continues its policy of being resolute in irresolution.” When the Prime Minister smiled at his words, he snarled back: “The Prime Minister smiles regarding a problem that affects the hearts and purses of Canadians everywhere, that affects the economy of this country.”