What happened to the missing volume of Mackenzie King’s diary – the one covering the final months of 1945? It has never been found. As late as the mid-1980s, the Mounties were still searching. They seemed to consider the possibility that Donald Forster, the political scientist who assisted Pickersgill with The Mackenzie King Record, had some involvement in its disappearance. When Forster died in 1983, the Mounties kept a clipping of the obituary and underlined the section where it mentioned Forster’s role in The Mackenzie King Record. A likely assumption is that the Mounties were at least curious about Forster, although all of the blanked-out pages in the Security Service records make this only speculation. The granddaughter of Fred McGregor, Mackenzie King’s assistant and literary executor, recalls that in the mid-1980s her parents received a visit from csis agents, who questioned them about the diary.1
In 1985 someone in csis wrote a memo outlining three possible scenarios for what happened to the diary: (1) theft by the Russian Intelligence Service, (2) theft by someone like a chauffeur, stenographer, and so on; or (3) destruction by King himself. The agent went through each of the three scenarios, finding problems with each. If the RIS took the diary, why not also take the earlier volume that also dealt with Gouzenko? The agent also didn’t think it made sense for King to have destroyed it, though this is what the political scientist Reg Whitaker had suggested in a Toronto Star article (which, as ever, the Security Service had clipped and put in the Featherbed files). The agent thought that this possibility didn’t fit King’s psychological profile or mentality. The only option the agent didn’t seriously discount was theft by someone like a “cook, butler, maid, chauffeur, literary executor, secretary, CBC crew member, etc.” With a list like that, it became a real-life version of the board-game Clue.2
It is almost impossible to say anything definitive at this point. But a few conjectures can be offered. The first odd point about the missing King diary is that it simply isn’t mentioned at all in the papers of King’s literary executors until a 1969 meeting with the RCMP. Publicly, it was first mentioned only when Pickersgill and Forster published (in January 1970) the third volume of The Mackenzie King Record, which included the 1945 diary.3 For almost twenty years, the literary executors conversed with each other and debated what to do with the diary but without ever putting in writing anything about a missing volume.
Pickersgill claimed to have done a thorough search of Laurier House after King died, looking for the missing volume. This may very well have happened but there is no record of it. The Security Service tried to determine if the RCMP had been involved in the search for the diary, but it seemed to be mistaking this search with the Daviault investigation in 1955. When the RCMP interviewed Edouard Handy, King’s assistant, he claimed that the missing volume was there when he left Laurier House in 1955. So, in other words, his story and Pickersgill’s don’t match. Could Jack Pickersgill have taken the volume himself? There is no record that the RCMP ever suspected that he did. But it remains one possibility. Another is that Donald Forster, who worked on the diaries so closely in the 1960s, took it.
But there is one other possibility that seems more likely. In 1955, when the literary executors discovered that someone had made copies of King’s diary and sold them, they began an investigation of where all of the diary books were at that point. They drew up a list of the books that had been copied. The list begins with the 1938 diary and then moves steadily forward in chronological fashion. The last volumes on the list are the diary books up to 9 November 1945 – in other words, right up until the period where the diary is missing.4 These were the last volumes copied before the literary executors began looking into Daviault’s activities.
This could very well be a coincidence. But it is striking that the next volume to be copied by Daviault, just at the moment where the literary executors learned of his deception, is the very one that was later reported to be missing. There is no record at this point in the files of that volume going missing. But one wonders. The literary executors tried to keep the whole matter confidential. They didn’t tell anyone else in the archives and only very belatedly went to the RCMP to launch an official investigation. In the climate of the 1950s, and especially around these kinds of people, controversy was to be avoided at all costs. What could be more controversial than a lost or stolen diary? If Daviault had taken it, and they and the RCMP could not prove that it was missing, perhaps they decided that it was best to keep the whole matter quiet, not to admit to the problem. Doing otherwise would add weight to the fear expressed about what Daviault might do with any copies of the diary that hadn’t been recovered. If he had a copy of the diary for which the executors didn’t have the original – the missing diary from late 1945 – then the possibility of what Daviault could have done with this would seem even more ominous. It would only have underlined further the need to preserve the whole diary and not destroy it, which King’s will seemed to indicate is what he wanted.
Of course, this can only be speculation, guided by a few bits of evidence. But it is at least as well substantiated as any theory that the Security Service proposed. Until this missing volume of the diary is found (if it ever will be), Mackenzie King still has a few more secrets to reveal.