To his villa in suburban Cairo one night last week went Canadian Ambassador Herbert Norman. 47, just back from seeing the Japanese movie, Mask of Destiny, with an Egyptian friend. Alone in the villa's great, silent library after midnight, Norman poured himself some straight shots of whisky while his wife slept in her bedroom. Next morning, weary from months of overwork, heavy-eyed from an almost sleepless night, Norman left home without waking his wife, walked slowly to the eight-story Nile View apartment building near by. Moments after he entered the building, he appeared on the roof—a tall, handsome man with greying hair. While passers-by stopped to watch in horror and some screamed. "Beware, khawaga [foreigner]," Norman removed his watch and sunglasses, laid them on the parapet. Turning his back to the street, he moved three steps backward, dropped to instant death on the pavement.
Herbert Norman's suicide would have attracted relatively little attention had it not been for the fact that the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by Mississippi Democrat James Eastland, last month revived a charge that Norman had been a Communist at Columbia University 19 years ago. Because of the charge, his death caused worldwide headlines and recriminations.
Scholar & Diplomat. Born in Japan of Canadian missionary parents, Norman studied at universities in Canada, the U.S. and Britain, and became in his early 30s one of the world's ranking scholars on Japanese history and culture. He joined the Department of External Affairs in 1939, and the following year was assigned to the Canadian legation in Tokyo. The Japanese interned him at the time of Pearl Harbor, repatriated him the following year; he spent the rest of the war years at an Ottawa desk.
By 1951 Norman had risen to the top rank of Canada's professional diplomatic corps. He was serving as acting permanent delegate to the United Nations in New York when his name cropped up in a hearing before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, then headed by Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran. Testifying on Communist infiltration in the U.S., German-born Karl Wittfogel, onetime professor of Chinese history at Columbia University and a professed ex-Communist, said that in 1938 he and Norman, then a student in the Japanese department at Columbia, had attended a Communist study group on Cape Cod. Wittfogel. now a contributor to the New Leader, testified that he had known Norman as a Communist.
Canada's Department of External Affairs took pains to say that Norman had never visited Cape Cod. External Affairs Chief Lester Pearson told a press conference that he had sent a message to Washington, expressing "regret and annoyance" that Norman had been named "on the basis of an unimpressive and unsubstantiated allegation by a former Communist." The charges against Norman, Pearson said, had been investigated in two Canadian security checks, "as a result of which Mr. Norman was given a clean bill of health, and he therefore remains a trusted and valuable official of the department." At the same time Pearson pointedly named Norman to a new and responsible job: chief adviser to the Canadian delegation negotiating the Japanese Peace Treaty. Evidence and testimony in the Canadian security check have never been revealed.