Charles Ritchie - Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962

ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE

An Appetite for Life
The Siren Years
Storm Signals
My Grandfathers House

Copyright 1981 Charles Ritchie

Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1981 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, 19061995
Diplomatic passport : more undiplomatic diaries, 19461962

eISBN: 978-1-55199-679-0

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

FC 616. R 58 A 3 2001 327.710092 C 2001-930636-9
F 1034.3. R 56 A 37 2001

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v3.1

To
my friends in the Department of External Affairs,
past and present

These journals, covering the years 1946 to 1962, take up where my wartime diaries, published as The Siren Years, ended. I ask myself the question, What is the compulsion that makes one put down on paper day after day such a personal record as this? Is it simply an exercise in egotism, or a confessional? Perhaps a little of both, but it may also be an obsession with the passing of time, a sense that life is slipping like sand through ones fingers and that before it vanishes completely one must shore up these remains.

It is said that every fat man has a thin man inside him, struggling to get out. Has every diarist a novelist inside him, struggling to get out? If so, the struggle is likely to be unavailing. The diarist, with his passion for the record historical, social, or political too often lacks the power of construction and the storytellers skill. On the other hand, many writers are marvellous diarists but they tend to regard their diaries as the waste product of their art, material which is not yet fused by the imagination into finished work. Some diaries are written with an eye to publication as a conscious contribution to history. My own were of the private kind. It is true that in my old age I went public, or partly public, but when I wrote them they were for my eyes only. Nor are they at all like the informative memoirs of many of my contemporaries in diplomacy. Yet forty years in a career are bound to be conditioning, perhaps more than one realizes oneself, especially in a career spent for the most part away from ones own country, living the rootless existence of those to whom a place is not a home but a posting, shifting from one foreign capital to another. In this career the representational role tends to take over. The man sometimes merges into the ambassador. The result is not so much pomposity as a smoothness from which all angles and irregularities of temperament and opinion have been ironed out. From this fate diary-writing may have been an escape hatch for me. Diplomacy is a profession in which protracted patience, discretion, and a glaze of agreeability prevail, and it was a relief to break out, if only on paper.

This is the record of years spent in the foreign service of Canada, yet no official business was included in it. Here are to be found no breaches of the sacrosanct Official Secrets Act. From the Department of External Affairs in which I served I took no papers on departure. Buried in their archives is the evidence of my working life. This deliberate omission conveys a curiously lopsided picture, as though the writer, instead of being an industrious and reasonably competent official, had been a detached observer drifting idly about the world. An observer, yes but what did he observe? Changing scenes and people, politicians, fellow diplomats and journalists, people of fashion or who sought to be so, authors and would-be authors, old aunts and young beauties, people labelled interesting, and, often more interesting, those without a label. As to the scenes, they shift from Ottawa to Paris, from Delhi to Bonn, from London to New York, and always back to his native Nova Scotia. Thus the journal is an odd mixture of anecdote, reflection, politics, and personalities. It may be thought that this record is too personal for publication during my lifetime. The alternative of posthumous publication seemed to me a bleak prospect, so I let the record stand, with a word of advice to any fellow diplomatic diarist keep diplomatic discretion out of your diaries and keep the diarists indiscretion out of your diplomacy. A double life is doubly enjoyable.

In the years 1945 to 1947 the war was just over and the Cold War was just beginning. This was a time marked by one international conference and confrontation after another, at which EastWest conflicts were accentuated towards the dreaded danger point of a third world war. Canada was represented at most of these gatherings, either as a participant or as an observer. While based in Ottawa I served as adviser to a series of Canadian delegations to such conferences, so that I was as much abroad as I was at home.

Despite the cloud of gloomy foreboding hanging over the future, these were, for a Canadian foreign service officer, exhilarating years. There was change in the air. Although the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, was still governed by a caution verging on isolationism, another mood was beginning to prevail in the country. Our pre-war policy of no prior commitments had not saved us involvement in the struggle, and it was increasingly obvious that it was in our interest as Canadians to play our full part in the attempt to build a more sane and stable international order. I do not think that we in the Department of External Affairs approached the task with dewy-eyed illusions, but with a realization that whatever the frustrations, it had to be attempted. A further spur to a positive Canadian foreign policy was provided by the new pride and confidence in our nationhood, born of our achievements in the war and Canadas growing wealth and importance. No doubt, too, the temporary eclipse of so many great nations in Europe and Asia, laid low by the war, thrust Canada closer to a front seat in the world community. These challenges and opportunities met with a ready and eager response in the Department of External Affairs, which was expanding in size and influence under the leadership of a gifted band of officials including Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, and Mike Pearson. With the departure in 1948 of Mackenzie King from power, with Pearson as Foreign Minister and Louis St. Laurent as Prime Minister, both convinced internationalists, the political leadership came into being which could use the energy and talents to be found in the department to the full, so that our foreign service gained widespread international respect.