14

To Open or Not to Open

Although the literary executors had passed ownership of King’s papers to the Public Archives of Canada in 1964, they nonetheless maintained control over access to certain papers until 1975 (twenty-five years after King’s death). It was only in the mid-1970s that all control over King’s papers would pass to the archives. Further, in setting up the regulations for the 1964 handover, the executors decided to keep back both the diary and the special spiritualism notebooks. They retained complete control over what would happen with them. Also, anyone who wanted to consult other King documents, including those items less than twenty-five years old, or the family papers, needed to write to the literary executors and request special permission.

Yet, as Mackenzie King and the King era faded into history, historians, political scientists, and others increasingly wanted to write on the topic. They had heard about King’s voluminous papers and about his extensive diary. As more volumes of Pickersgill’s Mackenzie King Record came out in the 1960s, academics wanted to see first-hand the valuable material in the diary. They heard through word of mouth that some scholars did have access to the original diary and they wrote to the literary executors asking for the same treatment. It was largely Pickersgill who was the contact man. It didn’t help that the literary executors made arbitrary decisions about who could and could not receive special access, all the while pretending that they were being fair, open, and equal to all. When the executors denied access to one young academic who had studied under the military historian C.P. Stacey, the student wrote back with polite indignation: “It is public knowledge that access has been granted to historians not working on the official biography or the Record.” The executors could claim that Stacey had been granted access in his capacity as official military historian. But they stretched this boundary on several occasions, essentially opening up the diaries to those scholars whom they deemed to be safely Liberal and denying access to those they could not be sure about – such as the young academic writing on the history of Canadian-Soviet relations or a young Peter Ward who was researching the King government’s actions toward Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.1

The research assistants who had worked on the official biography became impatient too. They had been allowed to take notes on the King papers as part of their work, and an implicit part of the agreement was that they could use this material for their own work – but not until after the official biography was published. Yet the death of one biographer after seven years on the job and the long delays in publishing the other volumes meant that these men’s careers were zooming past and they could not publish important research. James Eayrs, who had been hired as an external-relations expert, and who was the most demanding of the assistants, simply published the material anyway.²

Eayrs’s own work in the 1950s and 1960s helped to expose the behind-the-scenes functioning of Canada’s international diplomacy. When the historian Kenneth McNaught reviewed Eayrs’s volume on Canada’s entry into the Second World War (published in 1966), he noted that “what’s new in the Eayrs account comes largely from the King papers.” What it revealed was not complimentary to those at the top. The story Eayrs told, with access to these documents, “is one of timidity, wishful thinking and downright misconceptions.” There were important lessons for “the present generation. No one today doubts that a democracy obtains something less than the whole truth about the principles on which its foreign policy is conducted. It’s worth learning just how little the ordinary citizen knows about confusion at the top.”³

By the early 1970s, the pressure was mounting to make a final decision about the last of King’s papers. The passage of time helped. More and more of those mentioned in the diary were now dead. The events the diary recounted were becoming history. Although in the early 1970s the Canadian government was still holding to the “thirty-year rule” in deciding which government documents to release, that rule was increasingly anachronistic. Both the British and American governments had already released key government documents dealing with the war years. So the excuse that King’s papers contained state secrets that might impinge upon the secrecy of other countries was itself a less tenable position, and a less real concern. The reasons for secrecy were diminishing.

Although nothing changed immediately, Norman Robertson’s death in 1968 was a decisive moment in deciding the fate of King’s papers. Robertson had been the strongest voice among the literary executors favouring destruction. While an archivist like W. Kaye Lamb would implicitly have valued Neatby’s arguments about openness,4 and while Fred McGregor had long seen the significance of the diary, their arguments had always come up against Robertson’s sense of duty. It might be that the legal advice from the Department of Justice had opened the way to using King’s diary for the official biography, but the executors still needed to keep King’s obvious wishes for privacy in mind. With Robertson’s death, these arguments lost their most compelling advocate. The other executors would continuously invoke Robertson’s views, feeling a duty to him as much as to King, but Robertson himself would not be there to make his case.

As early as 1970, Pickersgill wrote to a scholar hinting that there might be a change in the literary executors’ position on the diary. He couldn’t promise anything, but some more open policy could be in the offing. The fateful meeting occurred on Christmas Eve, 1971. It was the one time when all of the literary executors could be in Ottawa at the same time. Lamb was flying in from British Columbia where he was living in retirement. He wrote to Pickersgill, saying, “My feelings about the chief matter we must discuss have firmed up, just as yours have done. Let us hope that they will more or less coincide!” There is no direct record of what happened that night but it seems that their views did coincide. A few days later, Lamb and Pickersgill wrote to confirm the details. The diary would be opened in full.⁵

In the first instance, the literary executors had decided to allow access to Mackenzie King’s diary until the end of 1931. Use of the diary would be unrestricted for those engaged in historical or other research. This covered the diary up to the end of the period dealt with in Neatby’s most recently published volume. Once Neatby finished his part of the official biography (taking King’s life to 1939), the executors would open access to the rest of the diary at that point, following the thirty-year rule. That is, researchers would be able to view volumes of the diary thirty years after King had penned them. So everything up to the 1945 diary would be opened up on 1 January 1976, and so on. In anticipation of possible criticism that they were neglecting their duty toward King, to those who might recall that King’s will had seemed clear that the diary was to be destroyed, Pickersgill explained: “In making this presentation, the Literary Executors have taken careful account of the terms of Mackenzie King’s Will, but have reached the conclusion that, they are acting in a manner which will best serve Mackenzie King’s memory and the cause of historical truth.” 6

This was true but incomplete. In fact, they also decided to open up the diary in part out of fear of what would happen if they did not. The man who created this fear was Jean-Louis Daviault – the man who had photographed the diary years earlier and who still claimed to have bootleg copies. Daviault was still very much on the minds of the literary executors.⁷ As late as 1968, Lamb received a phone call from a Canadian Press journalist telling him that “his friend” had again offered to sell copies of the Mackenzie King diary to some journalists.⁸ In writing to his fellow literary executor about the decision of whether to open up to the public or destroy the original diary, Lamb reasoned: “The existence of the bootleg microfilm copy is a further complication; I don’t see how we can destroy the original and thereby give the copy an immensely greater value.”⁹ So the little-known stolen-diary incident from the mid-1950s now played its own role in swaying the executors to openness.

This didn’t mean that they had neglected their duty to King in total, or that they had forgotten Norman Robertson’s concerns. They decided that the series of spiritualism binders containing King’s handwritten notes of his meetings with spiritualist mediums would be destroyed – though they wouldn’t destroy them until after Neatby had finished his volume. Lamb urged Pickersgill to be firm with Wilfrid Smith of the archives on the binders. They “have never been considered to be part of either the Mackenzie King Papers or the personal diaries … We gave Norman Robertson a definite promise that they would be destroyed, at the latest when the third volume of the biography is completed. Meanwhile they should be sealed, and no one should have access to them.”¹⁰

When Neatby had published his first volume back in 1963, Lamb had written to him requesting one change – the only change the literary executors ever directly asked that he make to the biography. Neatby had referenced the spiritualism binders in a footnote. Lamb asked that the reference be deleted. “My three fellow Literary Executors are firm in their resolve that these notes are to be destroyed,” he had written in 1963.11 Almost a decade later, they held to this resolve. They had promised Norman Robertson to destroy at least these parts of the King diary, and they would keep their promise – even when everything else was to go onto the free market of historical inquiry.

Once they made their decision, they moved quickly to implement it. Early in the new year, the archives sent out a press release, which repeated a statement made in Pickersgill’s letter to Smith about the literary executors being motivated by a desire to keep King’s wishes in mind and by a determination to act “in a manner which will best serve Mackenzie King’s memory and the cause of historical truth.”¹²

In the winter of 1971, one of the coldest and snowiest on record, it became open season on Mackenzie King’s past, at least until 1931. The University of Toronto Press quickly pressed the literary executors to be even more open and to publish a copy of the diary on microfiche. Lamb had some doubts about the wisdom of this move. “Making it available anywhere to anybody does go a little beyond my intention,” he wrote, “but I suppose the Archives would wish to microfilm it anyway, to save wear and tear on the original, and the end result would be much the same.” ¹³

The requests kept trickling in for access to the diary after 1931 and Pickersgill stuck to the same arbitrary policy of who could and could not see it. But, on the whole, the literary executors were content with their decision. They stipulated the final conditions on King’s other papers, setting dates into the next century for access to King’s financial and spiritualism papers. There had been no major media controversy about their decision – no dramatic series of stories on King’s secret life. The deadline for the final transfer of King’s papers had always been 1 January 1975 and late in 1974, as this deadline approached, Pickersgill felt that there had been no adverse repercussions to the earlier release of the diary and he was inclined to be generous. He wrote to Wilfrid Smith of the archives (who was now a literary executor himself, having replaced Fred McGregor after the latter’s death in 1972), saying that he personally would be agreeable to opening up King’s diary to researchers after 1931 on a thirty-year basis starting in the new year. The other literary executors agreed. Neatby still had not published his final volume but he did not want to stand in the way of opening up access to the papers to other researchers.14 With this decision made, the archives set in motion the usual press release making the announcement. It was the second time they had opened up a large trove of King’s diaries. The floodgates had already opened, and to little effect. What could go wrong?