ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE
An Appetite for Life
The Siren Years
Storm Signals
My Grandfather’s House
Copyright © 1981 Charles Ritchie
Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1981 McClelland & Stewart trade paperback edition published 2001 by arrangement with The Estate of Charles Ritchie
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ritchie, Charles, 1906–1995
Diplomatic passport : more undiplomatic diaries, 1946–1962
eISBN: 978-1-55199-679-0
1. Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995 – Diaries. 2. Diplomats – Canada – Diaries. I. Title.
FC616.R58A3 2001 327.71′0092 C2001-930636-9
F1034.3.R56A37 2001
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
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v3.1
To
my friends in the Department of External Affairs,
past and present
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
1945–1947
Paris, 1947–1949
Ottawa, 1950–1954
Bonn, 1954–1958
New York, 1958–1962
PREFACE
These journals, covering the years 1946 to 1962, take up where my wartime diaries, published as The Siren Years, ended. I ask myself the question, What is the compulsion that makes one put down on paper day after day such a personal record as this? Is it simply an exercise in egotism, or a confessional? Perhaps a little of both, but it may also be an obsession with the passing of time, a sense that life is slipping like sand through one’s fingers and that before it vanishes completely one must shore up these remains.
It is said that every fat man has a thin man inside him, struggling to get out. Has every diarist a novelist inside him, struggling to get out? If so, the struggle is likely to be unavailing. The diarist, with his passion for the record – historical, social, or political – too often lacks the power of construction and the storyteller’s skill. On the other hand, many writers are marvellous diarists but they tend to regard their diaries as the waste product of their art, material which is not yet fused by the imagination into finished work. Some diaries are written with an eye to publication as a conscious contribution to history. My own were of the private kind. It is true that in my old age I went public, or partly public, but when I wrote them they were for my eyes only. Nor are they at all like the informative memoirs of many of my contemporaries in diplomacy. Yet forty years in a career are bound to be conditioning, perhaps more than one realizes oneself, especially in a career spent for the most part away from one’s own country, living the rootless existence of those to whom a place is not a home but a posting, shifting from one foreign capital to another. In this career the representational role tends to take over. The man sometimes merges into the ambassador. The result is not so much pomposity as a smoothness from which all angles and irregularities of temperament and opinion have been ironed out. From this fate diary-writing may have been an escape hatch for me. Diplomacy is a profession in which protracted patience, discretion, and a glaze of agreeability prevail, and it was a relief to break out, if only on paper.
This is the record of years spent in the foreign service of Canada, yet no official business was included in it. Here are to be found no breaches of the sacrosanct Official Secrets Act. From the Department of External Affairs in which I served I took no papers on departure. Buried in their archives is the evidence of my working life. This deliberate omission conveys a curiously lopsided picture, as though the writer, instead of being an industrious and reasonably competent official, had been a detached observer drifting idly about the world. An observer, yes – but what did he observe? Changing scenes and people, politicians, fellow diplomats and journalists, people of fashion or who sought to be so, authors and would-be authors, old aunts and young beauties, people labelled “interesting,” and, often more interesting, those without a label. As to the scenes, they shift from Ottawa to Paris, from Delhi to Bonn, from London to New York, and always back to his native Nova Scotia. Thus the journal is an odd mixture of anecdote, reflection, politics, and personalities. It may be thought that this record is too personal for publication during my lifetime. The alternative of posthumous publication seemed to me a bleak prospect, so I let the record stand, with a word of advice to any fellow diplomatic diarist – keep diplomatic discretion out of your diaries and keep the diarist’s indiscretion out of your diplomacy. A double life is doubly enjoyable.
1945–1947
In the years 1945 to 1947 the war was just over and the Cold War was just beginning. This was a time marked by one international conference and confrontation after another, at which East–West conflicts were accentuated towards the dreaded danger point of a third world war. Canada was represented at most of these gatherings, either as a participant or as an observer. While based in Ottawa I served as adviser to a series of Canadian delegations to such conferences, so that I was as much abroad as I was at home.
Despite the cloud of gloomy foreboding hanging over the future, these were, for a Canadian foreign service officer, exhilarating years. There was change in the air. Although the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, was still governed by a caution verging on isolationism, another mood was beginning to prevail in the country. Our pre-war policy of no prior commitments had not saved us involvement in the struggle, and it was increasingly obvious that it was in our interest as Canadians to play our full part in the attempt to build a more sane and stable international order. I do not think that we in the Department of External Affairs approached the task with dewy-eyed illusions, but with a realization that whatever the frustrations, it had to be attempted. A further spur to a positive Canadian foreign policy was provided by the new pride and confidence in our nationhood, born of our achievements in the war and Canada’s growing wealth and importance. No doubt, too, the temporary eclipse of so many great nations in Europe and Asia, laid low by the war, thrust Canada closer to a front seat in the world community. These challenges and opportunities met with a ready and eager response in the Department of External Affairs, which was expanding in size and influence under the leadership of a gifted band of officials including Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, and Mike Pearson. With the departure in 1948 of Mackenzie King from power, with Pearson as Foreign Minister and Louis St. Laurent as Prime Minister, both convinced internationalists, the political leadership came into being which could use the energy and talents to be found in the department to the full, so that our foreign service gained widespread international respect.
Ottawa is a pleasant city. I had good friends and good times there. My work was interesting, yet I was restive. What more did I want? I suppose I shrank from the prospect of existence, year after year, as a completely adapted civil servant. I wanted to have one more fling at life outside the Victorian Gothic precincts of the Department. So that, in January 1947, I welcomed the news of my appointment as Counsellor to the Canadian Embassy in Paris. There was to be a foretaste of Paris, as I had been named one of the advisers to the Canadian Delegation to the Peace Conference to take place there in August 1946.
The year that I had spent in Ottawa was one of those blissful intermissions from the servitude of the diary. Either I was too busy to keep it up or the diarist addiction had temporarily relaxed its grip, only to return in full force later, like other incurable addictions. Thus these diaries resume at the Paris Peace Conference.
The Conference was convened for the formulation of the peace treaties between the wartime Allies and Italy and the Balkan states. Its main focus was the controversy over the future of Trieste and the claims and counter-claims of Italy and Yugoslavia for possession of that city. Like all post-war international meetings, this quickly developed into yet another episode of the Cold War. The Canadian Delegation was presided over in a very unconvincing fashion by our declining Prime Minister, Mackenzie King. My own job, in addition to attendance at the plenary sessions of the Conference dealing with the Italian treaty, was to assist in the co-ordination of Canadian policies as prepared by our representatives on the separate committees dealing with the other ex-enemy countries. Our delegation stayed at the Hotel Crillon, in conditions of mingled splendour and inconvenience. It was the Prime Minister’s favourite hotel and he had expressed a determination to sleep in the bed in which Woodrow Wilson had slept during the Peace Conference at the end of the First War. This involved delicate negotiations in inducing the hotel management to arrange the temporary expulsion of the lady who had for years resided in this suite. Even the apartments allotted to humbler members of the delegation, like myself, were those which before the war had been reserved for visiting sovereigns or peripatetic millionaires and, during the war, for German generals. (The salon of my own suite still smelled strongly of their cigars.) The hotel service was as urbane as it had been under the German occupation. The food was delicious; the telephone service, despite the presence of priceless antique telephones in every suite, was highly erratic. At times throughout the Conference we were isolated from other national delegations and totally cut off from telephone communication with Canada. Once, in a fit of exasperation, I determined to see for myself who the human agents were in the hotel who could be responsible for this confusion. I expected to encounter an array of overworked telephone operators; instead, I found one plump blonde lady placidly reading a magazine, with a box of chocolates at her side, facing a board on which light signals were frantically flashing from the different floors of the hotel. To these she seemed sublimely indifferent.
“Where,” I asked, “are your colleagues?” “I am alone,” she replied, giving me a glance of pathos, as though she languished for company, even my own. The frustration of the Crillon telephone system seemed a fitting accompaniment to the frustration of the Conference itself. Met to consolidate peace in Europe, the former Allies were preparing the ground for further conflict.
21 August 1946. Paris.
The Manchester Guardian compares the Peace Conference to the situation described in Sartre’s play Huis-Clos. Like the characters in Sartre’s Hell, the nations are trapped by their own past actions and cannot escape. The situation is frozen. The delegates can only repeat endlessly the same arguments and the same gestures. Profound disillusionment and weary cynicism characterize all the delegations except the irresponsible and ebullient Australians.
Even the setting reminds one of Sartre’s scene, which was a salon furnished in gilt and plush, of which all the windows had been bricked up. We play out our Hell in the airless Second Empire salons of the Luxembourg Palace. How long is this interminable struggle of wills to go on? The Russians appear to be able to keep it up indefinitely. They have nerves, stomachs, and constitutions of iron. They give the impression of men who have no private lives. We western amateurs have not streamlined our lives enough; we are still in the horse-and-buggy age.
I shall think of this time as dominated by the game of trying to fathom Soviet intentions, of the tactics and strategy of power. International affairs have become a battlefield where the rules of war are relevant, and the strains on the combatants are as gruelling as on the battlefield. You need physical, mental, and nervous strength. But, hardest of all, you cannot afford too many distractions. That is not so bad for the old men who live only for ambition. It is hard on the young; they tire more easily and are more vulnerable to their own mistakes. The Old Boys have made so many that one more or less does not matter to them. Then the young ones have the other battles of love to contend with. They are fighting on two fronts. They must have time to sleep with their wives or someone else will do it for them.
23 August 1946.
In the evenings, when I come back after the day’s Conference session is over, General Pope often joins me for a chat in the faded elegance of my hotel sitting-room, with its raspberry-coloured satin curtains. He is a delightful companion, witty and quirky. As Canadian representative on the Commission for the Peace Treaty with Romania, he is always stepping out of the line of his instructions. As we have few direct Canadian interests in the Romanian Treaty, he has been told that we should follow the British lead. He makes a point of doing the opposite. I remonstrate with him, as I have responsibility for co-ordination. “If you imagine that I am going to agree with that soft-centred young prig from the Foreign Office, you are much mistaken,” he says. Then we differ about the Nürnberg Trials. I say that such German generals as ordered the massacres of civilians and other excesses deserve to be shot. “And what about the German diplomats,” he asks, “who signed documents resulting in atrocities?” “It is different,” I say, “for a diplomat to sign a paper. Half the time he does not know what it may lead to. That is not like giving an order to kill.” “You and your trade union,” he says. “The fact is that the Nürnberg Trials are scandalously unjust and should never have taken place.” He may be right.
The only fun I have at the Conference sessions arises from the fact that I have been selected to maintain contact with the Australians. Their Foreign Minister, Evatt, whom we saw in action at the San Francisco Conference,1 has become insufferably megalomaniacal and irresponsible. He much enjoys undercutting any position taken by the Canadian delegation. Like many Australians, he seems to regard Canadians as mealy-mouthed fence-sitters. He is also very jealous of any Canadian initiative or achievement. Despite all this I much relish my contacts with the Australians. They are such pungently lively company and don’t give a damn for the proprieties. The New Zealanders may be nicer but they are tamer.
The other day during the Conference session Evatt made such a
n outrageous statement about Canadian policy that on the spur of the moment I got up from my seat, walked round the table to the Australian delegation, and, bearding him in his lair, said that we must have an immediate apology. He glared at me and I thought he was going to knock me down. But he said nothing. A few moments later he came over to us and apologized profusely.
I have been reading Darkness at Noon, Koestler’s novel about the Moscow Trials. The theme of the book is the tragedy of those who use unscrupulous means to attain great ends. It is a terrifying picture of the evil courses into which the Soviet bureaucracy has turned. Before the war one might have read it with the feeling that our humanitarian tradition was too deeply engraved for such dangers to threaten us. But can we be sure now? To defeat our enemies we used the atomic bomb, bombing the innocent, flame-throwing, commando tactics, and we imprisoned men without trial. Our newspapers toed the Party line on all these issues. When we were hard-pressed we were willing to use any means to attain our end – victory. Where was the humanitarianism of 1939 (war by leaflets – only the Nazis are guilty, not the German people, etc.) by 1945? So that our humanitarianism is of a fair-weather quality. It is born of stability and prosperity and dies with them. “Let us clear our minds,” as Dr. Johnson said, “of Cant.” But while we take a holiday from pity and morality in wartime and return to kindness and muddled thinking when the war is over, the Russians are in a perpetual state of war. How can we co-operate with such people? Only for limited and concrete purposes which promise joint advantages, and then watch your partner with a lynx-like eye. No other co-operation is possible. Does this mean that war is inevitable? At any rate it means years of unsleeping struggle for power. It means that all major decisions of foreign policy will have to be taken with an eye to this opponent. Fighting the Germans brutalized our methods of warfare to meet theirs; the struggle for power with the U.S.S.R. will brutalize our methods more and more. They do not believe in our morality for a moment. They think it clever hypocrisy. And after what we have suffered and inflicted in the last few years we are not so sure ourselves of our own moral superiority. Perhaps the Russians are just more logical than we, more brutally consistent. So often we can see, as in a distorting glass but still recognizable, our motives and actions reflected in theirs. We are more scrupulous, more gentlemanly, but how much does that difference matter? Sometimes, as over the scramble for bases, the difference seems to have narrowed down almost to the vanishing point. Yet that difference only divides us from the jungle world they inhabit. And the difference we must stick to – we must think it a strength, otherwise we shall be too much tempted to throw it over. We must demonstrate its effectiveness or we might as well disencumber ourselves of it and plunge nakedly into the struggle. Every act of hypocrisy in which our governments indulge weakens our own faith in that difference. If humane and fair political and social practices only spring from strength and not from fear, then we need to be strong – lest we give way to panic.
Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790) Page 1