IN CANADA THE WINTERS ARE HARD. POLITICIANS PREFER TO CAMPAIGN IN THE temperate months of spring or autumn when travel is reliable and the public mood is not depressed by storm and winter darkness. But 1958 was an exceptional year. Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, who had come to power with a minority of parliamentary seats in the general election of June 1957, dissolved the House of Commons in early February and entered a winter contest in defiance of nature. On March 31, after a campaign that dazzled the electorate and dismayed his foes, Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservatives won the largest majority in the country’s history: 208 of 265 seats, spread evenly across every region of the nation. The invincible Liberal Party was shattered, its front bench decimated, its treasury exhausted, its new leader humiliated by an electorate that had chosen to “Follow John.” The Social Credit Party disappeared entirely from parliament, and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was reduced to eight seats.
John Diefenbaker was sixty-two, yet he did not seem it. The prime minister campaigned at a frenetic pace, and with his famous victory he opened a Conservative era that might outlast the Liberal reign of twenty-two years. As expectations rose in the aftermath of victory, the prospect did not appear unreasonable. Instead, the Conservative prime minister gave the country a decade of continuous convulsion, marked by his government’s defeat in April 1963 and his own forced departure from the leadership in September 1967. For a decade and more after that, the old warrior remained hovering in parliament, the scourge of Liberal governments and his own successors. But it was the tumultuous decade of leadership from 1957 to 1967 that made him a subject for the history books.
When Diefenbaker died in August 1979, he was given an extended state funeral modelled – at his own direction – on the funerals of Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It culminated in a transcontinental train journey and burial on the grassy bluffs of the South Saskatchewan River overlooking the city of Saskatoon, beside the centre that had been built to house his personal and public papers and the relics of a lifetime.
What was remembered, and buried, on those bluffs was as much a legend as a man. The man lived a long public life, but it was a life of turmoil, rebuff, failure, disappointment, and bitterness more than of triumph and satisfaction. Yet out of it Diefenbaker built the legend of a morally triumphant underdog, the representative Canadian common man. The country took to the legend even as it rejected John Diefenbaker the politician.
When he became prime minister in 1957, the country did not know him. When it came to know him and to experience his leadership, the country preferred the legend to the man. To understand him - and perhaps to understand his country as well in the twentieth century - it is necessary to know both legend and man, both myth and reality.
John Diefenbaker was born into colonial Ontario before the end of the nineteenth century. He was of German-Scots ancestry, and his name cast him and his family as outsiders in a society that was, in the twilight of the Victorian era, proudly British in its politics and imperial in its view of the world. His father - despite his German name - was an admirer of the British parliamentary model and of imperial ideals. His mother was an independent Highland Scot with scant respect for the institutions her husband revered. Young John somehow absorbed the influences of both his parents - his father’s romantic imperialism and his mother’s iconoclasm and driving determination - without entirely reconciling them. From both mother and father, and from the conditions of his youth, he learned about life on the margins of society in a country where most others lived on the margins too. From there, he developed a youthful ambition to move to the centre. While his ambitions were forming and deepening, he could not know the costs of achieving them.
At sixty-one, he came to power late - perhaps too late, both for his administrative capacities and for the suppleness and timeliness of his political ideals. The office of prime minister he had coveted for years seemed in some essential ways beyond his ability to master. That may have been because the country he was chosen to govern was not the country that had formed him. It was already casting off its ties of empire, just as the imperial centre had cast it off. It had achieved international maturity in a world of technology and weapons he scarcely understood. And it was subject to the dominating influence of a friendly neighbour at the very moment when Canadians had come to accept their independence in the world. At home, the western Canadian vision of the nation as a single community absorbing all its subcommunities into a greater whole – a vision Diefenbaker had embraced – came into conflict with a revived French Canadian (or Québécois) nationalism. The conflict was one that Diefenbaker could never really comprehend. As a westerner, an outsider, a romantic parliamentarian of the Edwardian era, he was a man out of time and place in late twentieth-century Ottawa.
Yet in two senses he was a perfect representative of Canadians in the postwar era. He entered parliament from a bankrupt province at the end of ten years of depression, and his belief in a compassionate social policy was shared by progressives of all parties. In 1957 he spoke for a new independence among Canadians of every region, expressing a confident sense of themselves that meant rebellion against the patronizing smugness of Liberal governments of the 1940s and 1950s. His victories of 1957 and 1958 brought to the country a brief sense of liberation and of new horizons to conquer, but the expectations could not be fulfilled.
Privately and publicly, he was never fully in control of his emotions. By 1957 – perhaps much earlier – he was scarred by his failures. He was suspicious of colleagues, unfamiliar with the play of political compromise, inexperienced in sharing tasks and authority. Probably he was too old to learn new tricks. But he was also a man of high theatrical talent, stubbornness, and pluck, who found great pleasure in the political battle. That mixture of character and circumstance produced a life of complexity both for John Diefenbaker and for his country.