Kanata (49 page)

Diefenbaker wondered if they would have to get a girl for Kennedy when he came to Ottawa; he had heard rumours.

There were a few inconclusive areas of agreement between the two, and after the meeting Diefenbaker simmered with squalid thoughts. Kennedy's steamrolling confidence, imperious in every gesture. “He's a pup,” Diefenbaker told his special assistant John Fisher. “He thinks he can dictate to us. He cannot.
I will not be dictated to by that man
.” Dief told Fisher to find a print of a British ship winning a naval battle during the War of 1812.

“Why?”

“I'm going to send it to Kennedy.”

“Oh, I don't think that's a good idea. What are you trying to prove?”

“We must teach him some history,” Diefenbaker said. “History must be taught.”

K
ennedy strode back to the Oval Office, hand in his suit jacket pocket. “I don't want to see that boring son of a bitch again,” he told his brother Bobby.

D
iefenbaker had the marlin mounted in preparation for Kennedy's first official visit to Canada, as well as a painting that showed the British winning a naval battle in the War of 1812. It was a brilliant day in May and tens of thousands clogged the streets of Ottawa to see JFK and Jackie. They attracted a bigger crowd than the Queen and traffic was snarled for miles. When they walked through the Parliament Buildings a phalanx of secretaries came out to watch, each of them silently dying for JFK, their angora hearts screaming. He stopped and flirted with a few who appealed, his handshake lingering, making eye contact, reflexively measuring their sexual worth.

“Where's your marlin?” Kennedy asked Diefenbaker, smiling.

Dief escorted him to his office and pointed to it triumphantly.

“That
is
big,” Kennedy said. “And you caught it.” A hint of the interrogative. He radiated privilege and success, this despite the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs only weeks ago. The American-trained Cuban exiles were defeated in a few days, a failure of both planning and nerve.

They went out and greeted the crowd. Diefenbaker stood on the podium and spoke of warm historic relations between the two countries, beginning in the French that hadn't improved in all his years in politics, the words coming out, as always, in single unrelated sounds, a stilted phonetic bleat. “I welcome you as a great American,” Diefenbaker finally said in English, to everyone's relief.

“I am somewhat encouraged to say a few words in French,” Kennedy said on taking the podium, “after having the chance to listen to the Prime Minister.” His line got a laugh. Everyone loved him. Dief was relieved
at least that Kennedy's French was little better than his own.

They shovelled some dirt at a ceremonial planting of oak trees at Government House, a symbol of the two nations' shared destiny and respective strength. Dief handed Kennedy a silver-handled shovel (how appropriate, he thought), and Kennedy stared at it, smiling. His bad back, a war injury, meant he had to be careful. He lifted four shovelfuls, pausing to look up for the cameras. On the fifth came that electric pain, a spark that jangled like a hot wire through his back. He almost screamed. It had taken two years of physiotherapy to tame his back, to get him to a point where he didn't have to take painkillers every day. And now after shovelling dirt with this doddering menace it would take two more years of cortisone and corsets and massage to deal with it again.

Diefenbaker told the press the tree planting had been exhilarating.

“If that was exhilarating,” Kennedy whispered to an aide, “I never want to get laid again.”

H
e needed his daiquiris just so. The White House had sent instructions: two parts Bacardi Silver Label rum, one part lemon, one tablespoon sugar. And they'd had the gall to request Cuban cigars. After the Bay of Pigs, no less. He had banned them in the U.S., was pushing hard for Dief to do the same, but he needed his pleasures. He was, Dief decided, a man without principles.

“We'd like Canada to help out in Latin America,” Kennedy said when they finally sat down to talk. Kennedy also wanted Canada to increase its foreign aid budget, wanted support on
Vietnam and Berlin. It wasn't that he wanted Canada to help; he
expected
the country to do as he asked. If Kennedy had his way the country would be reduced to birdwatchers, a neutralized puppet dangling between giants. The most critical issue was nuclear. Kennedy was meeting Khrushchev in Vienna next month and he wanted Canada to accept nuclear warheads on its soil. “It's really important,” he said.

“There's a lot of opposition,” Diefenbaker said. “But I'll see if I can turn public opinion around in the next few weeks. At the moment, it is a political impossibility.”

Kennedy wanted the Bomarcs to be armed with nuclear warheads, and he wanted to store nuclear weapons at U.S. air bases on Canadian soil, and to equip Canada's NATO forces with a nuclear capacity. Khrushchev only understood muscle, and Kennedy couldn't have this vast hole—a peaceful, unarmed gap between him and the Soviets—when he was staring into Khrushchev's worker soul in Vienna.

Canada was of two minds. On the one hand, what if the Russians came over the pole? That dark-minded, perverse race, swimming in vodka and history. But there was a growing camp that sought disarmament. Diefenbaker was indecisive, and this issue had no clear answer, politically or morally. Anyway, the moral high ground was long gone. Canada had been supplying uranium for the American nuclear program for over twenty years; it brought money and jobs and it happened offstage, in the north, in towns that were grateful for the work. Diefenbaker stalled on the nuclear issue, crawling around the edges, seeking something soft to cling to.

D
inner was unpleasant. Kennedy had his daiquiri and chatted with Lester B. Pearson—“Mike” Pearson—Diefenbaker's political nemesis, the Nobel Prize winner, the lisping Liberal jellyfish. Of course Kennedy would chat with Pearson. They knew the same people, played the same sports. Kennedy had glowingly reviewed Pearson's book, for God's sake.
He's trying to humiliate me
, Dief thought. It was an insult, a deliberate one.

The next morning they stared solemnly into the cameras and laid a wreath at the war memorial. Afterwards there was lunch with just JFK and Jackie, Dief and Olive.

“Your husband's quite a fisherman,” Kennedy said.

Olive smiled. Olive, the pastor's daughter who had taught high school on the prairies. Across from her that Bouvier with her squared sphinx head. At dinner the night before, Jackie had chatted with the Governor General, Georges Vanier, in her fluent French. She had gone to the Sorbonne, had come from money. Perhaps her money had the taint Joe Kennedy's had. These were careless people, Dief thought, and they had large, careless families.

Diefenbaker and his first wife, Edna, hadn't had any children, God's wish perhaps (or was it his own?). Otherwise, he had fulfilled every covenant, as his mother predicted.

“I'd like to come up here and fish,” Kennedy said.

“Yes,” Diefenbaker said. “Although it's, as you know, so much more than that, than fishing.”

“Of course,” Kennedy said. That smile again. When he smiled Jackie smiled. Sitting primly in her Oleg Cassini gown, looking at the furniture and china, judging, redecorating in her head.

Kennedy was the great hope for mankind, the dream made flesh. Diefenbaker pondered this injustice as Jackie put
her fork and knife down with finality, most of her lunch untouched, the ghost of an apologetic smile. Dief had been among the first to move to isolate South Africa, to kick them out of the Commonwealth because of apartheid, and one of the few who hadn't gone along with the internment of Japanese Canadians during the war. He had implemented the Bill of Rights and given the vote to status Indians. He had done more than Kennedy for human rights. Look at the American negro. How was it that Kennedy was seen a saviour?

Jackie was a handsome woman, glamorous without being pretty. Impressive though, but it wasn't enough for Kennedy. Whatever he had would never be enough: Kennedy was an appetite. Diefenbaker had never strayed from Olive, had only rarely strayed with her. As a child his family moved from small-town Ontario to homestead in Saskatchewan. It was 1903, he was an eight-year-old whose world was both vast (that endless horizon, that limitless sky) and constrained by the confines of the small house that smelled of kerosene and smoke and earth, dark as a closet, and in the winter swallowed by a larger darkness, a world that killed and encouraged imagination in equal measure. It was in that shrouded cell that he first imagined himself, a slayer of mythic dragons that lay hunched on the plains.

His father had failed as a homesteader, a melancholy German lost on the prairie. Diefenbaker remembered sitting in the fields with his brother, Elmer, amid stunted tufts of wheat standing erratically on the infertile ground. Each harvest a funeral. Dief enlisted in 1916—what better way to erase the German name that had been the object of childhood ridicule?—but he was discharged honourably. There was an accident with a trenching tool while training in
England. (Though of course there had been no accident, no trenching tool; his injury was an illness, psychosomatic, like a crushing weight that made it impossible to breathe. His mother had told him of the night mare, the horse that rode through the dark and invaded our dreams, pressing on our chests as we slept. It was something like this that had overtaken him in England.) Kennedy was a war hero, but perhaps his heroism was as manufactured as Dief 's discharge. Diefenbaker was the people, Kennedy what the people aspired to.

“This weather is such …” the First Lady said breathily, her hands fluttering upward. Her whispery voice seemed like an affectation.

“Yes,” Olive said. “May is a lovely month.”

“Washington can get so close.”

“The winters …” Kennedy said.

“They stimulate the blood,” Diefenbaker said.

“As long as they stimulate something,” Kennedy said. That smile.

There were polite sounds, cutlery laid carefully on china, glasses placed on the table with care, the half-sigh of a conversation unbegun.

After lunch Kennedy gave a speech in the House of Commons. He took the stage and smiled that smile that radiated health and destiny while Diefenbaker sat and pondered the alarming shift that had occurred in three years. In 1958 it was Dief who had been the face of renewal. He was the logical sum of hard work and Christian values and sacrifice, a natural culmination of historical forces. But 1961 was the beginning of something, and Diefenbaker wasn't sure what that thing was. In 1958 experience was an asset; now age was a liability. He had been born in the nineteenth
century and was, his critics pointed out, better suited to it. “Geography has made us neighbours,” Kennedy said, “history has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man cut asunder.” The House stood up as one and gave him a lasting ovation. When Diefenbaker had gone to the U.S. to speak to a group of governors on the same subject—the kinship between these two great nations—there had been only tepid applause. Politics wasn't about substance anymore. Kennedy had won the election on television; Nixon was the better man.

Diefenbaker sat amid the idiot sound of clapping and wondered if he had ever hated anyone the way he hated Kennedy.

“I
don't trust that prick,” Kennedy said to McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser. “He's going to screw us on the nuclear.” They were sitting in the Oval Office. Kennedy had a daiquiri and a cigar and his sleeves were rolled up.

“The book is he can't make up his damn mind,” said Bundy. “He's going to be a running sore. He's getting it from both sides and he doesn't know which way to jump.”

“I hope to hell Pearson wins the next election. I can deal with Mike.”

“I wouldn't bet on it. I think we're stuck with Diefenbaker. I don't know what the hell they see in that man.”

“My back is agony. That bastard handed me a shovel and told me to start digging …”

“Rusk says he's all politics. You have to give him a political path on this.”

“He's erratic, maybe unbalanced. I'm not going to have any more dealings with that son of a bitch.”

“What, I wonder, will that do for relations between the two countries?” Bundy said pleasantly, familiar with this mood.

“Improve them.”

“He's leaning both ways on the nuclear, a talent. You should call him.”

“It's a waste of time. I'll send him a letter.” Kennedy hated few people, but one of them was that cryptic fool in Ottawa.

2

N
IKITA
K
HRUSHCHEV,
V
IENNA,
1961

Khrushchev, the unlikely victor. The turnip-headed peasant, his pants too short, that endearing simpleton smile and his quick grasp of kilotons, kill zones, and half-lives. But his country couldn't feed itself. We could feed the people, Polyansky had told him, if we didn't need to feed Moscow and Leningrad. Polyansky the genius. They were selling Russian gold on the London market to buy European butter. There was a joke going around the interminable lineups, “What nationality were Adam and Eve?”