Charles Ritchie - Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971

ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE

An Appetite for Life
The Siren Years
Diplomatic Passport
My Grandfathers House

Copyright 1983 Charles Ritchie

Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1983 McClelland & Stewart trade paperback edition published 2001 by arrangement with The Estate of Charles Ritchie

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data

Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995
Storm signals : more undiplomatic diaries, 1962-1971

eISBN: 978-1-55199-680-6

1. Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995 Diaries. 2. Diplomats Canada Diaries.
I. Title.

FC 616. R 58 A 3 2001 327.710092 C 2001-930637-7
F 1034. R 56 A 37 2001a

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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v3.1

To my niece Elizabeth Ritchie
and to the memory of
Elizabeth Bowen

This will be the fourth volume of these undiplomatic diaries. It covers the years 1962 to 1971, beginning with my appointment as Ambassador to Washington and ending when I quit the post of High Commissioner to London and said goodbye to the Foreign Service.

I should from the start warn the reader what not to expect. This is not an historical memoir or a study of the role of Canada in international affairs. Recently a spate of memoirs and studies of this period have appeared. Some are valuable contributions to history some less so. All were written with the wisdom of hindsight which is denied the diarist.

As a boy I wrote, I prefer diaries to memoirs. They are less made up afterwards. They are also less flattering to the ego of the author. It is a temptation to revise the record when one comes across opinions about people and events which have since proved to be wrong. That temptation has to be resisted. Also, one does not want to hurt the feelings of the living or cause distress to the friends and relatives of the dead. Yet if one irons out all pungency of comment the sanitized text becomes so bland as to be unreadable. The only real answer to the problem would be for the diarist to die before publication or for those mentioned in the diary to die before him either seems an extreme solution.

This record is only a footnote to History. Yet History, if not at the centre of the stage, is always in the wings, for the diarist played a small part on the fringes of the drama. Politics dominated the Washington years, and politicians good, bad, and indifferent come and go throughout the story. So too do my diplomatic colleagues. Diplomats are not a particularly popular breed and my old profession, like all professions, has its trivial, sometimes ludicrous, side, but most of its practitioners are hard-headed, humane, and tolerant people who devote much of their energies to the peaceful solution of intractable international problems and the prevention of violent international collisions. As to our own Foreign Service, it contains some of the best brains and most devoted public servants in our country.

Though the framework of this journal is that of the diplomatic career, the diaries themselves are highly personal. The scenes and people appearing in them are an oddly assorted company, not chosen in order of importance or according to the rules of protocol. Why else does the diabolical dachshund Popski usurp space which should be reserved for his betters? Why does the snapshot of an eccentric encountered by accident replace the portrait of a friend whom I saw every day?

In this book statesmen, or would-be statesmen, rub shoulders with authors, society hostesses; old friends reappear and a younger generation begins to enter on the stage; the scenes shift from Embassy life in London, Washington, and Paris to the streets of Ottawa and the south shore of Nova Scotia. It is a peculiar book because it reflects the changing moods of the writer, ranging from gloom and nostalgia to exhilaration and amusement, written from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour. We diarists are peculiar people; we may appear harmless, yet we can be dangerous. We write things down, awkward things sometimes, indiscreet things, things better forgotten. We should be banned. No doubt we soon will be, for we have no union or lobby to defend us. Diarists are by definition non-joiners; theirs is not a group activity. Our only plea in defence might be that we find Life so interesting that we are not willing to see it slip between our fingers without leaving a trace behind.

After four years as Permanent Representative to the United Nations I left New York on April 27, 1962, to go as Canadian Ambassador to Washington. My appointment there took place at a time of strained and worsening relationship between the Kennedy administration and the government of Prime Minister Diefenbaker. I had been chosen as Ambassador at the urging of the Secretary of State for External Affairs, Howard Green, and after a prolonged period of indecision on the part of the Prime Minister as to the best candidate for the job. I hardly knew Mr. Diefenbaker personally, and my interview with him prior to my appointment was of the most cursory kind. Howard Green, on the other hand, I knew well. I had worked very closely with him in my capacity as Permanent Representative to the United Nations and I had developed a respect for his ability and integrity, and a personal affection for him. I had serious misgivings myself about my suitability for the Washington post, principally on the grounds that I had not enough knowledge of the trade and economic issues between our two countries. However, the outgoing Ambassador, Arnold Heeney, sought to encourage me in every way possible, and this, combined with Howard Greens confidence, overcame any hesitations I might have had.

To be an ambassador in a capital when relations between your own government and the government to which you are accredited are bad, and getting worse, is always a tricky situation and is a difficult hand to play. I had spent happy years in my youth as Third Secretary in the (then) Canadian Legation in Washington. I had many friends there. So my wife Sylvia and I were warmly welcomed, and there was not the faintest reflection, in the hospitality with which we were greeted, of the clouds on the political horizon. However, pleasant as this was, it had little to do with the realities of politics. I had only been in Washington a very short time before this was brought home to me. The occasion was a private party at which the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was present. To my surprise, he took the occasion to launch an attack on the policies and attitude of the Canadian government in such forthright language that Walter Lippmann, who was among the guests, said to me afterwards that in all his experience he had never heard such terms used to an ambassador about his government. There could be no doubt in my mind, or in anyone elses, of the personal quality of the Presidents dislike of Mr. Diefenbaker, whom he regarded with supercilious aversion and whose policies seemed to him to have an anti-American bias. Nor could there be any doubt that the Prime Minister reciprocated these sentiments. In Mr. Diefenbakers case there was anger and irritation, particularly with the Presidents somewhat arrogant and offhand style. More profound was Mr. Diefenbakers suspicion, which deepened into conviction, that the President was in close sympathy with the Canadian Leader of the Opposition, Lester B. Pearson, and would not hesitate to interfere in our domestic affairs to bring about a change of government.