Allan Levine - King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny

King

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ALLAN LEVINE

King

WILLIAM LYON

MACKENZIE KING

A LIFE GUIDED BY

THE HAND OF DESTINY

Copyright 2011 by Allan Levine

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Douglas & McIntyre
An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver BC Canada V5T 4S7
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-560-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-55365-908-2 (ebook)

Editing by Trena White
Copyediting by Lara Kordic
Jacket design by Jessica Sullivan
Front cover photograph Corbis

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

With the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council
With the generous support of the City of Winnipeg through the Winnipeg Arts Council

For my dear mother and my loyal hound, Maggie
(Mackenzie King would have understood)

My belief in myself leads me to hope that this will some day be realized. The public will admire me for the courage & spirit I show in sacrificing a certainty for a great uncertainty Lastly there is the purpose of God in all, the realization of the dream of my life, the page unfolds as by the hand of Destiny. From a child I have looked forward to this hour as that which should lead me into my lifes work. I have believed my lifes work lies there, and now I am led to the threshold by the Invisible Hand.
THE DIARY OF WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING, July 25, 1907

The secret of his unique accomplishment is difficult to identify, for Mr. King was a character of baffling complexity.
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS, July 24, 1950

Table of Contents

I am taking up this diary again as a means of keeping true to my true purpose. It has kept me in the path from drifting more than I otherwise might have, it has helped to clear me in my thought and convictions, and it has been a real companion and friend.THE DIARY OF WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING, January 1, 1902

LIKE MOST DAYS, January 15, 1929, started for William Lyon Mackenzie King, the fifty-four-year-old prime minister of Canada, with the recording of yet another vision. Early that morning, Willie King, or Rex, the nickname used by his small circle of friends, called from his second-floor bedroom in Laurier House in Ottawa for his personal secretary, Howard Measures. He had had another vivid dream, and he needed to immediately dictate it before it passed into the realm of the unknown. Measures obediently took down every loony word, and later that day the story of the dream was dispatched to Kings fortune teller, Mrs. Rachel Bleaney, in Kingston, for her wise interpretation.

In his vision, King found himself in a large building with a never-ending hallway. He began to climb the flight of stairs before him. Suddenly, he came across His Majesty, King George V, lying on a couch, motionless. There was no sign of breathing and he might have been thought to be dead, as King explained. He moved on to another room and found a large blue envelope with a red seal on it containing the Royal morning mail. Mackenzie King did not see his parents, both long dead, but he was conscious of their presence.

Mrs. Bleaney soon sent the prime minister her dream analysis. Something unexpected was going to happen to him, she predicted. According to the Kingston soothsayer, Dreaming of royalty generally means some unexpected honour which I firmly believe is soon about to be bestowed on you; yet I feel you are likely to be very grave and anxious over a very important question that may arise in Parliament. She foresaw that a trip to Britain was imminent. Your dear ones were certainly with you in this dream, but there seems a little cloud that they could not show themselves as clear as you could have liked, but you will have some more strange yet wonderful visions. You may have three ones after the other, but your dear mother is your leading guide and always will be, and although you were lonely and felt this in your heart, she is coming again in a most remarkable and beautiful way to prepare you for something of a most wonderful and remarkable nature as you will be taking the most important part in a large public event. Mrs. Bleaney signed the letter, Your most sincere and true spiritual friend and adviser.

There was, in fact, no grand trip to Britain that year nor any honours bestowed upon him. But even if Mrs. Bleaney was off the mark, King held her predictions in high regard.

What are we to make of this seemingly cockeyed vision and the hundreds of other such records of Mackenzie Kings dreams, sances and communications with his dear mother and all those others in the Great Beyond, as he reverentially referred to the afterlife?

Regardless of how it sometimes seems, Mackenzie King was not the only fervent believer and practitioner of spiritualism in the first half of the twentieth century, just the only Canadian prime minister to embrace its mystical tenets and ethereal customs. Did that make him unfit to be the leader of the country? Not in the least. There is no denying that his behaviour was bizarre and unconventional, as is his current popular reputation. Yet somehow he was able to tap his intellectual dexterity and make the prime ministers role his own for a generation. He wasnt a crackpot, asserted Walter Turnbull, who served as Kings principal secretary during the early forties, in a 1975 interview. He had this idea, as all leaders do, that he was the smartest man around. His ego was very big but he was one of the sanest people I ever knew in my life.

The mediums King sought out constantly reassured him about both personal and political issues. Sometimes, though not often, he was guided by what they told him; most of these prognostications and supernatural messages were exactly what his psychics knew he needed to hear.

Consider another example. In February 1939, seven months before the outbreak of the Second World War, King was understandably in a tense frame of mind. Early that month, he invited the English clairvoyant and palm reader Mrs. Quest Brown to Laurier House for an interview. She helped him make sense of things. You are obviously torn spiritually between duty and preserving your own inner integritythis aggressive and destructive battle is weakening your resistanceit is an insidious poison that is gradually sapping your strength, she told him. You have done so much for others and there is in every ones life a point where one analyses success at such a price is of doubtful merit. You can still fulfill your destinies from the maddening crowd. You have many years in front of you in which to achieve all you desire for Canada and possibly this must be achieved in the peace and silence of your own inner life. King, not surprisingly, concurred with this insightful assessment of his character. Mrs. Brown has diagnosed absolutely correctly the real conflict that I experienced over many years, he wrote in a personal note about the palm reading. My exhaustion and fatigue has arisen out of it, the eternal effort to preserve an inner peace with the terrible pressure of obligations arising out of my environment and duties. Such was the daily self-sacrifice that he believed he made for the country.