Norman Atkins Takes the Controls
Dalton Camp craved fewer meetings and more solitude, and resolved to experience both.
He especially wanted more time for writing. Free of party duties, he could direct his intelligent creativity into books, newspaper columns, and on-air commentaries. He might even salve his wounds from the political arena through the healing power of reinterpreting the narrative of his life. He wanted to write about public affairs “free of cant,” he said, and “with candour about the lives of those seeking and exercising power” who were impacted by politics’ “darker forces.” A manuscript he’d begun earlier, but put aside on advice from Spades Donald Guthrie and Patrick Vernon, he now retrieved and resumed, choosing as a title Gentlemen, Players & Politicians. Yet his diminishing personal ambitions in politics did not mean Dalton’s many other drives had died, or that his lifelong enchantment with public affairs had evaporated. There was still a future. He would transition out of the agency, just as he had left behind the presidency of the party, but ensure that his unique creation, the big blue machine, kept operating. One just never knew what might happen.
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For so many years Dalton had delegated activities to his brother-in-law that by now it was instinctive. He’d next hand off to Norman their interlocked advertising and campaign enterprise. Norman had created neither yet had become integral to both. In the pattern of entrusting the family business to an up-and-coming younger member, Dalton made Norman president of the agency.
Acting quickly, keen to display his worthiness, he streamlined the agency’s name, changing it to Camp Associates Advertising. As in musical chairs, he moved into the president’s large office at the Eglinton Avenue premises while Dalton relocated to a smaller space down the hall. Dalton would still appear intermittently, for instance if needed to impress a new client, but otherwise Norman could readily keep the existing stable of clients happy, attentively maintaining the high level of service they’d come to expect.
Despite his small office, Dalton retained a big interest in the agency’s wellbeing, because he still got half the profits. He’d earlier bought out Bill Kettlewell and Fred Boyer’s interests, so he and Norman shared the operation 50-50, a division consistent with how the two men had come to function as one. Their different yet complementary temperaments, and their dissimilar but meshing skills, were unified in advertising work and election campaigns, embodiments of an entwined personal relationship that had endured and triumphed across forty-seven years.
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Now it was like Dalton was leaving, without ever going away.
Norman felt fulfilled running the operation, handling commercial advertising accounts for an impressive roster of clients and conducting the blue machine’s campaigns. Camp Associates had plenty of remunerative work that appealed to him for its diversity of contacts and broadening range of activity. He appreciated, as Dalton had, that income from commercial work enabled their political activities. If the Albany Club was unofficial head office for the Tories, the Camp agency operated like the party’s permanent campaign headquarters.
Norman saw commercial campaigns and election campaigns as much the same, a generic operation. The effort to mobilize resources and to persuade gifted individuals to accomplish a goal, whether commercial or political, required meshing diverse areas of business life, government, politics, and communications with effective timing and error-free logistics. Although creativity in advertising was vital, it was just one component among many, whether the campaign was to sell Clairtone stereos or Progressive Conservative candidates. By now Norman had a well-honed approach to managing campaigns. Because they required deliberate planning and integration of so many elements, he’d begin with an approved budget and a detailed organization chart. In fact, his reliance on clearly established methods, a legacy from his days in the U.S. Army, became legendary. “Norman was big on organization, structure, and job descriptions,” said Dianne Axmith, who worked with him at the agency and in political campaigns. “He lived with flow charts.”
He defined “organization” simply as “people and communication.” Seeking “the right people for the responsibilities” on his organization chart, he’d pick people he knew were “responsible and respected my approach to organization.” After vetting volunteers with great care, he felt confident in his choices.
“I always knew if I gave them an assignment they would get it done,” he said, “and I would only involve myself if they were looking for assistance or direction.”
In fact, the volunteers knew Norman was incapable of restraining his curiosity about how a particular project was proceeding. “You were around Norman because he trusted you,” said Tom MacMillan, “but he couldn’t help himself. He would check on how things were progressing.”
Because a campaign must do many things through a variety of different roles, from raising money and printing brochures to putting up signs and organ-izing events, it seemed as logical for Norman to have a plan of organization as for a contractor to have a blueprint for the building he was constructing.
But his chart of boxes with connecting lines, a neat graphic representation on the wall to help people conceptualize roles and relationships, was never the reality on the street. So, off the chart, Norman always kept three things in mind: the man (virtually all his campaigns were run for men), the money, and the message. The candidate might be an asset or liability, so good organizers and constituency associations had to take care recruiting a worthy standard-bearer as the face of the campaign.
The amount of money raised, and the thoughtful development of a campaign budget that prioritized allocation of funds and enforced spending controls, would directly impact what he as campaign manager could really do. So a campaign budget for Norman was not just a series of spending categories with allocated amounts, but a tool to drive performance. In this era before election finance laws imposed limits and required proper accounting, he had seen too many free-spending electoral adventures. Thus, having a strict budget, and volunteers clearly responsible for their section of it, was key to his tightly run operation.
The “message” part entailed a broad mix: compelling statements about issues of the day, visually arresting brochures and signs, slogans and songs, pins and publicity, and every other component by which the campaign would be perceived by others. The entire campaign was a medium, and the medium itself was the message.
Once Norman discovered the benefits of in-depth polling, his budget always included money for a market research firm to conduct an initial base study. Astute polling analysis would guide his campaign’s overall strategy. Norman, in contrast to Dalton, studied polling data at length and valued its analysis. This helped balance what organizers believed and hoped with what those they sought to influence were actually thinking. He insisted the polling firm’s principal report directly to him as campaign chairman, to the leader, and to any others the two of them designated. “This provided information to the senior people in charge,” he said, “so that whatever intelligence is important for implementing the campaign can be shared.”
These sophisticated private polls were not the same ones news media publicized. Norman exhorted his campaign organization to never rely on the media’s opinion reports, or be influenced by them to change election strategy. He did not want his well-planned effort thrown off course. He saw thoughtful, deliberate pre-writ planning as “critical for a successful campaign.” Once that plan was settled, he knew that other important elements to implement the overall strategy, such as point-of-purchase materials, logo, and music, “seemed to just fall into place for the campaign.”
His campaign’s secretive war room monitored what opposition parties were saying and doing, to determine if he “needed to respond to some issue that was surfacing” or that “might be important in preparation for a leadership debate.” Yet, while Norman acknowledged the value of tracking activities of the opposition, he “always believed the most successful campaigns were those put together in a way that we had our own game plan and stuck to it.”
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An Atkins campaign operation required plenty of meetings. Though he’d talk at length with individuals one on one, he insisted on regular gatherings where every senior person in the campaign reported on progress.
Such frequently recurring deadlines put an onus on everyone to complete something new for their update. With each report, a sense of excitement was imparted around the table about how the larger campaign was building. The process also enabled Norman to evaluate individual and collective progress.
“While those meetings could be long and tedious,” he said, “they refined the organization in preparation for the writ period” when the official campaign got underway. “At these meetings each person would describe their responsibility and how they were going to implement the work to be done, so that all other members of the committee knew what he or she was doing.” Dubbing this his “shakedown” for a campaign, Atkins’s goal was to “iron out all the areas of difficulty that an individual might have” and “avoid any overlap.” He wanted “everybody singing from the same hymn book.”
Norman devised slogans to embrace this ethos. He’d plaster headquarters with posters, hand out special campaign pins, and issue volunteers coffee mugs imprinted with the slogan “Let’s have fun while getting the job done.” There’d be humorous awards for offbeat campaign accomplishments. He’d ensure regular delivery of piping hot pizzas to headquarters, and host intermitent social events to maintain his team’s cohesiveness for a successful campaign. He wanted all volunteers to experience his approach and “feel good about the campaign and believe their contribution truly important to the ultimate success on election day.”
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Such was the operational approach of the man now solo at the controls, but on the higher level of Norman’s activities, Dalton’s presence continued to be real.
For one thing, Dalton, although more in the background, remained the senior strategist, and when it came to writing speeches and pithy campaign messages, a role he continued to enjoy, nobody was his equal. For another, Dalton had been his mentor. His eclectic pattern, which encompassed most dimensions known to politics, had become the model Norman followed and applied to himself. Any differences in their ways of practising politics were due merely to dissimilarities in character, interests, and talents. Camp’s entry into political life had, from the beginning, incorporated a healthy mixture of public policy and campaign strategizing. His instincts and efforts were not abstract, but practical, because he lived in and absorbed the experiences of a real world. He might one moment be advancing or criticizing specific programs, but the next, writing inspiring speeches for candidates or getting voters to the polls.
At the highest levels of electoral politics, Norman had witnessed Dalton fusing brilliant strategy, writing cogent messages, and intelligently pressing the combative edge of partisan attack. Camp kept abreast of advertising’s changing nature, from his first glimpse of the business in 1948 looking over the shoulders of admen from Montreal in a Fredericton hotel suite, to his triumphant experience with Norman in the Bob Stanfield makeover of 1967.
Dalton had come to understand advertising as sophisticated social engin-eering. French social scientist and philosopher Jacques Ellul offered a radical interpretation of the nature and role of political propaganda, and when an English-language edition of his book appeared in 1965, Dalton devoured it. The goal of contemporary propaganda, discerned Ellul, was not to modify ideas but to provoke action, an insight Dalton had instinctively embraced for years, displayed in his first editorial advertisements in the 1952 New Brunswick election. Of abiding interest to Dalton were the writings of Vance Packard on how economic behaviour and social patterns were influenced by advertising, B.F. Skinner on his methods of conditioning human behaviour, and Marshall McLuhan on how media and humans interact in ways that transform people even though they are not aware of it.
Camp stayed in contact with political and journalist friends in the United States who were absorbing these ideas, and relished discussing the nature of campaigns of persuasion with them. Election campaigns in the United States had never been clean, but these deeper theologies of persuasion and newer practices of propaganda were now escalating fear and smear to greater prominence, aided by television.
Dalton and Norman alike monitored the distasteful effectiveness of “negative advertising” in campaigns, aimed at destroying one’s rival more than promoting one’s own principles and plans. Dalton mused about his sharp “editorial ads” in election campaigns, and the Duncan Macpherson political cartoons he’d initiated, seeing them as somehow part of this escalating trend from lampoon to ridicule to hard negative personal attack.
In the 1950s and 1960s, their blue machine grew ever more potent through application of new technologies to fight political rivals, the domestic political equivalent of an arms race between nations. Most of their new approaches came from the United States, not only because they were convenient imports but because Dalton and Norman, and the like-minded Canadians who gravitated into their orbit, were open to doing so. Camp and Atkins each cherished America’s vibrant diversity and celebrated the country’s dynamic democratic nature. That set them apart from many Conservatives whose traditional disdain for the United States and sense of “Britishness” kept them looking for inspiration to the so-called Mother Country and made them less open to American innovation.
Dalton and Norman happily accepted invitations to events in the United States from a number that country’s political luminaries. Through the casual conversations these opportunities provided, they absorbed large principles and specific details about campaign developments that were proving effective in the United States. The republic next door was a convenient laboratory for experiments in political persuasion. With their open minds, free from anti-American filters, they unhesitatingly imported new U.S. practices into Canadian campaigns.
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The reason they so complemented each other, all their lives, was that each cherished the field in which he excelled without competing against the other. The political machine they created for PC campaigns embodied their separate attributes.
Dalton was happiest waging guerrilla warfare from a cramped hotel room, chain-smoking cigarettes and gulping tar-black coffee, crouched for attack at his typewriter through the dark silence of night: a maestro’s stunning solo performance. Norman thrived on meetings, drawing up and filling in organization charts, long telephone conversations, inventory control, talent scouting, order, and careful attention to all details of planning: the exemplary quartermaster of political campaigns.
Some who tried to differentiate between them focused on physical attributes, such as manner of speaking. Political observer Ron Graham, in an article for Saturday Night, noted how Atkins apologized to others “for not being very articulate” and admitting “that speeches, policy discussions, and big ideas” were not his strengths. Dalton, on the other hand, was a persuasive public speaker. Brian Armstrong was about to quit the PCs and join the Liberals when he heard Dalton speak, and immediately changed his mind. Roy McMurtry, who felt unease about the acrimonious and petty nature of national politics in the 1960s and had voted Liberal, heard Dalton speak in 1965 and right away volunteered to help in his election campaign. Camp exherted this same power over hundreds more, including the vast number of recruits from Toronto’s Junior Board of Trade.
Norman’s great ability, instead, noted the journalist, “is organization: putting together events, keeping an eye on the details, establishing contexts in which the best people available can do whatever they do best.”
The more Graham sought to explain “the great symbiotic partnership” between Camp and Atkins, the more he drew heavily on characteristics extrapolated from their physical dissimilarities, almost to the point of parody: “Camp is natty in a tweed jacket and cravat. His bald head bespeaks power and intelligence. He radiates toughness and self-assurance.” Then, “Next to him Atkins appears rather oafish. He’s heavy and ill at ease, though there’s a grace to his step that explains why the former high-school quarter-back is still a terror on the tennis courts. His face is as big as a harvest moon, his three-piece suit looks more utilitarian than senatorial, and he exudes sheepishness.”
Graham would continue in this vein. Norman “has a grin as wide and heartwarming as a Halloween pumpkin’s, and his soft, woeful voice has a slight lisp of vulnerability.” The writer invoked Nancy McLean, who’d produced TV commercials for the big blue machine, to support his psychological portrait of Atkins. She told Graham, “He’s extremely sensitive and easily hurt.”
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If Dalton was an essential loner who cared little for meetings and could be ill at ease and out of sorts at social events, Norman was a social creature who thrived on getting people together and being part of a closely bonded group.
Given his nature, it seemed as if the Albany Club was a place Sir John A. Macdonald and his wily partisan organizers had created just for Norman. A convenient subway ride downtown from Eglinton Avenue, he’d be “at home” easily and often at 91 King Street East. Dalton’s admission as a member began an infiltration, and then effectively a takeover, of the club by the blue machine. Although Camp remained a frequent attendee, as in other realms it was Atkins who took organizational control.
By the time the two arrived on the scene in the 1960s, the club had functioned as the out-of-Ottawa headquarters of Canada’s Tories for generations, its extensive connections running from well-tended precincts in the heart of downtown Toronto to all parts of Canada. As a hub of Canadian Toryism, the country’s only enduring political club played a role in Canadian public affairs much greater than most people realize. Over many decades, the Albany’s members had been active in producing provincial Tory governments, sending the bulwark of Conservative MPs to Ottawa, and funding party operations across the country. Whatever the issue, no matter whose career, regardless of the year, the Albany Club threaded, as Ross DeGeer observed, “its steady blue line” through Canadian politics.
Increasingly, Dalton and Norman organized their blue machine through the club, at the club, and with members of the club. Everyone in the Albany was already Progressive Conservative, so this was like the egg and the chicken creating each other. For the quarter century between 1971 and 1996, the club’s presidents included Eric Ford, Ross DeGeer, Norman Atkins, Brian Armstrong, Tom MacMillan, Bill Saunderson, Dianne Axmith, Bill McAleer, and Paul Curley, all senior blue machinists, many of them Spades. The Albany’s board of directors and committees were even more generously populated with Norman’s loyal allies and organizers. Unending gatherings in a building honeycombed with private meeting rooms, and a continuous parade of formal dinners in the club’s grand dining room to commemorate Tory milestones and celebrate PC achievements, all acquired gravitas from the high-toned setting. The club fostered the camaraderie and communication Norman believed essential for bonding effective political campaigns and supporting friends.
The clandestine Spades were themselves a central part of the Albany Club. At intervals, a half-dozen of them held the presidency. Once a year, at Norman’s instigation, the Spades would seek even greater privacy in the countryside. The retreats for this band of brothers became anticipated, one said, as “marvellous weekends away together, a group of men who loved politics, enjoyed extended philosophical discussions, lots of laughs, and sport.”
By getting, dissecting, and evaluating good intelligence in this manner, the Spades decided who in the party warranted their support to advance, who should be sidelined, and where money should be seeded to ensure that “bright people” got elected, whether the office was in municipal politics or on the national executive of the Progressive Conservative Party.
Norman knew money was essential to implement actions the Spades felt desirable. They raised the cash among themselves and from an expanded trustworthy group, their discreet wealthy friends. Accountant Saunderson was treasurer, managing the Spades’ bank account, keeping all financial records, and acting as lead fundraiser, ensuring plenty of oil to keep the blue machine running smoothly.
“It was money we would use to help people,” he explained. “There was no tax receipting in those days.” If somebody was running for office at a party annual meeting, either nationally or provincially, Norman would just say, “We are going to need some money for the annual meeting.” The Spades wanted “to make sure the right people, some of the bright people, got elected. We would always cough up money for a good cause.” Such backing helped Michael Meighen, grandson of Conservative prime minister Arthur Meighen, become president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, and David Crombie to become mayor of Toronto, then later an MP and Cabinet minister.
For the blue machine, primarily a backroom operation, secrecy had been the order of the day ever since Dalton became master and commander, initially because admen had to operate separate from the rest of the campaign team, then because he’d become persona non grata within much of the Tory party when he confronted the Diefenbaker conundrum. With his understudy co-pilot Norman taking over the controls, secrecy continued to prevail, thanks to Norman’s innate shyness, his military instinct to keep battle plans from the enemy, and his preference to speak through actions rather than words.
The day of campaign organizers holding press conferences had yet to arrive. Besides, in 1969 there was still too much to do in Tory campaign backrooms to become distracted.