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The Greatest Prime Minister?

By the early 1980s, Mackenzie King lived the afterlife of a palimpsest, those ancient documents whose original words had been erased so that something new could be rewritten over the top. Yet the original wording still revealed itself, ghostly scratchings under the surface, a text that was always double. So it was with King’s afterlife – Weird Willie and the statesman, a double life seen together and not separately. What had changed was that, by the end of the 1970s, Canadians had become fascinated with the hidden stories of official life, the truths previously hidden. For Mackenzie King, this meant that Weird Willie was every bit as much a part of the meaning of Mackenzie King as his public record. The real Mackenzie King was there, exposed, if difficult to render comprehensible with all his complexity and contradictions.

The figure of Weird Willie King popped up across the Canadian cultural landscape in novels and poetry and film. In Mordecai Richler’s 1980 novel Joshua Then and Now, there is the “Mackenzie King Memorial Society,” an organization founded by the main character and his Jewish friends as a send-up of the hypocrisy and bunk of official life. Allan Stratton’s play Rexy! premiered in 1981, winning many awards. Most of the humour in Rexy! arises from the irreverent portrayal of King’s pettiness, massive ego, eccentricities, and self-serving delusions. It still has King at the height of his power in the Second World War and making tough decisions, but there is always the striking contrast between the petty man and his large role.

In 1983 the journalist Heather Robertson gave Canadians perhaps the wackiest version of Mackenzie King when she published Willie, the first of a trilogy of novels about the King years. The book was inspired by the fantastic fictionalization of real historic figures in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. In Willie Robertson has Mackenzie King marking his place in his Bible with a pair of women’s panties and even raping the book’s main female character. Reviewers revelled in what they repeatedly called the book’s “irreverence.” Willie became a best-seller and award-winning novel, even beating out works by literary giants like Morley Callaghan and Margaret Atwood. Robertson herself talked about how cathartic the writing process had been – to get out fully what she wanted to say. At first, the writing proved difficult, but eventually Robertson let herself go. “My moment of liberation as a fiction writer came,” she recalled, “when I sat down at my typewriter and wrote ‘The Red Cross sucks cock.’” Apparently that was enough. “To get that out of my Wasp Presbyterian subconscious was totally liberating,” Robertson recalled. “After that the novel took off.”1

There were other appearances of Weird Willie King, including in his very own CBC television mini-series directed by the Canadian cinematic great Donald Brittain. And then there was, of course, Dennis Lee’s subtly small entry in his famous book of children’s poems, Alligator Pie, where Lee writes of how the former prime minister “Sat in the middle and played with string” and “Loved his mother like anything.” Brief and to the point. It encapsulated the way King had become a cultural metaphor in himself. He stood for a way of looking at prime ministers and public figures on an ever more level field, and in a less deferential fashion.²

A funny thing happened on the way to the 1990s: Mackenzie King’s reputation was resuscitated. Commentators began speaking again of Mackenzie King as one of Canada’s greatest prime ministers, as if the whole fuss over his private life had been a bad dream. In 1997 Maclean’s magazine ranked William Lyon Mackenzie King as Canada’s “greatest prime minister.” Two senior political historians, Norman Hillmer and J.L. Granatstein, had asked experts to rank all the prime ministers on a scale of 0 to 10 – “from utter failure to greatness.” It was no surprise that John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier ranked among the “greats” in the top three. But the fact that King took top spot might have raised eyebrows. Hillmer and Granatstein acknowledged that “this [ranking] might surprise those who know nothing of King beyond Dennis Lee’s little poem,” yet they went on to say that “the historians … were more impressed by King’s great political skills, his devotion to unity, his establishment of Canada’s international persona, his crucial steps towards establishment of the social welfare safety net, and the brilliant way he ran Canada’s enormous war effort. No historians admired King as a man … but few denied his brilliance as a political leader.”3 It was as if Bruce Hutchison had been resurrected and made a professor of political history.

Weird Willie and all his antics didn’t disappear. Commentators simply turned down the volume, and different voices rose up to offer once again a version of Mackenzie King as a political actor and prime minister. Hillmer and Granatstein argued that “the trick in politics is to survive. Without that, there can be nothing, no argument the people are on side, no scope for action, and no lasting impression.” And, as his twenty-two years in power demonstrated, “King was the master survivor of Canadian politics.”⁴ Like the King-friendly writers of the 1950s, they admitted King’s personal inadequacy. “Up close, King’s actions – and King himself – were often unimpressive,” wrote Hillmer and Granatstein. “With perspective and time, however, the grand pattern emerges: Mackenzie King was Canada’s greatest prime minister, party leader, and politician.” They celebrated the fact that the pendulum of opinion had now swung back in King’s favour. After all, they wrote: “No one can rule a nation as disparate as Canada for so long without talents of a high order, and King’s place at last is being properly recognized.”⁵ It wasn’t quite the same wording as Grant Dexter’s “No one could fool the people so long,” but it was pretty close.

This wasn’t, though, a return to the 1950s. Context matters. In the 1990s, the King legacy looked better and better. French–English relations had reached an all-time low with the rise of the Bloc Québécois and the failure of Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. There was also the national hangover from decades of what some had come to see as too-ambitious prime ministers, Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. In ranking the prime ministers and assessing leadership, Hillmer and Granatsein and their experts warned of the dangers of being too decisive. For decisiveness was “not always its own reward, nor suited to a cautious and conservative people.” They asked instead if it wasn’t “better to govern as Mackenzie King did, piling compromise on hesitation in this all too easily divided country.” It seemed, with Jean Chrétien as prime minister in the 1990s, that the country had returned to more successful, older ways. “Cautious and conservative by temperament and experience,” they wrote, “Chrétien embraced the King philosophy of governing from the middle, day by day, avoiding the hard choices whenever possible, making the deals when necessary.”6

A few years earlier, the historian Michael Bliss had taken his turn to debunk the myth of Weird Willie. In his best-selling book on Canada’s prime ministers, Right Honourable Men, Bliss complained that “my late colleague Colonel C.P. Stacey did a shabby thing to Mackenzie King, the greatest and most interesting of Canada’s prime ministers.” The image of Weird Willie that Stacey had propagated in A Very Double Life had corrupted Canadians views. “For years,” Bliss wrote, “it was the first book about King that curious Canadians were apt to pick up. It had immense impact in further vulgarizing” King’s image.⁷ This simply wasn’t deserved.

“So what if [King] had been lecherous, silly, or immature in private?” Bliss asked. “No one, including Stacey, had shown that these activities had the slightest effect on King’s conduct of government.” And, as for King’s sexual proclivities, “So what if he sowed wild oats in his youth (if he actually did), had lady friends in old age, and became superstitious, self-absorbed, and maudlin about his dogs? Does not our tolerant age understand the normality of a little harmless deviance?” King’s spiritualism may have been odd – “there was always a silly, fraudulent side to organized spiritualism” – but “there was also a serious interest in life after death, psychic powers, and the possibility of spiritual communications.”⁸ Bliss quoted Harry Ferns, who himself had been a King critic, but not of his personal life: “It will take a long time to rescue the reputation of Mackenzie King from the psychologists and the pornographers.” Much of the speculation about King’s oddities “is at best half true,” Bliss argued. Directly taking on the double-life argument, Bliss claimed that “the King diaries are not the record of a public success and a private failure. King’s life is not a Jekyll-and-Hyde epic. Carefully read, his public and private records portray an extraordinarily gifted and sensitive man, the product of a certain moment in cultural history, who dedicated his life to public service and succeeded beyond even his own ambitious dreams. Willie King did a good job both as a politician and as a human being.” 9

The psychologists and the pornographers: it’s not a coincidence that these were the terms of Ferns and Bliss. For who better to represent the cultural opening up of previous secrets that had been so much at the centre of cultural change over the 1960s and 1970s than those who delved into the minds and sex lives of Canadians? The difference was that, in the mid-1990s, Bliss lived in a world that was no longer as easily titillated by King’s secrets. The very fact of a politician’s double life – and to write about it in mainstream publications – no longer seemed so novel. In fact, a more cynical public culture would take a politician’s duplicity for granted.

Mackenzie King had served his purpose. When he again excited public discussion it came in new areas – in the role he had played in denying entry to Jewish refugees at the end of the 1930s or in the treatment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War. When Maclean’s published another ranking of prime ministers in 2016, William Lyon Mackenzie King once again earned the top spot. This time, it was John A. Macdonald who had fallen several spots because of controversy over his treatment of indigenous peoples.¹⁰ History is never finished with its main characters – it is only the questions and passions that change from one generation to the next.¹¹

But for over thirty years, from the 1950s to the 1980s, Mackenzie King had symbolized an older kind of Canada. He played a role in helping later generations of Canadians reorient themselves away from the values of their Victorian forebears and to create a new culture of the self and individual rights. Partly this had been about private actions and cultural values. But these transformations also impinged on the way politicians were talked about. At the height of the Weird Willie craze in the mid-1970s, it had seemed almost utopian and certainly liberating to expose the dark secrets of figures like King and of the inner workings of official institutions and “The Establishment.” King became a symbol of an older Canada and of a kind of culture and politics that had secrets. And he did so just as the culture at large – in Canada but not only in Canada – became obsessed with turning the inside out, with exposing secrets, with overturning standards of decency and respectability, with making open and obvious what had previously been considered private and secret.

Two decades later, the utopian hopes had faded. The genie was not being put back into the bottle. It was much harder to write, as some had in the 1950s, about the greatness of political leaders.12 The idea of the statesman (or stateswoman) seemed an ever more elusive ideal. The democratic levelling continued apace. On Canadian television screens, the Royal Canadian Air Farce launched a “chicken cannon” that shot a gross mixture of concoctions at the images of prominent figures. No one could get so high that they couldn’t be taken down a notch. But few cared. Revelations had become so standard and routine, especially in the much-watched world of American politics. The 1990s saw another American president’s secret activities become fodder for a continuous news cycle – this time concerning Bill Clinton’s relations with a female intern. Once again sexual secrets and political secrets – the personal and the political – tumbled together on news channels across the world.

All of this had simply become common gossip – fascinating in detail but no longer amazing in what it said about the state of modern politics. The expectation that politics and politicians generally could be something else had diminished. For good and ill, Canadians lived in an irreverent democracy.