Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John G Diefenbaker

Dean F. Oliver is the assistant director of the Centre for International
and Security Studies at York University in Toronto.

This massive volume is the most important work to date on the life and
career of John George Diefenbaker, Canada’s crustaceous and
controversial prime minister from 1957–1963. Based on both secondary
and primary sources, this reasonably balanced picture of a politician
who many claimed was not (balanced, that is) demolishes once and for all
the reliability of Diefenbaker’s own self-adulatory three-volume
memoir, One Canada. Rogue Tory is very well written in a breezy,
straightforward style that will make it accessible to both academic and
popular audiences and is as strong on Diefenbaker’s personal life and
legal practice as it is on his political career.

In other respects, however, the book is less satisfying. Smith is far
better at describing the career of his subject, for example, than he is
at explaining it. While he makes excellent use of the Diefenbaker
papers, sufficient to damn “the Chief” for all but the most ardent
Tory zealots, circumstance ought to have received as much attention as
character. Political careers, after all, are bound closely to their
social, economic, and political context. The links between Western
Canadian populism and protest movements and Diefenbaker’s political
fate, for example, are poorly explored, as are, in general, most federal
election campaigns.

Smith’s brief coverage of the crucial 1963 contest illustrates both
weaknesses. Raging against the forces of liberalism, Americanism, and
big business and deserted by many of his former colleagues, Diefenbaker
experiences what was arguably his finest hour—a gantlet from which he
emerged triumphant, even in defeat. How this dithering, discredited,
duplicitous, foaming-at-the-mouth caricature could have retained 95
seats against Lester Pearson’s 129, however, remains a mystery in
Smith’s account. Diefenbaker’s own verdict—“I went down there to
see what I could do for the common people and the big people finished
me—the most powerful interests”—is never addressed. A real
conclusion would have helped. The book ends abruptly with a chapter on
Diefenbaker’s Lincolnesque funeral, but biographies, unlike lives,
should end not in death but in a final reckoning with their subject.
Smith’s coverage of cabinet relations, the Cuban missile crisis, and
party politics all reflect the same problem.

Rogue Tory, despite these flaws, is a fine work of scholarship that
should be essential reading for anyone interested in either the period
or the man. That it says far more about the latter than the former,
however, means merely that a more complete picture of Diefenbaker’s
life and, in particular, his legend has yet to emerge.