The King who slept between two elephants
Canada’s longest-serving prime minister was complicated and crucial Ken Whyte
If I were ever to write a biography of a Canadian political figure, it would be William Lyon Mackenzie King, prime minister from 1921 to 1948, with a couple of breaks along the way, and leader of the Liberal party for 29 uninterrupted years.
Despite a stunning lack of retail political skills, he was a crucial presence in the life of the nation from the end of the First World War to the start of the Cold War.
He was a hugely complicated man, cold and tactless to many, warm and unctuous to his betters, a loner of the first order, never married, in thrall to the occult, capable of the keenest domestic and geopolitical strategizing, and given to wildly contradictory displays of personal humility and self-aggrandizement.
It is possible to dwell on his supernatural fascinations and conclude that he was mad. It is possible to dwell on his political maneuverings and declare him a genius.
It is possible to look at the brilliant statue of him on Parliament Hill and not know what to think.
Best of all, Mackenzie King left 50,000 pages of a diary that has been called “the most important single political document in twentieth-century Canadian history.” If you’re writing biography, striving to get up close and personal with your subject, diaries are gold, and King’s is Fort Knox.
This week, Sutherland House published Neville Thompson’s magnificent The Third Man: Churchill, Roosevelt, Mackenzie King, and the Untold Friendships that Won WW2.
It is not a biography of King. There have already been a couple of those. Thompson’s book is something more necessary to an appreciation of the late leader. He takes a close look at King doing his most important work in the prime of life, managing Canada’s contributions to the Allied cause in WW2 while serving as a lynchpin between Great Britain and the United States and, more particularly, their larger-than-life leaders, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
King knew both of these men long before the war and knew each of them better than they knew each other. He understood as well as any person on the planet why the success of their relationship was crucial to defeating Nazi Germany. He was determined to make it work and was uniquely positioned to do so.
As the prime minister of the senior British dominion, King was capable of explaining Churchill and the British empire to Americans. As America’s closest neighbor, he was well situated to interpret Roosevelt and the U.S. to the U.K. He was treated as a peer and confidant by both leaders throughout the war and respected as such by their inner circles (and thus included in their counsels).
By constantly making himself available and useful, King contributed enormously to the fruitful Churchill-roosevelt relationship and to the larger war effort. Where the genius comes in is that King did all this to be of service to his Allies, and also to Canada.
Trudeau the First once described the relationship between Canada and the U.S. as sleeping with an elephant: “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” Brian Mulroney added: “If the elephant rolls over, you are a dead man.” For six years, during the greatest crisis in human history, King slept between two elephants.
The U.K. wanted a newly independent Canada to knuckle under and put the urgent needs of empire first. The U.S., worried about North American security and impatient with such niceties as borders, wanted King to submit to continental (i.e., U.S.) war management. There was a great deal of twitching and grunting.
King managed to satisfy both elephants without ever sacrificing Canadian sovereignty. He hopped out of bed in ’45 not simply intact but with Canada stronger and more independent than ever.
Thompson’s book tells the complete story of King’s war and his triangular relationship with the great leaders, making full use of the diary in which the prime minister recorded everything happening around him. His shrewd observations here (from 1943) are an indication of what gives the diary its historical value and what makes Thompson’s book compulsive reading:
Churchill, I greatly fear, may not last out the war — because of drink ... I pray it may not be so and that he may be spared to enjoy some of the fruits of victory, which he more than any other single man deserves... The President has overtaxed his strength in other ways. He has had a harder battle in many ways than Churchill. His fight for the people has made him many and bitter enemies. He has done too much, I fear for purely political reasons — the vast expenditures totally regardless of consequence, & which may leave the United States in an appalling condition some day... but I believe that he has been sincere in his determination to better the conditions of the masses. He is more human than Churchill, but each desire to be at the top. Churchill would like to be the ruler of an Empire (conservative) Roosevelt the head of a Commonwealth (democrat). I wonder if his ambition to figure too largely on a world stage may not be his undoing & the undoing of his strength & of his political power?