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Standing under a banner marked CANADA: A POWER, NOT A PUPPET, a dignified rage in his deep-set blue eyes, Diefenbaker would declare: "There are interests against me, powerful interests." He had the Prairie Provinces solidly behind him, thanks to the Tories' $425.6 million wheat sales to Red China. To the farmers, the fact that the eastern financial and industrial interests, the big-city vote and all major Conservative newspapers but two were against him, made his candidacy only the more gallant.
Once again, by any innuendo he could conceive, or any indiscretion in Washington he could seize on, Diefenbaker tried to stir up anti-Americanism, a brew not so effective as it once was, but still heady. "Nobody pushes Canada around," he warned, especially not a nation that took 27 months longer than Canada to enter the Second World War. The Toronto Star accused him of talking like "some alcoholic patriot in a tavern."
Hoopla & Circus. Pearson, in the rhetoric of Kennedy (which has become the prevailing international style), promised to "get Canada moving again, moving forward economically and back into the councils of the world." Once he remarked: "It has been said that I am not able to move people to tears or excitement. Quite probably that is true." Unwilling to make hard, unqualified statements, ill at ease in the glare of klieg lights when he mounted a platform, quick and most effective in small groups, Pearson established little rapport with the voters, often projected a sense of thoughtful indecision. "The thing that terrifies me is demagoguery," he said. "The hoopla, the circus part of it, all that sort of thing still makes me blush."
A proposed TV debate between the competitors never came off. "I have no competitors," said Diefenbaker. And Pearson, in one of the best lines of the campaign, answered: "I would say to the Prime Minister, in the most kindly way possible, that he must not let failure go to his head."
Yet the issues that agitated the voters were profound—more profound than any that Kennedy and Nixon had fought over in 1960. The question of nuclear warheads, though it got most of the headline attention, was largely a sham debate. More basic was troubled Canada's need to set a new economic course, and along with this was what Pearson called "the major issue which faces all Canadians today"—the fissures that have developed between the one-third of the nation that is French, and the English majority.
In the campaign, Pearson promised to confront both issues. With his imminent accession as Canada's 14th Prime Minister, he had a chance to do so. After a lifetime in education and diplomacy, he had turned to the new trade of politics. Now he had the chance to prove that politics is the art of the possible.
Empty Bedpans. Until he entered politics, Lester Pearson had been something of a golden boy, a grinning, bow-tied diplomat liked by almost everyone who knew him, and admired for his talents for conciliation. He led the kind of life in which the breaks seemed to happen to him without vulgar effort on his part.