National Post (National Edition)
Diefenbaker deathly afraid of body-snatchers
PM entombed in concrete at his request
There’s only one definite way to figure out if John Diefenbaker really did father illegitimate children; dig him up, extract a DNA sample and perform a paternity test.
It’s unlikely that any judge would allow the exhumation of an official National Historic Person. But there’s another, more technical, barrier at play: John Diefenbaker cannot be exhumed.
After the 13th Prime Minister was consigned to the earth on Aug. 22, 1979, the coffins of him and his wife Olive were covered with a healthy layer of wet cement.
In the 1995 book Trumpets and Drums, Diefenbaker associate Dick Spencer wrote that “the final service rendered Dief by Saskatoon funeral attendants was the pouring of wet cement into his grave, around and onto the casket below.”
Spencer’s description remains one of the only surviving accounts of the unusual measure.
The reason, according to the book, was that Diefenbaker was worried about having his body stolen. Specifically, he had been spooked by an 1876 criminal plot to steal Abraham Lincoln’s body that was foiled at the last minute by an undercover Secret Service agent.
After that, Honest Abe was interred in a steel cage encased by concrete.
“What many weren’t aware of was the Chief’s fascination with Abraham Lincoln’s rites,” wrote Spencer. “Lincoln had been so protected in his final resting place. Dief requested and was given the same precaution.”
Diefenbaker appears to be the only Canadian prime minister who arranged this kind of burial treatment. Most of Canada’s first ministers, in fact, are buried in family plots or out-of-theway municipal cemeteries.
And despite the 1876 Lincoln fiasco, being buried under concrete is even rare among U.S. presidents.
Digging up anyone from George Washington to John F. Kennedy is as easy as prying up a marble lid or taking a spade to two metres of earth. James Garfield’s casket wasn’t even buried; it’s still visible in a Cleveland crypt.
In fact, Diefenbaker is actually part of a relatively elite group of people with ultra-secure graves. Film pioneer Charles Chaplin, notably, is now in a secure grave after his corpse was stolen for ransom in 1978.
Concrete graves also enshroud some of history’s most notorious criminals, including gangster John Dillinger and the 19th century serial killer H.H. Holmes.
The brutal Soviet dictator Josef Stalin originally had his body preserved like that of Vladimir Lenin, but as his crimes became more widely known after his death, the dictator was shifted to a nondescript concrete-lined grave outside the Kremlin.
More curious still about Diefenbaker is that nobody seems to remember that he demanded such bizarre arrangements.
The grave is located outside the Diefenbaker Canada Centre on the grounds of the University of Saskatchewan. But neither the Diefenbaker Centre nor the University of Saskatchewan Archives could provide any evidence of a concrete burial.
“Unfortunately, we are unable to locate any mention of Diefenbaker’s wishes regarding being buried in cement, or any notes at all on the subject, within Diefenbaker’s own papers or within University records,” wrote a University of Saskatchewan researcher.
The unusual burial does not appear to have been mentioned in press coverage of the initial funeral, and rarely makes it into Diefenbaker biographies.
Aside from the Spencer account, in fact, the only written account the National Post could find was by an anonymous student groundskeeper quoted in the book Inside These Greystone Walls, a history of the University of Saskatchewan.
“I think the hole itself was steel-lined, or cement-lined, rather. And then they poured a big cement pad over the casket,” the student told author Michael Taft.
However, the bizarre request would be in keeping with the over-the-top pageantry that Diefenbaker insisted on for his burial.
Every detail had been intricately planned by Diefenbaker, and it remains the most elaborate — and most expensive — funeral for a prime minister in Canadian history.
It included a state funeral, a singing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the disinterment of his late wife Olive and a highly publicized funeral train from Ottawa to Saskatoon.
In the months before his death, Diefenbaker had spent countless hours refining his list of honorary pallbearers.
“He (Diefenbaker) had studied every detail of Winston Churchill’s state funeral, down to the simple inscription on Churchill’s gravestone,” wrote Spencer in Trumpets and Drums.
Spencer noted that he had tried in vain to curb Diefenbaker’s obsession on the “macabre” subject and that “the plans had been talked about, practically rehearsed, with us during the last two years.”
As for any suspicions that Diefenbaker ordered the concrete treatment specifically to avoid any future paternity tests, the timeline is off. Diefenbaker was buried in 1979, a full nine years before the applications of forensic DNA testing were widely known.
CHIEF’S FASCINATION WITH ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S RITES.