The Official Story
Mackenzie King always meant to be the person who wrote the full story of his life. When he finally retired late in 1948 he told everyone around him that he was going to write his memoirs. After all, Churchill had done it, proving himself to be both a statesman and a man of letters. King dearly would have liked to equal if not best his contemporary. Everyone seemed to expect it. “What a story he could write!” exclaimed the editor of the Ottawa Journal. Even if King did not have it in him to write monumental history and biography, “just the things from memory” would suffice, “recollections that would make old scenes and controversies live again – the sort of thing that so many British statesmen, their armour put off, did so well about memorable happenings at Westminster.” 1
King privately claimed that he had already written his story. It was all there in his diary, just waiting to be revised and presented to the public. While he lived he would bring down a volume of his diary for a specially honoured guest and read them a passage. Look at the detail, the accuracy, he would say. All he had to do was put it in order.2 It is a mistake many writers make. A book in your head, and a book in draft, is not a book on the page. So Mackenzie King found out. Even if his health had not deteriorated, he quailed at the sight of his own papers. One of the few people who could be called King’s good friend, Violet Markham, recalled visiting him in the autumn of 1949. He was supposed to meet her on the American eastern seaboard for a holiday but his bad health meant that she came to him in Ottawa instead. She found him fretting about his will and estate and especially his memoirs. King led her down to his basement and showed her the shelves and filing cabinets stuffed with papers. “As he showed me the material,” she later wrote, “I was conscious of the nervous tension with which even the sight of the papers filled him.”3
Still, there was no shortage of help. His old friend John D. Rockefeller was alive and the Rockefeller Foundation offered the help of its vast resources. Perhaps what King needed was a team of assistants, two or three top people from the civil service or universities and a small cadre of stenographers and office assistants. The Foundation, along with the president of McGill University, Cyril James, made the arrangements, and in early April 1949 the Rockefeller Foundation announced its largest grant of the year (amounting to $100,000) to fund Mackenzie King’s memoir project. Rumours had leaked out suggesting that the American foundation was buying King’s papers, essentially exporting vital documents of national historical importance. King quickly released a statement quieting such concerns. The papers would be donated to the National Archives.4
A small team of assistants began to sort through the mountain of material. His long-time colleague Fred McGregor, who long ago had served as his secretary when he worked for American companies and when he came to Ottawa first as opposition leader and then prime minister, returned to him once again to help him with this, the last of his books. But it was not to be. Throughout the winter and spring of 1950, King’s health deteriorated. A team of nurses came to care for him, with someone present in his home at all times. He hoped that the move to his summer home at Kingsmere would help him feel better. Instead, it was there that he died toward the end of July. The memoirs would never be finished. Others would take charge of his papers, his diary, and his secrets.
It is unclear what he himself would have revealed about his private life and his belief in spiritualism. After King died, it became commonplace for journalists and academics to say what a shame it had been that Mackenzie King never lived long enough to finish his memoirs. It was the journalistic equivalent of saying “I’m sorry for your loss” or “He will be greatly missed.” But the hints we get from the documents King left behind suggest that this was wishful thinking. Perhaps, to put it charitably, we could say that King’s memoirs would have been much like his public speeches: significant as much for what they didn’t say as for what they did, tales of omission and purposeful obfuscation.
We would have learned a great deal about all the good things other people said about Mackenzie King. One of King’s first tasks in his memoir project was to have an assistant compile an extensive list of all the honours he had received. The enterprising assistant kept it all in a neatly organized binder with its own index. Entries included “Clubs, messes, etc. (honorary life membership in or honors from)” and “Freedom of City, honorary citizenship, etc.” An astonishing number of Greek cities named streets and parks after King and the prime minister had kept a record of each. He even recorded those honours he had declined.5
King left a plan for the biography, an outline of what he thought it could offer to readers.6 Under four headings, King broke his story down into the inspirational, the informative, the philosophical, and the secret of his success in government. King felt his story might inspire readers because of how it showed that “privilege in the form of birth, wealth, position, etc., [was] not essential to success in public life.” He failed to mention that, while he may not have had the wealth of a Rockefeller, his family connections were of fundamental importance in his career. Indeed, in other documents, King confessed how his early successes depended heavily on his father’s friends on the University of Toronto’s Board of Governors. This brought him into the orbit of figures like Willison of the Toronto Globe and William Mulock, postmaster general in Wilfrid Laurier’s government and the man who later recruited King as the youngest deputy minister in the federal government.7 It was not clear how the son, let alone the daughter, of a Cape Breton coal miner or an Oshawa autoworker might have been inspired by King’s rise from what may have felt to King like, but what really was not, a very humble station.
But King also thought his story compelling because it showed that “the path to success lies along lines of being true to certain teachings and right activities, e.g. integrity, good-will, initiative, disinterestedness vs. self-seeking.” This last reads especially oddly because King had been an incredibly ambitious young man, a networker of shameless proportions who rarely failed to seek out powerful and influential potential friends. Later, on his trips to England as prime minister, he was known to arrive unannounced and uninvited at the country homes of the British aristocracy. Even King’s friendly biographers in later years noted King’s ambitious self-seeking.8 King’s own memoirs, if finished, would have suggested something much more modest and, frankly, untrue.
The only mystical side trip would have been King’s belief in the pattern of his life. He believed that, when his life was examined as a whole, it showed what he called “the perfect round.” This is a subject that interested others, though it fascinated King more than most: the generational shift from rebel grandfather to prime ministerial grandson. King’s rhetoric could be a trifle lofty, calling this “God’s covenant fulfilled.” But for him it mattered that Queen Victoria had put a bounty on his grandfather’s head, and that another monarch had greeted King himself, the grandson, as head of the Dominion of Canada. The monarch had bestowed on the grandson the Order of Merit, the highest honour possible. (No doubt King’s memoirs would have glossed over the irony that, in accepting the Order of Merit, King in fact went against a measure he claimed to have been so proud of, the outlawing of Canadians’ accepting British titles and honours.) Perhaps even better, when Mackenzie King was unwell in London, the monarch personally visited him at his sickbed. This was, for King, “evidence of divine guidance and direction … The ever-widening circle. The perfect round.” 9
It’s quite possible that, so long as King lived, he would have gotten away with this level of cursory treatment of his life. The other biographies that had been published of King had not attempted to delve deeply into his personal life, and barely scraped the surface of the controversial public decisions he had made. A combination of deference, behind-the-scenes control, and censorship put King out of the reach of many critics. The first biography of King had been written back in the 1920s by Owen Ernest McGillicuddy, a journalist out for an opportunity. His choice of biographical subjects seemed more to do with commercial success than partisan considerations given that he later wrote a biography of R.B. Bennett. His book on King, The Making of a Premier, couldn’t have been friendlier. Saturday Night thought it verged on propaganda and would find a suitable place on the bookshelves of Sunday schools. The book could really have been called How Virtue Was Rewarded. King emerges in its pages as “an ideal school-boy, an exemplary undergraduate, an efficient public servant, a good son and a fond brother, an assiduous worker – strong, unselfish, clear-headed, compassionate – how else could he be fittingly rewarded but by the premiership?”10
Another biography of the 1920s, written by John Lewis of the Toronto Star, was clearly partisan. Lewis was later promoted to the Senate by King. In 1935, in advance of the general election, it seemed a good idea to release another book on King; King went back to the Lewis volume but this time hired Norman Rogers of Queen’s University to update it. What neither King nor Rogers admitted publicly was that Mackenzie King himself was reading and even writing sections of the book himself. It is little wonder that the volume gives a sympathetic explanation of all the tricky parts of King’s past. Rogers himself ran as a Liberal candidate in the 1935 election and after winning soon found himself in the Liberal cabinet. It paid to write or update an homage to the chief.11
The language of deference and statesmanship found in Rogers’s book is worth noting. It appealed to the idea that, when Canadians were finding out about a politician’s life, they were looking for examples of his character. It was political biography as Victorian fiction, looking to see what kind of Dickensian character King came out as. “There has been little opportunity for the younger generation of Canadians to become acquainted with the early life and public service of Mr. King,” wrote Rogers. “It is more important, perhaps, that Canadians generally should be made familiar with these qualities of character, training and experience which have given him an exceptional education and equipment to meet that challenge of a new era in Canadian history.” Statesmen like King were different from ordinary mortals. As the introduction put it: “A modern biographer has said of statesmen that they lay upon posterity the duty of understanding them.” And so it was of King.12
The London Times reporter in Ottawa, John Stevenson, had wanted to pen a critical biography of King. Drafts of it still survive in his private papers deposited with Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. However, they come with a note attached to the front: “Suppressed at request of the London Times.” His bosses didn’t think it was politic to have their man in Canada printing something that could make enemies in Ottawa during the war. Apparently, the publishing houses in Canada went along with this, though the editors themselves were happy to read Stevenson’s work personally. It was one thing to snicker in private, but quite something else to deride a statesman in public.13
When deference didn’t work, King and the Liberals resorted to more strenuous means of ensuring that the public received what they considered to be the proper image of the prime minister. Robert Rumilly, a French refugee living in Quebec during the war, wanted to write a biography of King. While he initially intended it to be praiseworthy, he changed his mind when he learned that another author, Emil Ludwig, was granted access to the prime minister though Rumilly was not. Rumilly turned against King. He added a final scathing chapter to his draft and negotiated with a publisher for the book to be printed in Quebec. When the Liberals learned of the book and of its unfriendly final chapter, they made sure no one would see it. They approached Rumilly and his publisher with an offer they couldn’t refuse, buying up all 15,061 of the printed copies of the book as well as all rights to its further publication. The wartime public only ever saw Emil Ludwig’s small romantic volume on King as a heroic, gentle, thoughtful wartime leader.14
Even when King’s secrets were out in plain sight, the Canadian public seemed unwilling to pry. In 1949 H. Reginald Hardy, at the time a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, wrote a full-length biography of Mackenzie King. The former prime minister was retired, and this could have been an opportunity to pry into the more controversial aspects of his life. But this wasn’t what Hardy had to offer. In fact, he consulted with King and even omitted certain sections that had concerned him. These had to do with King’s friendship with Joan Patteson, the woman closest to him during his time as prime minister but also the wife of Godfroy Patteson, a local Ottawa banker. The section itself was innocuous but, even in raising the relationship, King no doubt felt that it opened him to gossip.15
Even more telling of the deference of the age: Hardy’s biography actually exposed King’s interest in psychic research and yet he did so in a seemingly innocuous fashion that no one deemed fit to follow up on. Midway through the biography Hardy addressed what he called the “King legend.” By this he meant the stories that his contemporaries told of King, especially by the late 1930s, after King had been in office for a number of years. “The stories they told!” enthused Hardy. “They left no corner of his public or private life unexplored.” This may have been true, but the way they told the stories mattered a good deal and Hardy is a case in point. A few pages later Hardy addressed King’s “religious side,” which, he said, was “highly developed.” Hardy went on to explain how King began each day in contemplation, reading the Bible or some inspiring text. “King’s views on life, death, and the hereafter are very definite and clear,” wrote Hardy. King very much believed in life after death and in the “survival of the human personality.”
Yet it went beyond that, though Hardy was slightly coy in explaining how much further. He discussed how King’s connections with loved ones who had departed this life was closer than for others, perhaps because King never married and never had children. King firmly believed that the departed continued to influence his life. The book writes of King’s interest in “psychic research,” stating that, in his view, it is a “branch of scientific study which … cannot be overlooked by any thinking man.” Hardy then notes King’s connection to the late Oliver Lodge, a noted spiritualist. This could have raised eyebrows. So too could the subsequent extended quotation from a biography of the late British prime minister Arthur James Balfour, who had been a member of the Society for Psychical Research. This explained how Balfour had been drawn toward questions of eternal life but also, revealingly, toward the possibility of being recognized by those on the other side. Hardy quotes King as saying that “my interest in psychical phenomena and my views on life after death couldn’t be better expressed.” 16
In other words, even while King still lived, a friendly biography had already exposed King’s interest in psychic research. It would not have taken much for a slightly more inquisitive and less deferential journalist to take the same information and write an altogether different account, one that questioned the prime minister’s spiritualistic activities. Yet this never happened, at least not yet. For the moment, deference reigned. King could keep his secrets, even if this meant that they remained hidden in plain sight.
King’s literary executors prided themselves on their judgment. Good Liberals all, they represented the apotheosis of what sound government in Canada had become at mid-century – sound Liberal government, that is. They came from the top echelons of the Canadian civil service. “Ottawa Men,” some would later call them.17 They represented an era in Canadian government when the civil service grew in size and reputation as never before. During the Depression and then especially during the Second World War, the government took on more and more complicated tasks, controlling everything from the price of butter to social-welfare programs and even what products private factories could produce. Sitting atop this growing heap of possible government chaos, smart, competent, ambitious men tried to ride the Canadian state in the right direction. They had pushed aside the partisan appointees who usually staffed the civil service and in their place tried to create an efficient government of experts.
Of the literary executors, only Fred McGregor could have been called King’s friend. McGregor had worked with King decades earlier as a private secretary. He had gone on to a career of his own, managing the industrial-relations bureaucracy in Canada. By the end of the 1940s, McGregor chaired the Combines Commission, a Mackenzie King–inspired creation that regulated business competition. When King retired and looked about for someone to organize his papers, he turned to his old secretary. McGregor was loyal and efficient, even if he was rumoured to once have angrily thrown a book across the room at his boss. McGregor had just the kind of quiet, self-effacing personality that King demanded.18
J.W. Pickersgill was the most political choice. No man blurred the line between the civil service and partisan politics more than Pickersgill. Jack, as he was known to friends, joined External Affairs in 1937 after finishing first overall in the national civil-service entrance exams. Mackenzie King immediately seconded this former Rhodes scholar and historian to work on his own staff. King was both prime minister and his own minister of external affairs, and he had a habit of cherry picking the best and brightest from the foreign service, although not many lasted. King demanded much, and friends told Pickersgill that he would be back in his department soon.19
Instead, Pickersgill soon became King’s most trusted adviser. He had a knack for knowing just what King wanted. Perhaps it was what the historian Harry Ferns called his “chameleon character,” the way he took on the mannerisms of those around him. Even in his days at university, the student paper presciently referred to him as “the power behind the throne.” By the time of King’s death, Pickersgill had switched over easily into the St Laurent administration. The advice in Ottawa was to “clear it with Jack” before proposing an idea to the prime minister. Most days he could be found lunching with one cabinet minister or another, and many said that Pickersgill was at least as powerful as anyone in Ottawa save the prime minister himself.20
Another literary executor, Norman Robertson, managed to wed himself more skilfully to the civil-service ideal. When Robertson first entered External Affairs in 1929, he, too, was seconded by King to the prime minister’s office, but only for a brief time. Robertson returned to External Affairs, eventually heading the division as undersecretary in 1941. King trusted Robertson and in 1948 made him clerk of the Privy Council, the senior civil servant in the government. The tall, lanky Robertson shared many of King’s beliefs, though like many he respected King far more than he liked him. Still, when King named Robertson a literary executor, Robertson carried out his duties with all of the careful efficiency that he took to his other posts. Indeed, he would eventually be the literary executor most concerned with guarding King’s privacy.21
It was only logical that King also chose W. Kaye Lamb, the new national archivist. Hailing from British Columbia, Lamb was a scholar-administrator who already impressed observers. He would go on to shape profoundly the national archives and library, dramatically expanding the collections and leading the move to the impressive new building on Wellington Street in a monumental row alongside the Supreme Court and Parliament. As King’s papers were destined for the archives in the end, Lamb would have much to do with them anyway.22
These, then, were the four men King relied upon to guard his literary legacy: Ottawa men and, after their own fashion, Liberals. To them went the task of determining what later generations of Canadians would see of King’s private and public world. They had a dual job – to reveal and to hide, to open up some parts of Mackenzie King’s great life and to suppress others, albeit quietly. Like theatre promoters, they put together the show that would be the life of Mackenzie King, statesman. But, as with all such productions, a great deal happened at the edge of the curtains that the audience was not supposed to see.
These men were not radicals and they were not likely to reinvent the methods of public remembrance for a man like King, who, after all, was not one for radical change himself. Their first and main job consisted of erecting the proper monument for King. In his will, King left a great sum of money and property to the government of Canada, including his residences in Ottawa and at Kingsmere in the Gatineau hills just outside the capital, both of which would be turned into museums. The literary executors turned their attention to erecting what is often the most enduring monument to a public man, the few inches of space devoted to him on bookshelves in libraries and private homes across the country. It is the biography, a thick hard-backed tome of steady prose and careful research, often simply called “The Life.” If Mackenzie King couldn’t write his own version, this left his literary executors with the task of deciding what kind of a life would be written, who would write it, and what secrets it would and would not reveal.
The list of potential biographers they considered reads like a who’s who of Canadian men of letters at mid-century. It included the nation’s great journalists Bruce Hutchison and Blair Fraser, the writer Hugh MacLennan, literary critic E.K. Brown, historians like Arthur Lower and Frank Underhill, and the political scientist Robert MacGregor Dawson. Everyone agreed that the ideal candidate would be “a Canadian of the stature of John Morley or Robert Sherwood.” John Morley had written a biography of King’s idol W.E. Gladstone. Indeed, King’s own copy of Morley’s Gladstone was well-thumbed. The playwright Robert Sherwood had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Roosevelt and Hopkins, a dramatic and intimate account of Roosevelt’s foreign policy during the Second World War. A Canadian like this would be ideal but, McGregor lamented, “Where shall we find him?”23
They seriously considered the prose dynamo Bruce Hutchison. The author of The Unknown Country, Hutchison would have written a compelling book. (Indeed, as we will see, he didn’t give up the idea of writing on King.) But the literary executors chose safely. They selected MacGregor Dawson, a serious scholar, a Nova Scotian transplanted to Ontario, and a thoughtful middle-of-the-road liberal intellectual. Dawson’s book The Government of Canada wasn’t titled to inspire, but, as the Montreal Star reported, it displayed “a lightness of touch and a trace of somewhat sardonic humour.” Dawson could be trusted, and he could at least inject his prose with the kind of wry wit appreciated by the Ottawa Men themselves.24
The Montreal Star considered Dawson a lucky man, winning what it called “the most entrancing job of his generation.” In this they weren’t far wrong. He would be paid an annual salary of $10,000, almost twice what he had earned at the University of Toronto. He would be helped by a team of research assistants and stenographers. But the paper couldn’t have been more mistaken on how long the job would take, predicting that Dawson would finish in about two years. In fact, Dawson would work for the next eight years before dying in 1958, several months before publication of the first volume. Two more official biographers would take over after he died. Several more books would be published over the next two and a half decades, the last one in 1976. Even then, King’s official biography would never be finished.
That, though, was all in the future. By late 1950, the literary executors had selected their man. Then began an even more difficult task: figuring out what to do with King’s papers.
Mackenzie King didn’t throw things away. He left his house stuffed with letters and notes, memoranda and reports. Whole rooms in the basement of Laurier House, his Ottawa residence, now a museum, were devoted to filing cabinets. He never seemed to have even thrown away a Christmas card. Then there was his diary. Volume after volume sat on shelves to be either read or destroyed. King had first taken up his diary as a young student at the University of Toronto in 1893. He wrote in purpose-made diary books, the kind that contained useful bits of information at the front and back, important facts about Canada like the names of all the members of the House of Commons. Each day had a short space in which to write. Soon King was filling up the entire allotted space and writing along the edges in between. Few diarists had King’s stamina. There were only a few years in his life where he lapsed from his daily ritual. Every day, for almost fifty-seven years, King recorded his life. In the mid-1930s, back as prime minister after the R.B. Bennett interregnum, he found that he had so much to say he wanted a secretary to take it all down. He began dictating his diary, and his accounts and confessions ballooned in size. There was so much to say, so much to record, of matters high and low, of policy and daily minutiae. The diary books, kept in binders, found their place on the shelves next to the earlier bound volumes. In all, the diary comprised almost thirty thousand pages and spanned more than half a century from 1893 right up until three days before his death in July 1950.
For King’s official correspondence and other government records, the team from the Public Archives were already at work and could simply carry on as they had while King still lived. But the private papers and correspondence were another matter. These had their complications, including correspondence with his family and with a number of women friends that might have contained surprises for the public. The biggest surprise would have been King’s records detailing his psychical research. No one outside a tiny circle either knew or at least publicly spoke of this. There was a great deal of these records – binders full of transcripts, books on occult matters, correspondence with mediums and fellow believers. All required some kind of decision, and likely destruction.
As for the diary itself, King had seemed to decide its fate. The newspapers reported on the sections in King’s will that said the diary was to be destroyed except for the portions he specifically indicated should be preserved. When journalists enquired about this last clause, they heard from sources at Laurier House unofficially that King had not indicated that any parts of the diary were to be kept. Too bad, some said. A lost opportunity to get to know the inside story of Canadian politics, and the real life of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister.25
Except it wasn’t quite so straightforward. It all depended on the meaning of the word “indicated.” Behind the scenes, the literary executor Fred McGregor and King’s former private secretary J. Edouard Handy (to whom King had dictated his diary) weren’t so sure. Both knew just how extensive King’s diary keeping had been. They also knew just how valuable it would be to anyone trying to write the biography of the former prime minister. It would be a shame if they were forced to burn these vital historic documents.26
Handy and McGregor went to the other executors with their ideas. They claimed that, even though King had not managed to mark in writing which sections of his diary he wanted preserved, he had spoken his wishes to them. Some entries could not be made public or preserved, particularly where he had written down discussions with other heads of state. The same applied to entries that would hurt the feelings of someone who still lived. Handy thought that there weren’t too many of these, but nonetheless, they should be suppressed. Then there were the purely private matters, things only King could have cared about, including his interest in psychical research. Such diary entries, they said, would have to be handled with a great deal of care. But, aside from these delicate matters, would it be possible to preserve the rest of the diary, at least for the writing of King’s official biography?
To seek advice, the literary executor Jack Pickersgill wrote to Prime Minister Louis St Laurent asking if the Department of Justice could provide an interpretation of the law regarding literary executors and the specific way in which the instructions from the deceased could be interpreted. St Laurent agreed and, within a matter of weeks, the deputy minister of justice had written back with a detailed assessment on the legal precedents. Most importantly, the Department of Justice thought the meaning of the word “indicated” could be interpreted liberally to include verbal instructions.27 Essentially the literary executors could use their own judgment based on what they broadly understood King’s wishes to be. In other words, if you want something destroyed, do it yourself before you die.
The legal advice opened the door, but it remained to be seen whether King’s literary executors would walk through it. Not everyone was pleased with the idea of seeming to go against King’s written instructions. King’s closest friend, Joan Patteson, thought that the executors should destroy the diary books. She said that King had made her promise to ensure that the executors “burned them without reading – and while I saw the need perhaps of reading them, the dying request was very sacred to me.’28 Patteson might not have read the diary herself, but aside from Handy she would have known more than anyone else what it might contain. Norman Robertson, too, considered King’s written instructions sacred. As the executors sat down to decide what to do, it was Robertson who kept urging caution. It might very well be, as Fred McGregor kept pointing out, that King had planned to use the diary to write his memoirs. Robertson, though, wanted some more precise indication by King, perhaps to be found in the diary, before he would concede that it should be preserved forever or used in and quoted from in the official biography.29
For this was the debate now upon them. McGregor, with Handy at his side, pointed out the great value to history and to the nation of King’s papers. Against them was the argument of caution and privacy, of keeping to King’s strict advice. The executors debated back and forth through the early 1950s and onward. In the short term, though, they reached a compromise. Robertson gave his assent to allowing McGregor and Handy to begin to transcribe parts of the diary for use by the official biographer. They initially hoped to separate out the sections of the diary that King would have wanted to be kept from those that he would have wanted to remain private. It didn’t help that King’s handwriting was so difficult to read. Fred McGregor was one of the few to manage the task. So he set himself up, with a Dictaphone, in a room on the second floor of Laurier House. Handy would also help, and they employed a stenographer. They would try to create a sanitized version of the Mackenzie King diary.
It soon became clear that they couldn’t manage to keep apart the public and the private King, the diary that he would have wanted others to read from the one he would have wanted to be secret. They removed some sections from the diary, leaving a note in each instance. They claimed, though, that it soon became almost impossible to divide the diary in this way. What they did omit, they said, was inconsequential, although no one has ever gone through the different versions of the diary to be sure.
In a room beside theirs on the second floor at Laurier House worked Robert MacGregor Dawson, the official biographer. Around them, King’s old house had become a museum whose curator was J. Edouard Handy himself. Handy helped McGregor with the diary transcription and otherwise oversaw the museum. It made for an odd mix. A team of King’s assistants was secluded on the second floor working on the Official Life while visitors shuffled respectfully through the rest of the house, peeking into corners and learning about the curios on display in the private home of a very public man.
