Kanata (51 page)

At the end of the speech, his own party was divided as to whether he had come out in favour of nuclear weapons or against them. The press was equally unsure and printed both
versions, pro and con. But the U.S. State Department was furious; they issued an official press release accusing Diefenbaker of being a liar.

When Dief read the press release, he frothed, spit forming on his lips, aerated by his curses and flying in small flecks onto the leather-topped desk. A goddamned liar! It was an outrage. The government of one country officially and publicly declaring an allied leader to be a liar. This was Kennedy's work, that boastful son of a bitch. There was a federal election coming and Kennedy wanted Pearson to win and he was going to use his money and influence to get his man in office. He would treat Canada the way the U.S. treated the Congo or Iran or any banana republic and simply install someone they could do business with. He had heard that Joe Kennedy had bought the election for his son—118,000 votes, easily affordable—and now the son was trying to do the same here. When Diefenbaker's bile subsided, he realized he could use this. Here was clear evidence of American interference.

But his own party was leaving him. Diefenbaker was increasingly incoherent and isolated, consumed by the paranoia that nurtured him.

“Everyone's against me except the people,” he told Olive.

“They're what's important.”

“The country has no idea what is at stake here, Olive. The very borders are being redrawn.” A border wasn't a wall, he thought, it was an imaginary line. You didn't need to send an army over it now, you could send radio and television signals and movies and money. Kennedy was a handsome salesman selling a bill of goods.

“You'll tell them, John. It's what you're best at. They'll listen.”

H
e campaigned on his strengths. He wasn't a policy maker, he was a populist. And like many fine populists, he had a talent for hatred. He was a brilliant hater; he could develop and nurture hate and keep it at a high pitch. He could celebrate it and knead it into something ennobling, something that felt like love. Everyone was his enemy: Kennedy, America, the elite, the corporations, the Liberals, the press.
Newsweek
(whose Washington editor was Kennedy's friend Ben Bradlee) ran an issue with an unflattering photograph of Diefenbaker on the cover. (Macdonald had said
he
was the ugliest man in politics but he would surely have to take second place now.) Dief looked, as one pundit reported, like a cross between Queen Victoria on her death bed and a rabid owl. The caption read “Canada's Diefenbaker, Decline and Fall,” and the article described him as a vacillating rube. “Britain's Prime Minister Harold Macmillan can hardly bear the sight of him and President Kennedy dislikes him cordially.” They said he ran the country like a tantrum-prone country judge.

Diefenbaker had the magazine sent out to all his supporters as a rallying cry, evidence that the Americans were trying to unseat him, and by extension, trying to unseat Canadian democracy. He received a letter of sympathy from Richard Nixon, a Quaker with a gift for vendetta that rivalled Dief 's own.

What Diefenbaker needed was the country to hate along with him. After Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defence secretary, said the Bomarc bases in Canada would be targets for Russian warheads that would otherwise be headed for American cities, Diefenbaker toured small towns and villages armed with McNamara's words, crying, “Decoys, decoys,
decoys!
A decoy duck in a nuclear war! That's what
the Americans would reduce us to. Are we to be a burnt sacrifice?”

The cities had little time for him, but the rural people, the small towns and hamlets, still loved him. He took a train across the country and stopped everywhere and rejoiced in this rural reflection of his government, a reflection of himself. It was a government made not of policy or legislation but of the divine plebeian will of its leader. Diefenbaker understood the little man, and in his own night fears, staring bug-eyed as dawn spread dully in his room, he worried that he was the little man.

The papers had turned on him, the cartoons increasingly cruel, but Dief gathered strength from the attacks, and he was invigorated by the campaign. They had attacked Macdonald like this, he thought. After a few weeks, he could feel a change in mood; the country moving back to him, even if the party wasn't. He had remade the Conservative Party into an image of himself: against big business and corporate interests, anti-urban, a populist party that celebrated Diefenbaker himself. Pearson had started the campaign with a striking lead, but it was diminishing with each day. Pearson hated campaigning. He was an uninspired speaker whose natural private charm turned to something else on the podium, a stiffness, an off-putting principal chastising a child. Diefenbaker loved to campaign, and as the election neared, he saw a moment when the country was magically returning to what it had been in 1958, when the honest aspirations of its millions were parsed into clear and comforting lines.

But Pearson won, the lisping Nobel bow-tie nancy.

“Kennedy spent one million dollars and used four hundred
operators to defeat me,” Diefenbaker told his wife. “This was not an election, it was a coup d'état.”

O
n November 22, Diefenbaker was in the parliamentary cafeteria eating with five friends—telling them how Kennedy had phoned, and mimicking Kennedy's Boston accent (“When I tell Canader to do something I expect Canader to do it!”), how he had told Kennedy where to get off—when his secretary, Bunny Pound, came running up with the news. “Kennedy's been shot,” she said. “He's dead.”

“Ohhh,” Diefenbaker said, slumping. “That could have been me.” It wasn't clear if this was a private fear or a public boast.

Diefenbaker excused himself, and went and found his speechwriter and told him to put together a eulogy. He delivered it in the House hours later. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood as the embodiment of freedom not only in his own country but throughout the world,” Diefenbaker said, with that preacher's delivery. “Canadians, yes, free men everywhere will bow their heads in sorrow. Free men everywhere mourn. Mankind can ill afford to lose this man at this hour.”

An arrogant man, an imperious leader who won the Canadian election for the Liberals, the martyr that America craved, and history would hoist him to its golden heights and he would be forever Jesus. Their feud had lasted 823 days—his own tally—and Diefenbaker wouldn't betray his hatred just because the man was dead. He had a gift.

1967

The first maps were to dispel fear. We claim those spaces, piss on the trees to mark our territory. It's partly a bluff, of course; really, we're just hoping for the best. Each new map is eventually made a lie. Towns wither and die and that small dot lingers, inert, for years until Rand McNally finally erases it. Cities grow, empires die, continents shift, people change. Is the mapmaker reflecting the world's existence or his own?

I am a living map, Thompson's blood. I sought him out, I wanted that link. My father was never really there. Stanford was my guide, but he was gone so soon, and my mother retreated into the past, comforted by ghosts. We need to attach to something. In the end I looked to Thompson; I explored.

All history is suspect, including this one. What we include, what we suppress, what we remember, what we think we remember. How reliable are witnesses? The suspect was tall/short/medium build, and he was wearing a suit/jeans and drove away in a red Chevy/blue Ford. Not everyone sees the country the same way. But
the centennial brought it into focus for a brief moment—that moment when people pose for a photograph: a beaming schoolchild, face washed, hair slicked, full of hope. Our national agonies—French, English, native—suddenly shone. The centennial is waning now, the country poised at the brink of something profound it can't quite define.

Billy Whitecloud's expression seemed altered slightly. Could he be experiencing some life inside his head? A flicker of joy? A memory?

My brother, Stanford, was about your age when he went to France. After he left I thought of him every day. I thought that was how I could keep him alive. As long as he lived in my head, he was safe from harm. I imagined his life over there as something noble and heroic. It's an easy fiction to maintain. That's the version that comes to us in paintings and books and movies (and sometimes history). It was different after I got there, of course. But even after the war, some small part of me wanted to believe Stanford was alive. He was out there; in Paris or Egypt or Brazil, somewhere.

Michael took the piece of paper out of his wallet, a compact square that he unfolded. This letter arrived a month ago. It was addressed to The Mountain Horse Family of Cochrane, Alberta.

Michael read: