Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  King was very concerned about the Middle East, as was Pearson, but both entertained unrealistic hopes for a conciliatory solution, King even citing Industry and Humanity again, which had no possible applicability to such an area of permanent crisis. Britain had effectively promised Palestine as a homeland for the Jews without compromising the rights of the Arabs, which was a chimera, an impossibility whose cynicism is mitigated only by the desperate times of 1917, when Balfour made his very consequential Declaration. The United States – although Marshall and some others did not agree with Truman, and Truman himself took his time coming to the conclusion – was prepared to use force to partition the territory, as the only solution resided in some division of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. King and Pearson, with St. Laurent again skirting the issue for a time, tried to devise a method of not implying a willingness to provide forces without having a direct breach with the United States. St. Laurent again got the government through without serious disagreement by supporting a Belgian resolution to encourage the permanent Security Council members to pursue conciliation, and, if the American resolution to enforce a partition came to a vote, to abstain.

  On February 25, 1948, a coup d’état in Prague installed the communists, and on March 10, Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister and son of the founder of the country, leapt or was pushed from a window and died. (King at first considered this a suicide, and, as he had known Masaryk, he wondered at the implications of Masaryk, John G. Winant, who was the former U.S. ambassador in London, and former Japanese ambassador to France, K. Kato, all committing suicide. “All three were real personal friends, and three of the best men I have known. What an age we are living in!” They were very distinguishable cases, and only Winant’s was the result of a conventional depression.133)

  On March 17, Truman addressed Congress and called the Soviet Union a menace to all Europe and to world peace and asked for immediate passage of the Marshall Plan and reinstitution of conscription. The Italian election on April 18 was a fierce contest between the leftist coalition led by the Communist Party and their leader, Palmiro Togliatti, and the Christian Democrats led by Premier Alcide De Gasperi. There was considerable pre-electoral violence in northern Italy, heavy intervention by the Roman Catholic Church, and massive financing from abroad, specifically the CIA and the Soviet Union. Pope Pius XII effectively declared a Communist vote an act of self-excommunication. The popular formulation was “When you vote, God sees you but Stalin doesn’t.” The Christian Democrats won, 48.5 per cent to 31 per cent, and the democratic socialists who provided about a third of the leftist vote, flaked off and made their peace with the government. On May 14, the United States recognized the State of Israel, which was immediately attacked by its Arab neighbours who refused to abide by the United Nations partition. Despite being heavily outnumbered, the Jews prevailed and Israel expanded considerably beyond what was initially designated as its borders.

  On June 11, 1948, Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg presented a resolution which was quickly adopted by the U.S. Senate authorizing military alliances with regional collective security groups in furtherance of the United Nations Charter. On June 23, the Western Allied powers enacted currency reforms in West Berlin, contrary to the Soviet ambition to circulate its own currency throughout the city. The next day, Stalin abruptly closed the land access from West Germany to West Berlin, and the United States, with the full cooperation of Great Britain and France, began the air supply of the 2.1 million residents of West Berlin. Truman made it clear that any interception of Allied aircraft would be an act of war and ostentatiously moved two squadrons of B-29s and escorting aircraft to West Germany, which were assumed to be ready to launch an atomic attack on the Soviet Union. This was in fact a ruse, as the planes were not equipped to carry atomic bombs, but the Russians never discovered that.

  This was another disastrous blunder by Stalin, seeming to break his undertakings, threaten war, and strangle the prostrate city of Berlin, in which there were no military targets. And he failed; he was clearly afraid of the power of the United States, and after 321 days he abandoned the blockade and reopened land traffic to West Berlin from West Germany. Henceforth, the Western Allied objective was to resuscitate Germany as a great industrial power and as a military ally, precisely what Stalin had feared. This sudden escalation of the Cold War did not lead to a great deal of consultation with Canada and swiftly brushed past the King-Pearson formula of equivocal and conciliatory noises and avoidance of seeming to fall in too quickly behind the United States. King did have some claim to being one of the creators of the Western Alliance, as the arrangements he had made with Roosevelt in the 1930s and during the war were cited by him and the Americans as the forerunner for what became the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

  In the face of these events, King pulled in behind Attlee and Truman and was steadily advising his cabinet, caucus, and Parliament of the gravity of the international situation. Tempered only by his concern that Pearson was capable of immersing Canada in international crises imprudently, King scrambled to the front line of the Cold Warriors again, the position he had held at the outset with the Gouzenko affair almost three years before. On March 19, he wrote in his diary, “It is truly appalling how far the Russians have been permitted and have been able to get ahead in the four years since the war [it was only three years]. I cannot but have the feeling that the United States with its fiddling and fussing and interfering in everything and affording them the platform they have had, has been responsible, as was the League of Nations, for enabling the situation to develop to the point where it has. A perfectly appalling menace.”134 Again, complaints of fiddling and fussing from Mackenzie King were bizarre. He did continue to support British temporizing in Palestine over the American preparedness to force a division, but events took care of that. He also claimed to have been vindicated in Korea, but subsequent events would indicate that the entire debate – which had caused St. Laurent, the clear heir apparent to the headship of the government, to raise the possibility of resignation – completely missed the point of what was happening in Korea.

  King and Truman met at a convocation ceremony in Virginia on April 1, 1948, and had a very satisfactory talk. King was always pretty co-operative when consulted by U.S. leaders, and his instincts and loyalties in world affairs were impeccable, as long as he wasn’t gulled by wicked people, as he had been briefly by Hitler, or suddenly asked to deal with a very complicated problem like the Middle East. King even had second thoughts about buying a British aircraft carrier, which would be renamed Magnificent. “What Canada wants with the largest aircraft carrier afloat under a title like that, I don’t know.” (The United States had thirty aircraft carriers that were larger, and the British eleven, and even Australia had two sister ships.) King had no notion of what a navy could do for national pride. When Canada received her first cruiser, from the Royal Navy, she was not for a time renamed but continued as HMCS Uganda “after the protectorate.”135 On April 17, Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian foreign minister and one of the leaders of the movement for European cooperation, came to Ottawa and to Laurier House, and King had a very agreeable and informative talk with him. Spaak was concerned but more cool-headed than King, and was confident that Stalin could be deterred by the Americans. There was endless debate and discussion in cabinet about the international tensions, and King occasionally met with the three opposition leaders, John Bracken of the Progressive Conservatives, M.J. Coldwell of the CCF, and Solon Low of Social Credit, and they were generally supportive. King was reassured to find from St. Laurent and his other French-Canadian ministers that there would be no hesitation from Quebec in the event of a threat of hostilities, that any dispute with the Soviet Union could be fairly presented as a confrontation with communism, and that Quebec would exceed all parts of the country in the vigour of its response, spurred on by the Roman Catholic Church in full battle cry, from Pius XII down. (Villeneuve had died in 1947, and his authority would not be replicated in Quebec until the elev
ation of Paul-Émile Léger, a close protégé of Pius XII, as cardinal-archbishop of Montreal in 1952.)

  King’s declining days as prime minister were irritated by a false effort to blame him for negligence in sending the Canadian battalions to Hong Kong shortly before the Japanese attack there in December 1941. The matter was resolved in King’s favour by documents tendered to the British House of Commons in response to questions there, but not before King referred to the former Conservative House leader Gordon Graydon, in an unusual association, as being “at best … of the calibre of a basketball fan.”136 On April 20, 1948, King surpassed Sir Robert Walpole’s record as the longest-serving prime minster in the history of Britain or any of the Commonwealth countries but felt “terrible depression and sadness,”137 though the testimonials to him in the House were generous. On July 22, Newfoundland voted 52.3 per cent to 47.7 in favour of joining Canada as opposed to the resumption of responsible government. The cabinet agreed that the majority was adequate and proceeded. It was one of the last of King’s innumerable successes in office: Sir John A. Macdonald had joined four provinces and added three, Sir Wilfrid Laurier added two more, and King completed the country (though it was under his successor that Newfoundland actually joined Canada).

  On July 19, John Bracken announced his retirement as Progressive Conservative leader. King wrote in his diary, “I confess it made me feel quite sad. Bracken’s life as leader has really been a tragedy. He should never have left Manitoba. Was never fit for leadership in Ottawa. Has been a failure in every way, but to have him not merely kicked around by his own party but suffering from what may be an incurable disease, made one feel a profound sympathy.” He correctly thought Ontario premier George Drew “the most likely person to be chosen leader, simply because he has a dominating way with him.… He has an arrogant manner, worse than either Meighen or Bennett, and has a more bitter tongue than Meighen. This helped to destroy these men and the party. Having that type of man as an opponent has been the best asset I have had.… I could not stand having Drew as an opponent … perpetual antagonism.”138 He congratulated himself, as was his custom, on his good judgment in retiring at the approach of the eighth Conservative leader he would face (counting Meighen twice).

  Less welcome news for King came from Quebec on July 28. In 1942, Duplessis had allowed the “rental” by Godbout for five years of Quebec’s powers over direct taxes to Ottawa, to lapse in 1947. He had embarked on a program of rural electrification, and by his policy of generous legislation to protect workers and raise their wages, but placing comparative restraints on labour unions, he had attracted a good deal of investment to Quebec, and the province was flourishing. By maintaining clerical personnel in the schools and hospitals at lower wages than would be paid to secular people, and were paid in the other provinces, he avoided debt, reduced taxes, and devoted most of the budget to what would today be called infrastructure: schools, hospitals, universities, roads, as well as advanced social programs, including work accident insurance and daycare. There is no question that the heavy roads and public works budgets generated unusually large financial contributions to the governing Union Nationale, though, despite perfervid efforts by current and subsequent opponents to find it, there has never been any evidence that contracts were inflated in amount at the taxpayers’ expense to the benefit of the party treasury. Duplessis perfected the techniques of Quebec premiers Taschereau and Gouin, but did not lower them ethically. Duplessis’s nationalist policies were a combination of demanding the letter of the British North America Act’s division of taxing and spending powers and jurisdiction, as he had at the Federal-Provincial Conference in April 1946 – a tactically brilliant approach that gratified the nationalists by repulsing centralization and upholding Quebec’s rights, and impressed the conservatives by adhering rigorously to the constitution – and tokenistic gestures. He renamed Spencer Wood, the home of the lieutenant-governor, Bois de Coulonge, and, more importantly, he gave Quebec the now familiar blue-and-white fleur-de-lys flag, a politically rewarding symbol of Quebec’s distinct identity.

  The 1948 Quebec election was the usual rock ’em, sock ’em affair. Adélard Godbout kicked off on June 13 with the warning that the re-election of Duplessis would give Quebec “a dictatorship of the same calibre as that which existed in Germany with Hitler and which exists at present with Stalin in Russia.”139 Duplessis replied on June 20 that there were communists in Quebec, as the publication of their slender newspaper Le Combat, and the election in Montreal of convicted spy Fred Rose as federal MP, proved. The two leaders were scraping the barrel, accusing each other of fronting fascist and communist elements. Duplessis left it to his provincial secretary, Omer Côté, to accuse his opponent in Montreal Saint-Jacques, Roger Ouimet (Ernest Lapointe’s son-in-law), of being a communist and to declare that “the Liberal Party is the party of war and conscription, of concentration camps, and of shameful immigration, and the Union Nationale is the party of schools, peace, order, and prosperity.”140

  Montreal mayor Camillien Houde and Maurice Duplessis, estranged since 1931, when Duplessis replaced Houde as provincial Opposition leader, had a grand reconciliation and held an immense joint assembly at Montreal’s Marché Saint-Jacques on July 22. Duplessis gave an aggressive recitation of his usual themes, confining the red smear to mere insinuations of Liberal lassitude, and Houde followed by taking up St. Laurent’s claim in response to a recent parliamentary question that Quebec’s Liberal French-speaking MPs, not Section 133 of the British North America Act, would protect the rights of French-speaking people in Canada. Houde rhetorically wondered which of these MPs could be so relied upon, and went through the Montreal area Liberal members of Parliament, asking, “Is it …?” before naming each of the faceless Liberal backbenchers in turn, ending with Azellus Denis, the veteran MP for Saint-Denis, whom Houde called the “symbol of Liberal mediocrity.” At each name, the huge audience, and the whole province by radio, became more infected with the spirit of the mayor’s merrymaking. Houde carried on in this vein for half an hour and the crowd was reduced to a near-delirium of laughter.141 Duplessis was determined to recover the nationalists and restore the two-party system in Quebec, which he had helped shatter fifteen years before by prying the Action Libérale Nationale (ALN) loose from the Liberals, and he did. In the intervening years, the ALN, Franc Parti, Bloc Populaire, Créditistes (the Quebec wing of the Social Credit Party), and CCF had all had some sort of deputation in Quebec.

  On July 28, 1948, Duplessis’s Union Nationale took eighty-four constituencies to eight for the Liberals, the worst defeat that party has ever suffered in Quebec, and took 53 per cent of the vote to 36 per cent Liberal and 10 per cent Créditiste. Godbout was defeated in his own district and King appointed him to the Senate, where he rejoined Bouchard. (He could have been succeeding King as prime minister had he accepted the succession to Lapointe when it was offered in 1941.) The distinguished representative of the wealthy Montreal district of Westmount, George C. Marler, spent election day golfing at his summer home at Métis on the Lower St. Lawrence and dozed off, expecting to awaken in the new government, and instead found out that he was the acting leader of the Opposition. King recorded in his diary his belief that Duplessis had won because of the attempt to centralize taxes in the federal-provincial discussions (which, as has been recorded, he entirely approved at the time and did not see, and nor did St. Laurent, the political hazards of it) and because of postwar inflation and the failure of his finance ministers, Ilsley and Abbott, to reduce taxes as well as cancelling war debt (which he also approved each year), and because, “most important of all, the organization Duplessis had built up based on moneys derived from liquor licence sources and the immense amount of money used by his government, his promises, patronage, etc. – straight corruption.”142 (King did not require any lessons from Duplessis or anyone else about how incumbent political parties financed themselves.) He wrote that “unfairly trying to concentrate too many of the taxes in federal hands, the unwillingne
ss to make concessions to the provinces … handed over the Liberal ground on provincial rights to Duplessis” and Drew. King was typically oblivious to the fact that he had only himself to blame for that.

  About ten years later, Duplessis said to his cabinet, “The nationalists in Quebec are a ten-pound fish on a five-pound line; you have to reel them in slowly and let them out slowly. I shut them up for ten years with the flag of Quebec; I’ll shut them up for another ten years by opening an office in Paris and official relations with the French – we couldn’t do it in the Fourth Republic but we can with de Gaulle; and for ten years after that with a World’s Fair in Montreal. After that, you will be on your own. Someone will take my place but you will not replace me.”143 The failure to make a durable constitutional and fiscal arrangement with Duplessis between 1944 and 1959, when it could have been done, has been a heavy burden on Canada since. Duplessis’s successors either died before they could pursue a durable arrangement (Paul Sauvé and Daniel Johnson Sr.), or weren’t strong enough politically to attempt one, or have been separatists who did not want an agreement.

  The National Liberal Convention opened in the Ottawa Coliseum on August 5, 1948; voting was August 7. King had pushed various people to announce their candidacy and then withdraw in favour of St. Laurent. He didn’t like James (Jimmy) Gardiner, who in his nomination speech made much of his friendship with King. “I took that with a grain of salt,” wrote King, thinking Gardiner was prepared to join a cabal with Mitchell Hepburn and Charles Gavan Power, who was the third candidate. The vote, on the only ballot, was St. Laurent 843, Gardiner 323, Power 56. King had received a thunderous ovation when he addressed the convention the day before, especially for his favourite line: “I have the confidence of the Liberal Party in greater measure than I have ever possessed it.”144 After St. Laurent’s election, King gave a rather moving reminiscence of how, on the way back from Lapointe’s funeral, Power had told him that St. Laurent was definitely the man for the succession. This did not imply that King was in any hurry actually to hand over the premiership to his chosen and ratified successor. He went for a holiday in Maine with John D. Rockefeller and was still considering remaining as president of the Privy Council, to “help” the new prime minister.