Monday, Apr. 22, 1957
Second Thoughts
Assured by External Affairs Chief Lester Pearson that Canadian security checks gave a "clean bill of health" to Herbert Norman, Canadian Ambassador to Egypt, Canadians last week turned hotly angry with a U.S. Senate subcommittee that released evidence of Norman's Communist leanings in the 1930s. Politicians, editors and many others blamed the subcommittee for Norman's suicide leap from a Cairo building a fortnight ago. Then at week's end, harassed "Mike" Pearson admitted under intensive questioning in the House of Commons that "Mr. Norman, as a university student many years ago, was known to have associated quite openly in university circles with persons who were thought to be Communists."
With that admission, the pure flame of public anger yellowed and flickered, except for a backfire of resentment against Pearson for having misled public opinion. What had threatened to create a real diplomatic strain between Canada and the U.S. turned instead into an occasion for second thoughts and cooler analysis.
The international strain had grown great in the month since the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee dusted off and released again some 1951 testimony against Norman. The old testimony, plus paraphrases from a "U.S. Government executive-agency security report" read into the record by Committee Counsel Robert Morris, showed that Norman had been active in a Communist study group at Columbia University in 1938, when he was 28. Later, the record showed, he had held office in the pro-Communist American Friends of the Chinese People; once in 1942 he flashed his diplomatic credentials before an FBI agent to try to rescue some Marxist documents in the possession of a left-wing Japanese professor seized for repatriation. This background became the business of U.S. security agencies when Norman served briefly in 1945 as a counter-intelligence officer on the staff of General MacArthur in Tokyo.
Release of the committee report stirred the Department of External Affairs to protest publication of "irresponsible allegations" against Norman. After Norman's suicide, the department followed up with a stiffer note demanding assurance that security information supplied by Canadian agencies would not be released by U.S. agencies without Canada's permission. The plain presumption was that some part of the evidence against Norman had come from the Canadian government. But on this point, too, Pearson had to back down. In Parliament he admitted that the Senate subcommittee had not used Canadian sources.
As the fact of Norman's past Communist connections emerged in the debate. Social Credit Leader Solon Low turned fiercely to Pearson. "The government has failed dismally right from 1951 to get this thing cleared away," he cried. "If Mr. Norman was hounded to death . . . this government and the officials of the Department of External Affairs must bear a large part of the blame."
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