Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  On election night, the Liberals won seventy members to fourteen Union Nationale, and won the popular vote 54 per cent to 39, a complete reversal of three years before. Among the popular vote of French-speaking Quebeckers, Godbout and Bouchard only won 38 per cent to 34, with about 5 per cent going to a splintering of extreme nationalists and the non-French voting virtually en bloc for the Liberals. Duplessis told his Trois-Rivières constituents, who re-elected him personally, “I predict that those who have manipulated the popular vote tonight will not have long to wait before tasting the disapprobation of the public of Quebec.” He told his weeping sister that she “need not worry. We shall have conscription. I will be back and next time I will stay for fifteen years.” King’s public statement said that a “victory for M. Duplessis would have been received with rejoicing in Nazi Germany.” Cardinal Villeneuve, a cunning and unsentimental observer, who would play a very important secular role throughout the war and was entirely supportive of the war effort, wrote Duplessis, “I presume that friends are today more scarce for you than they have been.… The scales of fortune and success have tipped suddenly. That changes nothing of what you were before, a man with faults but also with remarkable qualities of mind and heart, a font of intelligent ideas and aptitudes for government, a statesman.… Who knows that the future does not reserve for you a return to power? And you would regain it with the wisdom that adversity alone can give.”82 The Liberals had won, and deserved, a great victory, though it is unlikely that Hitler took much notice of it. For once, King’s diarized self-laudations were largely justified. But in time, Duplessis and Villeneuve would prove to be the prophets.

  King was preparing his position for a long war with great skill reinforced by transient good fortune. A reckoning with Ontario’s Mitchell Hepburn was next. The Ontario Opposition leader, Colonel George Drew, prodded Hepburn into criticism of his federal leader. On January 18, 1940, Hepburn, with Drew’s vastly amused support, proposed a resolution “regretting that the federal government … has made so little effort to prosecute Canada’s duty in the war in the vigorous manner the people of Canada desire to see.” This was untrue and was completely beyond Hepburn’s jurisdictional competence as a provincial premier. King learned of the resolution, which passed easily with little dissent, as he was preparing to spend the evening at the cinema (Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, a comedy). When King returned to Laurier House, he couldn’t reach any of his close collaborators on the telephone and finally a young male stenographer arrived and worked with the prime minister on a statement. King determined to call an election and to get round his pledge to the new federal Conservative leader, Robert Manion, that an election would only be called at the end of a session by converting the upcoming Throne Speech into an announcement that Parliament had been dissolved. It was as bold a move as the federal invasion of the Quebec election campaign. He advised the governor general, Lord Tweedsmuir, that this was his plan on January 23, and, except for telling the war cabinet, did not mention his plans to his full cabinet until January 24, the day before the opening of Parliament. (Charles Dunning had retired from finance and been replaced by James Layton Ralston, and Norman Rogers had become defence minister, as King found Ian Mackenzie, the former defence minister, like Power, drank too much, which he considered an unforgiveable gaucherie.) As King prayed on the eve of his surprise announcement, a star appeared to him that inspired him with beatific visions of his mother, and he was confident that all would be well.83 Manion and Woodsworth were angry and flabbergasted, but the Liberals were uplifted by their chief’s astuteness as he moved determinedly into his third decade as Liberal leader. Election day would be on March 26. “The premier of Ontario says King must go, and King will go – to the people.” It was a good line, and King ran as the only leader capable of preserving national unity and maximizing Canada’s influence in the world. The war had completed the economic recovery from the depression, and Manion’s only argument was for a coalition, even renaming the Conservatives the National Government party. The Liberals were well organized, and the Conservatives had not recovered from the terrible beating King had given them in 1935. (Tweedsmuir died of a coronary in his bath on February 11, and would be replaced as governor general by the Earl of Athlone.)

  It was Mackenzie King’s greatest victory of all of his seven elections as Liberal leader, a mighty sweep and a very personal triumph. The Liberals won 179 MPs on 51.3 per cent of the vote, up even from the 1935 total of 173 MPs and 44.7 per cent. The Conservatives won 36 MPs, a loss of 3, including Manion himself, and 29.2 per cent of the vote, down marginally from 29.8 in 1935. Woodsworth’s CCF (he had resumed the leadership) gained 1 MP to hold 9, but, with 8.4 per cent of the total vote, had lost a whole percentage point. John H. Blackmore’s Social Credit Party lost 10 MPs to hold just 7, and declined from 2.5 per cent of the vote to just 1 per cent. William Herridge, R.B. Bennett’s brother-in-law, had founded the New Democracy party, and won 3 MPs and 1.6 per cent of the vote but lost in his own district. The rest of the MPs and votes were scattered, and a couple of the independents were really Liberals. Quebec delivered almost all it had for Lapointe, Cardin, Godbout, and Bouchard; Duplessis played no role at all, and the province elected only one Conservative. King had now set himself up admirably for a long war, with a new and heavy majority and an overwhelming mandate, and the severe humiliation of all his opponents, federal and provincial.

  King had ridden the boom and bust between the wars very craftily, seizing on Governor General Byng’s parliamentary inexperience to confound Meighen and awaiting macroeconomic conditions to expose Bennett’s bluster and bravura. He had moved, as was his wont, just ahead of events as he consorted with the appeasers before abruptly changing to a more purposeful course. And before the war had affected Canada at all, he had bolted down the problems that had riven the country in the Great War: there would be no conscription for overseas service, and the government had crushed all opposition in securing an overwhelming mandate to mount a maximum voluntary war effort.

  Unfortunately, Neville Chamberlain, whom King had so much admired as an appeasing prime minister, and had commended to Hitler so warmly less than three years before, was not having as good a war. The sands had almost run out for Chamberlain; unimaginable fates impended for France, Roosevelt was navigating inscrutably toward a third term, Stalin was an unfathomable enigma, Hitler was a mortal threat to civilization, Mussolini was strutting and posturing an absurd mime, and anything could happen in the western Pacific.

  But in Laurier House, all was in readiness for any eventuality. Just seventy-three years after it was set up as a semi-autonomous state, and having exchanged ministers with only a handful of countries, Canada and its leader had had a remarkable rise. It was an important country, and its strength would be felt in the world. As King moved into his third decade as Liberal leader, all his skill, deviousness, and determination would be required and tested, but great days were imminent, for him and for Canada.

  King with U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) and British prime minister Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) at the Quebec Conference of 1943 (to which King was not really invited). Roosevelt and Churchill, probably the two greatest statesmen of the twentieth century, never knew exactly what to make of King, but he got on well and enjoyed lengthily cordial relations with both, and raised Canada’s status in the world from struggling to negotiate its own fisheries agreements to founding membership in the United Nations and the Western Alliance.

  * In his diary of June 17, 1930, King recounts a dream of being rudely asked for money by two naked beggars, the next two federal Conservative leaders, R.B. Bennett and R.J. Manion. He was boarding a ship for England, but gave them some clothes, but they were ungrateful and vanished into a club. King interpreted the sea voyage as the election campaign. It is not that far-fetched a dream but his very sober determination of it, as if it had clear and important meaning, is rather bizarre.

  † Secretary of State James G. Blaine had effective
ly proposed federal union to a Liberal Toronto reporter (Chapter 4).

  * Duplessis was nominated as permanent leader of the Quebec Conservatives at their convention in Sherbrooke on October 5, 1933, by Laurier and Bourassa’s old protégé, Armand Lavergne, now deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, in a fiery speech ending, “The gates of glory shall be opened to him; he is deserving.”58

  * King George V, not particularly known as a wit, said privately, “You don’t send coals to Newcastle and you don’t send Hoares to Paris.”

  CHAPTER 7

  King and the Art of Cunning Caution in War and Cold War, 1940–1949. From “Premier Dominion of the Crown,”* to Indispensable Anglo-American Ally

  1. Mackenzie King V: The Supreme Crisis of Civilization, 1940–1941

  King’s luck had held, as his re-election preceded the opening of the real war by barely two weeks. After six months of what was called in the three main combatant countries the “phony war,” the “drôle de guerre,” and the “Sitzkrieg,” in April 1940 Hitler seized Denmark in one day and defied the Royal Navy by landing at a number of points along the Norwegian coast. An Anglo-French relief force landed in Norway in mid-April but was forced to evacuate after ten days. The British returned to the northern port of Narvik in late May but had to quit that toehold also after ten days. It was another snappy, professional German military operation that was an inauspicious augury for direct British land combat with Germany. It precipitated a confidence debate in the British House of Commons from May 7 to 10. This was not at first expected to be a major problem for the government, but it suddenly became clear that Parliament and the country wanted a much more vigorous prosecution of the war. The debate was heartfelt, often extremely eloquent, and sometimes very nasty. Sir Roger Keyes, MP, a hero of the First World War, appeared in his admiral’s uniform. Winston Churchill supporter Leo Amery, who was offered chancellor or foreign secretary but refused to be bought into the regime, quoted Cromwell: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart.… In the name of God, go!” Lloyd George, the last wartime prime minister and now dean of the House after fifty-two years, urged Neville Chamberlain to follow his own counsel of sacrifice by sacrificing his office. Churchill gamely closed for the government and did his best for Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, but the division, while it sustained the government, revealed too much disaffection for it to continue as constituted: forty-one Conservative MPs voted against their own party and fifty abstained. A national government was called for, and the Labour and Liberal Party opposition leaders made it clear that they would not serve under Chamberlain, who tendered his resignation to the king on May 10 as the long-awaited German offensive on the Western Front stormed into and over the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. Chamberlain recommended Halifax, who was the king’s preference, and the Labour leaders, Clement Attlee, Arthur Greenwood, and Ernest Bevin, said they would serve under Halifax or Churchill, whose views had been heavily validated by recent events. Halifax felt that there would be difficulties trying to govern from the House of Lords, which no one had done since the retirement of Salisbury in 1902. Also, his policy of appeasement and diplomacy had failed. Churchill might be impulsive, but he knew a lot about war, had predicted much of what had broken upon Europe since Munich, and was an inspiring and romantic figure and a great orator, none of which could be claimed for Halifax. And Churchill, by his personality, was going to dominate the government, and Halifax probably did not want to play Asquith to Churchill’s Lloyd George.

  The choice was clear, and on May 10 King George VI invested Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, sixty-five – a veteran of thirty-nine years in Parliament and nine different cabinet positions, including the exchequer, home office, war, the air force, munitions, trade, colonies, and the navy in both world wars – with practically unlimited powers as head of a national unity government. No one had assumed the great office of prime minister in more difficult circumstances, but Churchill did so serenely. As he later wrote, “All my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.”1 It was the custom in British history to reach for the decisive man when wars with other great powers went badly: the elder Pitt in the Seven Years War and his son in the Napoleonic Wars, Palmerston in the Crimean War, Lloyd George in 1916. Churchill’s first address to the House of Commons and to the world as prime minister was on May 13, and he made it clear that everything had changed utterly: “You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might … against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.… You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.” The British people were relieved to have a strenuous war leader. The rising figure in France as the German onslaught broke over it, General Charles de Gaulle, now the associate war minister, said of his first meeting with Churchill – who called de Gaulle at first sight “the man of destiny” – that “Mr. Churchill seemed equal to the rudest task, provided it also had grandeur. [He] confirmed me in my conviction that Great Britain, led by such a fighter, would certainly never flinch.”2 And Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had not enjoyed their meeting in 1919 (which Churchill did not remember) and considered that Churchill had been an unregenerate Tory chancellor under Stanley Baldwin, rejoiced that the pusillanimous shilly-shallying of Ramsay MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain was over and that finally there was a fiercely motivated and experienced war leader he could work with in Downing Street.

  The principal players in the greatest drama in modern times were all in place: Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, and now Churchill. And the second echelon was also now in view: de Gaulle, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Mahatma Gandhi, and, still and already there, an unlikely but inevitable warrior, Mackenzie King.

  The Battle of France quickly became a debacle. The German campaign plan, called “Sickle-sweep,” devised chiefly by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, but with direct input from Hitler himself (who had won two Iron Crosses and served with distinction in the trenches throughout the First World War and was wounded and gassed), was brilliantly conceived and executed. German armour struck through the Ardennes Forest, which had been thought to be impassable to tanks, just north of the massive fortification in depth of the Maginot Line, and, contrary to the Schlieffen Plan of the First World War, turned north and separated the Belgian, northern French, and British armies, including a Canadian division, from the main French army. Churchill had now to conduct a delicate balancing act, advising Roosevelt in the most urgent terms of Britain’s need to continue even if, as was increasingly conceivable after about May 20, France were flattened, and strengthening his argument with dire conjurations of how vulnerable even the United States would be if Britain were conquered, all the while proclaiming Britain to be unconquerable.

  Roosevelt had his own balancing act to conduct, confecting a draft of renomination to a third presidential term, which none of the thirty men who had preceded him in his office had sought, and promising to keep America out of war, while doing everything possible to encourage the French while they lasted and the British Commonwealth to fight on. Thus, on May 20, Churchill wrote Roosevelt, “In no conceivable circumstances will we consent to surrender. If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.… Excuse me, Mr. President, for putting this nightmare bluntly.… There is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas.”3 That of course is precisely what he wanted Roosevelt to do.

  On May 24, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull telephoned Mackenzie King and asked that King send at once a confidential s
pecial envoy to receive important information from the president that Roosevelt and Hull did not wish to commit to writing or utter over the telephone. Hull asked for “someone you can trust as much as yourself,” and King thoroughly briefed Hugh Keenleyside (1898–1992), secretary of the War Committee of the cabinet, and sent him by air. After he had attended upon President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull, Keenleyside returned on May 26 and went directly to King’s country house at Kingsmere, where he reported to King and O.D. Skelton. Roosevelt’s message was that the French were doomed and the Germans would probably attack Britain quickly and with an air advantage of about five to one. Roosevelt had serious doubts about Britain’s ability to withstand such an assault. His information was that Hitler would offer a relatively generous peace, seeking only some concessions from the colonial part of the Empire, and he thought Hitler might demand part or even all of the British fleet as well. Roosevelt asked King, via Keenleyside, to mobilize Commonwealth opinion against any such peace by Britain and to let Churchill know that the United States would, if asked, maintain the British fleet and protect the king and royal family and any other prominent evacuees to Bermuda or elsewhere, and would defend Greenland and the central Atlantic from German incursions.