Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806) Read online

  There followed an invitation to the Pearsons to go to the presidential ranch for the weekend. What effect – if any – this further intimacy had on the President is unknown. The ranch life seemed to the Pearsons a sort of burlesque circus. The hookers of bourbon at all hours, the helicoptering to visit neighbours, the incessant telephoning, the showing off, the incoherence and inconsequence of the arrangements – all disconcerted Mike. What disconcerted him even more was the impossibility of having any continuous discussion with the President, any exploration of political questions. The President was free with some fairly scabrous gossip about his fellow Senators. He would unexpectedly throw across to the Prime Minister a secret telegram or report which he was reading – thus making a demonstration of the easy, trustful way he felt about him, but there was none of that exchange of views on international or bilateral matters which had characterized the Prime Minister’s meeting with Kennedy at Hyannisport in 1963.

  All the same, the visit had been a success in political and personal terms. LBJ appeared to take to Mike and that, in terms of Canada–United States relations, was much gained. Every time the President saw me at an official reception he would send the warmest greetings to the Prime Minister, whom he described to me on one occasion as the head of government he “felt closest to.”

  Then came the thunderclap. The Prime Minister’s speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on April 2, 1965, advocating a pause in the bombing in Vietnam – and the President’s reaction to it – are part of political history, and this is not an historical record. The President’s reception of the speech was sulphurous, and the relationship between the two men never fully recovered. No doubt LBJ believed that an attempt had been made by one he thought to be a friend “to dictate United States policy in his own backyard.” When the Prime Minister arrived in Philadelphia he found a telegram from the President inviting him to lunch at Camp David. The telegram had been dispatched before the President had read the text of the speech. I accompanied the Prime Minister to Camp David – an occasion unfortunately unforgettable. Presidential aides Mac Bundy and Jack Valenti met us at the little airfield – no President. They were like schoolboys escorting the victim to the headmaster’s study for a sharp wigging or possibly “six of the best.” With strange innocence the Prime Minister and I were not fully prepared for what was to come. We anticipated that the speech would not be popular. Indeed, the Prime Minister’s expressed reason for not consulting the President in advance of making it had been that LBJ might put pressure on him to excise the reference to a pause in the bombing.

  Camp David could be a cozy mountain retreat – with a large, rough stone fireplace and the kind of pictures that go with it – but it was not cozy that day. LBJ received us with a civility that only gradually began to seem a trifle cool. I noticed with mild surprise that, contrary to his custom, he drank only one Bloody Mary before lunch. I made so bold as to have two. At luncheon the general conversation was made impossible because the President talked almost continuously on the table telephone. Part of the time he was receiving reports on bombing operations in Vietnam, at other times he seemed to be tidying up any telephone calls remaining at the bottom of his list – some fairly trivial ones that could have waited. Mike was left to make conversation with Lady Bird, Mac Bundy, and myself. He talked of the day’s flight over the battlefield of Gettysburg, of his long interest in the battle and in the Civil War in general. Lady Bird was receptive – he made a joke and she distinctly smiled. Mac and I at intervals made a remark.

  Lunch was over and there had been no mention of the speech. Over coffee the Prime Minister took the leap. “What,” he inquired, “did you think of my speech?” The President paused before replying. It was the pause when darkest clouds lower, pregnant with the coming storm. “Awful,” he said, and taking Mike by the arm, he led him onto the terrace.

  What followed I witnessed mainly in pantomime, although from time to time the President’s voice reached us in expletive adjuration. He strode the terrace, he sawed the air with his arms, with upraised fist he drove home the verbal hammer blows. He talked and talked – phrases reached Mac and me as we stood fascinated, watching from the dining room which gave onto the terrace through the open French windows – expostulating, upbraiding, reasoning, persuading. From time to time Mike attempted a sentence – only to have it swept away on the tide. Finally Mac suggested that he and I should take a walk through the wooded hills and leave our two masters together.

  Our conversation was a reproduction in minor key of what we had just been witnessing. Mac, with the gentleness of a deft surgeon, went for the crucial spots. Perhaps, he suggested, he had not got his message across to me in our last conversation when he had reminded me of the undesirability of public prodding of the President. (I had in fact conveyed this message to Ottawa.) Why had the Prime Minister chosen the United States as the place for such a speech? Why had there been no prior consultation with the President? Did I realize that the Prime Minister’s plea for a pause in the bombing coming at this time might inhibit the very aim he had in mind? The tone was friendly but the scalpel was sharp. I countered by saying that the substance of the speech was a Canadian policy statement and in our view a wise one. The Prime Minister was speaking as a Nobel Prize lecturer at an academic occasion; he must deal with issues affecting the peace of the world. The thought of interfering in United States policy was far from his mind. Finally, losing patience with unanswerable questions about the choice of place and occasion, I added that I could assure him that the United States would never have a better or more understanding friend than the present Prime Minister.

  By this time we had wound our way back again to the house. In the dining room we found Jack Valenti. The three of us looked out again at the terrace – the two figures were still there and the drama seemed to be approaching a climax of physical violence. Mike, only half seated, half leaning on the terrace balustrade, was now completely silent. The President strode up to him and seized him by the lapel of his coat, at the same time raising his other arm to the heavens.18 I looked at Mac in consternation, but he was smiling. “It will be all right now,” he said, “once the President has got it off his chest.” Shortly thereafter LBJ and the Prime Minister re-entered the house and we took our departure. The President this time accompanied the Prime Minister to the airport and patted with him with geniality.

  That night when I got back to Washington I rang up the Prime Minister, who had returned to Ottawa. I was emotional. I said to him that I had never been prouder of him than now. Indeed, he was both right and courageous in what he said, and the President would have done well to listen.

  Some weeks later I was lunching with the indomitable Dean Acheson, who attacked Mike and referred critically to his speech. Once again I explained the background and defended the substance. “Oh,” said Dean, “you will see that bouncy man come back here and do it again.”

  The next year when the Prime Minister received the Atlantic Pioneer Award of Federal Union Incorporated at Springfield, Illinois, he made a speech dealing with issues involving the relationship between the United States and its NATO allies. The speech was thought in Washington to imply some measure of criticism of U.S. attitudes. Again rumbles reached us from the White House. Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman was sent to Ottawa to seek clarification. At the White House, Walt Rostow, who had succeeded Bundy, spoke of the Prime Minister’s “egregious” speech and of the President’s displeasure and “Why,” he asked, “did he come into the President’s own backyard to make such a speech?”

  I heard myself replying much as I had to Mac Bundy on the earlier occasion a year before. But I thought I might guess the answer. Perhaps the Prime Minister had neither forgiven nor forgotten his encounter with the President on the terrace at Camp David. As Dean Acheson remarked, he was “a bouncy man” and he had bounced right back.

  1 At the time Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, he left government in 1966 to become President of the
Ford Foundation.

  2 Max Freedman was with the Winnipeg Free Press.

  3 Former United States Secretary of State – statesman and author.

  4 Henry Brandon, correspondent for the London Sunday Times.

  5 Joseph Alsop, author of column “Matter of Fact,” syndicated through the Washington Post and later the Los Angeles Times syndicates, and his wife, Susan Mary, authoress.

  6 U.S. Undersecretary of State.

  7 My brother, Roland Ritchie, Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, and his wife, Bunny.

  8 My niece, Elizabeth Ritchie, daughter of Roley and Bunny, is called Eliza in these diaries to avoid confusion with Elizabeth Bowen.

  9 At this time, William Bundy was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

  10 Lady Diana Cooper – widow of Duff Cooper, British politician; famous beauty and social figure.

  11 John Buchan, Baron Tweedsmuir, the novelist, was Governor General of Canada, 1935-1940.

  12 Thomas Stone, Canadian diplomat, Ambassador to Sweden and subsequently to the Netherlands, and his wife, Alix.

  13 Sons of George Ignatieff, Canadian diplomat, subsequently Provost of Trinity College, University of Toronto, and later Chancellor of the University of Toronto.

  14 The Budget introduced by the Minister of Finance, Walter Gordon, was considered in Washington to be anti-American.

  15 Viscount Hood, British diplomat and Minister in British Embassy, Washington.

  16 The former head of the C.I.A.

  17 At this time Harriman had just left the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs to become Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. From 1965 to 1968 he was to serve as Ambassador-at-Large.

  18 It has been stated that the President grabbed the Prime Minister by the back of the shirt collar and held him off the ground. I saw nothing of the kind and do not believe that this ever happened. It would indeed have been an intolerable insult.

  LONDON

  1967–1971

  When in 1966 I left Washington it was to go as Canadian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council in Paris. It seemed that this would be an appropriate and enjoyable assignment. I had had a long experience in matters affecting NATO, dating back to the early days of the Alliance. I had been a student in Paris, and later served in our Embassy there, and I looked forward to returning to a city I loved. As it turned out, I was not a very effective member of the Council and could not recapture the Paris of my younger days. I saw it as a beautiful and historic city that had, in some mysterious way, “come unstuck” in my imagination, an old love revisited when we had little left to say to each other.

  In my working life, I succeeded an old friend, George Ignatieff, who had brought enthusiasm and energy to the task. I had neither. Perhaps the strenuous years at the United Nations and in Washington had temporarily drained them out of me. Also, I found the North Atlantic Council itself a curiously unsatisfactory body, despite the able men who composed it. The work itself, covering as it does all aspects of the Alliance, could not fail to be interesting and important, but one had a sense of remoteness from the real centres of power in the NATO capitals where the decisions were reached. A complicating factor for a Canadian Representative was the policy which our government had adopted in relation to France. De Gaulle had pulled the French military forces out of NATO while France still, of course, remained a member of the Alliance. The French action was resented by other NATO governments. The Canadian government, however, partly for understandable domestic reasons, was anxious that the links with France should be maintained and that the French should be made to feel that, while we regretted their decision, nothing should be done to widen the breach between France and her NATO allies. This attitude was not popular with the other members of the Council, who tended to see it as a form of appeasement which the French had done nothing to merit. I do not think that the French government much appreciated our efforts. Indeed, Hervé Alphand, then at the head of the Quai d’Orsay (and an old acquaintance of mine from the days when we had both served in Washington), seemed to regard our efforts to placate General de Gaulle with a certain amount of cynical amusement.

  Meanwhile, the decision to move the Council from Paris to Brussels had been taken. The Canadian government and its Representative were not favourable to the change – the government on grounds of policy, its Representative on grounds of preference. Although Paris might no longer cast the same spell of illusion, it was still highly agreeable. We had a charming flat, a genius cook, interesting colleagues, and varied friends. The ministerial sessions of the Council gave one an opportunity to see the Foreign Ministers of NATO in action; the discussions in the Council touched on issues affecting the political balance of the Western world and of East–West relations. My daily walks in the Bois de Boulogne were a pleasure. But I had my eye on London. The tenure of Lionel Chevrier as High Commissioner was nearing its close. There was a possibility of a political appointment; on the other hand, a professional diplomat might be chosen. In the event, when Mike Pearson appointed me I felt it to be a recognition that the hand I had played in Washington had not, after all, been so badly played. More than that, I felt it a gesture of friendship from one who was reticent in expressing friendship. I was grateful not only for the appointment but for the friendship.

  I had very much wanted the London posting. Who would not? It is, to use a detestable adjective, a “prestigious” appointment. The attractions are obvious: to reside in London in a fine house, to be given the entry to varied English social and political worlds. I had reason to be delighted with my good fortune. It was to be my last post before retirement and I looked forward to it in a spirit best expressed by my friend Douglas LePan, who wrote, in congratulation, that my motto should be that of the Renaissance Pope – “God has given us the Papacy, now let us enjoy it.”

  London meant something more for me than my official position. As a child in Nova Scotia it was the London of Dickens which merged with my mother’s stories of her own London experiences to create in my imagination a multitudinous city, the only scene for the full spectacle of life. When I was a schoolboy in England, London was the promised land at the end of term, the cornucopia of theatres and treats. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, London meant the Big World where one’s friends sank or swam when thrust out into the business of earning a living. Later still, I myself was to be one of these, a fledgling journalist on the Evening Standard, living in a bed-sitting room above a grocer’s shop in the Earls Court Road. London had by then become a workplace, seen without illusion, as familiar as an old shoe. Coming back to it in war was a different matter. Under the bombs, one had a fellow feeling for every passerby in the streets. War and shared danger gave birth to a sense of community which peace had never achieved. We pitied those who were not with us in London in those days.

  So, with memories tugging at my elbow, here I was back once again; back, but with a difference. Before I had, as a Canadian, slipped in and out of the interstices of English life. Recognized in no social category, I had the freedom of the city; I was familiar without belonging, an insider-outsider. Now I came as the official representative of Canada, tagged and classified, also handsomely housed. The residence of the Canadian High Commissioner — 12 Upper Brook Street – was originally a typical upper-class town house. It had been bombed out during the war and was largely reconstructed. The result was satisfactory, but somehow lacked conviction, like a woman with a facelift.

  There was ample space for entertainment; the rooms were shapely and spacious. The long drawing-room had originally been decorated in glowing colours with rich fabrics imported from Paris. Later the Anglo-Saxon taste of some of the incumbents had been unable to stomach these splendours and had opted for middle-brow beige and genteel lime green in curtains and coverings. The pictures were a mixed bag – Canadian artists rubbing shoulders, not always happily, with their English neighbours, a Group of Seven iceberg staring bl
ankly at a Mortlake tapestry of cupids disporting themselves in a pillared pleasance.

  It required five servants to run the house. Of these, the butler was paid by the government, the cook and the maids out of my allowances. As to the fare provided there, the food – as always, under my wife’s direction – was excellent. An inspired cook herself, she knew the difference. The wines were passable. The dinner table accommodated thirty, the drawing-rooms comfortably up to three hundred. The chauffeur, John Rowan, and his wife and son had an agreeable apartment in the basement. John was, and is, a remarkable man. He accommodated himself with tact, while preserving his own complete independence, to a succession of High Commissioners, each one very different from his predecessor. The official car was the largest, most indecently ostentatious vehicle to be seen in London. (It has since been sold to an undertaking firm and must add class to any funeral, rivalling the hearse in length and gloomy grandeur.)