Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  The Cold War became progressively more rigid and preoccupying. The main peace conference took place in Paris from July to October 1946. (De Gaulle had resigned and the French changed governments every few months for the next twelve years.) King conveniently convinced himself that “Canada would expect me to go,” as he was the senior world leader and one of the few who had led his country through the war.121 He was not especially active at the conference, which broke down over the Russian objection to anything more than an observer role for anyone except themselves and the Americans, British, and French. King took little part and was edgy and unreasonable to his staff. On August 6, he listened to Molotov’s remarks and concluded that Molotov’s “whole performance throughout the day was one akin to that of Duplessis; no sincerity in it at all.”122 King was losing his touch to make that sort of comparison, though Duplessis’s verbal excesses were still occasionally inexplicable. King loved hobnobbing intimately with the world’s most powerful statesmen, but the righteous Protestant was always appalled by the opulence and grandiosity of these events, one of the reflexes that kept him close to Canadians, a country without glitz or any toleration of glitz. He wrote on August 9, “The social life of the kind one sees in a great capital is something which terrifies me. I thank God for not having been drawn into that whirlpool of suspicion, vanity, deception.”123 He had an innocuous but cordial reunion with Molotov.

  On August 22 (after visiting Canadian war sites in Normandy*

  ), he went to Nuremberg and watched some of the proceedings against the accused Nazi war criminals. His descriptions of some of the defendants are interesting. “Streicher and a few of the others looked more like real criminals [than did Göring and Ribbentrop]. It was terrible to think that that particular group of men were seeking to exterminate groups of men, women, and children – burn bodies.… The world had known nothing like it in all of its history. If there ever was a real exhibition of what hell can be and must be,” that must be it. They looked into the cells of the prisoners, and Rudolf Hess was in his. “When I looked in, his eyes suddenly blazed up as though he recognized me.… They were like coals of fire. He himself is like a man dying of consumption. A hideous, pathetic, figure. I shall never forget the look in his face.”125 King was as impressed by General Georges-Philéas Vanier as ambassador to France (he had been ambassador to Free France) as he was censorious of Vincent Massey, whom King considered, to the end, a self-serving toady, snob, and low careerist. (Massey was some of that, but was also very effective at the different positions he held.) Despite lecturing his entourage on their hotel bills, King returned, as was now his agreeable custom, on the Queen Mary.

  Dean Acheson, the U.S. undersecretary of state, came to visit King, and he found him impressive. Acheson (whose mother was a Gooderham from Toronto) was a very capable foreign policy expert and would be a distinguished secretary of state. King was overly impressed with James Byrnes, the current secretary of state, whom Truman was about to dismiss, and showed again that he was starting to lose his touch when he concluded on September 21, 1946, that former vice president Henry Wallace, an even more eccentric mystic than King himself and a fellow-traveller of Stalin and Molotov to boot, “has the popular end of the current controversy.”126 (Truman had fired Wallace, and Wallace was accusing him of fomenting difficulties with the Soviet Union.) King’s interpretation was explicable only by a decline in his political acuity and instinct. He was starting to slip and had publicly confirmed that he would not seek re-election.

  The peace conference reconvened in New York in November and December, and Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, and Romania, all made their peace with Russia and each other. King returned at the end of August and finally faced the fact that he was on the way out. He relinquished external affairs to St. Laurent, while Ilsley took justice and left finance to Douglas Abbott, a capable English Quebecker. Brooke Claxton became defence minister and Paul Martin, an able and bilingual Franco-Ontarian, took over the constitutionally sensitive field of health and welfare. The promotion of St. Laurent comported a rise in status for Lester Pearson also, as undersecretary, and King “was struck by his fine face and appearance. There was a light from within which shone through his countenance.”127 King probably had some premonition by now that St. Laurent and Pearson would lead the Liberal Party after him (ultimately with fourteen years as prime minister between them).

  On February 21, 1947, Attlee cabled Truman that Britain could no longer afford to conduct the defence of Greece against internal communist subversion supported by Stalin (in contravention of his spheres-of-influence agreement with Churchill in Moscow in October 1944) and was withdrawing the forty thousand British troops in Greece. Truman secured at least partial bipartisan support, addressed an emergency session of Congress on March 12, and asked for $400 million of emergency aid to Greece and Turkey. He warned that failure to act at once would imperil Europe, the Middle East, and all of Asia. He enunciated what became known as the Truman Doctrine, a policy of containing Soviet expansion by assisting countries that were resisting its aggression, whether overt or by subversion. At the Moscow foreign ministers’ conference in March and April 1947, General George C. Marshall, who had replaced King’s friend James Byrnes as secretary of state, and Ernest Bevin, now Britain’s foreign affairs minister, failed to make any progress over Germany, from which Molotov and Stalin proposed to extract $10 billion in reparations. Beyond that, the Soviet leaders seemed to seek as much chaos and misery as possible. Marshall became convinced that it would be impossible to achieve any agreement with Stalin, and after stops in Berlin and Paris and discussions with experts, he ordered preparation of a report, by a group chaired by George Kennan (who had composed the Long Telegram), to recommend measures for the reinforcement of non-communist Europe.

  Marshall spoke to the American people on April 28 and said, “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,” in reference to Congress. On June 5, after extensive discussion with Truman, Acheson, Kennan, Charles Bohlen (head of the State Department’s Russian desk and Roosevelt and Truman’s interpreter with Stalin), and others, Marshall revealed at a commencement address at Harvard University what became known as the Marshall Plan for combatting, as Marshall said, “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos” in Europe. He eschewed any animosity to anyone, but it was clear enough that it was an anti-Soviet defensive move. Marshall called upon the countries of Europe, including Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union itself, to define their own needs and uses for assistance and work out a plan of economic and social recovery which the United States was largely prepared to fund. Marshall said, “The whole world’s future hangs on proper judgment, hangs on the realization by the American people of what can best be done, or what must be done.”128 King’s initial reaction was relief that the Americans might be giving the Europeans enough resources for Britain and Western Europe to increase their customary levels of imports from Canada, which would enable Canada to alleviate its negative balance of payments with the United States. King had little early recognition of the visionary and generous nature of what Marshall and Truman proposed. In December, the Canadian government did announce that it would assist the Marshall Plan with a parallel program of credits for the Europeans to buy Canadian commodities when feasible; $706 million worth of food and raw materials and some finished goods were sold to the United States for shipment to Europe under the Marshall Plan, and generous loans were made by Canada to Europe to facilitate these purchases.

  On June 10 to 12, President and Mrs. Truman visited Ottawa and were present on Parliament Hill when portraits were unveiled in the Centre Block rotunda of Sir Robert Borden, who had died in 1937, and Mackenzie King. It was a fine occasion, and Governor General Alexander spoke eloquently of the two wartime leaders. King concluded, in his diary, “If anyone would have me believe that there was not behind all this a plan that was being worked out by invisible forces representing Divine Providence, and something of the inevitable Justice, I should tell him that he lacked o
rdinary intelligence. To speak of this as coincidence is just perfect nonsense. It is evidence of a moral order based on Righteousness and Justice which in the end rules the world and determines the final issues.”129 (Sometimes an unveiling is just an unveiling, even when so distinguishedly attended.) The conversations of the two leaders were very cordial, and Truman’s address to Parliament well-composed and well-received. But King did not feel he had such an intimate rapport with Truman as he had had with Roosevelt. (He didn’t really with Roosevelt either, but Roosevelt enjoyed enfolding the susceptible in his vast charm and power, and Truman was a much more direct, uncomplicated personality.)

  A conference was hastily organized in Paris between the Americans and the prospective recipients of their assistance in Europe. Molotov quickly stormed out of the conference, denouncing what was officially called the European Recovery Program as a “vicious American scheme for using dollars to buy” influence in Europe. All the satellite countries were pressured into declining to participate: Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, as well as the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet zone of Germany. This was another disastrous blunder by Stalin; in pulling out and attacking the U.S. plan, he assured its passage by the Republican-led Congress and painted Soviet communism as a retrograde, dictatorial empire of brute force and economic stagnation against the Western forces of democracy and economic growth. When the international game evolved from war-making, chicanery, and subversion and turned to the rights and welfare of the war-weary masses of the world, Stalin’s heavy-handed treachery and authoritarianism were no match for the tough but unaffected generosity of Truman and the other surviving members of the team assembled by Roosevelt (with whom, inevitably, King’s spiritualists now claimed he was in contact, along with Laurier, Gladstone, and the others). On September 18, 1947, Andrei Vyshinsky, Soviet deputy foreign minister and former chief prosecutor at Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s, where he executed his principal colleagues, denounced the United States in the UN Security Council as “warmongers,” and on October 5 Moscow announced the creation of the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), the successor to the Comintern (Communist International), which Stalin had theoretically discontinued in 1943 as a sop to Roosevelt and Churchill, who wearied of its revolutionary incitements to their peoples, especially in the British colonial empire.

  Despite their differences on almost everything else, on November 29, 1947, the United States and the Soviet Union pushed through at the United Nations a resolution approving the partition of the Palestine Mandate into predominantly Jewish and Arab areas, and Britain announced it would withdraw its fifty thousand soldiers there over the following six months.

  King returned to Europe in the autumn of 1947, chiefly for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth to the nephew of Earl Mountbatten. En route in New York, after dinner with Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, he was “horrified” to discover that his suite on the Queen Elizabeth would cost $2,200. He was prepared to move to steerage to avoid such a thing, and an accompanying Canadian National Railway executive was able to arrange with the New York manager of Cunard to give the Canadian government King’s sitting room at no charge. “There certainly was a providence looking over me, to have saved this situation,” King wrote in his diary. “It would be a tragic business where, after all the years I have been in public life, the nation left with the impression that I really cared for luxury and extravagance.”130 (King was deeply upset that his cook at Laurier House, Mrs. Gooch, who was in his party, lost her steamer trunk and went to great trouble to help her retrieve it. It eventually caught up with them in Paris. To the end, he remained a strange amalgam of self-indulgent and self-conscious introversion, unfeigned modesty and humility, and touching generosity of spirit.)

  He brought with him, over his arm, the mink coat Canada gave the princess as a wedding gift and presented it to her. He was amused that King George VI had the same concerns about Princess Elizabeth and her husband coming to Canada as King George V had expressed to him more than twenty years before about his sons, the future George VI and Edward VIII, making the same trip. He received the Order of Merit, an exalted honour, as a direct gift from the king, and had his usual tour of the palaces and great houses of London and the inner shires. He returned almost convinced by the stern conviction of Churchill, who was in paroxysms about the demise of the Empire, and Bevin and others, that a third world war could break out at any moment. This was nonsense, given America’s arsenal of atomic weapons. King retuned to Ottawa in early December and had an extensive talk with Governor General (Field Marshal, Viscount) Alexander, who was expecting war in six months, not two weeks as King suggested. They agreed that, on consideration, Truman and Marshall doubtless had the determination to threaten atomic attack and Stalin would “climb down.” King was afraid of chemical and bacteriological war. The division of India and Pakistan was already going badly, and King was advised to expect a good deal of Arab-Jewish violence in the partitioning of Palestine. It was a grim time, not in the least reminiscent of the false euphoria that engulfed the world after the First World War, but now the United States was engaged in global affairs, and the prospects were, in fact, infinitely more promising than they had been a generation before, when Mackenzie King was already in his current position but no other government leader in the world was, not even Stalin.131

  In late December, King intervened in cabinet to overrule St. Laurent’s proposal that Canada agree to serve on the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea. King took the view that Canada knew nothing of the Far East, had no capacity to influence events there, and should have nothing to do with it, and his view prevailed. Over the New Year, King and Pearson, with St. Laurent less involved, cooked up a plan for telling Truman and Marshall that Canada was concerned about the extent of American interference in the Far East. It was an asinine initiative that was about to be overwhelmed by events. The United States governed Japan and the Communists were now clearly winning the Chinese civil war and had fomented revolts in Malaya and Vietnam. King and Pearson were dreaming and had a fatuous vision of placating Asian communism. Once Pearson went to the United States to make representations, as King and St. Laurent agreed he should, he quickly grasped the American view of the gravity of events in the Far East and of their determination not to have communist powers sweep up defenceless countries as Stalin had in Eastern Europe. On receiving a cable from Pearson from New York, King was incited to write that the episode “has considerably shaken my faith in Pearson’s judgment.… Much too ready to be influenced by American opinion.”132 A month before, King had come back from London announcing that a third world war was about to break out in two weeks, heralded by Soviet attacks with chemical weapons; he was not a natural source for such criticism.

  On January 7, 1948, St. Laurent went to Laurier House for dinner, and he and King repaired to the prime minister’s library for a discussion afterwards. St. Laurent told King that if this impasse was not resolved, he and Ilsley, the justice minister, would have to resign. King did not understand this, and eventually they worked out a compromise in which St. Laurent would tell the House that the UN commission on Korea, which Canada would join, could only act, as far as Canada was concerned, over the whole Korean Peninsula, which assured that it would be inactive. This cooled things out, but it was increasingly clear how crotchety and eccentric King was becoming. For good measure, St. Laurent told King his fears of imminent war were, he thought, unfounded, and that he did not expect there would be another world war for at least fifty years, if ever. Canada had been elected as a temporary member of the UN Security Council, and King appointed General McNaughton as the country’s representative. King had favoured McNaughton as governor general but felt he had to defer to the appointment of so eminent a candidate as Field Marshal Viscount Alexander. (Field Marshal Montgomery, when visiting King, had expressed the greatest respect and liking for McNaughton and professed a desire to see him again. Given his role in McNaughton’s removal, this was disingenuous.)


  6. Mackenzie King VIII: Twilight, 1948–1949

  On January 20, 1948, King announced to a Liberal Party dinner at the Château Frontenac that he would retire and was calling for a leadership convention in approximately six months. He received a tremendous ovation at several points in his remarks of over an hour, especially when he said that he was more thoroughly at the head of a united party and government than ever. His had been an astonishing feat of political survival and accomplishment.