by Conrad Black
In Washington, the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who had directed the bureau almost as long as King had led the Canadian Liberal Party, and would soldier on in that role for another quarter-century, was at first cautious, but after the defection of Elizabeth Bentley in the United States, he urged King to arrest everyone Gouzenko had implicated and considered the Canadian prime minister “spineless” for waiting until the Americans and British were ready to make arrests also.111 As usual, it is not difficult to make fun of King’s habitual caution, but his desire not to go out into the world alone on this as a Judas goat for Canada’s senior allies is understandable.
King was concerned about such an explosive matter leading to a political polarization, with good reason, as it soon emerged. He struck a secret Royal Commission of two Supreme Court justices, Robert Taschereau (son of the former premier of Quebec) and Roy Kellock of Ontario, who recommended detention of all who were implicated. Given King’s cavalier disregard for the Japanese Canadians who were rounded up without any due process at all during the war, his concern now for the rights of suspects, though admirable, was bizarre. Hoover tried to force King’s hand by leaking the story through columnist Drew Pearson, but King, like a majestic hen waiting for her eggs to crack open spontaneously beneath her, refused to be ruffled. The first arrests were in February 1946, although for months before it occurred the arrest of Professor May was repeatedly discussed, even in conversations between the Canadian and British prime ministers and in exchanges of both with President Truman. King’s visit to Britain was more a get-acquainted meeting with the new Labour government than an urgent discussion of an impending Cold War. King George VI professed not to be aware of whether Stalin was alive or dead, and King had a convivial luncheon at the Soviet embassy with Ambassador Gousev. Attlee advised him that the British would be happy to have Newfoundland join Canada but did not wish it taken over by the United States. The new government was well disposed to the United States, and King was impressed by Attlee’s negative attitude toward the Russians, whom, King wrote in his diary, Atlee described as “ideological imperialists. They were out for power and they were using their ideologies with the masses to secure that end. The masses themselves did not realize the significance of it all.”112 King had an impressive tour of the British establishment, including repeated visits with Attlee and his family, Churchill, senior ministers and shadow ministers, and figures of the past like Queen Mary and Mrs. Neville Chamberlain. In one of the more animated moments of his discussions with the royal family, Princess Elizabeth, then nineteen, said she would have been happy to have shot Hitler herself.113 Churchill and Eden were more cordial than ever, and King found Attlee a delightful man. It must be said that King and Canada clearly possessed a status in the world that vastly exceeded any it had had before. The British, French, and Americans were not entirely convinced of Canadian sovereignty, and there is some reason to believe, on reading the memoirs of their statesmen of the time, that they never fully appreciated King for the formidable talent that he was and didn’t much consider how he had managed to be so successful. But the country and its leader had earned and gained great respect and had gone far in the world over the course of King’s long inning at the head of the government.
On February 9, 1946, Stalin, who gave a real public speech only once every two or three years, declared publicly that communism and capitalism were incompatible and that another world war was certain. In initiating the Cold War, he committed a strategic blunder that was surpassed in the twentieth century only by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and by Wilhelm II’s recourse in 1917 to submarine warfare against American merchant shipping. All three catastrophic mistakes grossly underestimated the power of the United States and the hazards of provoking it. Clever though Stalin was (unlike Wilhelm and the Second World War Japanese leadership), he didn’t realize how much stronger he would have been if he had facilitated the Americans’ accomplishment of their ambition to withdraw from Europe and return to a semi-isolated and overwhelmingly civilian existence. On February 22, right after Stalin’s speech, senior foreign service official George F. Kennan filed the famous “long telegram” (of eight thousand words) from Moscow, declaring the irreconcilability of the United States and the Soviet Union and stating that the Russians were neurotically suffused with feelings of inferiority and under the Communists were “committed fanatically” to the impossibility of “peaceful coexistence” and to a desire to disrupt the domestic tranquility and destroy the international standing and credibility of the United States.
On March 6, 1946, Winston Churchill acted on an invitation from Truman to speak at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where he famously stated that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere and all are subject [to] … control from Moscow.”114 He explained that the Soviets did not want war; they wanted victory without war. King listened to the speech on the radio and telephoned Churchill and Truman and warmly congratulated them. In his diary, he described the speech as the “most courageous speech I have ever listened to.… I confess I personally believe that as regards Russia the rest of the world is not in a very different position than other countries in Europe were when Hitler had made up his mind to aim at the conquest of Europe.” Churchill asked him to write Attlee, as he was concerned that Attlee not think he, Churchill, had put a foot wrong in foreign policy with his remarks. King was happy to do so, and did. He also spoke to Truman and congratulated him on arranging such an occasion. It must be said that Truman was concerned about how provocative the speech might be considered, and offered to send the battleship Missouri to collect Stalin and bring him to America, and convey him, as he had Churchill, in Roosevelt’s old railway car, the Ferdinand Magellan, to Fulton to give his perspective. Truman later accepted the praise he earned for sponsoring the address, and it says a great deal for King’s standing with the leaders of the world that Churchill asked him to intervene with his own country’s prime minister as he did. It also shows how clear-headed King was politically so soon after the war. There were still plenty of vocal advocates of open-ended accommodation of Stalin.115
King settled very comfortably into the Gouzenko affair and was something of a pioneering Cold Warrior. He conceived the Russian conduct as an assault upon Christianity: “It can be honestly said that few more courageous acts have ever been performed by leaders of the government than my own in the Russian intrigue against the Christian world and the manner in which I have fearlessly taken up and have begun to expose the whole of it.”116 Of course, this was his usual self-serving hyperbole, but was still not entirely undeserved praise. Less creditable was King’s interpretation of these events as an act of Jewish insidiousness. King harked back to Goldwin Smith, a mentor, though he became an annexationist, who denounced Jews as “poison in the veins of a community.” King did, however, as he had ten years before, write in his diary in 1946 of the unfairness of prejudices against a whole people, religious group, or nationality. But the frequent recurrence of Jewish defendants in the ensuing investigations and prosecutions in the Gouzenko affair fed his anti-Semitic tendencies, as well as his natural paranoia. He even began to doubt the loyalty of his long-serving valet and chauffeur, Robert Lay: “He has openly confessed his sympathy with the Reds.” The Taschereau-Kellock Commission recommended that all those named by Gouzenko be charged with violation of the Official Secrets Act, and in the next three years sixteen people were, and nine were convicted. It was a commendable display of due process compared to the witch hunts and virtual show trials in the United States. Still, M.J. Coldwell, the leader of the CCF, and a fair swath of editorial opinion, accused the government of abusing the civil rights of the accused. Somewhat typically of King’s desir
e always to be placatory, at least to the powerful, King sent a message of enduring friendship to Stalin, which elicited no reply at all.117
The Federal-Provincial Conference of April 1946 saw the different perspectives on the actual and desirable powers of the two levels of government revealed more clearly than they had been before. For the mainly English-speaking provinces, it was strictly a jurisdictional matter, and the premiers tended to seek greater prerogatives because they wanted more power for themselves. In general, the federal government had a greater call on the loyalty of the voters and taxpayers of those provinces, who identified themselves much more strongly by nationality than by province. As Quebec was the only French-speaking jurisdiction in North America above the level of a municipality, its position was quite different. Apart from whatever reservations Quebeckers still had about Confederation, and however there lingered, even latently, a desire for their own country, there was with all the French Québécois a concern to have in their own hands the powers to assure the survival of the French culture. It had been no small achievement to survive for 340 years since Champlain founded Quebec, and they were more convinced than ever of their right and duty to survive culturally. Some politicians played on this susceptibility, but almost all Québécois genuinely felt it. This, in the hands of so skilful a barrister as Maurice Duplessis, led to an elaborate constitutional argument for maximum decentralization that Duplessis the extremely astute politician (he lasted as long as party leader and won as many elections as King) put in simple and powerful terms to his electors. King was not prepared for this kind of an exchange; he never had really understood the particular concerns of Quebec, though he certainly recognized their existence and, unlike Borden, Meighen, Bennett, and the other leaders of the Conservative Party between Macdonald and Brian Mulroney, the need both to accommodate and even co-opt them. But he left it to Lapointe and St. Laurent to speak for him at any emotional level to his French-speaking compatriots. And where Lapointe was a hardball politician who moved up over many years in Laurier’s shadow, St. Laurent was brought in on the eve of his sixtieth birthday as a political leader of the government in Quebec, never having considered a political career in his life.
Duplessis had advantages of formation and temperament, and King was now seventy-two and very tired. Duplessis, just turning fifty-six, was in his prime. These were the protagonists, and Duplessis set it up to advocate greater provincial powers as a dutiful believer in Canada and made it impossible for the Liberals to smear him as an extremist as they had in 1939, when he was pilloried as a Nazi-sympathizer. Duplessis knew that as long as he made his arguments as a respectable believer in Canada (which he sincerely was, unlike a number of his successors as premier of Quebec), the other provincial leaders, as long as they made the federalist obeisances their electors required, would support, for their own jurisdictionally venal reasons, greater powers to tax and spend for themselves. Laurier and Borden had had one Federal-Provincial Conference each. King had one and then rolled out Rowell-Sirois to use the depression as a way of reducing the provinces almost to municipalities. He had plenty of warning of what was coming, but was startled at the force of Duplessis’s argument and the suavity and legal reconditeness with which it was advanced.
Essentially, Duplessis made the argument that the provinces had contracted with each other to create the federal government and could not have their agreed rights removed unilaterally by that government, even with the approval of a majority of the provinces; that all Quebec sought was the free exercise of the rights granted to it and the other provinces in 1867 by their own agreement, nothing more or less, with complete liberty to other provinces to make whatever arrangements they wished with the federal government. “The British North America Act gave the provinces exclusive power to legislate in excessively important matters, notably education, municipal institutions, public works in the province, hospitals, asylums, charitable institutions, the administration of justice, and generally everything touching on property and civil rights. To meet these expenses, the provinces were accorded natural resources, public lands, forests, mines and minerals, hydraulic and hydroelectric power, and as a source of revenue, direct taxes.”118 The federal proposals had revived Rowell-Sirois and suggested a complete provincial vacation of taxes on personal and corporate income, capital, and successions, in exchange for a grant based on the gross national product. Duplessis pointed out that the British North America Act had accorded the provinces “an incontestable right of priority” (which could certainly be contested, but not that the provinces had at least a concurrent right), and that in the last eighteen months of the Second World War the federal government had raised $450 million from personal and corporate income taxes alone in Quebec, which was more than five times the revenues of the province from all other sources combined. He considered the proposals on succession duties, an institution of the civil law that the federal government did not touch for the first seventy-five years of Confederation (as it had not touched income taxes for fifty years), to be unconstitutional.
Duplessis gave a very detailed analysis of the federal proposals that left little doubt that the objective of them was to take over the direct governance of every important policy area and the revenue sources to fund them, and reduce the provinces to identikit mini-states whose officials would play house on a shoestring budget. The provincial insufficiency of revenue to deal with their obligations in the 1930s was, under the federal proposals, to be dealt with by ceding the spending obligation and the areas of shared revenue rights entirely to the federal government. Duplessis’s proposal was to leave the spending obligations where they were, but for the provinces to repossess their full participation in the shared taxing jurisdictions. To a substantial extent, the problem in the 1930s had been addressed by King’s constitutional amendment granting the federal government the right to establish and fund an unemployment insurance system. As between the two approaches in the postwar context, Ottawa could not possibly bring Quebec along with its plan, given Quebec’s need to retain control of the institutions, especially education, which assured the flourishing of the French fact in North America, and Macdonald and Laurier (both of whom Duplessis frequently quoted) had done their best, sometimes unsuccessfully, to protect French rights outside Quebec. The inability of Quebec to repose full confidence in what would almost be a unitary state with a two-thirds non-French cultural majority in Canada was not unreasonable, and King and St. Laurent could not call Duplessis an extremist for seeking the letter of what Macdonald, Cartier, Brown, Taché, Galt, Mowat, McGee, Tilley, Tupper, and the other members of the Grand Coalition of 1864 to 1867 had agreed. His argument could not fail to tempt the other premiers, especially in the fiscally stronger provinces.
The Quebec nationalists, who had reviled Duplessis as an Uncle Tom, unanimously supported him. André Laurendeau for the Bloc Populaire, the seventy-eight-year-old Henri Bourassa in Le Devoir, and, through an authorized spokesman, Cardinal Villeneuve, all endorsed his position. (Writing with the cardinal’s approval in Le Droit, Camille L’Heureux called Duplessis’s presentation “a masterpiece. It is a magnificent and a solid document of a great democrat, of a real statesman, of a true Canadian animated by the spirit of the Fathers of Confederation, of a leader of national stature. It is useless, in fact, to have rights guaranteed by a constitution, if this constitution does not accord at the same time the full capacity to exercise them.”)119 King and his finance minister, James Ilsley, had not thought it through, and they were both too tired and gone in years to take on Duplessis, who was now unbeatable in Quebec.
The federal government could have made a deal on the basis Duplessis proposed, which was a legitimate update of the 1867 arrangements. The failure to do it would haunt the country for a long time. Duplessis was a conservative as well as a Quebec nationalist; most of those who came after him in Quebec were just provincial nationalists. King wrote in his diary that Duplessis “made a fool speech … it was in the nature of an appeal to the masses … name s
hould be Duplicity. A most asinine kind of speech – all attempt to have it appear that the Dominion was for centralization.”120 (It was, and King apparently sincerely did not realize it.) When he returned to the Quebec railway station from Ottawa, thousands greeted the premier, led by his eighty-eight-year-old leader in the Legislative Council, the distinguished historian Sir Thomas Chapais (who had been the leader of the opposition in the Council throughout the long Liberal reign of 1897 to 1936 and again in the recent Godbout term from 1939 to 1944. He was one of four people who were simultaneously a senator and a Quebec legislative councillor).
King spent much of the spring, starting as soon as the conference with the provinces had ended, in London, and had his now customary liver-busting round of sumptuous lunches and dinners. The king was very interested in the Gouzenko affair; Averill Harriman was very negative about the Russians, especially foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov, though he thought Stalin too was completely unreliable. Churchill’s heart was breaking as Attlee consented to the breakup of the Empire: India was going, with Egypt and Palestine not far behind. King tried to buck him up with comments on the value of self-government. King greatly liked field marshals Harold Alexander and Bernard Montgomery, though they did not like each other. King saw in Montgomery the grandson of the biographer of Christ, Dean Farrar, and admired his asceticism; Montgomery did not wish to stay with Alexander, the new governor general of Canada, when he came to Canada. King repeatedly urged Churchill to retire from the party leadership and focus on writing and Fulton-like speeches. Churchill, though seventy-one, still thought he could lead his party to victory in a general election, which was one of the few things he had not achieved in his career (and he did, though after King was dead). King, who had accomplished that feat six times (including 1925) was everywhere feted as a timeless and admired political leader. While in London, he passed Macdonald as the longest-serving Canadian prime minister (though this did not include Sir John’s time as premier of the Province of Canada).