Fire and Ashes

by Michael Ignatieff

  You wouldn’t want to say any of this. There are few rewards for candour in politics. What you say—always—is that you want to make a difference. You believe your experience qualifies you to serve. These circumlocutions are the etiquette of democracy, the ritual salute to the sovereignty of the people. The people themselves may suspect that the difference you want to make is to your own life, not to theirs. But they want to hear you say that you are in it for them.

  It’s worth considering that such dissembling may have its uses. The pretense may begin as a piece of hypocrisy and end up becoming a politician’s second nature. From pretending to serve, you may surprise yourself by actually doing so. Indeed, you have to acquire some sense of service if you are to survive at all. A politician’s job can be so thankless at times that if you don’t acquire a sense of vocation you turn yourself, by stages, without realizing it, into a hack.

  When I began considering the offer from the “men in black,” I had to decide, first of all, why I wanted to be prime minister. Let there be no mistake: that was the proposition on offer. I would return home, win election as a member of Parliament, and when the time came, make my bid for power. But why did I want power in the first place? I had almost no sense of political vocation, and I certainly didn’t have a good answer to the question of why I wanted to hold high office. What drew me most was the chance to stop being a spectator. I’d been in the stands all my life, watching the game. Now, I thought, it was time to step into the arena. But this is the kind of thing you say to yourself, not to those you’re trying to win over. I was to learn this soon enough. In the summer of 2006, when I was campaigning for the leadership of my party, I appeared before the Montreal business community in the white dining room of Power Corporation. One of the business leaders asked me whether I could explain, in just a sentence or two, why I wanted to be prime minister. The question caught me by surprise. I said it was the hardest job any country has on offer. I wanted to see whether I could handle the challenge.

  Nothing gets you into more trouble in politics than blurting out the truth. I can still remember the chill my answer spread over that crowd. These were business people who, being leaders themselves, weren’t interested in bankrolling my existential challenges. They were looking to support someone who would win and give them access to power.

  I learned then that I had the wrong answer to the basic question of what my political life was supposed to be for. Later on, when the climb to the top ceased to be an adventure and became a struggle to survive, I learned just how important it was to have convincing answers to the question of why you were doing it all. Believe me when I tell you that this language of existential challenge is strictly for dilettantes—something I was accused of being.

  I can remember a period between September and December 2009, when I was the leader of my party and made mistake after mistake, when the press was brutal and my own staff was so shell-shocked by the plummeting poll numbers that they couldn’t look me in the eye. Before the daily ordeal of Question Period (QP), down in the Commons Chamber, when I had to face a cocksure government that had me on the ropes, I would go into the washroom, look at myself in the mirror and force myself to want the job, force myself to believe I could do it, and not just throw in the towel then and there. During this period, Zsuzsanna would say to me: you don’t want this enough. But that wasn’t the problem. I no longer remembered why I had ever wanted it at all. These are the moments—and they occur in every tough job—when you’re no longer sure you’re up to it. Your every mistake seems to confirm that you aren’t. Your self-confidence is shot. All you know for certain is that you once wanted this and that you have to find that primal desire within if you hope to survive. So it had better be there.

  Politics tests your capacity for self-knowledge more than any profession I know. What I learned is this: the question about why you want to be a politician is a question about whom you want it for. In my case, whom did I want it for?

  At the primal level where ambition takes root in a person, you want the things you want in life for the people who made you who you are. In my case, I wanted political success for the sake of my mother, Alison, and my father, George, because I believed they would have wanted it for me. This is a piece of projection, of course, since they were long dead by the time my political career began. I felt their influence not in any injunctions they ever uttered about the way I should live my life, but rather in the distinguished way they had lived theirs. My ambitions felt less like my own creation than a tradition inherited from them. The Ignatieffs were minor nobility in nineteenth-century Russia who rose to some prominence through service to the czar. My great-grandfather was Russian ambassador to the Ottoman court in Constantinople and later, in 1882, minister of the interior, responsible for restoring order after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. His political career ended in failure, and he spent the last twenty years of his life on his estate in Ukraine, brooding about how intriguers at court had cost him the ear of the czar and how all his plans for Russia had ended in defeat. His son, my grandfather Paul, began his career running the family estates in Ukraine and then rose through the imperial bureaucracy to become deputy minister of agriculture and finally, in 1915, minister of education in the last government of Czar Nicholas II. The Russian Revolution swept him into exile, first in England and then in Canada. He and my grandmother, Natalie, ended their days in a small cottage in Upper Melbourne, Quebec, and are buried in the Presbyterian cemetery overlooking the St. Francis River.1

  My father, George, was the youngest of their five sons, and the most ambitious. He was sixteen when the family, down on their luck, landed in Montreal from England. That first summer, he went out to British Columbia to work on a railway party laying track in the Kootenay Valley. He learned to drink, swear and cut timber and returned home at the end of the summer of 1928, brown, muscular and a Canadian. He enrolled at the University of Toronto, did well enough to win a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College in Oxford and was there in 1939 when war was declared. He left Oxford and in early 1940 went down to London to serve with the Canadian government at Canada House in Trafalgar Square. There, at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself in a city under German bombardment, working as the personal assistant of Vincent Massey, the heir to the Massey-Harris-Ferguson farm machinery business, then serving as Canadian High Commissioner to Britain. For four years of the war, my father drafted Massey’s letters and telegrams and arranged his schedule, sometimes accompanying him to Whitehall for meetings with ministers and generals. Between the British defeat at Dunkirk, in 1940, and 1942, when American soldiers began to arrive in Britain, the Canadian Army was a vital component of the defence of the British Isles. Canada mattered. It was a dangerous but also a glorious time to begin your career as a diplomat for Canada. My father did his professional apprenticeship in the service of an extraordinary man, punctilious and pompous, more English than the English, and yet, for all that, a leader.

  My father’s working colleagues at Canada House also included Lester B. Pearson, a charismatic diplomat who much later became prime minister of Canada. Many long nights in 1940 and 1941, he and my father took their turn fire-watching together on the roof of Canada House, phoning the civil defence whenever they saw an incendiary catching fire on the roofs around Trafalgar Square. There were raids so severe that they forced the two of them off the roof and into basement shelters, where they huddled in the darkness, feeling the water from ruptured pipes slowly seeping around their shoes. One Sunday morning, after a particularly intense raid, they watched from the roof as charred files from bombed government offices in Whitehall drifted through the air. Pearson said something to the effect, my father remembered, “that civilization could not stand much more of this kind of destruction and that we would have to try to stop it.”2 In my father’s mind, at least, Pearson’s passionate post-war support for the United Nations flowed from that moment.

  There too at Canada House in the middle of the war, my father met my mother, Ali
son Grant. She was a niece of Vincent Massey: Massey’s wife, Alice Parkin, was her aunt. My mother had come to London in 1938, aged twenty-two, to attend the Royal College of Art and was working in MI5, British military intelligence, as a typist and secretary.

  My mother’s people were just as ambitious and public-spirited as the Ignatieffs. George Parkin, my great-grandfather, was a New Brunswick schoolteacher who managed, by sheer force of personality and cultivation of the powerful, to make himself the founding secretary of the Rhodes Trust, the organization that administers the Rhodes Scholarships in Oxford. Another great-grandfather, George Monro Grant, had been expedition secretary to the railway survey party, led by the engineer Sandford Fleming, that went west in the summer of 1872 to reconnoiter the Yellowhead route through the Rockies to the Pacific.3 From the high summer heat of July to the early snows of October they travelled by canoe, train, steamer, horseback and Red River cart from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They were the first Canadians to take the measure of the land that had been brought together as a country five years before. When my great-grandfather came home from the journey, he wrote Ocean to Ocean, one of the first narratives of the grandeur of the land and its future prospects. If you grew up, as I did, with Ocean to Ocean on the bookshelves, you felt you belonged to a family that had been nation-builders.

  The Grant side of the family had their stories about prime ministers too. John A. Macdonald—the Conservative chieftain who held the country together with bribery, threats and raw political skill till his death in 1891—was the member of Parliament for Kingston, where my great-grandfather presided as principal of Queen’s University. My great-grandfather, known around Kingston as Geordie Grant, had serious moral qualms about Macdonald’s methods—extorting cash for his party, for example, from the railroad builders—and he did not hesitate to make his scruples known. The two men met near the end of their lives at a function in Kingston, where Sir John A. approached my great-grandfather and in a joshing manner asked him, “Geordie, why were you never a friend of mine?” “I’ve been your friend, Sir John,” my great-grandfather tartly replied, “when you were right.” “I have no use for friends like that!”4 the old lion replied.

  These stories are what kept me to the sticking place when times were difficult. Politics was the big arena, the place where you lived a life of significance, where you measured up to the family imperatives. It was in the blood. I wanted it for them and so I wanted it for me.

  Let me confess right now that all this is still the wrong answer to the question of why you should go into politics. You can’t lead a political life to live up to your parents. It’s also a political error. Any sense of entitlement that you might take from your past is absolutely fatal in politics. The best thing about democracy is—or should be—that you have to earn everything, one vote at a time. I knew enough not to feel entitled. I knew I had to earn it. But the fact that I come from a family with a calling for public life played powerfully in my mind as I considered whether to accept the offer from the men who had come to dinner that October night.

  While my mother worked in M15 she roomed at 54A Walton Street in South Kensington with a tart, diminutive Winnipeg native named Kay Moore, later Gimpel. Between late 1942 and early 1943, they gave a home and a bed to Frank Pickersgill and John Macalister, two Canadians who had joined SOE, the Special Operations Executive, in order to parachute into France and join up with Resistance units combatting the German occupation forces. My mother grew close to Frank—how close I’ll never know—in the few months before June 1943, when he left one night to parachute into the dark to a landing spot in the Loire Valley south of Paris. Almost as soon as the pair of Canadians landed, they were betrayed and handed over to the Gestapo, who sent them to a concentration camp. For two years, my mother and Kay waited for word. Special Operations Executive asked them to concoct personal messages that only Frank and John would understand—such as “the samovar is boiling at 54A”—to see if they would reply on their wireless telegraph, but the replies that came back didn’t seem to be coming from them. The Germans in fact were playing radio games to mislead the SOE into believing the men were still functioning as agents. Both women began to fear the worst, but it was only in the spring of 1945, when Buchenwald was liberated, that Kay and Alison learned that the two Canadians had been executed there, after torture, months before, in September 1944.5

  In April 1945, my mother wrote a letter to Frank’s brother Jack, in which I hear—as sons rarely do—the authentic sound of my mother’s young hopes and dreams:

  I do know that [Frank] was happy in England—his time was very full, and consequently to those of us who were drawn into that circle of unbounded affection, love, and happiness, which he created, the loss cannot be counted.

  He bound the household together with his humour, his embracing interest and love of mankind. He set a standard we try to follow. I also know that nothing would have stopped him going—nothing anyone could say or do. He knew clearly and definitely to the day of his departure—he must go. His death is not only a personal loss to a few like myself who know his place will never be filled. His brand of courage—his courage coupled with his imagination—are not only needed in war, but needed so badly when the war is over, needed by everyone.

  But his life wasn’t wasted. I feel, as so many of his friends have here said to me, he left us his spirit and faith and uncompromising belief in what was right. That is the legacy he left us. He showed us a way of life and I for one won’t forget it ever.

  In the fall of 1945, my mother came home from the war and married my father. While she almost never talked about Frank, he was a presence in our home throughout my growing up. It happened that during the 1950s, our house in suburban Ottawa was just a block away from Frank’s brother, Jack, and his family. Frank was theirs more than ours, but our house cherished the memory too.

  After the war, my mother and father rose through the ranks of the Canadian Foreign Service, and my brother and I grew up in postings overseas: Washington, Belgrade, London, Paris, Geneva and back home in Ottawa. My father worked for several prime ministers, but one of them, Lester Pearson, was always just Mike to him. When I was a child in Ottawa in the 1950s, I once watched Mr. Pearson play baseball at the picnic for the Department of External Affairs, where my father worked and where Mr. Pearson was the minister. It was at a school baseball diamond in the suburbs and Mr. Pearson was at bat, in shirtsleeves and a tie. He bunted and beat out the throw to first base and turned around, foot on the bag, rewarding his employees, all loyally cheering, with a beaming smile.

  After the Arab-Israeli war of 1956, my father worked on the team that developed the peacekeeping force for Suez, an effort that won Pearson the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957. In the Arab-Israeli War a decade later, Pearson was prime minister and my father held Canada’s seat on the United Nations Security Council. He was one of the drafters of Resolution 242, which remains, to this day, a basis for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

  My father was a pallbearer at Pearson’s funeral in January 1973 and bore him to his resting place in Wakefield, Quebec. Just before I entered politics, I went up and paid my respects at his grave. Pearson is buried beside two public servants and close friends—Norman Robertson and Hume Wrong. Pearson, Robertson and Wrong were the epitome of a great age in Canadian government and public service. They wore sober suits and bow ties, crackled with an intimidating intelligence and wore their staffs down with a ferocious work ethic; they were internationally minded, honest as the day was long, small-c conservative in matters financial, liberal in their politics and, in a quiet Canadian way, fiercely patriotic. Theirs was the world I believed in, the example I grew up wanting to emulate. As I said, you want the things you want in life for the people who made you who you are. It never occurred to me, when I returned home and entered politics, that their liberal world and the Canada they had made had long since vanished.

  The men my father idealized were people who took for granted that government coul
d do great things. After the 1956 uprising against Communist rule in Budapest, my father helped Jack Pickersgill, then minister of immigration, to get thousands of Hungarians out of refugee camps and settled into a new life in Canada. It was a dramatic gesture by a confident country and my father was proud that he had helped so many people to freedom. The same expansive ambition was at work everywhere in the politics of the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the era when liberal governments in Europe and North America rebuilt their societies and laid the foundation for thirty years of prosperity. In the United States, Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system and the national space program, while Democratic governors in California built the California public university system, a model for higher education the world over. In Canada, a Liberal government built national highway systems and the St. Lawrence Seaway, and found the money to establish new university campuses and national research institutes like the Chalk River nuclear facility, which made Canada a world leader in the production of medical isotopes. The idea was that imaginative government could bind a country together. As soon as I was old enough to join the conversation around the family dinner table, I shared in the idea—or the illusion—that good government—run by people like my dad—was the ultimate solution to any national problem.