One was a gruff populist carrying the dust of the prairie, the other a shimmery political presence marked by the stardust of celebrity. One was a 105th Saskatoon Fusiliers veteran of World War I, the other a PT-109 veteran of World War II. One was Northwest Territories rural, the other Boston urbane. One was Canadian Baptist, the other Roman Catholic. One began his career in a tiny crossroads in Saskatchewan (population 400), the other in the U.S. House of Representatives (population 435).
John G. Diefenbaker and John F. Kennedy were separated by more than simply the 49th parallel.
The Canadian prime minister and American president clashed almost nonstop in the early 1960s, until Diefenbaker's ouster from power 50 years ago, on April 22, 1963. Since then, American leaders and their Canadian counterparts have certainly had moments of friction— Lyndon Johnson once physically manhandled Lester B. Pearson, and Richard M. Nixon described Pierre Elliott Trudeau as a "pompous egghead." But little compares with the deep enmity that Kennedy felt toward Diefenbaker and the raw resentment Diefenbaker returned to Kennedy.
Diefenbaker, who three times led the Tories to election victories, had enjoyed a congenial relationship with Dwight Eisenhower. Perhaps this was because Eisenhower had great respect for the courage of Canadian troops on D-Day, and because he was involved in two signal achievements involving both countries—the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the establishment of the Distant Early Warning line to signal both countries of a Soviet aerial attack.
Diefenbaker's relationship with Kennedy was another thing entirely. No one knows exactly why the two felt such enmity, but a picture emerges from contemporary accounts and later memoirs, including Diefenbaker's.
This much is known: The leaders met in Washington a month after Kennedy's inauguration in January 1961. Diefenbaker, no patsy when it came to relations with his southern neighbor, paused before an Oval Office display of War of 1812 battles and noted to Kennedy that the Americans hadn't won all the confrontations at sea in that war. This may have been the only occasion in the past 200 years that the 1813 encounter between the American warship Chesapeake and the British frigate Shannon has been a point of contention in the White House.
When Kennedy visited Ottawa in May 1961, the visit did not go well. The president came armed with a memo setting forth "What We Want From Ottawa Trip.'' One of the now largely forgotten five demands was "more aid to India." When Diefenbaker, who once said he wasn't anti-American but pro-Canadian, was handed the list of what the president wanted, the prime minister affixed a bold "no" with a gold pencil to each entry.
That afternoon Kennedy spoke before the Canadian Parliament and issued perhaps the most soaring celebration of the Canadian-American relationship ever, words that are quoted in ceremonial events on both sides of the border: "Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends."
But friendships sometimes are perilous, and the president's "What We Want From Ottawa" memo was somehow left in Ottawa. "The president apparently dropped it into my wastepaper basket at the end of the meeting,'' Diefenbaker says in his memoirs. In the memo's margin, members of the prime minister's staff thought they could make out, in Kennedy's handwriting, "S.O.B," meant as a description of his Canadian counterpart. But in his 1984 memoir, "Conversations With Kennedy," former Washington Post executive editor and Kennedy confidante Ben Bradlee writes plainly: "The president told me he did not write 'S.O.B.' on the . . . document."
In his reminiscence of the Kennedy years, speechwriter Theodore C. Sorensen speculated that the letters might really have been O.A.S., referring to the Organization of American States, perhaps the most innocuous international organization in history. In any case, what might have been just as incendiary was language on the document saying the Kennedy visit was designed to "push" the Canadians into agreement. "I could not understand the president of the United States coming to Ottawa 'to push' us into anything,'' the prime minister said in his memoirs.
Nor could Diefenbaker countenance Kennedy's invitation to Lester B. Pearson, his Liberal Party rival and eventually his successor, to a White House reception for 1961 Nobel Prize winners. The president's motivation in provoking Diefenbaker? No mystery there. As Mr. Bradlee said over the phone recently, "Jack didn't think much of him."
That's why, when Kennedy denied that he had written the "S.O.B." note about the prime minister, he explained that he hadn't realized quite that early that Diefenbaker was one.
Mr. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Press.