Rogue Tory

by Denis Smith

  We thought at the time the Bomarc was established, was set, that we’d meet the problem of the bomber. However, more and more it’s becoming known and apparent that such a system is no longer effective.

  The people of Canada are being fooled, or an attempt is being made to fool them, by the Opposition…

  And the other day, the other day, the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Mr. McNamara, said, well, we’re keeping these Bomarcs, in effect not because they are any good, but after all, we paid for them. Ah … I wonder why it is these facts are concealed from the people. Mr. Pearson says: Well, we have commitments. I say to him, there are no commitments that this Government has failed to carry out. Agreements entered into when one state of fact exists, are they to be maintained regardless of changing conditions?

  What did Mr. Pearson say? He said – Oh… I wish the Government would be consistent. These are his words, and I am quoting you. “In my view we should get out of the whole Bomarc operation.” That’s two years and a half ago. “The Bomarc operation … not only do we not think it is an effective weapon; our objection is the kind of defense it is, that kind of defense strategy it represents which we do not think will be effective, however effective the weapon may be.” Work that out; play that on your ukulele!

  First he says it is no good, and then he says however good it is and however effective, we don’t believe in it. And then he went on to say this – just like in the old crown and anchor game, you pay your money and you take your choice. (Laughter) All right…(laughter). “If the United States wishes to continue that kind of protection with the Bomarc, let the United States do so and let us withdraw from that kind of continental defense.” Now he says, “Canadians, we never break our commitments.” I agree with that. We never have…

  This is another one. I simply use his quotations to support the stand that we have consistently taken…

  …“The Ottawa Government should end its evasion of responsibility by discharging its commitments. It can only do this by accepting nuclear warheads.” Well, he told us all the time not to do that … Then he really came out with one…“You can only do this by accepting nuclear warheads,” I said to myself, that sentence can’t finish there. Because I know him. (Laughter.) I know him…“We would accept them. Then having accepted them, we would re-examine at once the whole basis of the Canadian defense policy so as to make it more realistic and effective for Canada than the present one.” (Laughter.)

  …They shouldn’t be playing politics such as Mr. Pearson’s been playing with an issue such as that, that affects the lives, the hopes, and the future of mankind. (Applause.)

  That’s the view we take … We’re going to set out in detail at the earliest opportunity this whole question in simple form…

  Insofar as Canadian soil is concerned, I set this forth before and I again set it forth. We shall place ourselves in a position, by agreement with the United States, so that if war does come, or emergency takes place, we shall have available to us readily accessible nuclear weapons. But in the meantime we shall not have Canada used as a storage dump for nuclear weapons. (Applause … Hear! Hear!)29

  If the government’s policy was confusing, Diefenbaker had demonstrated – to the delight of his partisan audience – that the Liberal policy was equally if not more confusing. Both Diefenbaker and Pearson were hapless dancing puppets in this game. The grand folly of nuclear deterrence meant, for Canada, a defence that could be no defence, and a policy that defied logic. There was no more sense to be made of it.

  Diefenbaker disposed easily of Robert Thompson. The Social Credit leader, he suggested, wanted to get rid of him because Thompson knew there were no Social Credit votes in the west as long as he remained prime minister.

  Diefenbaker was exhilarated by the fight. “You know,” he told his Prince Albert audience, “in nineteen hundred and forty-eight they said of Harry Truman, he had no chance in the election. All the press said that, or at least 90%. All the Gallup polls said that. Only one person believed that Harry Truman would win and that was his wife. I have my wife and an awful lot of others across Canada!”30 As his train arrived in Winnipeg, the Free Press reported that the prime minister’s weekend in Saskatchewan had been “a tonic” for him. “The two days of uncritical acclaim from the people in ‘small-town Saskatchewan’ unquestionably has strengthened him for the campaign which he gets underway in earnest in a Winnipeg rally tonight.”31

  Only four major newspapers supported the Conservatives in 1963: the Ottawa Journal, the Winnipeg Tribune, the Victoria Colonist, and Beaverbrook’s Fredericton Gleaner. But as Diefenbaker moved slowly through the small towns to rallies in the big cities, he grew more and more convinced that “the people” were indeed on his side. The crowds were big and enthusiastic and laughing with him. Mike Pearson and his team – despite their appearance of solidity and efficiency, and the promise of an activist government and reconciliation with the United States – could not ignite the same passions. And in mid-March they made a damaging error. Diefenbaker put it down to “the Liberal high command,” who “seemed to mistake our country for the United States”:

  Their Madison Avenue techniques came a cropper with their colouring books, white pigeons that flew off never to be seen again, and that never-to-be-forgotten “truth squad.” Poor Judy LaMarsh! I had much fun with her in Moncton and Halifax. She had a specially designated table right down at the front of the hall so she could hear everything. Although the people thought she was a great joke, they also were offended by the impudence of those who had sent her to challenge the truth of my every statement. The Liberals quickly got the message and ended the Truth Squad in two days. Had they kept her on, however, we might well have picked up several extra constituencies.32

  For Diefenbaker, mistaking Canada for the United States meant introducing too-slick electoral techniques, turning politics into a professionally managed game, and paying more attention to opinion in the big cities and the Oval Office than in Duck Lake. The Chief himself, as a keen student of American electoral politics, had made his own contributions in earlier years to the shift in campaign techniques, and this time he had no hesitation in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman. His real objection was not to American models and American influences, but to American influences of a certain kind: too much eastern sophistication, too much comfort with power, too many displays of arrogance, too close an association with the Kennedys and the eastern liberal establishment. The trouble for him was – as the polls showed – that John Kennedy was a real and powerful competitor for the allegiance of Canadians, and the beneficiary in this election was bound to be the Liberal Party.33

  But Diefenbaker’s emotional campaign, coupled with the general confusion about nuclear weapons and the American relationship, had stopped the Liberals cold. Their support in the polls fell, while Conservative strength held steady and Créditiste sentiment grew in rural Quebec.34 Liberal expectations of a parliamentary majority faded. In desperation, Keith Davey and Walter Gordon persuaded Pearson to promise that a new Liberal government would begin its term with “sixty days of decision.” Pearson was worn out, ill, and depressed, and by the end of March he wondered whether he could finish the campaign.35 Diefenbaker gained renewal in his own exhausting journeys, soaking up strength from his audiences as he played endlessly on his simple themes.

  President Kennedy did not want to assist Diefenbaker’s re-election, but in what Theodore Draper described as “the almost chaotic state of the leadership circles in Washington,” the right hand often did not know what the left hand was doing. At the end of March, the US Defense Department offered Diefenbaker a gift by releasing the transcript of secret testimony that Defense Secretary McNamara had given earlier in the month to the House Appropriations Subcommittee. In it, McNamara imprudently declared that the remaining Bomarc missile sites were expensive and ineffective, but once established, could be maintained at little cost. “At the very least,” he testified, “they could cause the Soviets to
target missiles against them and thereby increase their missile requirements or draw missiles onto these Bomarc targets that would otherwise be available for other targets.” Too late, the White House ordered a clarification explaining that the statement did not refer to the two dispersed Canadian sites – but the damage was done. Diefenbaker pounced: “The Liberal party would have us put nuclear warheads on something that’s hardly worth scrapping. What’s it for? To attract the fire of the intercontinental missiles. North Bay – knocked out. La Macaza – knocked out. Never, never, never, never has there been a revelation equal to this. The whole bottom fell out of the Liberal program today. The Liberal policy is to make Canada a decoy for intercontinental missiles.”36

  While the White House sought to maintain its public show of neutrality throughout the Canadian election, Kennedy could not restrain his private feelings. After the January 30 press release, Pearson remained fearful that another ill-considered effort to help him might backfire, and his fears were well founded. In late March, while Pearson was addressing a Canadian Legion meeting in Edmonton, he received a message on the platform that there was a telephone call for him from the White House. Pearson’s press spokesman Richard O’Hagan called back on the janitor’s telephone to discover that the messenger was Max Freedman, the Washington correspondent of the Winnipeg Free Press and a close friend of the president. He had just had a private dinner with Kennedy, and he insisted that he must speak to Pearson. O’Hagan brought the demand onstage to Pearson. Knowlton Nash recounts the story:

  Mystified and alarmed, knowing what Diefenbaker might do with such information, Pearson followed the janitor to a basement office. Nervously, he picked up the phone. They spoke for fifteen minutes, with Freedman enjoying his role as middleman between Kennedy and Pearson, passing on the highlights of his conversation with the president that night and some of Kennedy’s suggestions. “For God’s sake, tell the president not to say anything,” Pearson said. “I don’t want any help from him. This would be awful.”…

  “This was a narrow escape,” Pearson later said, “since I knew there were people abroad in this land who would … insist that it was a deep dark American plot to take over the country via Pearson and the Liberals. To my relief, it never was reported; the janitor said nothing about the call.”37

  With Pearson’s fresh warning (and the McNamara testimony) in mind, Kennedy’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy took renewed precautions on April 1 in a memorandum to the secretary of state and the secretary of defense:

  During this climactic week of the Canadian election campaign it is likely that intensified efforts will be made to implicate the United States in one way or another, especially by accusing us of trying to influence the outcome. The President wishes to avoid any appearance of interference, even by responding to what may appear to be untruthful, distorted, or unethical statements or actions.

  Will you, therefore, please insure that no one in your Departments, in Washington or in the field, says anything publicly about Canada until after the election without first clearing with the White House. This applies to all contacts with the press regardless of the degree of non-attribution.38

  Bundy must have been thinking of at least two provocative incidents. One concerned the suspicious opening of an American diplomatic pouch in the Ottawa post office.39 The other involved that familiar hot potato, the Rostow memorandum. On March 27 Charles Lynch of Southam Press reported in the Vancouver Province and the Ottawa Citizen that Prime Minister Diefenbaker had in his possession an uncomplimentary presidential briefing document from President Kennedy’s 1961 visit to Ottawa.40 By the time the Citizen used the story, two paragraphs had been added quoting Diefenbaker in Kelowna, British Columbia, as saying that the story was “completely false … I don’t know where that story came from … I have to repudiate it.”41 The State Department informed the American Embassy in Ottawa that it should respond to inquiries with a standard line: “We do not intend to comment on any speculative newspaper stories during a Canadian election campaign,” but it was watching every move with care.42

  On April 1 Lynch published a second story on the document, indicating that Diefenbaker had confirmed its existence. “Sources” added that he was unlikely to use it in the closing days of the election campaign. On the White House copy of this report, there is a handwritten note to McGeorge Bundy: “Pretty clear use of the ‘push’ document without ‘using’ it.”43 That view was confirmed in a dispatch from Butterworth the next day, reporting that Lynch had indicated that his source was Diefenbaker himself.44 Butterworth wondered why there had been no editorial comment in Canada, and concluded that “this is simply too hot a story to handle since it involves question good faith in personal relations between Canadian Prime Minister and Chief of State of Canada’s major ally.” As a result, the public had been left with an impression that there had been an American threat to “bring economic pressure on Canada in effort get nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. Moreover no one has publicly asked why … there has not been explanation how document acquired or why it was not promptly returned. We are now getting worst of both worlds.”

  The State Department commented to Bundy that Butterworth wanted consideration of an American response. But State’s inclination was to do nothing “unless Mr. Diefenbaker makes use of it in the next three days.” Any American statement “would have to be very carefully weighed at the highest level, since any action would cause a sensation in Canada, with unpredictable results.”45 Over the next few days the White House considered several possibilities: publication of the full document, continuing refusal to comment, or a conditional “no comment at this time,” which might imply a clarification after the election. Bundy’s White House aide considered that Diefenbaker’s most likely move on his “crooked path” would be to make selective references to part of the document on the evening of Friday, April 5. They would likely be sufficiently misleading to confirm the impression that the memo referred to pressures on Canada to accept nuclear weapons for storage. To respond in time, Washington would have to intervene before the Saturday morning newspapers went to press. The “tentatively agreed policy of this government” was to release the document from the White House “with a very brief comment designed to note in low key the unethical conduct of the Canadian Government in retaining and then disclosing the document,” but the author urged instead a policy of “no comment at this time.” Even a “gently chiding” release might be counterproductive in Canada, while a temporary “no comment” would confirm American neutrality in the election and also create “an air of mystery, as though we had a load of dynamite which we could easily detonate if we were not so determined to stay out of the campaign, especially in its closing hours.”46 By this time all the variations on Washington’s “non-intervention” were being weighed as forms of intervention, calculated not to assist Diefenbaker and not to harm Pearson. For the moment, the White House simply waited.

  Diefenbaker made no mention of the document on April 5, but by Saturday morning the story was blossoming. Peter Trueman of the Montreal Star and George Bain of the Toronto Globe and Mail both reported from Washington that the document had been written by Walt Rostow for the president and that it “contained at least one pencilled notation in the margin in the president’s own hand.” Bain identified the comment as: “What are we to say to the … on this point?” while Trueman quoted the words as: “What do we do with the … now?” (Both papers politely excised the epithet.) Bain said that the document contained no threats, and that “the Canadian government’s purpose in retaining the document seems to have been to use it as a diplomatic lever.” Washington’s complaint was that there had been “a serious breach of diplomatic courtesy … in making use of a mislaid private document.” The existence of the memorandum, he said, “did enter into diplomatic communications, perhaps through the United States ambassador having been informed.”47

  After these reports, the White House adopted another line of response: selective but full confide
ntial briefings for a few correspondents, but no public statements. The first result was a dispatch by the New York Times’s James Reston, published in the Montreal Star (but not in the Times) on election day, April 8. It reported that Washington “is full of rumors that the prime minister’s staff has been using a secret United States document as an instrument in his campaign for re-election.” Reston said that a Washington Post reporter had told his paper that the missing phrase from Saturday’s stories (supposedly in the president’s handwriting) was “S.O.B.” But “the report of Presidential anger seems to most observers here to be unlikely,” since Washington’s annoyance with Diefenbaker had arisen only recently over the issue of nuclear arms. That subject “was not in controversy then.” “Besides,” Reston added, “if anybody in Canada can read President Kennedy’s handwriting, it is more than anybody in Washington has been able to do. In this city, most people find it almost impossible even to decipher his signature.” What was true was that “Canadian-American relations have been poisoned by one incident after another.” And “the very fact that Mr. Diefenbaker could have threatened to use the working paper in the 1962 election has inevitably entered into estimates here of the working relations between the two governments.” Diefenbaker’s office had refused to comment to the New York Times about any marginal comments on the memo by the president. In Washington, Reston judged, there was only one general conclusion: “The document should, as a matter of diplomatic courtesy, have been returned to the State Department.”48