by Denis Smith
Like other ex–prime ministers, Diefenbaker enjoyed foreign journeys as a reminder of the privileges of power. He travelled in these years to Taiwan as the guest of the Chinese nationalist government, where he was entertained by Chiang Kai-shek; and in 1969 he drew headlines during a visit to the Soviet Union in the company of Joel Aldred. In Moscow he met with a Soviet deputy premier and, according to his own account, discussed the damming of the Bering Strait “to divert the warm Gulf Stream into the Arctic waters and make the Arctic coast habitable”; the construction of domed cities in the Canadian north “similar to some in the USSR with populations of 500,000 to 1,000,000”; and a scheme to heat the waters of Hudson Bay with nuclear energy to make Churchill, Manitoba, a year-round port. He discussed wheat purchases from Canada with the head of the Soviet grain agency; and in Kiev he declared Ukraine an independent state free of the Soviet Union and called for the establishment of a Canadian consulate-general in the Ukrainian capital. The Soviets seemed to treat these diverting fancies calmly.36
In 1970 Diefenbaker marked two notable anniversaries. On March 26 he celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of his entry into the House of Commons along with the Liberal solicitor general George McIlraith. Prime Minister Trudeau presented Diefenbaker with a blue carnation and McIlraith with a red one. Diefenbaker responded: “I have been to the mountaintops and I have been down in the valley. I do not want to mention personal matters, but on an occasion like this, I am filled with emotion. I do want to say that one’s happiness is greatly increased by having a wife to support, to stand and to counsel.” He added, “I am not passing that on to the Prime Minister by way of a suggestion, but I say to him that if he would follow my advice in that connection he would be amazed at the transition which would take place.” He warned the House that a Jewish congregation had presented him with a plaque of the Tree of Life and predicted he would live as long as Moses. That, he pointed out, was one hundred and twenty years.37 In September he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, in the afternoon at home with friends, in the evening at a reception in the Railway Committee Room of the House of Commons, where he was presented with a briefcase by his parliamentary colleagues. He took the briefcase home and slid it under a bed, where it rested for months until he opened it one day to discover that it contained hundreds of mint dollar bills.
Diefenbaker continued to rise early during this parliamentary term, to take a brisk morning walk, and to arrive at his office before 8 am. His days were still filled with movement and unexpected shifts of schedule, as he took telephone calls, greeted visiting friends, reporters, and gangs of invading school children, sat in the House for Question Period (where he could conjure up a noisy round of desk-thumping and insults at the flick of a phrase), and casually misplaced letters by throwing them into desk drawers out of reach of his secretaries. He brought two of the Youth for Dief disciples of 1967 into his office as staff assistants, first Keith Martin and later Sean O’Sullivan, to learn disorder at the hand of a master.
Full of good intentions, he began a desultory effort to put thoughts on paper for his memoirs. Harold Macmillan encouraged him and explained how he had organized his own massive and graceful volumes; John Gray of the
Macmillan Company of Canada gently prodded in the background; and for several months two academics taped his recollections while they tried to make sense of the vast and disorderly bulk of the Diefenbaker Papers stored in the Public Archives.38 But he was easily drawn back to his daily diversions and travels, and told visitors how the crowds that greeted him everywhere indicated he could make a successful return to power if he had the chance. After two years the first enterprise to produce his memoirs faded, and a succession of new literary advisers came briefly to his aid: Burt Richardson, Michael Wardell, Tom Van Dusen, Greg Guthrie, and finally John Munro and John Archer, who began to publish the memoirs with the first volume, One Canada: The Crusading Years, in 1975, when Diefenbaker reached the age of eighty. The second and third volumes followed in 1976 and 1977. In the meantime, Diefenbaker’s supporters Tom Van Dusen, Robert Coates, and James Johnston published their own anecdotal accounts of his now-legendary career, honouring the heroic battles of his later years and denouncing the infamies of Dalton Camp.39 Diefenbaker’s brother, Elmer, faithful, dependent, and infuriating to the last, died in 1971.
Diefenbaker could never escape for long the demons of resentment that haunted him in his last years. His mind worked steadily on schemes petty and grand, ludicrous and sublime, to achieve final revenge on his foes and redemption for himself. The audiences that greeted him with affection and curiosity in his unending journeys across the nation, the many awards he received for humanitarian service, the admiring attention he gained from young people who visited his office to hear his hoary anecdotes as fresh revelations of his spirit and humour, the plaques and geographical names and statues that began to give physical dimension to his memory, all pleased and comforted him. The legend - which he absorbed and transformed into his own memory of events - became one private means of dealing with his political failures and disappointments. The factual record - as others might recall or rediscover it - lost its substance. The legend became, for him, the Truth. It had a dark as well as a light side - and the dark side was as important as the light in his private scheme of self-justification. The dark side was the record of conspiracy and betrayal by his enemies and opponents, never justifiable and never fair. If there were failures to admit, then they were not personal failures but failures imposed by malign forces always beyond his control. He was both the hero and the victim of his destiny, and somehow beyond personal responsibility.
In the autumn of 1972 his envied political opponent Mike Pearson, who had retired to write and teach a seminar at Carleton University, published the first, widely acclaimed volume of his memoirs, Mike. Soon afterwards Pearson fell ill with cancer, and just after Christmas he died. His coffin stood for twenty-four hours in the hall of honour of the Parliament Buildings, where 12,000 people came in the December cold to revere his memory. The next day his funeral took place at Christ Church Cathedral, where the Very Rev. A.B. Moore saw him off gently with the words of a Chinese poet, “mak(ing) his way into the distance…playing his flute as he goes.”40 John Diefenbaker was there to reflect on time’s inexorable passage. Afterwards, he walked back to his office with a reporter and was asked whether, in death, he had kind words for Lester Bowles Pearson. Diefenbaker looked down for a long time in silence and at last shook his jowls and looked up: “He shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize.”41
Mike Pearson had departed quietly, playing the flute as he went; but John Diefenbaker had something grander in mind to mark his own farewell. In the 1960s he had discussions with the University of Saskatchewan about placing his personal papers in a special collection there, but the university was reluctant to take on a collection so large and so expensive to maintain. When Diefenbaker was elected chancellor of the university in 1969, however, he announced at the installation ceremony that he was donating his papers to the university. The gift could not be refused, and in the succeeding years plans were developed, with support from both the provincial and federal governments, to establish the Diefenbaker Centre as his prime ministerial archive and museum. It was located on the high bluff above the South Saskatchewan River, and opened under its first director, John Munro, soon after Diefenbaker’s death. In its plan the centre owed inspiration to the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. The Truman Library has its Oval Office, meticulously copied from the White House and furnished with Harry Truman’s office effects; the Diefenbaker Centre has not only the prime minister’s East Block office but the cabinet room as well, furnished as they were from 1957 to 1963 with Canadian relics. The centre was intended to live not only as a Diefenbaker archive, but as a focus for the study of prairie history.42
After 1968, Diefenbaker fought three more federal elections in his Prince Albert riding. By 1972 he had grown genuinely contemptuous of the rich and dilettantish playboy Pierre Tru
deau - an attitude that sat more comfortably with Diefenbaker than his ambiguity of 1968. Now he could endorse his successor without reserve as a leader who would respect parliament and Canadian tradition. He fought the 1972 summer campaign with his old verve and aggression, attending political events in his own constituency and beyond on thirty-nine days. For his constituency president, Dick Spencer, there was one briefly alarming evening when Diefenbaker erupted fire over the presence in the constituency of Peter Newman: “You know he wants to destroy me! He’s a dangerous man … He’s tried before, you know. What did you tell him?” Eventually reassured, the Chief sank into his chair with resigned sighs of “Ah, well … Ah, well.” On the hustings he still enchanted the crowds - this time, dropping down into small prairie towns by helicopter. Diefenbaker coasted again to a comfortable victory, and watched the national returns with incredulity as Trudeau lost his majority and ended just a hair’s breadth ahead of Stanfield, 109 seats to 107. The NDP held the balance with thirty-one seats. “Dief was more at home in his own Tory Party that night,” reflected Spencer, “than he had been for some time.” And yet: “I do not know what was the greater, Dief’s satisfaction with the humbling of Pierre Elliott Trudeau or his relief that Stanfield had been denied power. I know the latter condition pleased Olive immensely … Now Dief saw another charismatic Canadian political leader wretchedly pulled from giddy heights down to the moor below. It was strangely satisfying.” Diefenbaker could look forward to yet another campaign.43
In 1974, at age seventy-eight, Diefenbaker was nominated, for the first time since 1957, without Olive at his side. She was in an Ottawa hospital, but sent a telegram promising to be in the constituency before long. The national campaign went badly for Stanfield from the beginning, as Trudeau campaigned vigorously against the Conservative call for price and wage controls. As so frequently before, Diefenbaker rejected his party’s program and went his own way. By election day the result was predictable: a new Liberal majority, 141 seats to 95. Diefenbaker’s majority increased to over eleven thousand. For Robert Stanfield, this looked like the end of the road.44 Two years later he was succeeded at a leadership convention by the unlikely choice of Joe Clark, one of those young students first drawn to a career in the Conservative Party by the inspiration of John Diefenbaker’s 1957 election campaign. Another one, Brian Mulroney, would drive Clark out and succeed him in 1983.
Diefenbaker took the draft manuscript of the second volume of his memoirs to Barbados for a month-long Christmas holiday in 1975, but that interlude was cut short when Olive, now seventy-three years old, suffered a mild stroke and partial paralysis. The couple returned to Ottawa, where Olive gradually recovered movement on her left side.45 On January 1, 1976, Diefenbaker was named a Companion of Honour in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List, becoming one of a distinguished company that cannot exceed sixty-five members. Diefenbaker acknowledged the honour and told reporters that “it is a designation by the Queen herself and not based on a recommendation by the prime minister.” The Globe commented that “Canadians of all political faiths will applaud … With a lesser man than Mr. Diefenbaker there might be reason to worry that this recognition by the Monarch might be a rite of passage from the political melee into the more gentle twilight of mellow nostalgia. But of John Diefenbaker we need have no such fear.”46
When Diefenbaker travelled to London at the end of March for the ceremony of presentation at Windsor Castle, Trudeau injected his own, Diefenbaker-like, note of mischief by dropping the comment that it was he who had recommended Diefenbaker for the honour. The Chief - taking genuine or mock offence: Who could tell? - insisted that the queen had made her own choice, and that Trudeau had done no more than act as formal intermediary to discover whether he would accept.47
For Diefenbaker, the London trip was another memorable interlude. He stayed with his old political opponent and friend Paul Martin, who was now Canadian high commissioner. Despite their long competition, the two had always respected each other for their shared political vocations and talents. He was entertained - or better, he entertained - at a small luncheon hosted by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, “bantering quietly” with Martin and provoking his hosts to gusts of uproarious laughter with his anecdotes. That evening, Martin held a larger and equally convivial dinner in Diefenbaker’s honour.48 On April 1 he spoke to a lunch of four hundred guests at the Dorchester, telling old stories: “The sort of cracker-barrel stuff Dief has been giving Canadian audiences for years,” reported George Bain in the Toronto Star, “requiring the occasional growl and subtle inflection to put it over, and going over here on Park Lane as it does in Lilac, Sask.” Diefenbaker told his audience of the shortest judgment he’d ever heard, in a civil suit against a man who had made a final plea: “As God is my judge, I am not guilty.” The judge had replied: “He’s not. I am. You are.” And he recalled that he had once been introduced by a Ford dealer in British Columbia who droned on interminably while searching for his name and then, “his eyes brightening like those of a politician who suddenly remembers a constituent,” he announced: “And now, without further ado, I give you John Studebaker.”49
The next day, Diefenbaker talked with Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, and Margaret Thatcher, and spent “a fabulous evening” at Windsor Castle. Diefenbaker told the press that the queen “laughs at some of my cockeyed stories. And last night she was in an almost ecstatic mood.”50
He was also, good-humouredly, thinking about his own mortality. He commented to a reporter that early in 1975 someone from the Department of External Affairs had come to see him because “they thought I was going to die” and wanted to discuss funeral arrangements. “And I said, ‘Hightail! Get!’ and that’s not regarded as appropriate language in certain circles in External Affairs. I wasn’t particularly enamored of the craving desire to get information about my funeral. Some people had no sense of humor. They thought I was terrible.”51 His visitor - in fact from the secretary of state’s department - was Graham Glockling, the director of special events.
When I took over state funerals as part of my portfolio in Secretary of State, I looked into files and there wasn’t an awful lot there, quite frankly. And I thought, God, this is no way to run a railway or a funeral. So I was chatting to a few people and I said, it’s a pity the incumbent couldn’t have some input into this. A couple of people said, why don’t you try it out for size. I thought, well, Diefenbaker’s the most likely one … So I went over there. He was actually quite tickled at the whole idea … his words were something like, I’m so grateful that the government thinks enough of me to let me have a hand in the planning. I didn’t want to tell him it wasn’t the government, it was me. I just wanted to make my life easier.52
The project was titled Operation Hope Not, recalling the code-name of the planning committee for Winston Churchill’s state funeral. (But Churchill himself was not a participant in the planning, and made only one suggestion: “Remember, I would like lots of military bands at my funeral.” There were nine.53) Diefenbaker and Glockling completed the plan after several months, and Glockling filed it away.
During 1976 Olive partially recovered from her stroke, but she was weak and continued to suffer from the arthritis that had long pained her. In October she was hospitalized with a heart attack, but was released from hospital in December to spend Christmas at home. On December 22 she died. The funeral took place on Christmas Eve at the First Baptist Church in Ottawa, and she was interred in Beechwood Cemetery, beside the plot reserved for John. Another memorial service was held for her at St Alban’s Cathedral in Prince Albert. The many public reflections on her life were warm and heartfelt. The Ottawa Citizen commented: “The serenity which marked her life and death was not a mere social grace. It was a tranquillity born of deep faith combined with extraordinary strength of character. She allowed her example to speak for her, the example of a woman who had no doubts about her role as the wife of a public figure. Her graciousness was the outward sign of the inner confidence, a
nd it was more eloquent than mere declarations of philosophy. She was a radiant lady whose presence illuminated the places where she walked.” The Globe and Mail said: “As the wife of a Prime Minister, she was a graceful and serious enthusiast. As the wife of a politician, she was a staunch and demanding ally. As a woman, she was an unapologetic defender of the value of supportive partnership between husband and wife, and Canadians responded with widespread respect.” The Toronto Star spoke of her “calming influence on her mercurial husband.”54 The comments only hinted at the powerful influence Olive had had on her husband. Her public grace concealed a stern character, more forceful, more austere, more censorious than his own. At first she had been uneasy in her political role, but soon she was his closest confidante and firmest support. Later, in his adversity, she had reinforced rather than allayed his suspicions and his hatreds. For John, the death of this strong and loving partner of twenty-three years was a loss he could never overcome. For months he was in helpless despair, comforted intermittently by his faith.
He was still thinking - more frequently now - of his own approaching death. Aside from some troubled questions about the heavenly arrangements for Edna’s and Olive’s presence beside him, his preoccupations were worldly. He was concerned to set the final building stones of his legend properly in place. In the autumn of 1978 he proposed to his aides that he should be buried not in Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, but on the Saskatoon bluffs beside the Diefenbaker Centre, with Olive at his side. He approached Graham Glockling to reopen the file. The new proposal would require substantial fresh planning, including approval from the University of Saskatchewan, declaration of the site as consecrated ground, the transfer of Olive’s remains to Saskatoon, and the provision of a funeral train for the long journey from Ottawa to Saskatoon. The Chief proposed that the train “should stop at some places along the route: Fort William, where my people came on foot from Winnipeg; Winnipeg, where they came in 1813 with the Red River Settlement; Watrous in Lake Centre constituency, as they elected me there in 1940; then Saskatoon.” There were a thousand details besides. Glockling “just went ahead and changed the plans and the rest is history.”55