by Conrad Black
Pearson had been working on a plan that would incorporate a large part of the British and French forces into a UN force, cleverly bringing them under the same tent as the Americans and enabling them to claim success and minimize damage to the alliance. He reported to the cabinet in Ottawa on the afternoon of November 2 and then returned to New York. Eden finally started to return to his senses and called St. Laurent on November 3 to enthuse about a UN force that would enable British and French troops to “continue our operations against Egypt under the United Nations flag.”27 St. Laurent couldn’t offer much hope that that would be acceptable but would see what could be done. Eden revealed a fallback position of handing over the Anglo-French position to the UN when their initial targets had been achieved. Their conversation started stiffly but progressed well and constituted the beginning of productive resumption of contact between the British, French, and Israeli governments on one side and Washington on the other. By being the only government representatives that made sense, kept calm, and showed some imagination, St. Laurent and especially Pearson seriously distinguished themselves and advanced Canada’s diplomatic status to a position it had not held before. While Pearson did most of the thinking, St. Laurent collaborated usefully, gave Pearson the necessary support, and kept in line a fractious cabinet that could easily have been stampeded by the Victorian pyrotechnics of Diefenbaker and others. Pearson told St. Laurent that the best that might be done was to add some British and French forces, as they were “immediately available,” to the rudimentary United Nations Truce Supervision Organization headed by Canadian General E.L.M. Burns, and then add a permanent force of troops made up from other countries, including a Canadian contingent.
There was now a circle of coordinators communicating by telephone: St. Laurent keeping the cabinet in line, speaking with Pearson in New York – who was working with Lodge and Dulles, the Indians, and the UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld – and Robertson in London – who was dealing directly with senior officials of the Foreign Office and Quai d’Orsay, which was represented in London by senior career diplomat Ambassador Jean Chauvel (who was well along in a fantastic career that spanned the world and lasted nearly sixty years). It was this group that beat a path through the tenebrous thickets created by the blunders and outrages of many governments (mainly of the traditional great powers) simultaneously. Robertson arranged a delay in British main force landings until after the vote on the Lodge-Pearson resolution on the night of November 3. Pearson was not able to persuade India to join him in moving it, but Norway and Colombia (countries even less directly involved than Canada and as inoffensive as Canada to the protagonists) did join him in a resolution urging Hammarskjöld to produce a plan within forty-eight hours for the “setting up of an emergency UN force to secure and supervise the cessation of hostilities.” Lodge was now speaking for America, and in more emollient vocabulary than that of the irascible and sanctimonious Dulles. Eden told Robertson that Britain would hold for the forty-eight-hour deadline, and the Indians obtained from Nasser approval of Canadian, American, and Scandinavian troops in Egypt as a truce force. Pearson made a deal with a nineteen-nation Afro-Asian bloc that produced a resolution calling for a ceasefire within twelve hours. The resolutions were voted concurrently at 2 a.m., November 4. Pearson’s passed 57 to 0, with the United States for, and Britain, France, Israel, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, and the Soviet Bloc abstaining; and the Afro-Asian bloc resolution passed 59–5, with Canada in favour, in accord with Pearson’s arrangement, and twelve abstentions. Canada and Pearson were much congratulated at the UN and in world capitals, but the eighty-two-year-old Arthur Meighen spoke for many Canadians when he claimed to have vomited on reading the terms of the resolution. (It was his standard reaction all his adult life to almost any Canadian derogation from the British position, apart from the matter of relations with Japan in 1922. Chapter 6.)
In Hungary, 80 per cent of the army of that country had deserted to form an ad hoc patriotic and anti-communist force, and after ten days of insincere negotiations while they prepared their counter-blow and disorder largely continued all over Hungary, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary with seventeen divisions, including some other Warsaw Pact countries, and seized the Hungarian negotiators. Nagy finally asked for the intervention of the world community, with Soviet tanks less than a mile away from him, and from no one in particular, but claiming now to have responded to the exhortations of Radio Free Europe. The reoccupation was almost complete within a day, and Nagy was captured, tried secretly, and executed in 1958. (On the thirty-first anniversary of his interment in a prison cemetery, face down, and with hands tied by barbed wire, he was reinterred before a crowd of over one hundred thousand in a place of honour.) There were about two hundred thousand Hungarian refugees, and on a per capita basis, Canada and Australia were much more generous in receiving them than the United States was, despite the best efforts of Vice President Nixon, who visited the Hungarian border with Austria and lobbied Eisenhower and House Speaker Sam Rayburn to admit more than the usual quota of twenty-one thousand.28
The British finally landed on November 5 at the north end of the Suez Canal, and Soviet Premier Bulganin, in the name of the divided politburo, ignoring his own country’s monstrous aggression against the defenceless Hungarians, threatened war on Britain and France. Bulganin proposed joint Soviet-American military intervention in the Middle East. Preposterous as it was, it shook Eisenhower out of his recent piqued torpor. He ignored the joint military suggestion but responded at once that the Unites States would consider any Soviet military action against Britain or France to be an attack on the United States itself and that it would be replied to immediately and with maximum force. There was no more talk from the Kremlin about attacking Britain and France.
Eden could have deferred – that is, cancelled – the attack and claimed that he had accomplished his objectives, but in failing to do so, he threw away the last chance to appear as if he actually knew what he was doing. A run began on the British pound, and Britain’s request for a loan from the United States drew the reply that it could be done, conditional on a ceasefire by midnight on November 6. Eden privately declared himself to be “cornered” and declined the appeal of the French to continue for another day to strengthen their position. (Events had come full circle since Churchill and Eden were asking the French to fight on in 1940.) Eden accepted the U.S. deadline; he was finished, his health broken and his career over, but the crisis ended. When Eden called Eisenhower on November 6 to say that he would meet the deadline and asked how the election looked, Eisenhower said, “I don’t give a damn about the election; I guess it will be all right.”29 Eisenhower was easily re-elected on November 6, with 57.4 per cent of the vote compared with 42 per cent for his urbane opponent, whom he had also defeated in 1952, former Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson. Eisenhower telephoned St. Laurent and was unstinting in his praise of St. Laurent and Pearson. “You did a magnificent job, and we admire it,” he said.30 It was nothing but the truth. St. Laurent sent a conciliatory message to Nehru, who was considering seceding from the Commonwealth, and Eisenhower continued an oil embargo on Britain and France until their forces were out of Egypt. He had already told his ambassador in London, Winthrop Aldrich (brother-in-law of Mackenzie King’s friend John D. Rockefeller Jr.), to scheme with Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan (whose conduct in the whole affair was not completely disinterested) and government parliamentary leader Rab Butler, as he rightly assumed that Eden was finished and that one of them would be the next leader of the United Kingdom, with whom it would be necessary to rebuild relations.
While it had been a very effective performance by St. Laurent and Pearson, it was given a mixed reception by Canadians. A Gallup poll right after the crisis subsided found 43 per cent of Canadians supported the British and their allies, 40 per cent opposed, and only 17 per cent were undecided, and a majority of English-speaking Canadians felt their government had let Britain down. In parliamentary questioning
in late November, St. Laurent said, in a somewhat unguarded moment, that “the era when the supermen of Europe could govern the whole world is coming close to an end.”31 This was, in the circumstances, a very reasonable comment, but it led to further allegations that Canada had rolled over for the United States and betrayed the British and French. It also began a gradual overcommitment of Canada to the whole nebulous notion of peacekeeping; when you have war, peacekeepers can’t function, and when there is peace, they are not needed. But it became an inexpensive way to pretend to be maintaining a useful military, and an irreproachable way always to be on the right side orally, until fiascos in Bosnia and Somalia exposed the whole procedure as problematical.
Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, visited Ottawa in December, and St. Laurent claimed that the Canadian winter was merely his revenge on the teeming heat he had experienced when visiting India in 1954. They had their customary exchange on the need for defensive alliances and even the utility in some respect of nuclear weapons. Nehru trotted out his usual pieties about the virtue of poverty-stricken, chronically corrupt India for eschewing these insidious props of Western misrule. It was all part of St. Laurent’s personal campaign to keep the Commonwealth together and relevant in the world. In the same spirit of hosing down the hot embers of recent conflagrations, he had a cordial visit with President Eisenhower in Georgia earlier in the month. (It was a golfing visit, despite the fact that St. Laurent conceded to the media that he had not yet broken 100, when playing by the rules.)
In April 1957, there would occur a tragic illustration of the frictions between America at the height of the Cold War and Canada as it discreetly followed its only slightly divergent path. Career diplomat Herbert Norman, Canada’s ambassador to Egypt, whom the Americans had long suspected of being a communist sympathizer, because of university connections he had with the far left, and even of being a Soviet agent, was referred to again in deliberations of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security and committed suicide by leaping from the roof of the Swedish embassy in Cairo. He was a protégé of Pearson, and it was a terrible and unjust fate for a talented foreign service official which gave rise to a good deal of resentment and of conspiracy theories on the right and left. Norman was only forty-seven. Canadians have generally ascribed Norman’s death to what Pearson later described as “the black madness of the witch-hunt.”32
In December 1956 – George Drew having retired for reasons of health and of internecine squabbling – the redoubtable, combative, but erratic John Diefenbaker, four-term MP from Prince Albert, was elected leader of the Opposition. He and St. Laurent had got on reasonably well; St. Laurent respected his barristerial talents but doubted his judgment and whether he possessed the worldly exposure the office needed. He was thirteen years younger than St. Laurent but had served two years longer in the House of Commons.
5. The Tempestuous Interlude of John Diefenbaker, 1957–1962
After nearly five full terms, the government was a melange of talented younger ministers and a leading group that was now elderly. St. Laurent would be seventy-five in February 1957; C.D. Howe would be seventy-one in January; and Jimmy Gardiner had just turned seventy-three. They had all been very strong ministers, probably Mackenzie King’s three most brilliant recruits, but they had served between them a total of nearly sixty years in the senior positions of the government, and bruising events like the pipeline debate and the Suez Crisis encouraged the voters to think a change was required, especially as even the courtly and modest St. Laurent, perhaps to counter the insecurities of aging, lost few opportunities to state that the government would be in office for some time yet. St. Laurent observed his eighth anniversary as prime minister in November 1956, and he should have deferred the next election to the autumn of 1957, or even the spring of 1958, and prepared to hand over to a new leader. He, Howe, and Gardiner should have all gone together in 1957 and some more new blood been injected. St. Laurent had been remiss in not recruiting new talent from Quebec. Jean Lesage was capable, but Georges-Émile Lapalme, having been twice defeated by Duplessis, was retiring as Quebec Liberal leader, and it was assumed that Lesage would succeed him. Douglas Abbott and even Brooke Claxton should have been considered for a return to government, though it is possible that neither would have been interested. It was a very accomplished and talented government, but long in the saddle, very complacent, and facing an opponent much more adept at stirring up underdog sentiment and the wrath and ambitions of the average person than any previous Conservative leader had been since John A. Macdonald. Even Robert Borden had been no great popular standard-bearer – a solid Maritimes lawyer who exuded practical Protestant Imperial values and integrity, but no particular man of the people. The others had either been bullhorns like Meighen and Bennett, and even Drew, or inadequately distinct personalities like Robert Manion and John Bracken. Party leaders could only be indistinct in the public mind if they were extremely tactically astute, like King, who extended the frontiers both of indistinctness and of tactical cunning.
In the 1957 session, Diefenbaker opened his career as Opposition leader, a role in which he would excel, with the allegation that the government was full of “resolute inaction” in almost all fields. St. Laurent jauntily responded, welcoming the new leader, the seventh his party had faced since they were last out of government, and referred with typical graciousness and thoughtfulness to Drew and to the just retired Sir Anthony Eden. Walter Harris brought down a tight money budget on March 15, showing admirable Liberal disregard for the political exigencies, the mark of a regime confident of its electoral invulnerability. St. Laurent spoke about attending the Commonwealth Conference in late June and wrote to the new Ghanaian leader, Kwame Nkrumah, that he was looking forward to meeting him. Parliament was dissolved for elections on June 10, 1957. Many Senate seats were left unfilled, though St. Laurent did appoint the thirty-three-year-old Paul Hellyer as the first Toronto cabinet minister in his government, as associate minister of national defence.
The prime minister embarked by rail on a cross-Canada tour determined not to make any election promises for the purpose of generating votes. He had a rather lacklustre campaign opening in Winnipeg, though he managed some good lines about the pipeline debate being “as long as the pipeline itself and as full of another kind of natural gas.”33 He gave a laborious speech in Victoria on foreign policy, prepared by external affairs officials, and in Saskatoon, people were invited to bring their own lunch and watch him being served a proper luncheon before he spoke. There was still no decision on the South Saskatchewan hydroelectric project six years after deliberations on it began. The campaign continued in this subdued, aged, bumbling way, almost lifelessly, while Diefenbaker – who had been a maverick in his own party and an unsuccessful challenger to Bracken and to Drew – had an air of missionary fulfilment, as if he were reaching the summit of a steep mountain he had been climbing a long time. His oratory was sometimes cleverly sarcastic (taking a few Liberal words and misusing them – “the supermen,” Canada being “allied with Russia against Britain at the United Nations” – ending punchy sentences “and Howe!” and so forth) and sometimes invoked Canada’s future in an almost mystical incantation. It was fervent, witty, and effective, but not altogether substantial. St. Laurent’s windup in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens was a terrible failure: when an adolescent advanced up some steps toward St. Laurent holding a picture of him and then tore it up, one of the party executive pushed the teenager back, and he fell down the steps and lay unconscious on the floor as the prime minister, gape-mouthed, stared at this unscheduled divertissement and the vast stadium was silent.
On June 10, the Progressive Conservatives gained 61 MPs and 7.8 per cent of the vote to win 112 seats with 38.5 per cent. The Liberals lost 64 MPs and dropped 7.8 per cent of the vote to win 105 seats with 40.5 per cent. The CCF gained 2 MPs for a total of 25, but dropped 0.6 per cent of the vote to 10.6; and Social Credit gained 4 MPs for a total of 19 and gained 1.1 per cent of the popular vote to h
old 6.6. All four party leaders were re-elected, but C.D. Howe and Walter Harris and several other ministers were defeated. St. Laurent said to one of his defeated colleagues, “They just got tired of having us around.” He was popular and respected and the government was thought competent, but they had taken the country for granted. Of the nearly 8 per cent the Liberals lost in the overall popular vote, post-election polls showed almost 40 per cent of that was because of the pipeline debate, over 25 per cent of it was because of Harris’s skinflint pension increase, and 30 per cent of it was just because of a desire for a change, which is always a danger with a government twenty years in office, even if it goes to greater lengths to renovate itself than this one had. The support of Ontario’s Leslie Frost and Quebec’s Maurice Duplessis had helped Diefenbaker; Frost had appeared publicly with him, and this helped raise the Tory numbers by almost 10 per cent in Ontario, and while Duplessis had been more circumspect, he had committed his organization in several areas and provided the margin for success in seven or eight constituencies, including the defeat of Hugues Lapointe, son of his old nemesis. If Duplessis had sat on his hands and those eight Liberals had been re-elected, St. Laurent would tenuously have won the election and retired in favour of a new Liberal leader, who could probably have won a confidence vote in Parliament.
Jimmy Gardiner had been re-elected, and he led the cabinet faction that wanted to meet the House; he did not believe the smaller parties would support the Tories, and he well remembered King’s successful shenanigans against Meighen in 1925. The Liberals had narrowly led the popular vote, and Gardiner believed that the country just wanted to send the Liberals a warning but not actually make a change. Even at this late date, the Liberals found it inconceivable that the country would want to change governments. The government King had built was nowhere stronger than in the conviction of entitlement to govern riveted in his and his colleagues’ minds. St. Laurent, ever the man of duty, had never wanted office just to hold it, and while he had hung on too long, he certainly would not fail to do the honourable thing. After a couple of days of consideration, he was determined to tender the government’s resignation, and he told Diefenbaker that they should wait for the military vote (which gave the Liberals another MP) and then resign at the Progressive Conservative leader’s convenience. Both men were entirely courteous and generous in their comments, privately and publicly.