The Peacemaker

Canada's 14th Prime Minister, Lester Bowles Pearson, was never quite comfortable as a public person. The trouble was, as he once recalled, "I was never able to make a platitude sound like a pronouncement, or an indiscretion sound like a platitude." It was a forgivable flaw. But it prevented Pearson, while head of Canada's Liberal Party, from ever winning a majority in Parliament. It also helped make his term as Prime Minister (from 1963 to 1968) one of the most boisterous and fractious in Canadian history. Yet even before he died last week of cancer in Ottawa, at the age of 75, "Mike" Pearson had acquired recognition and respect as an authentic Canadian statesman.

Pearson was first known outside Canada as a diplomat, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve the 1956 Suez crisis. At home he presided over Canada's government at a time when Quebec was threatening to split the Canadian confederation --and responded with flexibility, imagination and skill. Although his government was plagued by scandal--which never touched him personally--it was also extraordinarily productive. Among other things, it produced Canada's comprehensive universal medicare program, and Canada's first national flag.

Pearson always seemed an unlikely sort of politician. He was a rumpled, bow-tied man who seemed to hate the necessities of electioneering and gave the appearance of someone who was barely muddling through. Nonetheless, he almost always got what he wanted in the end. The truth was that his amiable, unpretentious manner concealed a first-rate intellect, which was sometimes too generous in judging people but seldom wrong in discerning essential issues. Toronto-born, he served during World War I in the Royal Flying Corps, but was invalided home before he could get to France. After the war he settled as a history lecturer at the University of Toronto (where he married one of his students, Maryon, who survives him, along with two children).

Nobel Prize. Pearson's easy informality made him a highly successful ambassador to Washington in the 1940s, and an effective mediator in the founding days of the United Nations. In 1948 he helped negotiate and guide through the General Assembly the resolution establishing the state of Israel. When Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, Pearson proposed that the combatants be separated by an emergency U.N. force. He won approval for the idea from the General Assembly--and the Nobel Prize. It was the high point of his career.

The nadir came in 1958, when Pearson, newly named as leader of Canada's Liberal Party, lost an election to a Tory firebrand prairie lawyer named John Diefenbaker by the most lopsided margin in Canadian history. It was the first of four elections in a decade-long political duel between Mike and Dief. Pearson's liberals finally won more seats than Diefenbaker's conservatives in 1963, but for the next five years, Pearson's Cabinet seemed to lurch from one headline-making crisis to another. He survived each potential disaster, largely by leaving his ministers to fight their own battles; meanwhile, he presided over a raft of social legislation intended to create what he called "the Good Society." In 1968 he relinquished the reins of the government and leadership of the Liberal Party, and was succeeded by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then Justice Minister. Pearson took on one final diplomatic task: heading a World Bank Commission on International Development, which in 1969 urged that foreign aid be virtually doubled.

Pearson's most lasting accomplishment was essentially a negative one--he kept Canada from splitting apart. He awoke his own party and English-speaking Canada to the imperative need to accommodate Quebec's so-called Quiet Revolution. He also invoked a diplomat's infinite flexibility to prevent a collision between Ottawa and French Canadian nationalists. In a rare moment of immodesty, Mike Pearson precisely summed up his own achievement: "It is not nation building. It is nation saving. It is not less than that."

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