Prime Ministers and Presidents Part Two

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17 November 2011

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Prime Ministers and

Presidents Part Two

In the late 1950s relations between the leaders

of Canada and America entered a long, chilly phase

In 1957, Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker ended the long Liberal hold on power in Ottawa.

The special relationship started out in a friendly way with the signing of the North American Air Defence Agreement (NORAD). The 1958 pact set up an integrated system to ensure Canadian and American security against the threat of Soviet air attack. But, it was far more important to the United States, which was a more likely target than Canada.

Cordial Relations between

Diefenbaker and Eisenhower

Mr. Diefenbaker (show seated below left with the U.S. President, right) got along well with President Eisenhower.

However, the Canadian prime minister soon began to feel pressured by Washington on defence matters.

A June 1960 summit meeting presented the usual show of harmony between the leaders, but relations were starting to turn sour. America’s fierce opposition to communism caused Mr. Diefenbaker to feel that Washington was “pushing people around.”

The growing cost of military hardware and mounting opposition to placing nuclear warheads in Canada were signalling a coming split.

With the arrival of John F. Kennedy in the White House in 1961, a major rift developed between Ottawa and Washington.

The Kennedy Years

In 1961, President Kennedy came to Ottawa. The new president said that “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. Necessity has made us allies.”

But, behind closed doors, the relationship between Diefenbaker and Kennedy was frosty.

Mr. Kennedy pressed the prime minister to join the Organization of American States (OAS), to increase Canada’s foreign aid, and to beef up defence spending and NATO contributions.

Mr. Diefenbaker felt that the president was interfering in internal policies and this annoyed him.

The prime minister also found a Kennedy strategy memo left behind on a sofa; it confirmed his suspicions that the Americans were far too “pushy” with Ottawa.

Relations did not recover while these two men were in power and Mr. Kennedy is reported to have called the Canadian leader a “boring son-of-a-bitch.”

But, Prime Minister Diefenbaker could trade insults with the best of them, at least in private. In 1962, he said of President John F. Kennedy: “He’s a hothead. He’s a fool - too young, too brash, too inexperienced, and a boastful son-of-a-bitch!”

Vietnam War a Prickly Point

The issue that dominated Canadian-American relations from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s was U.S. military intervention in Vietnam and Indochina.

Napalm is dropped by a U.S. Plane on a suspected target in Vietnam.

After U.S. President Lyndon Johnson launched a massive escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965, the Liberal government of Lester B. Pearson found itself in a difficult position.

Ottawa had big doubts about the wisdom of American military aggression in Southeast Asia. For a while, it was thought best to remain silent to preserve the special relationship - there were trade and jobs to preserve.

But then, Mr. Pearson went very public with criticism. In a speech in Philadelphia, he urged the United States to end its bombing of North Vietnam.

President Johnson blew a gasket. When Mr. Pearson arrived at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland the next day he had some to explaining to do.

Canada’s prime minister was given a “severe talking to.” Lawrence Martin in his 1982 book The Presidents and the Prime Ministers described what happened next. As Mr. Martin describes it, LBJ grabbed Pearson by the shirt collar, lifted the prime minister off the floor and shouted, “You pissed on my rug!”

Mr. Pearson is said to have mustered all his considerable diplomatic skills and to have calmed Lyndon Johnson down. The two claimed to have parted company on genial terms.

The Trudeau Era

The first foreign leader to visit newly-elected U.S. President Richard Nixon in the White House in 1969 was Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

President Nixon (left) and Prime Minister Trudeau put on happy faces for the cameras.

In the middle of a Canadian foreign policy review at the time, Mr. Trudeau spoke to the National Press Club in Washington. There, he spun his famous metaphor: “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even tempered the beast is…one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

Through twitches and grunts, President Nixon developed a rare appreciation for Canada’s national interests.

Speaking to Parliament during his 1972 visit, Mr. Nixon remarked: “It is time to move beyond the sentimental rhetoric of the past…to recognize that we have very separate identities…[and] significant differences.”

But, Mr. Nixon didn’t much like Pierre Trudeau, calling him a crude name given to a certain body part and also referring to him as “a pompous egghead.”

The victim of the insult responded with, “I’ve been called worse things by better people.”

And, we now learn, the FBI kept a careful watch on Mr. Trudeau. It seems the agency was concerned about his leftist leanings. Not as concerned as the wackos of the extreme right though.

A group in Florida caught the FBI’s attention: it was putting out a recorded telephone message saying that Mr. Trudeau “adores [China’s leader] Mao Zedong and wants to make Canada over into a Red Chinese-style communist slave state.”

Others went further, and the FBI intercepted at least four death threats originating in the U.S. against the Canadian prime minister.

The 161-page FBI file on Mr. Trudeau was released a few months after his death in 2000, although large sections were blacked out. Every U.S. president who dealt with Pierre Trudeau likely saw his FBI file.

It’s probably not stretching the imagination to believe the FBI or the CIA continue to keep an eye on Canada’s leaders. U.S. presidents are likely to want to know as much as they can about the people they are dealing with.

Ronald Reagan Comes to Power

With the rise of conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan (left)to power in 1980, the stage was set for a new phase of stress in Canada-U.S. Relations.

Mr. Reagan and his administration hated the National Energy Program of 1980.

The president tried everything to have the policy gutted or withdrawn. The American Ambassador to Canada, Paul Robinson, lectured Canada for its discriminatory energy policy, “softness” on communism, and excessive spending on social programs.

By the time of the 1981 Ottawa economic summit, Mr. Trudeau's patience with Ronald Reagan was wearing thin and relations entered a period of tension.

Mr. Trudeau responded to growing American economic and cultural policies with a revival of Canadian nationalism.

Canadian policies, including the creation of the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), ruling on American TV commercial deletions, the removal of Time magazine and Reader’s Digest tax exemptions, Canada’s attempts to expand trade with other nations, and agitation for acid rain clean-up measures, all rankled the Americans.

In his 1985 book Canada and the Reagan Challenge, political scientist Stephen Clarkson reveals Mr. Trudeau was accused in the U.S. of “rabid nationalism,” and of “fanning the flames of anti-Americanism.”

Professor Clarkson reports a U.S. official as saying, “If the U.S. allows Canada to get away with its new policies, what about Mexico?”

Still another recalled the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973, and outlined a plan to topple the government in Canada by “destabilizing the industrial base in Ontario and Quebec.”

In 1983, Prime Minister Trudeau launched a three-month-long Peace Initiative to try to open East-West dialogue. This didn’t go down well in Washington either. U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger suggested Mr. Trudeau might have been smoking too much pot.

Resources consulted for this series

“Continental Divide.” CBC News.

“Canadian American Relations.” Canadian Encyclopedia.

“U.S. Presidents and Canadian Prime Ministers: Good Vibes or not.” Gil Troy and L. Ian MacDonald, Policy Options, March 2011.

“The Presidents and the Prime Ministers.” Lawrence Martin, Doubleday Canada, 1982.

Return to Part One

Coming soon - Part Three

During the War of 1812, British-Canadian forces fought their way into the American capital, Washington.

They burned the president’s mansion and several other government

Buildings.

To conceal the damage to the stonework, the Americans covered the President’s house with whitewash - and so created the “White House” as we know it today.

When John Kennedy visited Ottawa in 1961, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker — against the advice of White House staff — scheduled a tree-planting ritual at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence in Ottawa.

Mr. Kennedy wanted to show up his elderly host and ploughed into the ground vigorously with his shovel.

Too vigorously as it turned out, because the young president seriously aggravated an old back injury.

“Back in the old days, when John Diefenbaker warred with John F.

Kennedy, he declared:

‘We are a power, not

a puppet.’ The boys at

the White House had a good laugh at that one.

But, at least the Chief (Diefenbaker) got the

second half right.”

Lawrence Martin,

The Globe and Mail

“Canadians, generally, want good relations with the United States, but they do

not necessarily want

to admit to it.”

Canada’s former

Ambassador to the U.S.

Derek Burney

John Diefenbaker and Dwight D. Eisenhower both came from a western farm background.

Both men loved fishing, so in July 1958 the two leaders did some angling at Harrington Lake in Quebec.

A year later, the lake and its lodge became the official summer retreat of Canadian prime ministers, serving a similar function to that of Camp David, Maryland in the U.S.

“Whenever there’s a

Republican administration in power it is more difficult for Canadian governments, [and] particularly Liberal governments which are

usually in power here, to have good relations because of the ideological divide – they’re more right-wing and we don’t tend to agree with them.”

Lawrence Martin,

The Globe and Mail

When President Nixon visited Ottawa in April 1972 he was very unpopular in Canada.

Security was so tight that Time magazine reported the U.S. Secret Service “even hosed down the mushy snowbanks near Parliament Hill to eliminate the potential threat of snowballs being hurled.”