Dief’s ‘favourite reporter’ reminisces

Murray Lyons reflects on the Chief’s penchant for self-mythologizing.

When I was a reporter at the Prince Albert Daily Herald starting in 1975, I was John Diefenbaker’s favourite reporter. How do I know this? He told me.

In fact, Diefenbaker would make an effort to come and see me when he was in town.

I would look up from my typewriter and there he was: the one-time lawyer from Wakaw who rose to lead, in 1958, the biggest Conservative government in Canadian history.

“Hello,” he would say, looking at me directly with his blue eyes blazing, just like Peter C. Newman had described in a book I read for first-year political science class. (I had been told never to mention Newman’s name around the Chief.)

“How’s my favourite reporter?”

As a student of Canadian history, what could be more thrilling?

One time on his visit home to P.A., he even invited me to his hotel room at the Sheraton Marlboro, where he would be surrounded by his acolytes, all of whom believed Dief had anointed them as his successor when he died.

My friend and boss Oren Robison told me not to let it swell my head. A succession of Herald reporters had been Dief’s “favourite reporter.”

The culmination of my Dief fascination came when the Chief’s trusted friend Dick Spencer, a high school English teacher and city councillor, invited me to join the “Chief” on a visit to Duck Lake and Fort Carlton to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of Treaty 6.

In the car, I saw Dief at his mischievous best. Turning to me from the front seat, he did his best Robert Stanfield impression. It was pretty good. He had a Churchill anecdote related to Diefenbaker’s status as a teetotaller. “Oh, so you only harm yourself,” Churchill is alleged to have said to Diefenbaker.

Over cocktails at another time when Dief was not present, Spencer told me some of the things Dief said about himself might be myth. For example, when he visited the family cottage of Dr. Glenn Green, he would occasionally agree to a glass of beer on a hot day.

So was Dief telling the truth about being a non-drinker? Maybe. Maybe not.

Dr. Green was a believer in natural remedies. Maybe Dief enjoyed the benefits of a stout. It’s good for restoring iron, you know. If it was medicinal, the myth of being a nondrinker could be maintained.

That’s the funny thing about myths. We come to believe a story about ourselves even if one of the key details also happened to someone else. Like being the favourite reporter of a former prime minister.

In July 1977, I left Prince Albert to become city editor of the Moose Jaw Times-Herald. Same chain. Same poor wages.

On a visit back to see Oren and the others at the Herald in Prince Albert, they had bad news for me. My former colleague Les MacPherson was clearly the rising star of that newsroom. MacPherson had also apparently charmed Diefenbaker. As the son of Diefenbaker supporter D.K. MacPherson, it all made sense. Dief had already told Les he was his “favourite reporter.”

It is crushing to see a myth destroyed like that.

I got over it.

Now, I see calls for the DiefLaurier statue in Saskatoon — paper boy and future prime minister sells current prime minister a newspaper — to be dismantled as if it were a statue of Lenin in St. Petersburg after the fall of the Soviet Union. Why? Because it’s possible the story may be more Diefenbaker myth than true.

“It never happened,” said a Regina lawyer, offering no actual proof Laurier never encountered a young Diefenbaker on the morning Laurier laid the cornerstone for the University of Saskatchewan’s College Building.

And yes, a former Prince Albert Daily Herald managing editor, Heather Persson, is now ready to defend the Chief and his possible myth telling. Why?

It can’t be personal. I am of the firm view that Ms. Persson was never Diefenbaker’s “favourite reporter.”

You will have to ask her why that was not possible.

It’s possible the story may be more Diefenbaker myth than true.