The Cover-Up Is the Story
The Security Service came to tea in August 1972. It wasn’t the first espionage-related social call for W. Kaye Lamb. Over the years, the former head of Canada’s Public Archives and Mackenzie King literary executor had entertained RCMP Security Service officers from time to time. Usually he offered his advice as best he could. This time, though, they brought him some information: Jean-Louis Daviault was dead.1 Lamb called it a “sad end to a sad story” – only it wasn’t quite an ending. For the Security Service was still very much interested in Daviault and the Mackenzie King diaries and the secrets they might reveal.
In the 1970s, the public pounced on authority figures who were suspected of covering up secret scandals and withholding information. The fixation on cover-ups ranged from the real-life scandals of Richard Nixon to the Hollywood fantasies of films like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, where the danger lurks below the surface of the ocean and the local authorities try to prevent the news from spreading and scaring off tourists. To read the newspapers of the 1970s is to immerse yourself in a world of suspicion and intrigue where constituted authority ought not to be trusted.
The story of Mackenzie King and his diary wound its chameleonlike way through these cultural trends. King could easily stand in, as we have seen, for a public authority figure that hadn’t been the man he had publicly professed to be. Yet it went slightly deeper than that – and along a more convoluted route. There were secrets within secrets and the RCMP Security Service seemed to think that Jean-Louis Daviault and the King diary could help them make sense of it all.
For years, the RCMP had been checking the loyalty of high-level civil servants in an operation they code-named “Operation Featherbed.” Over the years the top-secret files of the same name grew to include the names of many individuals, even men who held the highest office in the land, such as Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. The premise behind Operation Featherbed rested on solid foundations. Soviet moles working secretly and undetected had risen to prominent positions in the governments of Canada’s allies, the United States and Great Britain. In fact, the moles infiltrated not only government agencies but the security establishments of those countries – the very entities meant to ferret out such spies. The names became synonymous with intrigue and Cold War deception – those like Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt in Britain and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States. If it happened in the United States and Britain, why not Canada?2
When the Canadian diplomat Herbert Norman committed suicide by throwing himself off the top of a Cairo building in 1957, the RCMP was convinced that he did so out of guilt. Norman had long been considered by the Security Service to be a possible Soviet mole within External Affairs but he had been cleared by his civilian bosses in earlier investigations. The FBI and sympathetic anti-communist American politicians repeatedly questioned Norman’s loyalty and, for them, this is what had precipitated his suicide. Opinion within Canada was divided, with many criticizing the way American hysteria had brought down an innocent Canadian. The Mounties, for their part, responded to the Norman case by creating Operation Featherbed to keep track of other possible Soviet sympathizers who were working at the highest levels of the Canadian government.
In the end, the Mounties’ Cold War logic would be proven wrong. The most prominent Canadian spies often weren’t ideologically motivated. They did it for money, something that the Mounties did not overlook but that they did not fully appreciate either. Operation Featherbed never uncovered a top mole in the Canadian establishment. But over the next fifteen years the operation’s files stayed open and were occasionally the basis of a number of investigations. The files grew, as security files did, and took on a life of their own. Names were added to “indices,” backgrounds were checked, and leads followed up. One trail of evidence led to Mackenzie King’s literary executors.
In the summer of 1969, two RCMP agents asked to meet with two of King’s literary executors, W. Kaye Lamb and Jack Pickersgill. They had read parts of Pickersgill’s Mackenzie King Record, the published version of excerpts of King’s diary. They sat down in Pickersgill’s office at the Canadian Transport Commission and laid out their case for why he should help them in their search for spies in the top echelons of the Canadian government. The RCMP thought that Pickersgill could assist them given “his long association with the country’s political elite” and “his actual presence in the Prime Minister’s office during the war years.” They wanted to develop Pickersgill as a source. They also wanted access to the Mackenzie King diary, which was not at that point open to the public.3
The agents were taking up an old idea within the Service – that there had been a cover-up following the Gouzenko investigation. When the Soviet embassy cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko had defected in September 1945, bringing with him evidence of Soviet spy networks in Canada, the Canadian government initially kept the defection secret. Mackenzie King busied himself meeting with his British and American allies while, behind the scenes, the RCMP investigated the documents and the names they contained. It was only in the spring of 1946, after an American radio program leaked news of Gouzenko’s defection, that the Canadian government admitted to the scandal and quickly rounded up suspects. What if a Soviet mole had known about the defection before it became public? What if they had taken action to tidy up their own connections, hiding them from later discovery? This was the suspicion that had lingered on among the RCMP Security Service.
Their meeting with Pickersgill and Lamb gave some support for this theory. It was then that the agents learned that a portion of the diary was missing. It wasn’t just any portion. It was King’s diary for the final part of 1945, from 10 November until the end of December, the exact period when King held high-level meetings to decide what to do about the spy ring. This seemed especially suspicious. If that portion of the diary contained sensitive information about Soviet moles within the Canadian government, what better way to cover it up than to steal the diary? Alternatively, what if someone had stolen the diary to learn about King’s secret meetings? In either case, the Security Service decided that the matter had to be investigated.
The agents left pleased with their meeting. They found Pickersgill to be cordial and helpful, even if he confessed to being “of the school which may hold some skepticism as to what secrets Canada may hold.” He agreed to help them again in the future. The agents clearly liked that Pickersgill confessed to always feeling a bit dubious about the National Film Board, long a dumping-boy of the RCMP. Both Lamb and Pickersgill “felt that the C.B.C. policy which is so blatantly anti-American cannot be a mere accident.” As ever, the cultural departments of government elicited the most skepticism among Cold Warriors.4
Several years later, the Security Service returned to the King diary when an agent seems to have read the journalist Peter Dempson’s memoir Assignment Ottawa, his account of his time as a reporter in the parliamentary press gallery. Dempson recounted an anecdote about how someone had stolen copies of Mackenzie King’s diary and offered them for sale to the Toronto Telegram. The book was published in 1968 but it was four years later, early in 1972, that a Security Service officer visited the Public Archives to inquire about Dempson’s revelations.5
The Mounties seemed to have thought Dempson was referring to the same issue of the missing King diary covering the Gouzenko years. But in meeting with Lamb they realized that this episode referred to the separate situation in which it was believed that Jean-Louis Daviault had stolen copies of the diary. Lamb recounted the Daviault story to them. He explained that no one else in the archives, aside from himself, knew about the incident at the time and that the RCMP had investigated but could not find enough information to charge Daviault. Lamb also told them about the incident only a few years earlier, in 1968, when a reporter had said that Daviault was again offering the diary for sale. The fact that Daviault also had access as part of his job to minutes of cabinet meetings and other Privy Council materials struck the Mounties as significant.6 Over the next year, Daviault became a priority for Operation Featherbed.
Unfortunately, at this point, the operation’s files become frustratingly unclear. Many portions of text have been covered over to omit the names of individuals and, in some cases, whole pages of information are missing. All we can see is a blank page. What is clear is that the Security Service thought that Daviault might have had links to other moles and to someone in the Russian intelligence service either directly or via a go-between.
The Mounties couldn’t speak to Daviault in person. In May 1971 Daviault had checked into the Holiday Inn on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa and never checked out. Hotel staff later found Daviault in his room, dead of an overdose of barbiturates. It seemed to be a suicide but the Mounties suspected something more. An agent recorded that Daviault’s shoes and tie were missing when his body was found. Perhaps this was “important,” they mused.7 They wondered if anything might have driven him to emotional desperation and instability. They checked their records to see which Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) agents had been in Ottawa and especially around the Dalhousie Street area in 1971. They were in touch with other parts of the RCMP in an attempt to track down the copies of the King diary that Daviault might have had in his possession. They interviewed his former friends and acquaintances, obtained his employment files and his death certificate. They even discovered information about his recent medical history, including the doctors he had been seeing, and why.8
Although the many blanked-out sections of the files don’t allow us to know why this mattered so much to the Security Service, it’s clear that, for a time, they considered the matter of great importance. On the recovery of the diary, they wrote that there was a “degree of urgency” to the process. By September 1972, A.M. Barr of the Service thought that “there is a very good possibility that Jean DAVIAULT was the agent, or at least the source of the information for the agent, [blank].” Daviault had “access” and “motive.” Some unidentified person, Barr said, was “on the scene and no doubt, [blank] knew that DAVIAULT was desperately trying to find a buyer for the documents which he had in his possession.” They needed to do more homework and establish what connections there were between Daviault and this unnamed agent. “My personal feelings are,” wrote Barr, “that DAVIAULT was somehow involved in this matter and is in some way the key to the puzzle.” Ultimately, the Mounties could prove nothing. Corporal D.L. McKinnon agreed with Barr that Daviault was likely key to the whole puzzle but, he pointed out, “there is already a great deal of circumstantial evidence but not conclusive unrefutable [sic] evidence.” The Featherbed files become more sparse at this point, though an unnamed Mountie remarks regarding another investigation in 1974 that “I would not want us to loose [sic] sight of DAVIAULT, as I feel that he is the original source of the info.”9
The Mounties might not have lost sight of Daviault, but it’s difficult to tell. There is no additional information in the files indicating that they discovered that Daviault had been an agent or a go-between selling information to the Soviets. Yet the King diary itself would pop up in public discussion of the RCMP at several points over the 1970s and early 1980s. It emerged, though, in reference not to King’s secrets but to the secrets of the RCMP and the government itself. For in the mid-1970s, even as the RCMP Security Service continued its Cold War investigations, the force came under scrutiny. This suspicion about the RCMP was one manifestation of a wider trend, as Canadians came to ask hard questions about their government and its secrets.
The Canadian political tradition was supposed to be deferential. In the post-war decades, commentators frequently said that what distinguished Canada from the United States was Canada’s Tory tradition, particularly its British heritage and its respect for authority. This was supposed to be as much a mark of French Canada as of English Canada. Canadian heroes were not revolutionaries or rebels. The great line from the Canadian constitution (the British North America Act until 1982) was “Peace, order and good government.” Canadians were more lawful than Americans; they had settled the West with the Mounties and law and order and not with warfare; Canadians were more open to government interference in the economy and less critical of elites. Yet, even as political scientists, historians, and writers mythologized this more deferential Canada, others were busy undermining the semi-solid foundations of this myth.10
The usual way of explaining the growing distrust of politicians in the 1960s and 1970s is to blame two American phenomena: Watergate and the Vietnam War, both of which Canadians followed avidly. The revelations of wrongdoing in connection with these two events were clear proof of the manner in which politicians at the highest level lied to the public and engaged in base and illegal acts. They weren’t who they said they were. Even if one didn’t disagree with the bombing of Cambodia, the mere fact that the Nixon administration had tried to keep this major act of war a secret from its own people demonstrated what the public might not know of the most basic facts of the current political situation. And so it was with the dirty tricks of the Nixon administration that were unravelled in the Watergate scandal. A burglary at the head offices of the national Democratic Party went from being a minor local story to a national crisis as it became increasingly plain that the smell of corruption emanated from the Oval Office itself. At the centre of it were two investigative journalists determined to ferret out the secret truth that was being denied them. Ultimately, Nixon was forced to release secret transcripts of conversations in the Oval Office, the infamous White House tapes, that not only showed that he had ordered the burglary but also revealed Nixon to be much less than “presidential.” Americans may have expected something high and noble in their presidents, but the White House tapes revealed Nixon to be foul-mouthed, petty, and corrupt. In the standard accounts of these years in American politics, the Watergate scandal encapsulated all that was wrong with the political system at the tail end of what had promised to be the idealistic decade of the ’60s.11
Yet the decline of deference was much more than an American phenomenon. It also clearly was as much about changing cultural values as it was about specific events. Long before Watergate, Canadian commentators began to voice more strident criticism both of government secrecy and of the wrongdoings of that vaguely defined category, the “establishment.” In 1965 the sociologist John Porter published what became a surprise academic best-seller, The Vertical Mosaic. In this dense book that was probably bought and discussed more often than read, Porter exposed the hidden and not-so-hidden hierarchies of class that pervaded Canadian society. What truly stuck with the public was Porter’s argument that Canada had an establishment, an old-boys’ network of power and prestige, rooted in everything from clubs and directorships to the cultural activities of wealthy children, from ballet classes to elocution lessons. Canada was not only governed by an elite class that was strikingly homogenous but the people fortunate enough to belong to it lived lives differed markedly from those of other Canadians. In The Smug Minority, popular journalist Pierre Berton lambasted the establishment and presented its members as a small group of individuals defending themselves against the inevitable tide of progress that would wipe away their Puritan values.12
Richard Needham poked fun at these people in his Globe column. “It’s a strange world our rulers inhabit,” Needham wrote. “They ride in the back seats of huge, black, chauffeur-driven cars. They make, and listen to, speeches of excruciating boredom. They hold testimonial dinners for each other, and present each other with scrolls and honorary degrees and stuffed owls … the more powerful you become the more you move away from people; you end up resembling Mackenzie King or some other such human disaster.” 13
The Mackenzie King reference was more than a passing phrase. Over the 1960s and especially in the 1970s, the revelations about Mackenzie King fed the public’s skepticism about the political establishment and what they were hiding. The most successful Canadian prime minister had been a secretive man. So much of what the public thought they knew about him was proving to have been untrue. What else had he kept hidden? If King had fooled everyone so thoroughly, what were contemporary politicians hiding? Revelations about the past confirmed current fears and assumptions.
In 1971 the United States Supreme Court rejected a bid to ban the publication of the Pentagon Papers – those secret documents that exposed how American governments had consistently and systematically lied both to the American people and to Congress. The public would get to see what really went on in the war rooms of government. The Globe and Mail pointed out that Canadians should not assume that this government secrecy and malfeasance was confined to United States. “Government in Canada has always functioned on the basis that the people need know only its decisions, not the facts and opinions on which those decisions are based,” the Globe warned. Many important government papers simply disappeared. They became the property of “the men who chance at the time to be governing.” The best example to hand was the case of Mackenzie King and his voluminous papers, which became the property of his literary executors. It was only the arbitrary decision of these men that determined if Canadians could see some of the most important documents about their government’s history.14
The Canadian political scientist Donald C. Rowat argued in 1965 that “any large measure of government secrecy is incompatible with democracy.” He wondered about the existence of an “establishment” or “inner circle” in Canadian government and how this contributed to secrecy. “Does there exist, for example, an ‘inner circle’ of politicians and perhaps certain members of the press who share knowledge about the inner working of party politics and the sources of election expenses? Is there a gentleman’s agreement within the circle that certain embarrassing subjects should not be revealed or discussed publicly?” As an example, Rowat turned to Mackenzie King. “It would be interesting to know for how long reporters knew about Mackenzie King’s spiritualism before it was finally revealed.”15
When King’s diary was released to the public, and especially after Stacey’s book made the diary such a sensation, commentators couldn’t help but connect King’s secrets with the secrets of Richard Nixon. The connection seemed too obvious, too clear – especially the way in which both men proved to be their own worst enemies. In Nixon’s case, he revealed himself on the White House tapes; in King’s, his secrets were in his diary. On the release of another batch of the King diary in 1975, the Canadian edition of Time magazine claimed that it constituted “a document as revealing as the White House tape transcripts.” The London Free Press talked about the “diarist’s dilemma,” the desire both to confess in the diary and to use the diary as some kind of memorial. “Often the two prove mutually destructive,” the paper noted, “as when Richard M. Nixon refused to destroy the telltale tapes which eventually destroyed him, because they would, he believed, assure him a place in history. They did, but not the place he expected.” And so it was with King. The diary and the tapes showed that both men had led a “double life.”16
Although Nixon had resigned in 1974, the story of Watergate lived on in books and cinema. The two journalists who had doggedly broke the story published not one but two best-selling accounts of their activities. One of these books sat atop the best-seller list at the same time as A Very Double Life earned Stacey his extra retirement income. The Americans had Nixon and corruption. Canadians had King and the prostitutes. Hollywood saw a winner and turned Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men into a film of the same name starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The film was wildly successful and won many Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards.
Harry Ferns went to see All the President’s Men in May 1976 and he immediately wrote to his former co-author, Bernard Ostry.17 The two men had finally contacted each other again after more than two decades, this time at the behest of a publisher who wanted to take advantage of the fresh interest in Mackenzie King. James Lorimer had started an independent publishing house to publish radical books that were critical of the Canadian establishment. It was exactly the kind of press that hadn’t existed in Canada two decades earlier. Lorimer saw a forgotten gem in The Age of Mackenzie King. The fact that the book had ostensibly been censored and had been just too radical for the 1950s made it all the more attractive.18
By the mid-1970s, Harry Ferns both was and wasn’t the same man. He still had an amazing and insightful intelligence, and the ability to cut through so much nonsense to get to the heart of an issue. He remained as prickly as ever, still wary of his reputation and Canada, and resentful at how he had been treated by the Liberal establishment. But Ferns had moved far to the right politically. He would title his memoirs Reading from Left to Right and it certainly matched his own trajectory. By the 1970s, he had become a libertarian critic of what he saw as Western democracies and their devotion to bureaucratically controlled socialism. He advocated free-market approaches to all kinds of social issues, and in his own world of the university he helped to create Britain’s first for-profit free-enterprise institution of higher learning, the University of Buckingham. In other words, Ferns went from being a Marxist to being one of those freemarket laissez-faire liberal thinkers who preceded Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power.
He still valued, though, the work he had done in exposing the hypocrisy of Mackenzie King and the Liberal Party in Canada. He agreed to republish the book with Lorimer, and when he saw All the President’s Men he wrote to Ostry saying that he had to see the film. Just as had happened to Ostry in Ottawa, Woodward and Bernstein were shut out of the Library of Congress when they went looking for documents to prove their case. Ostry saw the parallel immediately. He wrote to Lorimer and urged the press to dramatize how his own experiences matched those of Woodward and Bernstein. Ultimately, Nixon was found out by his tapes, but the initial work to bring the White House under suspicion came from two journalists doing the legwork and building up a case based on what evidence they could find. So it was with Ostry. He didn’t have access to the diary but he “was able to arrive at reasonable conclusions by employing all the materials that were in the public domain but had not been used by historians or political scientists up to that time.” He continued: “At a time when there is so much concern about access to information,” Ostry wrote, “the need [is] for young people to employ every resource in gaining access to information. You do not need to know 100% of the facts or have every scrap of information on a subject to make fundamental judgements.” 19
With Ostry’s connections, he arranged for promotional quotes and reviews by some of the leading journalists and academics in the country: Peter Newman, George Grant, Larry Zolf, John Gray, Dalton Camp, Donald Creighton, W.L. Morton, Kildare Dobbs, and others. Ostry wrote to his good friend Mordecai Richler to get him to work on his friends at the Book of the Month Club. The scandal of their book, the fact that there were rumours of it having been censored, made it an attractive and even “sexy” sell in the mid-1970s. This was a far cry from the world of respectable Canadian politics in the mid-1950s where controversy was to be avoided at all costs; this time the controversy is what the press used to sell the book. Reviewers revelled in exposing how the times had changed and how this book, which had been smothered and hushed up in the repressive climate of the 1950s, could now be published.20
Dalton Camp’s comments were indicative. He talked about there having been “a conspiracy to keep the truth about Mackenzie King from the Canadian people.” The official biographers, he wrote, “were in on the cover-up.” Laurier House, where they worked on the official biography, “was not so much the prime resource for King scholars … as it was a fudge factory.” It mattered to this generation of journalists, writers, and thinkers that the Canada of the 1970s was different from the Canada of their youth. In his introduction to the new edition, John Meisel wrote that it “is difficult to now recollect … what things were like in 1955.” He wrote of how, at that time, the official biographers were like many Canadians in that they “shared King’s commitment to the bland politics of non-doctrinaire, compromising, pluralist democracy.” The academic establishment in the mid-1950s “was essentially liberal democratic, bourgeois and genteel. Harmony at all cost, rather than conflict, was indisputably deemed by virtually everyone to be the most desirable form of interaction.” This is what needed to be kept to the forefront of one’s mind in reading the book, Meisel wrote, for Ferns and Ostry’s creation “splashed onto this benign scene and mightily disturbed the smooth academic calm.”21
This wasn’t exactly true. But it mattered to commentators in the mid-1970s that they were resurrecting a book that an earlier generation had deemed too risqué. It also mattered that it might have been censored – that the establishment might have tried to hide something from the public. Peter Newman wrote of how The Age of Mackenzie King had been “condemned at the time of its initial publication by Canada’s academic establishment (who have always shown a penchant for gentility over honesty).” One 1976 letter to the editor announced that he assumed “Liberal (cap L) historians, professional and amateur, would have gone underground at least temporarily after their longstanding Mackenzie King cover-up had been exposed by Col. C.P. Stacey and a few others.” A review in The Liberal magazine, of all places, wrote of how the new vision of King was so surprising in large part because of the “unimaginative narrowness of … historians who have long guarded their readers from anything that might suggest humanity in their national leaders.” Lorimer played up this idea in its own publicity, talking of how the “history establishment” had tried to suppress the Age of Mackenzie King when it was first published.22
The journalist Heather Robertson wrote a scathing review of Neatby’s final volume of the official biography in Maclean’s. “The contrast between the official biographies of King and C.P. Stacey’s lurid revelations in A Very Double Life is so startling,” she complained, “that it’s hard to believe they’re all writing about the same man.” This despite the fact that King’s diary had quickly become like a “bible of Canadian history for the period.” But it needed good historians, unafraid to look straight at the real Mackenzie King, to make it come alive. This just wasn’t the case. “No wonder Canadian history is such a bore,” she complained. “All the good parts have been left out.”23
If you’re going to blame someone for a cover-up, it helps if you have a small group of conspirators who can easily be singled out. In the case of Mackenzie King’s secret life, the culprits were obvious: his literary executors. Their prominent place in the political establishment of post-war Canada made them likely targets. This was especially true of Jack Pickersgill, who was the most publicly visible as a former cabinet minister and someone who was also the literary executor of three Liberal prime ministers. More than anyone, Pickersgill controlled what Canadians could learn about the private lives of leading politicians and the behind-the-scene events of recent politics.
This is the angle that Bernard Ostry and his publisher played up in their publicity. When Ostry appeared on television or on the radio, or when he did interviews for newspapers, he told the story – over and over again – of his encounter with King’s literary executors and the Liberal establishment.24 He recounted how documents were taken from him and then, mysteriously, given back – and how he had to pay a visit to Jack Pickersgill to plead for their return. W. Kaye Lamb, retired in Vancouver, had to defend himself. He happened to be giving a public lecture on the same day that stories appeared in the papers about how Ostry had been denied access to documents at the archives. Lamb conceded that Ostry had been denied access to certain papers, though he explained that this had been a misunderstanding, not a conspiracy. He was also put on the defensive by allegations that the literary executors had not shown MacGregor Dawson the original diary – that they had in fact tailored the diary so that Dawson (and hence the public) saw only doctored parts of it. “That is quite untrue,” Lamb said. “The truth is that Dr. Dawson had not the patience to read the whole diary.” By this Lamb meant that Dawson had asked to see only “the part [of the diary] that related to public affairs.” The news story replayed the funny account of the literary executors’ attempt to hush up the spiritualist medium Geraldine Cummins’s memoir. Lamb admitted to this, though, on the more recent sensationalistic account of King having solicited the sexual services of prostitutes, he said that the evidence in King’s diary did not back it up.25
Still, there was only so much that Lamb and the literary executors could do to challenge Ostry’s account. On many points, what Ostry said was factually accurate. But the spin that Ostry put on these facts made it look as if the literary executors had been more conniving than they had been – certainly than they had considered themselves. What had changed was the public context in which these stories were recounted. Gone was the deference that Lamb could expect to receive from the press.
Ostry had more than just old stories. He had a whole new scandal to hit the headlines – or, rather, he had new evidence on an explosive old scandal. Late in 1976, after his book came out and after Ostry had been in the headlines, someone approached him – a “deep throat,” he called him – and “dropped onto my lap the most compromising material on King yet.” In the early 1930s, King went through what he called his “valley of humiliation.” It all had to do with his involvement in a corruption scandal concerning the Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power company’s bid to develop hydro-electricity along the St Lawrence River. The company had lobbied the government for permission to go ahead and it was clear that much of this lobbying happened unofficially. On such a high-stakes investment, the company was not inclined to take chances and offered a $700,000 donation to the Liberal Party (and, it seemed, to the Conservative Party as well). Liberal Senators Wilfrid McDougald and Andrew Haydon also reportedly enriched themselves personally out of the deal for their help in ensuring the Liberal government’s approval of the process. The scandal came to light only in 1931, at a time when King was out of office. It was made more difficult for King personally when it became public that McDougald had paid for part of King’s holiday to Bermuda. This wasn’t direct evidence that the prime minister had been bribed, but it certainly did not look good.26
In 1977 McDougald’s niece, Nan Pollitt, gave documents to the Public Archives that included financial records further implicating King in the scandal. She had cheque stubs showing that McDougald had deposited into King’s Boston bank account $25,000 in two instalments, one in 1927 and another in 1928. This was at the exact same time that McDougald was helping the company lobby the government for approval of the power development. McDougald’s niece reported that her uncle had always claimed he had been a scapegoat, blamed to hide King’s involvement in the scandal. 27
When reporters turned to Ostry for comment, he had a good deal to add. He pointed out that he had been aware of the transactions many years earlier. Another former Liberal senator and fundraiser, Charles Murphy, had written a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Journal, Grattan O’Leary, claiming that he had personally delivered money from McDougald to King.28 Historians like Ramsay Cook and J.L. Granatstein disputed Ostry’s claims. They referred to other funds created for political leaders, such as those for Lester Pearson, and argued that in King’s case there was no proof of any direct link between the funds and any specific King action. Moreover, as Granatstein put it, “none of this smells very sweet but clearly Mr. King was no better or worse than his successors.” To this Ostry responded by saying how dismayed he was “at the unprofessional approach of a historian [like Granatstein] who is capable of equating a fund publicly established toward the end of Lester Pearson’s distinguished career … with the fact of laundered funds deposited secretly in a foreign bank to a personal account of a prime minister the details of which are still locked behind closed doors, controlled by his literary executors.” 29
But for Ostry the issue was bigger than a single bribe. King “was on the take until the day he died,” is how he put it to one journalist. All one had to do was to think about the whole story of King’s life. King went into politics at a young age and as a man of modest means. He spent several years as a deputy minister and then cabinet minister. After several years in private employ, he again re-entered government and spent the rest of his life as prime minister or leader of the Official Opposition. He “died a millionaire.” “His estate in Kingsmere, which began as a small cottage, expanded throughout his career in quality and quantity, most often financed by those who heard of his ‘needs’ and ‘interests’ and ‘difficulties.’ His house was filled with expensive gifts while his travels, when not paid for by the public, were financed by his wealthy friends like P.C. Larkin … So assiduously devoted to his financial ‘problems’ were his patrons that, clearly, his personal expenses were ever minimal … Indeed when one considers all the time he spent writing and re-writing his diaries and is witness to the incredible number of personal notes to rich friends thanking them profusely for their generosity, one marvels that he found the time for the politics he carried out with such skill.” 30
How could historians like Granatstein turn to King’s diary to explain his actions? Why trust King’s word over the word of someone still living, or the research of historians like Reg Whitaker who were showing some of the more corrupt fundraising practices of the Liberal Party? More importantly, Ostry wrote, given all of this information about King that had for so long been in the public domain, “serious historians, one would have thought, would try in their analysis to distinguish between what King told himself he was doing, what he did and what he told (or kept secret from) the public about what he was doing. When you do this, you soon recognize that Mackenzie King not only took money but he ‘took’ the Canadian public.” 31
That last line appeared in the respectable Globe and Mail. In an interview with Vancouver’s counter-culture paper the Georgia Straight, Ostry was blunter: “It’s interesting to know whether King was running out late at night looking for ways of screwing prostitutes,” he said, “but I must say that it strikes me … as far more important for students and the general public to understand the screwing he gave the Canadian people.” 32
Ostry certainly wrote like this privately back in the 1950s, but the media landscape had changed considerably by the mid-1970s and his language now made for a good story, and good copy. Pickersgill professed ignorance. He defended King by claiming that he had always lived well within his means, rarely spending even his own salary. What use did he have for these funds? Blair Neatby suggested that the money from McDougald seems to have been part of the anonymous fund established by Peter Larkin to help refurbish and maintain Laurier House when Lady Laurier willed it to the leader of the Liberal Party shortly after King became leader. 33 But, as even Granatstein admitted, it didn’t “smell very sweet.”
It all fit into a wider way of thinking about politics in which it increasingly became common to assume that politicians were hiding something about their real selves. This might be evidence of corruption or personal idiosyncrasies and oddities, or the real way in which power worked. By the end of the 1970s, Mackenzie King stood in the public mind – for all of the above reasons – as the prime Canadian historical example of the truth that politicians weren’t who they said they were.
A few years later, in the spring of 1981, the Mackenzie King diary yet again made the news, though this time in the context of government secrecy more generally. The Trudeau government was being asked to explain why it had not yet released the government documents concerning the Gouzenko spy trials from 1946. In 1976 the government had refused to open up the documents after the usual thirty-year period had elapsed, and had kept the files secret for ten more years. Under pressure, the Trudeau government agreed to review the files after five years, in 1981. Critics wondered what it was trying to hide. The comments of historian J.L. Granatstein (in his biography of top civil servant and King literary executor Norman Robertson) had made the news in garbled form, with a suggestion that some of the documents were missing. Journalists mixed this up with tales of the missing copy of the Mackenzie King diary that covered the latter months of 1945 and so included some of the Gouzenko period. Would the government release the files? Were some of these documents, including the King diary, missing and why?
The news stories came just as the McDonald Commission into the RCMP Security Service was about to release its final report in May 1981. The federal government had been pushed into creating the commission in 1977 in the maelstrom of controversy over illegal activities conducted by the Security Service that had come out in the Quebec government’s Keable Inquiry. The Parti Québécois government of René Lévesque had gleefully helped to expose the RCMP’s surveillance of separatist and left-leaning organizations in Quebec. In the national inquiry, from 1977 to 1981, still more attention was focused on the many shady activities that the government’s spies had been performing in the name of protecting Canadians from threats to national security. Ultimately, the Commission recommended that the Security Service components of the RCMP be removed from that organization and a separate Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) be created.
The attack on government secrecy came from critics on both the left and the right. One of the most vociferous was Tom Cossitt, a Conservative MP who had once been a Liberal and who bore a grudge against Pierre Trudeau. Even though he had been a Liberal, Cossitt soon became one of the more right-wing Progressive Conservative MPs, increasingly dissatisfied with the centrist turn of the party under Robert Stanfield and then Joe Clark. Cossitt was one of a new breed of MPs who challenged the typical deference of those in Ottawa for the way the regular game of statesmanship was played. He took the lead in attacking things like the public cost of the prime minister’s liquor cabinet and the fund created to build a swimming pool for Trudeau at his home on Sussex Drive. All matters, big and small, deserved and received Cossitt’s attention.
It was Cossitt who had helped to publicize Operation Featherbed and the hunt for Soviet moles within the Canadian government. In December 1975 he put a question on the parliamentary order paper about the existence of RCMP files “commonly referred to as ‘Featherbed.’” Where were these files? Had the RCMP shown their contents to the CIA or the FBI, and what was the name of the person referred to there? 34 It’s not clear who tipped off Cossitt about the existence of Featherbed but he didn’t forget it. Over the next decade he would return again and again to questions of national security and what the government and possibly the RCMP were hiding.
Two years later, in November 1977, just as the McDonald Commission on national security was starting its deliberations, Cossitt came back to the question of Featherbed. This time he had allegations to go with the questions. Cossitt alleged that the Featherbed files contained information on prominent members of the press gallery and even top members of the cabinet. Within days, the Globe and Mail was reporting that a copy of the Featherbed files had been offered for sale to some media in Toronto for the whopping price tag of $100,000.35
The public debate crashed into the RCMP with serious but hard-to-decipher consequences. Internally, one officer was obliged to defend himself against allegations that he had briefed a journalist about Operation Featherbed. On Cossitt, the RCMP thought they knew what they were dealing with. They claimed that, ever since a controversy over his run for the Liberal nomination in his constituency in 1971, Cossitt had borne a deep grudge against Trudeau. Cossitt believed that Trudeau’s was one of the names in the Featherbed files. Moreover, he thought the files would reveal facts about Trudeau’s alleged homosexual activities. This had been a slow-burning obsession for some Conservatives despite Trudeau’s many public flirtations with women. Even Richard Nixon had thought Trudeau was a homosexual, “all evidence to the contrary,” as Henry Kissinger had put it. Cossitt clearly hoped to get any “proof” out into the open.36
The issue emerged once again in 1981, and again in connection with questions by Cossitt in the House and revelations made in yet another book. In Their Trade Is Treachery, Chapman Pincher made a number of allegations, including that the British spy Roger Hollis had been a double agent, the so-called Fifth Man among the many prominent Soviet moles who had infiltrated the British spy agency M15. The Canadian connection came in because Hollis had visited Canada in 1945 to interview the defector Igor Gouzenko. Allegedly, Gouzenko had been suspicious of the man, and the suggestion was that Hollis had even then been working for the Soviets. Cossitt used this latest revelation to bring up again the question of the secret documents that the government was keeping from the public. Under pressure, the government once more instructed the RCMP to review the Gouzenko files and then ordered them opened late in 1981. This happened at the same time that Cossitt again demanded to know about the Featherbed files and what the government was hiding. Did the files include revelations about senior government ministers and public servants? 37
This is when attention turned to the missing volume of Mackenzie King’s diary. Journalists wondered why it had gone missing. Charlie Greenwell from CJOH News raised the question that the RCMP had also been asking: “Is there something in the missing entries someone still living doesn’t want the rest of us to know about?” Greenwell quoted unnamed “espionage specialists” who claimed that, with “so many people close to KING … involved with the RUSSIANS,” it would “indeed have been advantagous [sic] for those individuals to remove potentially embarrassing documents from public view. One way to do that would be to have portions of the diary mysteriously disappear before it reached the archives.” This left the government and the archives with the duty of explaining away the gaps.38
The national archivist (and King literary executor), Wilfrid Smith, explained to the press that the missing volume of the diary was never received by the archives – though in truth he couldn’t have been certain about this. Within the government, the solicitor general asked the RCMP for an explanation.39 Eventually, he reported the same thing as the archivist, and also claimed that there had been a special copy of the King diary dealing with the Gouzenko case and that it was still in the archives’ possession. Meanwhile, the Security Service agents were forced to learn again what they did and didn’t know. Institutional memory seemed short-lived and the agents tried to figure out which documents the press could be referring to and which volumes of the King diary were and weren’t missing.
In this confused mishmash of documents that were or weren’t missing, or secrets kept or lost or stolen, Mackenzie King and his diary were bit players, symbols of secrecy writ large. Yet behind all of the back and forth could be felt a general sense of government secrecy as both an expectation and a problem. They were hiding something. The idea of an excerpted version of the Mackenzie King diary that could count as the official “record” now seemed both quaint and preposterous. Official histories were little more than attempts to brainwash the public into believing an acceptable version of events. The controversy that had quashed Ferns and Ostry’s book back in the 1950s was the new normal. In the midst of the annual release of new versions of the King diary (what Maclean’s magazine called “Mackenzie King’s annual, posthumous striptease”), and with the backdrop of Watergate and the McDonald Commission’s revelations of RCMP dirty tactics, journalists could easily write about the “laundered version of the diaries,” about King’s “double life,” and especially about the petty things done by someone who was ostensibly supposed to be a great public figure.40
There were still some who could argue that no one could fool the people for so long. But this old chestnut now vied for supremacy with a new common sense – certainly an idea that had gained a greater respectability in the way in which people talked about politics – that politicians were always trying to fool the people. And one thing was clear: the people would be fooled no longer.
In the end, Mackenzie King kept a few secrets. In releasing his diary to the public, King’s literary executors believed they were doing what was best. After the passage of time, after the other revelations of King’s private life that had already come out, and after the nightmare of the stolen copies of the diary, it seemed to them that ensuring the public could see the whole of King’s diary was the best way of to preserve his memory.
This didn’t mean that they would let the public see everything. Some documents, including the papers outlining in greater detail his interest in spiritualism, and his financial records, they kept restricted for several more decades into the next century. One set of documents, though, they destroyed. These were the set of binders that contained King’s extensive personal notes about his spiritualistic activities, including handwritten transcriptions of some seances. Some of this material, but not all, had already showed up in the released portions of the diary. Other material could be found in his correspondence with mediums that would be opened in later years. But, when the literary executors met on Christmas Eve in 1971 and decided to open up the diary, they promised themselves that they would destroy these binders. They would wait until Blair Neatby finished with his final volume of the official biography. And then they would be destroyed.
In March 1977 that is exactly what happened. Two of the literary executors, Gordon Robertson and Jack Pickersgill, made themselves a fire. It had been twenty-seven years since the literary executors had taken on their duties. Two of the original literary executors – Fred McGregor and Norman Robertson – had died in the intervening period and been replaced. No one had expected to carry out their duties to King for so long. But, on that day, they carried out one final obligation. The myths and mystifications of Weird Willie King were everywhere about them. Each year saw a new batch of Weird Willie stories with the release of yet another volume of the King diary. Novelists and poets, to say nothing of bemused history professors and journalists, had turned King into a subject of amusing asides and anecdotes. Even so, and perhaps partly as a result, Robertson and Pickersgill dropped the spiritualism binders into the fire. These, at least, would not be fodder for public controversy. In some small way, they had kept their promise to the old chief.41
