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A condensed history of Pearson

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April 22, 2013

A condensed history of Pearson

By Andrew Cohen

“I have been fortunate in all my lives,” said Lester Pearson. “I’ve had almost as many as a cat.” It was true. Lester Pearson lived many lives, offering many lessons, and it is those lives and lessons that we celebrate today.

Those lives took him from the leafy parsonages of southern Ontario to the halls of the academy to the battlefields of Europe. They led him to Chicago, Oxford and Toronto as sausage-stuffer, student and professor, and then as diplomat to Ottawa, Geneva, London, and Washington. And then back home, to Ottawa, to a feverish if fitful stewardship in politics – first as foreign minister, than as leader of the opposition, and finally as prime minister of Canada.

Fifty years after he came to power, on this day in 1963, he speaks to us still. He speaks to us because he is us. His is a Canadian life, and let no one tell you otherwise. Like all our prime ministers, his isn’t foremost a Liberal story or a Conservative story. His is a Canadian story.

That story began on April 23, 1897 – tomorrow would be his 116th birthday – in a white, starched Canada thoroughly unlike the one he would leave 75 years later. “God was in his heaven and Queen Victoria was on her throne,” he wrote in his memoirs. “All was well.”

He was born in Newtonbrook, a hamlet since swallowed by suburban Toronto. His father was a preacher. His life was shaped by religion, which he tolerated, and sports, which he loved. He was the second of third sons. His father’s nomadic ministry took him to Davisville, Aurora, Toronto, Peterborough, Hamilton and Chatham. They lived in genteel poverty.
There are two things you should know about Lester Pearson as a child: The first is that he devoured the books of G.A. Henty, the Victorian author of a celebrated series of boy’s adventure stories set in places around the world that few recall today. In a life which would take him into the creases in the map of the world, he would say later, as Canada’s most distinguished diplomat, there was scarcely a place he had not visited before, as a boy, with G.A. Henty.

The second was that he was happy. Remarkably happy. It is fashionable for biographers today to search for clues in childhood neuroses and complexes which took hold in later life; I have to report, ladies and gentlemen, that Master Pearson had none. The truth is that he suffered none of the agonies of great men: no Oedipus complex, no middle child syndrome, no sibling rivalry, no parental abuse. On his life’s journey, which would carry him far from southern Ontario, he had no emotional baggage. Just those soothing hymns from those sunny Sundays of his untroubled childhood.

And so the life unfolded: to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, at 16 years old, where he challenged Vincent Massey’s dictum that students wear gowns at dinner. He refused, arguing this was Toronto, not Oxford, a small act of defiance in which he asserted, for the first time, an independent view of Canada.

Then to war, as soon as he, signing up on his 18th birthday. He had visions of dodging danger as he swept up the wounded and carried them through shot and shell to safety. Instead, he began life in Great War in the army less glamourously, near Salonica, in Macedonia, where he was as an orderly, in a camp hospital, carrying bedpans.

Later, thinking his war too soft, he petitioned to go to the western front. He ended up in flight school, where he acquired the name “Mike”, from his instructor, who thought Lester was too “sissy” a name for a flyer. It stuck, and he was called Mike all his life — when he wasn’t “Mr. Pearson”, which those who knew him still call him today. He had an accident in training, and in recovery, he stepped in front of a bus on Edgeware Road in London. He was sent home, suffering a nervous breakdown. The war had been too much and now it was over. Before it ended, he began to question what this ghastly enterprise was all about. He never talked much about the war; politically speaking, he was not a war profiteer. He said only: “My war service was just about as undistinguished as it could be. I managed to stay alive.”

Now, what’s next? He played minor league professional baseball in Guelph. He went to Chicago to work for Armour and Company in Chicago, a meatpacking concern. He thought he was going to be an executive; he ended up in a plant, on the line, stuffing sausages, wondering, we imagine, how he had gone from the killing fields of Europe to the stockyards of Chicago, replacing one abattoir for another.

Then, in 1920, he fulfils a dream: to go to Oxford to read history and then return to Canada to teach it at the University of Toronto. He does both, of course, playing hockey in Europe (he was called Herr Zig-Zag because of his superb stick-handling) and coaching football (which, he said, took up “only’ three hours a day).

And then, things accelerate. In 1928, he joins the fledgling Department of External Affairs. To Ottawa, and an office in the eaves of the East Block, freezing in winter and withering in summer, and the beginning of a long, storied career in London, Ottawa and Washington, before, during and after World War II. With exquisite timing, he moves shrewdly from the old world to the new, following the locus of international power. In the 1940s, you should know, he was the best known Canadian in the world, rivaled only by Barbara Anne Scott, the figure-skater.

In 1946, he became Under-Secretary in the Department under its first Minister, Louis St. Laurent. In 1948, in the way things were done, St. Laurent, now prime minister, invited Mr. Pearson to become Minister of External Affairs. Because he had no seat in the House, one was opened for him in Algoma East in northern Ontario; a bewildered Pearson had to be shown where the riding was on a map. He knew nothing about campaigning, other than being told to wave. Once, after hours in back of the car, Mr. Pearson waved and waved until the incumbent, Tom Farquhar, who was instructing him on the art of politics, declared: “You can stop waving now, Mike. We’re out of the riding.”
He won that seat on October 1948, the first of eight consecutive elections, and held it for the next 20 years, even though there were times, when he was foreign minister, when he would get there only once a year.

His ascent, so seamless, continued; the ever-buoyant Mike Pearson was kissed by the winds of fortune.

It was as foreign minister, in the 1950s, that his star shone brightest. So significant was his contribution that had he never become prime minister, his professional life would have made him an unqualified success in life. As the world split between east and west, as decolonization dismantled old empires and the United States displaced Great Britain, there was a call for cool heads and experienced hands.

Time after time, Pearson was there. When India wanted to leave the Commonwealth in 1949, when the world established its first aid program in Colombo in 1950, when war broke out in Korea in 1950, Pearson was moderator, creator or conciliator. He was the first western leader to meet Nikita Krushchev; he helped create NATO. And then, of course, the Suez Crisis: the zenith of his diplomacy; Suez was also his signature. All I will add is this: when Henry Cabot Lodge, the American ambassador, saw Pearson at work in the General Assembly, scribbling that historic resolution under the bright lights in the hollow of the night, then presenting it persuasively, he observed: “It was remarkable, one of the highpoints of my political life.” The next year, Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before then, though, there was defeat for the Liberals though not for Mr. Pearson. Soon he was leader, a job he said he didn’t want. “Well, I will accept if it comes along, but I’m not going to scratch for it.” He didn’t have to. He was handed it. There was no real opposition and Walter Gordon picked up the bill for the campaign expenses. Indeed, he wrote a personal cheque for $3,000.

Mr. Pearson brought down Diefenbaker in January 1958 and then Diefenbaker brought down Mr. Pearson. The election of 1958 was a disaster for Mr. Pearson, who saw his party drop to 49 seats in the House. Mr. Pearson watched the returns with his wife, Marion, in the Chateau Laurier. She was horrified — and terrified — that now he would remain opposition leader. “Mike, you’ve lost everything,” she said. “You’ve even won your seat!”
And then, the rebuilding of the Liberal Party. Enlisting Keith Davey, Dick O’Hagan and Tom Kent. Adopting policies like bilingualism. Recruiting candidates like Herb Gray, John Turner, John Chrétien, Pierre Trudeau. For five years, the Liberals were in the wilderness. Rebuilding the party and returning it to power, on April 22, 1963, was his greatest, least-recognized achievement.

I won’t go into the achievement of his government because you know that and others will speak to it today.

By 1967, when he turned 70, he knew it was time to go. The next year he did, happy to turn over the party to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whom he privately supported. Mr. Pearson retired to a rose-covered cottage in Rockclife, but he had no time to tend the roses. There would be teaching, consulting and travelling, and his memoirs, which he never finished.

In the fall of 1972, he was dying. Keith Davey went to see him, and Keith told me this story. They talked about the dismal fortunes of the Maple Leafs — not a lot has changed there – who wouldn’t make the playoffs the next year. “Worse,” Mike told Keith, “it’s a crisis you’re going to have to face on your own.”

On December 27, at seventy five years old, Lester Pearson died. His body lay in an oak coffin, draped with the Maple Leaf, in the Parliament of Canada. Thousands saw him lie in state. He had a state funeral.

On Dec. 31, under gun-metal skies and a cold rain, they buried him on a hilltop, high in the Gatineau Hills, in a pioneer cemetery above the Village of Wakefield.

He had left us too early, with much left to do. Then again, he’d earned his rest.

Andrew Cohen, a journalist by trade, is a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a board member of the Canadian Centre.

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