Of all my experiences as a political journalist, the 1965 election that followed publication of Renegade in Power is the one forever etched in my mind as a pivotal event. I may well be the last journalist still writing who witnessed that mystical campaign riding the back of a train. I watched it develop from its baleful start in Halifax to its climax in the howling halls of the Great Plains. That western part of Canada was never an offspring of what Donald Creighton called “the Empire of the St. Lawrence,” but a proud land on its own. Its people, who swarmed the platforms to welcome the Diefenbaker train, wanted one thing understood, plain and simple: they were nobody’s country cousins, now or ever.
I soaked up the atmosphere of those rural way stations and grabbed the chance to immerse myself in Canada’s political heartland. In 1965, Canadians were beginning to lose their link with the land. The country’s accelerating urbanization had mostly destroyed the connection between identity and landscape. Instead of being the defining element of our lives, our sense of place had been reduced to a mere backdrop to events. But not aboard the Diefenbaker train. We were the event. In many instances we were the last passenger train, all four cars, ever to snake through the sparsely settled terrain, stopping at settlements that would never again play a part in national elections.
When I decided to include this chapter in my memoirs I deliberately adapted my original dispatches from that epic journey. They alone caught the immediacy of those never-to-berepeated, heart-tugging moments. At Yarbo, Raymore, Watrous, Biggar, Wadena, Mortlach, Morse, Maple Creek, Taber, Fort Macleod, Claresholm, Nanton, Vulcan, Barons, Three Hills, Findlater, Aylesbury, Lumsden, and Gull Lake— these, not in that order, were some of the main way stations.
The election itself was less a campaign than a guerrilla war, fought with unreliable troops and eccentric lieutenants. The Canadian Prairies became a land for Diefenbaker to flee across, every whistle stop a destination, a momentary reprieve from the partisan fury that had erupted among urban voters who no longer responded to his call. At some point early in the campaign, Dief transformed himself into a figment of his own imagination. He ignored his dismal prospects and baptized himself the personification of the national will.
While his political rivals were comfortably lodged in jet planes, issuing press releases as they flew from one airport to the next, “the Man from Prince Albert” was jolting into small towns at twenty-minute intervals aboard his chartered train, pushing its punishing way across the country. His advisers had warned him that such a campaign would prove disastrous, because in the age of the airplane and automobile, railway stations no longer figured in most Canadians’ lives. But Diefenbaker wanted to see his people one last time. To him, the tracks were not rusting ribbons of steel but umbilical cords to his past. If the train stations were there mainly for their symbolic value, well, so was he. The hoot of the locomotive in the night had been the classic summons to adventure in the days when he was young, and he was bound to relive that time of his life and the lives of his followers.
I had known Diefenbaker as a politician like no other— I had, in fact, written the book— but this would be the first land-bound passage I would take with him of such extended duration and poignancy. It was his fifth national campaign, and my disenchantment with Diefenbaker was by then complete, but I felt only admiration for his odyssey from these steppes to the nation’s highest office. Each day, I rose at dawn to a pewter sky, which soon turned to a crisp autumnal light.
Even by the standards of the mid1960s, it was an incredibly primitive operation. The brakeman riding the rear caboose could communicate with the conductor or locomotive engineer only through hand or lantern signals. The only way the press could stay in touch with their home office was to send telegrams along the way; these were plucked from the moving train with pincer-like gizmos held out by local telegraph operators.
Everyone sensed that a clear Liberal sweep was in the offing, so the press car was filled with second-tier reporters. Diefenbaker had been reduced to a curiosity. The press car resounded to the Chief’s high oratory as the radio correspondents played and edited their tapes. “What was that?” some print reporter would shout. “Play that again.” The news reporters on a daily cycle were neither required nor allowed to stray far beyond a faithful reporting of Dief’s speeches; by the end of the campaign, many could lip-synch his oratory word for word.
In his private car, Diefenbaker dictated and signed three hundred letters a day to well-wishers along his route. Between whistle stops, particularly late in the day, fatigue would dissolve his face into deep creases and lines. The greatest campaigner Canada had ever known was showing his age. One night, I was in his carriage to clarify something or other, and he appeared in his bathrobe. He spoke to me while shuffling around with hunched shoulders, dodging and ducking like a prizefighter preparing for the ring.
The campaign had started in Halifax, where the omens had not been good. Our motorcade from the train station to his first speech at the Queen Elizabeth High School auditorium was escorted by a lone motorcycle cop, and a fat one at that. Always anxious to identify with his locale, Diefenbaker must have felt particularly desperate. “Had it not been for the trade winds between here and Newfoundland,” he declared with a straight face, “my great-greatgrandmother would have been born in Halifax.” The geographic nonsense did not matter, as those who came to see him were by then such die-hard Diefenbakerists that he could have said his ancestors arrived on favourable intergalactic winds from the star Betelgeuse and nobody would have noticed. A grizzled veteran with a handlebar moustache drooping at one end, waving a Union Jack, told me his name was George Fader, that he was eighty-four years old and had come all the way from Truro to glimpse Diefenbaker. Was that a hardship? “Praise God, no,” he replied. “I’ve lived to see him.” It dawned on me that recording the story of this campaign would be less about the politician than about his people.
Dief had to make a token appearance in Quebec, the province he never understood and which now treated him as an alien from another planet. He gamely tried a few words of French in Matapedia, where five offduty trainmen and three stray dogs turned out to meet him. At Rimouski, seven lonely Tories were waiting on the platform. Diefenbaker didn’t recognize the local candidate, though it turned out to be one of his former MPs, Gerard Ouellet. At Amqui, I happened to be standing beside Dief when he was introduced to a M. Legris, who in turn presented his son, standing beside him. “C’est mon fils,” he said, proudly.
Diefenbaker smiled and extended his hand. “Bonjour, Mon-sewer Monfeece,” he said.
It wasn’t until the Diefenbaker train hit the Prairies that the campaign really started. At each waypoint, the station platform was filled with a (genuine) crowd bearing placards aloft, carrying their handwritten campaign slogan: “He cared enough to come.” Nothing else mattered. Diefenbaker cared and he had come. Pearson, who was firing salvos of canned Liberal propaganda from his chartered jet, hadn’t come and, by implication, didn’t care. What’s more, if he did come he wouldn’t understand. It was a political gimmick, but to those of us who were there, it rang true.
The Chief moved like a legend over the land. Everywhere his train stopped, clusters of people would seek the sight of him under the slanting autumn sun. Men with fingers hooked into their broad belts gazed at the former prime minister, their wind-creased faces showing a warm glow of recognition. The wind fluttered the hair of the women as they shyly shook his hand to extend a mute blessing, occasionally performing a rusty curtsy. I walked through them and looked back at Dief, framed by the impatient train and a crowd that wanted him to stay at least another hour, and realized I was witnessing a unique tableau of gratitude and anger. The locals who turned out at these soon-to-be-abandoned waypoints had shown up because Diefenbaker reminded them of the time when they had been at the forefront of Canadian civilization. For that they were grateful, but there was anger as well. Theirs was the politics of resentment. For a while the Chief had offered hope— a hope, his people now realized, that would vanish with him.
Their fathers had turned the virgin sod and planted wheat fields, fed the eastern multitudes, and fought the good fight in two European wars. In return they had been pushed aside by a world they never made and seldom visited; they had seen their influence and legacy lost to the moneyed, urban East. They retreated into the hard nut of patient optimism that made their humour drier than the soil after a season’s drought and their spirits more resilient than stinkweed. They had survived blizzard, locust, hail, and freight rates, but they knew they could not survive Dief’s departure— there were no other Chiefs in line.
Diefenbaker’s rapport with his people was not built solely on remembering their names, shaking their hands, or reciting comforting homilies. It was mystical and it was palpable when he stood silently on the station platforms, looking into men’s eyes and women’s feelings, seeming to share their worries and fear of the future. He could do little now to improve their lot, but it was the contact— the sight of him— they wanted, and that was enough.
He was comfortable among them, at his playful best as he called out to some old-timers in Melville, Saskatchewan: “When did you get here?”
The oldest among them proudly replied that he had arrived in 1903.
“When in ’03?” Diefenbaker retorted.
“September, I recall . . .”
A gleeful Diefenbaker shot back: “We came in August!”
At Morse, local musicians serenaded him with an unsteady version of “The Thunderer.” I couldn’t file my copy because the telegrapher was playing drums in the civic band; all I could do was hang around the caboose, watching. As the train pulled out, the band struck up “God Be with You (Until We Meet Again.”) I hopped on board the departing train and saw, for the only time in my life, John Diefenbaker in tears.
Later in Swift Current, Saskatchewan (known to residents as “Speedy Creek”), two dozen bluegowned ladies from some church choir swayed in time to the music from the back of a flatbed truck. When they broke into an emotional rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory,” Diefenbaker’s sound baritone voice joined the chorus. It was my turn for tears.
At Duck Lake, he told a cluster of adoring supporters: “They say I’ve made mistakes. But they were mistakes of the heart.” Somewhere along the route, an old man sat by the tracks in the fading light, holding up a crudely lettered sign as the train rolled past: “John, you’ll never die.”
He spoke mostly from the back of the train over a great megaphone, his beloved wife, Olive, beside him, and never said anything much except that he was sure glad to be there. It was a communion that no other politician could comprehend, much less replicate. In such company, with my background and high profile, I stood out like an evil creature from Hades. It was important for me to bird-dog Diefenbaker as closely as possible to pick up the small details so essential to my style of writing, and we had more than a few “elevator moments” where he either looked right through me, shot me a look with the venom of a snake’s tongue, or just gazed at me while cursing under his breath. But he never upbraided me publicly and he allowed me to stay on the train. What I wrote was no longer important to him; he had come to be with his folk, and nothing else mattered.
In Taber, we enjoyed a boil-up of the sweetest fall corn in Christendom. The Chief told a hush of schoolchildren: “I only wish that I could come back when you’re my age to see the kind of Canada that you’ll see. So dream your dreams; keep them and pursue them.”
In support of my nascent theory that kookiness increases in direct relation to the proximity of the Pacific Ocean, it was in the foothills town of Fort Macleod, Alberta, that I heard a pensioner whisper in the Chief’s ear: “That Pearson is a devil! He wants to give away the Crowsnest Mountain to Quebec!” That terse prediction sent me out to walk the land and relax a bit. It was a wet day, and I remembered classical composer Igor Stravinsky’s comment that “the smell of Russian earth is different.” The smell of damp Prairie soil at harvest time is different too, I thought. Stravinsky also said that “such things are impossible to forget,” and I have never lost the nurturing scent of that good black loam. The story of a country emerges slowly from its landscape, through dinosaur bones, arrowheads, and the memories of what once moved. Dief, I knew, would not be forgotten in his own land. We moved north then, across the Alberta badlands.
At Stettler, two raggedy kids were proudly waving a huge, hand-lettered cardboard sign: “Dief For Dheif.”
By the time we hit Calgary and Edmonton, his campaign was on fire. We were being escorted in style, with three sleek outriders on each side of the Chief’s car and saluting police officers waving us through intersections.
What endowed the whistle-stop tour with its thin ration of substance was Diefenbaker’s nightly oratory at high schools, Legion halls, and community centres. His speeches were reminiscent of old-time tent revival meetings, where the language of exhortation took the place of logical discourse. As Diefenbaker rose each night, his manner was at first halting, his voice muted, as though gathering strength, unwilling to expend his remaining energy. The crowd would hush to catch his words. Once his listeners had committed their attention, his voice would take on an infectious rhythm, clipped consonants alternating with long open vowels, the Biblical cadence of a fired-up evangelist, harvesting souls for the Lord. The left hand would hold back his ever-present imaginary lawyer’s robes, while his right hand swooped down in accusatory chops. The whole man swayed to the melody of his words, giving physical expression to his outrage. After attending dozens of these rural pageants, I realized they were not political events at all, but a shared celebration of faith. Diefenbaker reminded his listeners of a simpler time when people lived in one house all their lives, with one woman, one God, and one hairstyle. He invoked a time when people did a little business so they could socialize, instead of the other way around; when they still entertained themselves with games of cribbage and “500,” and the wives cooked hot cross buns on Sundays.
He would take on a highly formal and tragic tone while reciting the woes of the Liberal government, like some gruff ship’s captain performing a burial at sea. The next instant, with the energy born of gloating, he would call down hellfire on the wicked Grits. When the moment demanded, he would invent words (“Those crimesters who support the Liberal Party”), mangle his metaphors (“I never look a gift horse in the eye!”), and clang together head-shaking non sequiturs: (“I owe you all so much! Why do I continue in public life?”).
When we reached Diefenbaker’s home riding of Prince Albert two days before polling day, a foot or two of snow lay on the ground. It was not the same country where the election had started, in either mood or weather. We were moved into the Marlboro Hotel while the official party remained aboard CNR Car 97 at the railway station.
That Sunday evening before the vote, I went for a walk through Prince Albert. The town was deserted, lines of street lights setting off the evergreens that marched in dark and serried stillness toward the northern horizon. I must have come too close to one of the “home-occupied houses” because a dog barked, setting off a chain reaction of yelping pups up the street. I walked by the old Lincoln Hotel and went across Central Avenue, past the twostorey Toronto-Dominion Bank building, prominently proclaiming: “Diefenbaker, Cuelenaere & Hall, Law Offices.” The town had been an important fur trade depot, and the Hudson’s Bay Company sheds were still there.
The election results poured in the next day. Considering the circumstances, the vote was a triumph for the Old Chief. He held the Liberals to a minority government. Outside Quebec, he won fourteen more seats than the Liberals. All of his western whistle stops had gone solidly Tory, but only one Conservative (Lincoln Alexander) survived in the fifty constituencies of Canada’s largest cities. It was clear that Dief was Yesterday’s Man and would have to go, whether he wanted to or not.
Diefenbaker died fourteen years after his last national campaign. On August 22, 1979, he was laid to rest by the side of his second wife, Olive, on a grassy knoll overlooking the South Saskatchewan River at the University of Saskatchewan campus in Saskatoon. His papers and archives are stored at the nearby Diefenbaker Centre and a human rights institution that operates in his name. He was an inveterate pack rat: his archive comprises three million documents. A bronze plaque at the graveside marks his resting place with a brief tribute. It is a peaceful spot, with the lazy river making its stately progress north and the prairie winds rustling softly through the willows. John Diefenbaker and I were opponents, certainly, but respectful ones. His casual anti-Semitism and petty-minded streaks could be pardoned; his failure to translate his vision into reality once in office could not. I owed him, not only for inspiring in me the confidence to believe I could go anywhere and do anything despite my ethnic background. He also gave my pen the raw materials it needed for getting me there. He was a shooting star that flashed across the sky, then fell back to earth in the silent heart of the country, whence he came.
Excerpted from Here Be Dragons: The Memoirs of a Passionate Outsider, from McClelland & Stewart, the Canadian Publishers, 2004. By permission of the author and publisher.
