CANADA: Here I Am . . .

Serious state business took Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker on his 27,000-mile, 53-day world tour, but in Rome last week he was just a super-privileged tourist. He roamed among the ruins of the Colosseum and the Forum (“That’s where Cicero stood”), and wife Olive shopped for Christmas presents of handkerchiefs and Venetian glass. Then Baptist Diefenbaker called at the Vatican for an audience with Pope John XXIII, chatted for 15 minutes, emerged exclaiming at the new Pope’s “benign, amiable” personality “and his modest outlook.” He quoted the Pope as having told him (through an interpreter): “Here I am at the end of the road and at the top of the heap.”