Unbuttoned

When Mackenzie King died in 1950 little was known publicly about his eccentric private life; King’s final will declared that his voluminous diary should be destroyed and its contents were carefully guarded during the research and writing of his official biography. Yet twenty five years later, his diaries were publicly available and King’s private life was the subject of energetic media discussion. King increasingly came to be known in public as the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. This is a work of cultural history that uses the monumental shift from reverence and the inaccessible private life of a prime minister to its total exposure as a way of discussing the sea change in Canadian culture and to examine what this meant about our expectations of politicians, political life, and our society more generally.