Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  And King could not fail to “confess” to himself that “this morning when I heard the news [of Churchill’s defeat], there came over me at once a sense of greater responsibility which is now mine. I am the only one who really was intimate with both Churchill and Roosevelt throughout the war. My position, internationally, will be heightened as a consequence. Also, the victory in Canada strengthens that position.” This was all true, as far as it went, but the world seemed to recognize that while King spent a lot of time with Churchill and Roosevelt, it was not because he had a lot of influence on either of them, as Jan Smuts had on Churchill, but because they both found him an amenable companion who represented a useful and admirable country. Yet, this was a great advance on Robert Borden, who scarcely knew President Wilson, and though he was often with Lloyd George, it was only as part of the charade of the Imperial War Cabinet. Laurier and Macdonald, who were not in power during great wars, were well regarded by the foreign leaders they met but never had occasion to spend much time with them. Canada and King had progressed a long way, if not as far as King liked to pretend. But he was still there, and Churchill and Roosevelt weren’t.

  Churchill himself said (speaking from his bath) to his doctor, John Wilson, “If the people want Clem Attlee, let them have him. That’s why we fought and won the war.” And Stalin said, as Churchill abruptly departed the summit conference, “Democracy must be a wretched system to replace a great man like Churchill with someone like Attlee.”101 (Attlee was a principled retired major but a rather colourless man, especially in comparison to Churchill.) De Gaulle drew a slightly different conclusion: “Winston Churchill lost neither his glory nor his popularity thereby; merely the adherence he had won as guide and symbol of the nation in peril. His nature, identified with a magnificent enterprise, his countenance etched by the fires and frosts of great events, were no longer adequate to the era of mediocrity.… Learning that England had asked her captain to leave the command to which she had called him when the tempest fell, I foresaw the moment when I would relinquish the helm of France, of my own accord, as I had taken it.”102 This is what de Gaulle did, six months later, as France chose to return to a regime of fragmented parties and a weak state. De Gaulle returned to his property at Colombey-les-deux-Églises, in Champagne, 180 kilometres east of Paris, and waited for twelve years for the Fourth Republic to flounder to an end. Churchill and de Gaulle would be back, but of the leaders of the democratic combatants, the indistinct but imperishable William Lyon Mackenzie King was the only one to proceed in uninterrupted incumbency into, through, and out of the Second World War, back again in 1945, as he had been in 1935, as he had been in 1925.

  There was now a race between the American release of the atomic bomb on Japan, which was warned that there was a new weapon which would be used if it did not surrender, and the Soviet rush to war with Japan, which led to possibly the worst week in the military history of any great power: the Japanese rejected the surrender demand and the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, killing one hundred thousand people and injuring sixty thousand; the Soviet Union, which had been asked by Japan to mediate peace with the Western powers, declared war instead and invaded Manchuria with a million men on August 8; the Americans, not receiving any interest from Japan in giving up the war, dropped a second atomic bomb, on Nagasaki on August 9, killing seventy thousand people and injuring about fifty thousand; and on August 10, Emperor Hirohito told the nation by radio that “events have not gone altogether as we would have wished” and asked his subjects to “think the unthinkable and endure the unendurable.” Japan agreed to surrender on sole condition of retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch, and Truman accepted these terms on behalf of the warring powers. Hostilities ended on August 13, and Japan submitted to military occupation by the United States and disarmed entirely. The surrender occurred on the U.S. battleship Missouri (sister of the Iowa) in Tokyo Bay on September 2, six years and one day after the Second World War began. The theatre commanders, General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz, received the surrender, along with representatives of their allies. (Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave was the unexceptionable representative for Canada, yet one dismissed by the acidulous American General Joseph Stilwell in his memoirs as “an elderly masher of the gigolo type.”103) MacArthur was declared and was submissively accepted as military governor of the Japanese empire, where he exercised absolute authority with great liberality and success and became a revered figure to the Japanese. Thus, with Japan, there passed into the hands of the West the fourth great strategic prize of the war, after France, Germany, and Italy (where Roosevelt had refused the Soviet Union any position on the control commission). Considering how badly it had begun, the war ended very positively for the West.

  Approximately 70 million people had died in the Second World War, 24 million in military roles, including nearly 6 million prisoners of war, and 46 million civilians. More than 100 million were injured, including serious war-related illnesses. The Soviet Union suffered 9.5 million military deaths and 14 million civilian; China 3.5 million military deaths and 12 million civilian; Germany 5.5 million military deaths and 2 million civilian; Japan 2.1 million military deaths and 750,000 civilian; Poland 5.5 million civilian deaths; and there were approximately 500,000 military and civilian deaths combined in each of the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. The United States suffered 322,000 dead and 700,000 injured. Canada suffered 45,000 dead and about 55,000 injured.

  The United States emerged from the war as the possessor of half the entire economic product of the world and of a nuclear monopoly; as the founder and host, in New York, of the United Nations Organization; and as by far the most powerful and esteemed nationality in the world by almost any measurement. Its strategic management and quality of civilian and military leadership, under Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, and many others, had been of unsurpassable distinction. Canada had again distinguished itself, was in from the beginning as a disinterested and courageous fighter for international law and the cause of freedom throughout the world, and had had a brilliant war in all respects, except that she was even more overshadowed by the United States at the end of the war than at the beginning and Great Britain had slipped – by attrition and despite its heroic war effort and the inspirational leadership of Churchill – as a pole of influence for Canada to cling to in distinction from the United States. Any fear of physical absorption of Canada by the United States had long disappeared, and the internal stresses in Canada had been managed skilfully and were not threatening as the war ended. But the raison d’être of Canada as an independent country, if the French fact was not a federalizing but rather a divisive force, was still vague. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the master of self-serving but constructive ambiguity, was not the leader to solve this problem. But he was not finished yet.

  5. Mackenzie King VII: The Start of the Cold War and the Resumption of Federal-Provincial Discord, 1945–1948

  As the end of war loomed, King reconvened the Federal-Provincial Conference (they were still called Dominion-Provincial Conferences for a while) in August 1945 to try to start a process for permanent implementation of as much as he could of the recommendations of the Rowell-Sirois Commission. He had persuaded Adélard Godbout of Quebec, but not Ontario’s Mitchell Hepburn, to “rent” Quebec’s concurrent right to direct taxes to the federal government in exchange for federal grants to assist with provincial spending requirements in health and education, and sought to extend these arrangements. To King, it was perfectly natural and efficient and assisted in the goal of equality in services provided to Canadians in every province. It was among the many contradictions of King’s personality that while he was a devious and cynical political operator, he was almost incapable of imagining that anyone could have a radically different notion of the purpose and nature of Canadian federalism to his own. John A. Macdonald, having gone through all the tortuosities of putting Confederation together, knew that there was a sizeable facti
on in Quebec that opposed Confederation and would like to secede from it, and an even larger one that only entered it as the lesser of evils because Quebec was not capable of functioning as an independent country in 1867 and could not be assured even of being allowed to attempt such a project in peace. Confederation was then a more desirable formula for Quebec than running the risk of being culturally swamped and absorbed into the immense English-speaking sea of Americans and other Canadians. Laurier fought those battles as a young lawyer and newspaper editor, and contended with Honoré Mercier and Henri Bourassa for the loyalties and confidence of the French Quebec intelligentsia and electorate. Although King spoke elemental French, he did not really understand the province. He did understand that for Canada to survive and to function, the French had to be rallied, and Canada had to be made to work for them, both financially and emotionally. He could assure the first, and did, but he relied on Lapointe and then St. Laurent to deliver the votes and the moral commitment of the people of Quebec. He always seemed to think that any provincial leader who disagreed with his vision of federalism was just an insincere rabble-rouser (and some were) and had little comprehension of the fact that many Québécois didn’t believe in Canada at all. (He was, however, correct that most of them, whatever the strength of their reservations, could be bought, fiscally, if their cultural pride was not directly affronted.)

  The intergovernmental meeting of August 1945 reassured King to the extent that Duplessis was not the pyrotechnic and even bumptious figure he had been when he met the Rowell-Sirois commissioners on their tour in Quebec, or exchanged fire with King during Duplessis’s liquor-sodden alliance with Hepburn. Duplessis was older, wiser, a teetotaler, and had the inner strength of the reformed alcoholic and the sense of purpose of a man reborn, having spent many months in an oxygen tent and narrowly regained his former office. To some extent, the exchange over the next twelve years between Duplessis and St. Laurent would resemble those between George-Étienne Cartier and Antoine-Aimé Dorion, and Laurier’s with Mercier and Bourassa. But Duplessis and St. Laurent weren’t competing directly for the same voters, and Quebec voted heavily for both, four elections in a row. Duplessis, who like many educated French enjoyed puns and was quick with them, had the formula that neither the Saint-Maurice nor the St. Lawrence overflowed its banks into the other, a fluvial displacement of him and St. Laurent that worked in French. His exchanges with St. Laurent were always very civilized and were learned disagreements on constitutional law. Duplessis was anti-separatist and thought Canada was a good deal for Quebec. He was pro-Canadian, pro-American, and pro-British, and his threats never went beyond double taxation: Quebec would impose its own personal and corporate income taxes, as it had a right to do, and if the federal government did not give Quebec taxpayers a credit for that tax in assessing federal tax on Quebeckers, the voters of that province could decide which jurisdiction had it right.

  The 1945 meeting was just an opener, with an agreement to reconvene in April 1946 with substantive proposals then. It did have an amusing start, as Duplessis’s large official car broke down on the road on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River about twenty miles from Hull. He and his delegation walked up a farmer’s long driveway and asked to use his telephone. As the farmer didn’t have a telephone, Duplessis asked if he could engage him to drive them to Ottawa in his car. The premier was completely undismayed by the deteriorated condition of the farmer’s ancient jalopy, and two of his colleagues had to sit on the knees of two others. When they turned in to the driveway of the Château Laurier, Duplessis told the farmer to pull up right in front of a CBC news camera filming the arrival of the premiers, and then leapt out, brandishing his cane, and said to the astonishment of onlookers, “Look, we are the Quebec delegation. This is the only car we have. We are poor, as you can see. That is why we want our rightful share of the taxes.”104 It was a made-over Duplessis, not the man King remembered and had tried to forget, but a much more formidable and durable one.

  Charles de Gaulle made his second visit to Canada starting on August 28, 1945. De Gaulle was “particularly friendly,” King wrote in his diary.105 De Gaulle began what would be a refrain for the remaining twenty-five years of his career: the Americans and British had given away too much at Yalta and Potsdam. This was rubbish in fact, as Truman and Churchill and Attlee demanded that Stalin abide by his promises about withdrawing from the Eastern European countries and assisting in their establishment as democracies. It was part of the myth de Gaulle would confect, that France was the defender of Europe and European democracy and that the Anglo-Saxons could not be relied upon to do it. He was sympathetic to Churchill for his defeat at the polls, and liked the British, as a European democracy, much more than the Russians, whom he distrusted, and the Americans, whose prosperity and power he resented. King wrote, “I was surprised too to find that he still had a little feeling against Roosevelt. I sought to dispel that but there is something in the U.S. relation to France that I do not yet comprehend. He spoke nicely about President Truman but did not seem to be enthusiastic about the States. He seemed to feel that both the U.S. and Russia were too conscious of their power and determined to manage everything.”106 He thought constitutional arrangements in France would be favourable to his wishes for a strong executive. (They weren’t, in the event, for many years, until de Gaulle was invited to write them himself.) King explained to de Gaulle that he had flown the Red Ensign over Parliament in his honour as a wartime ally, as that was the flag of the Canadian armed forces. King told de Gaulle of his “feeling now toward the big Five much as France had felt toward the big Four,” (China was also a member). He was clear that Canada did not imagine it had any authority over matters that did not concern it, but that where “we were expected to assume responsibility, we should be given fullest powers … not merely consultation.… I did not think the post-war settlement should follow the pattern of what had been done during the war itself. I spoke of Canada having made a very great contribution.”107

  A few months later, in January 1946, King received a visit from General and Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was immensely impressed with Eisenhower. In a dinner he tendered to the Eisenhowers, King quoted verbatim from an address he had given in the same place twenty-five years before in honour of Marshal Foch, the analogous figure from that war. As an encore, in responding to generous words of Eisenhower’s at a Canadian Club luncheon, King informed him that one of the larger mountains in the Canadian Rockies had been officially renamed Mount Eisenhower and gave him a certificate to that effect. King found the general a man of such gracious manners, high intelligence, and great charm that he sought him out for extensive conversation. They discussed Churchill, and Eisenhower spoke of his great admiration for Churchill but said he thought him too concerned always to get his way, and said how difficult it had been to dissuade him about his proposed invasion of Southern Europe up the Adriatic and through Slovenia. King showed his limitations as a military strategist by saying Churchill deserved great credit for deferring the D-Day landings as long as he did. Eisenhower diplomatically did not comment, as Churchill had wished to delay it longer, and delays, beyond a certain point, caused increased Soviet penetration of Eastern Europe.108

  In some respects, the Cold War began in Canada and, almost unbelievably, the ineffable man for all seasons, Mackenzie King, was one of the first protagonists. On the morning of September 6, King was greeted as he arrived at his office by two senior external affairs officials, who advised him of the defection to Canada of a twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, from the Soviet embassy with wads of secret documents indicating that a massive espionage operation was being conducted in the West by the Soviet Union. He was a member of the foreign military intelligence directorate of the Red Army and risked the lives of his wife, six months pregnant, and his two-year-old child. Gouzenko bounced around in a chronically distressed state for two days between the Ottawa Journal, the Justice Department, and the Ottawa municipal police, until the RCMP deduced that his apart
ment had been broken into and he was placed in protective custody, where he remained for most of the rest of his life. (He died in 1982, aged sixty-three.) The operation Gouzenko was part of was designed to accelerate Soviet development of an atomic bomb (he defected a month after the detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki), though the material he had obtained was not especially sensitive. But it revealed a widespread communist plot that had seduced the cooperation of about fifteen Canadians including the one Labour Progressive (communist) MP, Fred Rose. The matter was so sensitive that King opened a special secret diary to describe the story as it unfolded. After natural initial skepticism, he quickly concluded that Gouzenko was “a true world patriot” who had been won over to the West by his exposure to Canadian democracy. When he met him in July 1946, King was impressed by Gouzenko as being “clean-cut” and by his “keen intellect … manliness, courage, and standing for right.” This was not unjustified praise.

  King consulted William Stephenson, known as Intrepid, the Winnipeg-born British intelligence chief, and Stephenson dissuaded him from raising the issue directly with the Russians. A secret order-in-council reimposed part of the War Measures Act, which had expired. A British nuclear physicist who had been working at the National Research Council, Professor Alan Nunn May, was detained, and he was later charged, convicted, and imprisoned. King, sinking his teeth into the issue, saw himself as being “singled out as an instrument on the part of unseen forces to bring about the exposure that has now taken place. There has never been anything in the world’s history more complete than what we will reveal of the Russian method to control the continent.”109 He determined that he had to go in person to advise President Truman and Prime Minister Attlee of what was afoot. He arranged it in style, as befits a five-term leader of a recently victorious power, intending to travel on his own railway car to Washington before boarding the great liner Queen Mary to Britain. He flew to Washington instead when he learned that it would cost three hundred dollars to transfer his private railway car from Grand Central Station to Penn Station. The minister in Washington, Lester Pearson, humorously wrote Ottawa that he had arranged for a storm to be held up over Washington until after King had landed, for the temperature to come down to a comfortable level, and for the autumn rollback of the clocks to give the prime minister another hour’s sleep.110