Prairie Lawyer

(See Cover)

On a screened porch in the residence of the U.S. ambassador in green and summery Ottawa, two tall, greying men stood elbow to elbow one evening last week, each intent upon the other. While cocktail-party chatter echoed in other rooms, John George Diefenbaker, the Prime Minister of Canada, talked, gestured, sipped from a glass of orange juice. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, cradled a rye highball in his hand as he nodded, smiled, listened. Thus casually, top officials of the world's two most neighborly nations began to explore the subtle new relationship that must come about. Reason: Canada, in an upset election, has chosen a Tory government that is worried about the possibility of U.S. economic domination over Canada.

Prime Minister Diefenbaker, 61, is a Saskatchewan lawyer who lost five elections before he finally reached Parliament at the age of 44. An unknown who won leadership of the minority Tory Party last December mostly because his demoralized colleagues thought he could lead the way honorably to inevitable defeat, he instead took the party to victory by an exhausting personal effort. He knows, likes and respects the U.S. But his brow darkens and he grows snappishly critical at even such a small economic friction as last month's unloading of low-priced U.S. turkeys onto the Ontario market. Dulles' talk with Diefenbaker is only the first that the Prime Minister will want to have with U.S. officialdom. The opening moves are under way for the Prime Minister to visit President Eisenhower later this year.

Getting Along. To almost every Canadian, the U.S. is an enveloping fact of life. Most of the population lives within 200 miles of the U.S. border. Collectively, Canadians travel south of the border some 27 million times a year, and get some 27 million visits by U.S. residents in return. Buffalo TV stations regularly draw bigger audiences in Toronto than does the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Canadian Novelist Hugh (Two Solitudes) MacLennan complained recently that a Canadian writer has to get his book published in New York before his countrymen will buy it.

Canada and the U.S. want to get along, can get along, and most of the time they do get along. But the closeness of contact makes irritation inevitable. In the last three years Ottawa has sent half a dozen stiff notes to Washington protesting U.S. trade restrictions. The case of Canadian Diplomat Herbert Norman, who killed himself in Cairo after a U.S. Senate subcommittee revealed that he once had Communist connections, inspired bitter diplomatic notes and an outburst of anti-U.S. editorials. Proud that their currency is robustly solid, Canadians are furious when some U.S. shopkeeper or cab driver turns down a Canadian dollar: "It's worth $1.05!" they protest in frustration.

The two neighbors are each other's best customers, but it is a chronic Canadian complaint that Canada gets the short end of the bargain. By the trainload and shipload, Canadian newsprint, nickel, aluminum feed the U.S. economy. The Consolidated Denison mine in Blind River, Ont. contains twice as much uranium as all the known U.S. reserves, and its entire output through 1961 is earmarked for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In turn, the U.S. ships industrial machinery, automobiles and consumer goods to the north, and Canada's trade deficit with the U.S. last year ran to $1,290,000,000.

Until recently Canada managed to offset her perennial deficit in U.S. trade by selling wheat to the rest of the world, but this market tapered off last year, and Canadians blame U.S. international wheat giveaways and subsidized sales. Unless the problem of U.S. surplus-wheat disposal can be settled without injuring Canada, warns a Canadian official, it could threaten Canadian-U.S. relations even on defense matters. Canada and the U.S. must also work out joint policies for waterpower development of the international rivers of the Pacific Northwest, and Canada must decide whether its own long-term interests permit the large-scale export of abundant Alberta natural gas to a fuel-hungry U.S.

The Moody Baptist. The man the Canadian people chose in June's election to guard their liberties, ensure their prosperity, levy their taxes, and sell their wheat is a husky (5 ft. 11 1/2 in., 175 lbs.) prairie lawyer who practices the profession of politics with all the zeal of a successful evangelist. John Diefenbaker is an intense, moody man, sensitive to personal affront. His deep-set blue eyes can blaze with anger or fill with quick emotion; moments later he can smile with easy friendship, remember a name, recall an anecdote to suit an occasion and mood. Brought up a Baptist, Diefenbaker does not smoke, and he recently surprised Sir Winston Churchill by declining politely to share a bottle of Napoleon brandy.

Impatient of the dull details of a law case or parliamentary debate he prefers to delegate the slogging staff work of poltics; he can skim a 300-page legal brief to his satisfaction in an hour and a half. Canadians say that he is their "first Prime Minister with a hearty laugh."

Diefenbaker's youth was a conscious preparation for public life. He was born in Sept. 18, 1895 in the Ontario village of Newstadt, son of a German-descended schoolteacher who liked to boast that he had taught William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's famed and durable (1921-48, except for five years) Liberal Prime Minster. When John was eight, father Diefenbaker took his family to a Saskatchewan crossroads where the northern prairies turn into a subarctic wasteland of muskeg, timber and lakes. There one day father Diefenbaker tied a red bandanna to the rim of a wagon wheel and, counting the turns of the wheel, measured off a 160-acre homestead. That spring he broke the virgin sod to the plow and put in his first crop of wheat.

The elder Diefenbaker tutored young John, kept him reading nightly by the light of a coal-oil lamp. According to a family legend, John looked up one night from a biography of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Liberal Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911, and announced in a firm voice: "I'm going to be Premier of Canada." His mother smiled; John's studies went ahead as though high office were indeed the aim. He never even learned to milk a cow.

When the boy was ready to enter high school, his family unhesitatingly sold the homestead and moved to Saskatoon. In school John read the speeches of British parliamentary orators, developed his own florid Victorian style by speaking from a stage while an uncle listened critically from the back of an empty auditorium. Moving on to the University of Saskatchewan, young Diefenbaker joined the ranks of the campus apprentice politicians who ran the debating society, heatedly argued national issues in a mock Parliament. He devoured political biographies (a special hero: Lincoln), won better-than-average marks and a forecast in the college magazine The Sheaf that he would some day lead the opposition in the House of Commons in Ottawa.

"It's His Birthday." In 1916 he was called to active duty, sent to France as a second lieutenant. Diefenbaker's military career was painfully anticlimactic. Soon after landing in France, he suffered a spinal injury in a back-of-the-lines accident that to this day he embarrassedly refuses to describe. He spent four months in a hospital, was sent home and discharged. Back at the University of Saskatchewan, he shot through law school in one year, and during the summer of 1919 he hung up his brand-new diploma in a 9-ft.-by-9-ft. office in a tin-fronted building in nearby Wakaw (pop. 400).

Wakaw was a town that drowsed six days a week, only to swarm on Saturdays with farmers in town to shop, socialize, swap drinks from common bottles, and sometimes blow smoldering feuds into bloody violence. Out of such a quarrel came the young lawyer's first case. The client: a farmer charged with shotgunning a neighbor to death. The trial came on John Diefenbaker's 24th birthday. The crown prosecutor made a solid case, and the judge issued a strong charge, all but directing the jury to convict. Instead, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Later, Diefenbaker met the foreman and asked how the jury reached its decision. "We talked it over," said the foreman, "and somebody said: 'After all, it's the kid's first case.' Then somebody else said: 'And it's his birthday.' That settled it. We all voted for acquittal."

But if Diefenbaker won his first case on a fluke, he quickly picked up the knack of winning others on his merits. Of 20 murder cases that he tried, only two clients went to the hangman. "He's a spellbinder before a jury," says an associate. "He would start his defense by working on one member of the jury, pitching to him exclusively. When he had him, he would start on the second and so on until he had the whole jury won." Says Diefenbaker: "I just chat with the jury."

The handsome young lawyer attended the Baptist Church, served on the town council. Oldtimers recall that he was "skinny enough to spit through," but with his racy Maxwell touring car, he added notably to the gaiety of the local young set. Among his feminine companions was Olive Evangeline Freeman, Nova Scotia-born daughter of a Saskatoon Baptist minister. But three years after he set up shop in Wakaw, Diefenbaker was ready to move on to what seemed from Wakaw to be the big time: Prince Albert (1923 pop. 12,000).

15-Year Loser. There Diefenbaker got into politics, began a 15-year record of steady losing. A Liberal by family tradition but an oppositionist by temperament, he switched to the Conservative Party, the perennial underdog in Saskatchewan. The move made him eligible to accept a Tory nomination for Prince Albert's seat in the House of Commons. He lost. The same year, in a new general election, John Diefenbaker challenged Prime Minister Mackenzie King himself--and lost to the Prime Minister by a 4,000-vote margin.

In 1929 Lawyer Diefenbaker married Edna Brower, a lively woman who managed to distract Diefenbaker occasionally from his dedication to politics. Under her coaching he learned to play bridge, began to turn up at dances. Three more times Diefenbaker tried for office and each time lost. He was beaten for mayor of Prince Albert, twice for seats in the Saskatchewan legislature. But he won a record for ambition and persistence, and as the 1940 election approached, Conservatives in nearby Lake Center passed over six aspirants from their own constituency to nominate Diefenbaker for Parliament.

The invitation reached Diefenbaker in a Humboldt, Sask. courtroom, where he was defending a construction foreman charged with paying arsonists to burn down grain elevators so he could get the reconstruction jobs. Diefenbaker hastily turned the case over to one of his law partners, rushed off to confer with his nominators, wound up agreeing to run. The defendant got a ten-year sentence.

Diefenbaker deliberately blurred party lines, ardently wooed Liberals and Socialists. He squeaked through by 280 votes; across the nation, his party elected only 38 other M.P.s.

Industrial Buildup. At first, as a member of that tiny Tory band in Ottawa, John Diefenbaker was chiefly a spectator. Prime Minister Mackenzie King had taken the country to war at Britain's side. Clarence Decatur Howe, Canada's U.S.-born Minister of Munitions and Supply, ordered a massive tooling up, to start a great flow of aircraft, small arms and ammunition and vehicles to Europe--a tooling up that was virtually the birth of big Canadian industry. The war decisions were made in the Cabinet and speedily ratified in Parliament by the Liberal government's top-heavy majority. John Diefenbaker ran errands for his constituents and cultivated Parliament Hill newsmen, who found him approachable, patient, quotable.

After the war, Canada's economy used its war-built industry to take off like a three-stage rocket. Powering the first big surge was a tremendous demand for durable and consumer goods. Next, the Korean war touched off a boom in aircraft, armaments, strategic materials. Two years ago, the third big surge cut in, powered by the development of vast new natural-resources industries--pipelines, waterpower projects, uranium and iron-ore developments, the St. Lawrence Seaway. Between 1946 and 1956 the gross national product leaped from $12 billion to $29 billion. The booming Toronto Stock Exchange spawned a new crop of millionaires who blossomed out in yachts and swimming pools.

As Canada's material wealth multiplied, so did her self-confidence and national pride. Canadians spoke up with a stronger voice at the United Nations and NATO. The government at Ottawa quietly dropped the word "Dominion" from Canada's name and most official usage, asked for and got a native-born Canadian--Vincent Massey--to serve as Governor General. Old Mackenzie King stepped down in 1948. The Liberals chose scholarly Louis St. Laurent to lead the party, and his father-of-a-family dignity carried general elections in 1949 and 1953.

Politician's Rise. Through the cold years, Tory Diefenbaker grew as a politician. Challenging a government move, he would stand near his desk in the oak-paneled House of Commons, hands on hips. His penetrating, nasal voice rose, his deep-set blue eyes flashed angrily. Up went the long accusatory forefinger, down it came aimed squarely at an erring Liberal. He learned to draw out Cabinet ministers with deceptively simple questions, clobber them with carefully researched facts. He argued for a national bill of rights, was quick and eloquent at the defense of private citizens he thought the government was pushing around, e.g., Japanese-Canadians relocated from their West Coast homes under war powers.

His continuing law practice helped his political buildup. In 1951, though mourning the death of his wife Edna, he took a case that put him before the nation as never before. A British Columbia railroad telegrapher was charged with manslaughter after a mixed-up message resulted in a train wreck that killed four crewmen and 21 Korea-bound soldiers. The telegrapher appealed to Diefenbaker, who promptly paid the $1,500 fee for membership in the B.C. bar and took the defense.

Because of legal technicalities, the crown based its charge on one fireman's death alone. But Diefenbaker returned again and again to the troops, who apparently died because officials of the government-run railroad had assigned them to wooden coaches on the train--the only coaches that were wrecked. At length the annoyed prosecuting attorney, a reserve colonel, cried: "We're not concerned with the deaths of a few privates going to Korea." Said a juror, later: "I was a sergeant. I always knew those colonels were not concerned with the death of ordinary soldiers." By effectively shifting the major negligence to the government, Diefenbaker won the case, made himself a workingman's hero.

Two and a half years after his wife's death, Diefenbaker began once more to see his old friend from Wakaw days--Olive Freeman Palmer, by then the widowed mother of a grown daughter, and assistant director of guidance for the Ontario Department of Education. In December 1953 they were quietly married in Toronto.

On to Leadership. Twice Diefenbaker tried unsuccessfully for the leadership of his party, losing the second time to George Alexander Drew, who as a powerful premier of Ontario had maintained excellent relations with his party's big-money contributors on Toronto's Bay Street. As starchy George Drew led his party twice to electoral defeat, Diefenbaker built up successively bigger votes for himself.

Canada's prosperity was hard to argue against, but one aspect of the boom increasingly disturbed the Britain-oriented Tories, and particularly John Diefenbaker: the extent that control of the nation's natural resources was passing to U.S. investors. Canadians, investing heavily in such safe and sound ventures as mortgages, public utilities and business expansion, put up three-fourths of the capital for their postwar growth; but U.S. investors, plunging heavily into high-risk mineral explorations, managed to sew up 75% of Canada's oil and gas, half its mining. The fact that U.S. investment more than balanced Canada's trade deficit and raised the value of the Canadian dollar only sharpened Tory fears that "it can't go on like this."

All the tensions generated by Canada's historic postwar rise vibrated through the House of Commons one day in May 1956, when the Liberal government's economic czar, Trade and Commerce Minister Howe, brought in a bill to ensure the construction of a gas pipeline from Alberta to Eastern Canada. The franchise had already been granted to Trans-Canada Pipe Lines Ltd., a corporation controlled by U.S. oilmen; now Howe proposed to lend the company $80 million to start construction. In addition, Howe planned to set up a government corporation to build an uneconomic section of the line. Angrily, the Tories in the House tried to shout down the loan. If government aid were needed, argued Tory Leader George Drew, let it go to a company controlled by Canadians. Minister Howe bulled ahead; the Liberals invoked a rarely used and unpopular closure motion to shut off debate and whip the bill through.

The struggle left Drew ill and exhausted. From a Toronto hospital room, he resigned as party leader. At a convention in Ottawa in December, John Diefenbaker won the leadership on the first ballot. Diefenbaker opened his campaign for the June election with the simple charge that the entrenched Liberals had become too powerful and arrogant. The Tories, he promised, would put an end to the "concentration of overwhelming power in the Cabinet."

"I Love Parliament." Although Tory old pros in his party warned that such high-mindedness had no political sex appeal, Diefenbaker plunged ahead. "I love Parliament," he said, and described the occasions when the Liberal government had held it "in contempt." Quoting Howe's "Who's to stop us?" Diefenbaker thundered: "The road of the Liberal government leads to the extinction of parliamentary government in Canada."

Subtly, Diefenbaker cashed in on the anti-American sentiment that the pipeline debate stirred up: "If foreign investments are to remain predominant in resource industries, Canada would tend to become a purely extractive national economy." As the campaign progressed, his audiences became bigger and more demonstrative. Keeping a man-killing schedule of daylight speaking tours and nights of travel by train and airplane, he seemed to live on chicken sandwiches and cat naps grabbed in moving automobiles. He explained his knack for dropping off to sleep easily: "You just clench your back teeth." On his six-week, 20,000-mile campaign tour, he astonished his staff by gaining 8 lbs.

Newspapers and politicians admired the try, but almost to a man they gave Diefenbaker no chance. The Gallup poll forecast a Liberal walkaway. Instead, the Tories raised their hold on the House of Commons from 50 seats to 111 (including one member gained in a recent by-election). The Liberals were cut down from 167 to 105 members. Independents, plus the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (socialist) and the rightist Social Credit Party picked up 48, thus denying the Tories a majority.

One night a week after the election, as John Diefenbaker and Olive sat down to chicken sandwiches and ice cream in Ottawa's Chateau Laurier hotel, a telephone call came from Government House. While Olive wept softly with excitement, John was informed that on the following day Governor General Massey would ask him to form a new government of Canada.

Canada First. As the course and aims of the new government emerged in the past two months. Canadians seemed increasingly pleased with the change of faces in Ottawa. Even Liberal newspapers found little to carp about, and leaders of the opposition parties promised not to "obstruct" the new government. On Oct. 14, Queen Elizabeth II will read a government policy statement to the new 23rd Parliament, and Diefenbaker will then present his legislative program to a hostile majority in the House of Commons. The opposition parties could join forces at any time to overthrow his government and force a new election. Far from holding any terrors for Diefenbaker, that is a situation he may even invite, perhaps early next year, by proposing legislation he knows the opposition cannot accept. For Diefenbaker can reasonably hope that the Tories would win the election, quite possibly with a clear majority in the House.

John Diefenbaker is proudly and confessedly a nationalist, in a nation whose oldtimers can recall when annexation by the U.S. was still a live political issue. His special concern is how to bind together the 4,000-mile-long, east-west ribbon that is populated Canada, weaving it strongly enough to resist the fraying influences of the north-south pull of economics and geography. How to make a nation out of Canada has in fact been the historic preoccupation of both of Canada's major parties almost to the exclusion of doctrinaire, right-left, capitalism-socialism struggles. Canada's first Prime Minister, Tory John A. Macdonald (1867-73, 1878-91), liberally subsidized the Canadian Pacific Railroad to keep Canada from being served only by north-bound branch lines of U.S. railroads. Liberal C. D. Howe, a devoted private enterpriser, saw nothing strange in fathering a national airline and a national radio-TV network. When Liberals adopted baby bonuses, old-age pensions, a $100 million Canada Council to encourage culture, Conservatives generally approved. Tory Diefenbaker, in fact, promises higher pensions and fatter farm subsidies.

On the emotional issue of foreign relations, subtle differences mark the party attitudes. Liberals cherish the British Commonwealth as a purely sentimental unifying influence. John Diefenbaker (though he is the first Tory Prime Minister with a non-British name) loves Britain--and sees it as a useful lever to help Canada resist U.S. domination. In London for a Commonwealth Conference soon after his election, Diefenbaker invited his fellow Prime Ministers to send their finance ministers to Ottawa this fall to talk up Commonwealth trade. And back in Ottawa, he called on Canadians to shift 15% of their U.S. purchase orders to British suppliers, thus strengthen Britain's ability to buy Canadian wheat.

"I believe that Canadians are becoming more and more conscious of the need for re-examination of Canada's economic policies to ensure and preserve for the people of Canada the control of their own political and economic destiny," says John Diefenbaker. Then he adds a favorite line: "I am not anti-American. The very thought is repugnant to me. I am strongly pro-Canadian."

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