Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1946-1962

164 Pages·2001·0.8 MB·English

by  Charles Ritchie

ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE
An Appetite for Life
The Siren Years
Storm Signals
My Grandfather’s House

Copyright © 1981 Charles Ritchie
Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1981 McClelland & Stewart trade
paperback edition published 2001 by arrangement with The Estate of Charles Ritchie
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a
retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an
infringement of the copyright law.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Ritchie, Charles, 1906–1995
Diplomatic passport : more undiplomatic diaries, 1946–1962
eISBN: 978-1-55199679-0
1. Ritchie, Charles, 1906-1995 – Diaries. 2. Diplomats – Canada – Diaries. I. Title.
FC616.R58A3 2001 327.71′0092 C2001-930636-9
F1034.3.R56A37 2001
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support
of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
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v3.1
To
my friends in the Department of External Affairs,
past and present
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PREFACE
1945–1947
Paris, 1947–1949
Ottawa, 1950–1954
Bonn, 1954–1958
New York, 1958–1962
PREFACE
These journals, covering the years 1946 to 1962, take up where my
wartime diaries, published as The Siren Years, ended. I ask myself the
question, What is the compulsion that makes one put down on paper day
after day such a personal record as this? Is it simply an exercise in
egotism, or a confessional? Perhaps a little of both, but it may also be an
obsession with the passing of time, a sense that life is slipping like sand
through one’s fingers and that before it vanishes completely one must
shore up these remains.
It is said that every fat man has a thin man inside him, struggling to
get out. Has every diarist a novelist inside him, struggling to get out? If
so, the struggle is likely to be unavailing. The diarist, with his passion
for the record – historical, social, or political – too often lacks the power
of construction and the storyteller’s skill. On the other hand, many
writers are marvellous diarists but they tend to regard their diaries as
the waste product of their art, material which is not yet fused by the
imagination into finished work. Some diaries are written with an eye to
publication as a conscious contribution to history. My own were of the
private kind. It is true that in my old age I went public, or partly public,
but when I wrote them they were for my eyes only. Nor are they at all
like the informative memoirs of many of my contemporaries in
diplomacy. Yet forty years in a career are bound to be conditioning,
perhaps more than one realizes oneself, especially in a career spent for
the most part away from one’s own country, living the rootless existence
of those to whom a place is not a home but a posting, shifting from one
foreign capital to another. In this career the representational role tends
to take over. The man sometimes merges into the ambassador. The result
is not so much pomposity as a smoothness from which all angles and
irregularities of temperament and opinion have been ironed out. From
this fate diary-writing may have been an escape hatch for me. Diplomacy
is a profession in which protracted patience, discretion, and a glaze of
agreeability prevail, and it was a relief to break out, if only on paper.
This is the record of years spent in the foreign service of Canada, yet
no official business was included in it. Here are to be found no breaches
of the sacrosanct Official Secrets Act. From the Department of External
Affairs in which I served I took no papers on departure. Buried in their
archives is the evidence of my working life. This deliberate omission
conveys a curiously lopsided picture, as though the writer, instead of
being an industrious and reasonably competent official, had been a
detached observer drifting idly about the world. An observer, yes – but
what did he observe? Changing scenes and people, politicians, fellow
diplomats and journalists, people of fashion or who sought to be so,
authors and would-be authors, old aunts and young beauties, people
labelled “interesting,” and, often more interesting, those without a label.
As to the scenes, they shift from Ottawa to Paris, from Delhi to Bonn,
from London to New York, and always back to his native Nova Scotia.
Thus the journal is an odd mixture of anecdote, reflection, politics, and
personalities. It may be thought that this record is too personal for
publication during my lifetime. The alternative of posthumous
publication seemed to me a bleak prospect, so I let the record stand,
with a word of advice to any fellow diplomatic diarist – keep diplomatic
discretion out of your diaries and keep the diarist’s indiscretion out of
your diplomacy. A double life is doubly enjoyable.
1945–1947
In the years 1945 to 1947 the war was just over and the Cold War was
just beginning. This was a time marked by one international conference
and confrontation after another, at which East–West conflicts were
accentuated towards the dreaded danger point of a third world war.
Canada was represented at most of these gatherings, either as a
participant or as an observer. While based in Ottawa I served as adviser
to a series of Canadian delegations to such conferences, so that I was as
much abroad as I was at home.
Despite the cloud of gloomy foreboding hanging over the future, these
were, for a Canadian foreign service officer, exhilarating years. There
was change in the air. Although the Prime Minister, Mackenzie King,
was still governed by a caution verging on isolationism, another mood
was beginning to prevail in the country. Our pre-war policy of no prior
commitments had not saved us involvement in the struggle, and it was
increasingly obvious that it was in our interest as Canadians to play our
full part in the attempt to build a more sane and stable international
order. I do not think that we in the Department of External Affairs
approached the task with dewy-eyed illusions, but with a realization that
whatever the frustrations, it had to be attempted. A further spur to a
positive Canadian foreign policy was provided by the new pride and
confidence in our nationhood, born of our achievements in the war and
Canada’s growing wealth and importance. No doubt, too, the temporary
eclipse of so many great nations in Europe and Asia, laid low by the war,
thrust Canada closer to a front seat in the world community. These
challenges and opportunities met with a ready and eager response in the
Department of External Affairs, which was expanding in size and
influence under the leadership of a gifted band of officials including
Norman Robertson, Hume Wrong, and Mike Pearson. With the departure
in 1948 of Mackenzie King from power, with Pearson as Foreign Minister
and Louis St. Laurent as Prime Minister, both convinced
internationalists, the political leadership came into being which could