Diplomatic Passport : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962 (9781551996790)

by Ritchie, Charles

  Before the curtain goes up on the official performance of the General Assembly and the Councils and Committees of the United Nations, the scenery has to be put in place, the parts of the players rehearsed, scripts compared. And this is done when little groups of actors huddle together in low-voiced confabulation or drift towards each other casually – but by arrangement – in the corridors of the Assembly Hall or in the wings of the Security Council. Often each carries with him a sheet of paper, the text of his country’s forthcoming Resolution, for which he seeks support from other delegations. Or there are points of procedure to be picked over – under which provision would it be best to proceed, or which amendment of the text (often pencilled on the typewritten page) will be most likely to attract support or at least avert defeat by inducing benign abstentions when the Resolution comes to the vote? It is as well to keep these exchanges as inconspicuous as possible, certainly out of earshot of the enemy, for there – on the other side of the lounge – the enemy are gathered in similar preparation for the fray. They are planning the defeat of one’s government’s cherished project or, more damaging still, an amendment of their own which will, by an extension or rearrangement of language, enlarge the scope of the Resolution and water down its intention so that no credit will redound to your country and there will be no headlines in the press at home to the greater lustre of the government in power.

  And now, talking of governments, here comes with soft feet across the carpet towards us an elegant lady, her hair beautifully braided – the multilingual telephonist. “Mr. Ambassador, there is an urgent call for you from the Minister of External Affairs in Ottawa. Would you care to take it now? He is waiting on the line.” “Waiting on the line” – that will never do. With hurried apology to my colleagues, with controlled speed – one does not run but moves quietly to the voice of the master – “Hello, Charles. How are things down there? Got everything lined up for our Resolution? Who’s supporting – how many co-sponsors?” “What? only nine countries? We’ll have to do better than that. What about Australia? No, darn it, we didn’t vote for their Resolution. India?” “So they want to make it more like an Indian Resolution, do they? Charles, you’ll have to get more co-sponsors quickly. I want to make an announcement in the House of Commons tomorrow. Twist a few arms – I know you can do it. Good luck, and let me have the additional names later in the day.” It is all very well, but where is one to find these “additional names”? I have already canvassed all those delegations which are in sympathy with our Resolution. I have even incorporated some of their amendments into our text as bait for their support. I wish the Minister was here to twist a few arms himself. No doubt he could do it; he is a practised politician and vote-getter. All day I go from pillar to post seeking out even the most unlikely allies and by late afternoon I am still one short of a total of twelve co-sponsors. But I have reached the end of the line. No one else is interested in the Canadian resolution. I go into the lavatory and, standing at the urinal next to me, buttoning up his trousers, is the Ambassador of Haiti. I barely know the man – our relations with Haiti are minimal. The Duvalier régime is not popular at the United Nations. “Excellency,” I say to him in my most polished French, “may I have a word with you?” He looks surprised, almost affronted, at this approach to him in this place. I draw him into the washroom. I do not attempt to explain the merits of our resolution; I simply say, “I am offering Your Excellency a unique opportunity to associate your country with a great initiative in the cause of peace.” I venture the suggestion that President Duvalier could not fail to approve. I point out that as the list of co-sponsors appears alphabetically, Haiti would rank high on the printed list, above other important nations. The Ambassador, a small, stout, elephant-coloured man, pauses and stares at me through thick horn-rimmed glasses, and then, “Excellency, I shall have to consult my government.” “I fear,” I reply, “that the list closes this evening. Would it be possible to have an answer before midnight tonight?” The Ambassador bows and emerges from the washroom. At 11:30 he telephones me – Haiti accepts. I have achieved twelve co-sponsors.

  9 December 1961.

  I am having difficulties with the Indian Delegation and in particular with the Indian Representative. What prevents him from being what at first sight he seems – a silver-haired, wise Indian civil servant, devoted, highly intelligent, and industrious? What is wrong with him? Why does the oil of malice in him rise so easily to the surface? I should like to know his whole story. Has he been so much snubbed in the past to develop this india-rubbery self-assurance, these ingratiating, pawing gestures? Perhaps that may explain his insistence on his position as an ambassador and his wife’s detestable arrogance towards her so-called inferiors. The other night when they dined at this house I put her on my right, on the other side a very intelligent, entertaining member of the Department of External Affairs who is down here on a visit. During the whole of dinner she never spoke one word to him, in fact, turned her back on him. He was not of sufficient rank for her to talk to.

  Descartes says that one proof of the existence of God is man’s sense of his own imperfection; that this sense of imperfection would not exist unless there were a perfect being. I think of a picture, Piranesi ruins, with some figures of men and women in the foreground. The scale and grandeur of the ruins give the measure of the people, the men and women posed against them illustrate the scale of the walls and pillars. Without God there is no scale of measurement. Man swells into a nervous monster. And yet there are plenty of modest and noble men and women who live without God and plenty of monsters who believe in Him.

  15 January 1962.

  The die is cast. I am to go as Ambassador to Washington. I suppose I could have flatly said “No,” but who would turn down the biggest job in the profession? My hesitation has been partly due to my own blank ignorance of so many of the issues involved between Canada and the United States, particularly the trade and economic ones. (When I said this to my mother she replied, “Well, you’ll just have to learn about them, won’t you.”) I also shrink from the prospect of returning to normal diplomatic life with all its tedious formalities and conventionalities. The United Nations spared one a lot of this. There is little time for such things in this hothouse of international intrigue, where one stumbles from crisis to crisis. I prefer this speeded-up process to a more leisurely pace. However, perhaps I need not worry about tedium in this new post; on the contrary, all the storm signals are out for foul weather between Washington and Ottawa. Relations between the two governments are bad and show signs of getting worse. This was brought home to me when I went to Ottawa for my interview with the Prime Minister on my appointment and also during my visit to Arnold Heeney, our present Ambassador in Washington. Not only are there substantive differences of policy involved, but the atmosphere is poisoned by the mutual aversion of the Prime Minister for the President and the President for the Prime Minister. President Kennedy seems to regard Mr. Diefenbaker as a mischief-making old man who cannot be trusted, whereas Mr. Diefenbaker sees the President as an arrogant young man and a political enemy. In such a situation the role of Canadian Ambassador to Washington promises to be a tricky one. This does not dismay me, but I ask myself why I have been selected for it. Arnold Heeney, a warm friend, has urged that I should be his successor. The Minister, Howard Green, has adopted me as his candidate for the job and has been working on the Prime Minister in my favour. I am grateful for his support; I have always had respect and affection for him. As for the Prime Minister, I think he finally made up his mind that I was the safest available bet for the post, and I wonder whether my Conservative family connection helped him in my case to overcome his endemic suspicion of members of the Department of External Affairs. During our interview I had the impression that he was preoccupied, self-isolated, and, far from enjoying the exercise of power, was overpowered by it.

  I hear on all sides that the present government is extremely unpopular in Washington and that the Americans say that every communication t
hey receive from us is a protest or a complaint against them. Also, they are beginning to give us the cold shoulder and their reaction to any Canadian official visitor is a snub. I do not think that this perpetual nattering at the Americans will get us anywhere. I am all for standing up to them on a real question of principle or policy but snapping at their heels all the time is undignified and unproductive. I suppose, however, that they must be getting hardened to this treatment. It is what they get from most of their allies, in intervals of their asking for favours. The British, with their usual realism, ever since the humiliation of Suez, never stop making up to them. At one time we had pretensions to consider ourselves a “bridge” between the United Kingdom and the United States. What a bad joke that looks now! I doubt all the same that the British have much influence on United States policy. The Americans in their present mood do not welcome advice from anyone, least of all from the present Canadian government. I think that one difficulty I shall experience in Washington is finding a basis for communication with the American official world. In the past we have had speedy access to United States government departments on an informal footing which has sometimes been envied by other foreign governments. This has been advantageous to us in some ways but it has its drawbacks. It has meant that our agreement with the general direction of United States policy has been taken for granted, so much so that we hardly seem to be regarded as a “foreign” government at all. When we differ from them on anything important they seem much more surprised and irritated than when dealing with “foreign” countries from whom they can expect trouble. It becomes a sort of family quarrel; always the worst kind. And then, too, the disparity between us has been immensely increased since the War. Now the United States is the greatest military and economic power in the non-communist world, with no British Empire to offset it. The old neighbourly relationship between our two countries was never, of course, based on equality between us, but the inequality was less glaring than it now is.

  This enormous access of United States power is reflected inevitably in the men who wield it. A diplomatic colleague who was with me in Washington before the War said the other day, “You will find that the American official has become much ‘grander’ than he used to be,” I have encountered this attitude myself during my visits to Washington but “grand” is not quite the right word for it. The personal friendliness and informality are still there. It is rather that they have developed a complete impermeability to advice, criticism, or comment of any kind, combined with the patient courtesy that one extends to the well-meaning irrelevance. I think that this is an element in the irritation that our Prime Minister feels and that other Canadians may share. No doubt we do not make sufficient allowance for the world-wide responsibilities which the Americans carry on their shoulders. However, any assumption of superiority, conscious or unconscious, has always been peculiarly difficult for Canadians to swallow, prompting the very Canadian question, “Who the hell do they think they are?”

  My own problem may be that American friends, knowing of my long association with Mike Pearson, may show a certain sympathy for me in serving under Mr. Diefenbaker. This must be discouraged from the start. I like and admire the Americans, I am devoted to Mike, I shall do anything I can to keep relations on an even keel between Canada and the United States, but if it comes to a showdown of any kind there must be no question as to where my loyalties lie.

  24 January 1962.

  Farewell party given for us by the San Miniatos.1 The Windsors were the feature of the evening. I sat next to her. She has developed a curious, disconcerting tic. When she stops talking, her lips meet and part tremblingly like a nibbling rabbit, or as though she were talking to herself. Indeed, she seems ravaged but unsated, her green eyes brilliant with anticipation of a party at Mrs. Cafritz’s2 in Washington next week. But then, she is easy, conversable, engagingly full of curiosity, and with a nose tilted for scandal. The Duke, royally red in the face with a white carnation in his buttonhole, expatiated to Sylvia on the impossibility of his having black men to dinner and wondered how we bore this portion of our lot at the United Nations. The room was full of jewels which mattered more than the names and numbers of the players. The Duchess’s Schlumberger bracelet of coal-dark sapphires and small diamonds, our hostess’s cabochon rubies, my neighbour’s enormous black pearl, like a slug crawling over her finger from the foliage of diamonds, and, out-soaring all, the diamond necklace of a Russian lady of endless antecedents, whose still-lovely face is permanently framed in an envelope of gauze. “Does she take it off,” they asked her husband, “when she goes to bed?” “No, never,” he replied, “but it isn’t that that I mind. It is that her diamonds scratch.” Café society is not a cinch. These people bought or charmed or clawed their way into this enclosure. There is less room for nonentities here than in ordinary society. The room is full of adventurers and adventuresses, from born ladies who got sick of being ladies to slightly shop-worn countesses from Brooklyn or the Bronx, and one white-skinned young beauty with a pile of red hair and sardonic eyes. This is a slippery arena and I was glad to see my dear friend, our hostess, dauntless Gladys, steering her way with a certain rough, tough, shy, bold authority.

  2 April 1962.

  As my departure from New York becomes imminent, I have been reflecting on the United Nations and its claim to be a world community – and on the tragic fate of Dag Hammarskjöld. The world community was to be incarnated in the United Nations, but the incarnation has never really taken place. Its prophet – and, since his death in the Congo, its martyr – was Dag Hammarskjöld. Its religious ceremony, so it seems to me, is the concert of classical music (chosen by Dag) which is the prelude to the meeting of the General Assembly. There are the delegates from more than half the world gathered together – for once in silence – with reverent expressions on their faces, listening to the strains of Beethoven and Bach, their souls presumably lifted above mundane differences into an ethereal world of music in which their common humanity is made manifest. The concert lasts about an hour – the unity of mood among the listeners lasts no longer. There is also the chapel or room of meditation – undenominational, of course – to which it must have been hoped that delegates would repair to cool their tempers exacerbated in the heat of debate and to contemplate the latter end of things. I have looked in there once or twice myself. On those occasions it was empty, except for a member of the U.N. security guard pacing up and down at the entrance, to guard it against defilement.

  There used to be a common saying – I forget who originated it – that “the United Nations is no better than its members.” That indeed was a truism abundantly proved, but the very fact that it had to be stated shows that there is a widespread expectation – or at least hope – that the whole will turn out to be more than its parts. There is support for the cause of the United Nations (nowhere more than in Canada), and this cause is felt to be something superior to the sum total of the different nations represented there. It is to be an emanation of the good intentions, the better selves, of these nations, working together for peace and the dignity of man. A spirit brooding upon the waters of a troubled world. Of course, many of those who devote themselves to the cause are hard-headed, able men and women, not easily deluded by optimism but sustained by a purpose. There is, however, an element of mysticism and also of muddle in the minds of many of its supporters. They expect miracles and are disillusioned. For this, Hammarskjöld himself – the symbol of the United Nations – bore some of the responsibility. He himself was a mystic but he was far from muddled. Like Mahatma Gandhi, who in some ways he resembled, he combined a fervent faith in the unseen with a very keen eye for the scene before him. He knew – none better – the task he had set himself and he approached it with spiritual humility and intellectual arrogance. The task was to speed the evolution of the United Nations from a meeting-place of nations into an effective instrument in international politics – to make of it what some mistakenly believe it already is, a cohesive force. He knew that the odds
were against him, but he had been a mountaineer. Over the fireplace in his own room was suspended a mountaineer’s pick – it was not there for nothing. He would set out to scale the mountain and if he failed to reach the top the fall would be precipitous. This was the risk that added zest to the enterprise. Meanwhile, like any experienced climber, he would assess the chances, study the terrain, and hire the most trustworthy guides – his own secretariat. The mountain that he set himself to conquer was that of exclusive, aggressive nationalism, deeply rooted in history and engendering conflict. For all his skills, it proved too much for him. His failure can be attributed too simply to Soviet resistance. This was the precipitant, but it was also a convenient screen for the reluctance of others, especially the Western Great Powers, to accord him the support he would have needed. How then did he go wrong? It was partly a failure of patience, partly an overplaying of his hand. These were the political errors. Beyond them was a deeper failure – the failure of the doctrine he sought to embody – the doctrine of supernational solidarity. It was too insubstantial – too fleshless; it might take hold of men’s minds but could not appeal to their passions. The air at the top of the mountain was too thin for common humans.

  27 April 1962.

  It is half an hour before train time, the suitcases are packed. There is no necessity for me to lug them all into the hall – that is precisely what we gave five dollars to the doorman to do – but I know I shall be pressured into doing it myself. Before breakfast this morning I went for a farewell walk in the Park and, standing on the bridge, quickly and sadly said goodbye to my beloved New York. It has served me well and would have done even better for me if I had had more initiative to plunder its gifts. I shall never in any foreseeable or unforeseeable future live in this place again. It is painful to leave, but this must be concealed from Washingtonians, as they no more appreciate hearing good things of New York than New Yorkers do of Washington.