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The elder Diefenbaker tutored young John, kept him reading nightly by the light of a coal-oil lamp. According to a family legend, John looked up one night from a biography of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Liberal Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911, and announced in a firm voice: "I'm going to be Premier of Canada." His mother smiled; John's studies went ahead as though high office were indeed the aim. He never even learned to milk a cow.
When the boy was ready to enter high school, his family unhesitatingly sold the homestead and moved to Saskatoon. In school John read the speeches of British parliamentary orators, developed his own florid Victorian style by speaking from a stage while an uncle listened critically from the back of an empty auditorium. Moving on to the University of Saskatchewan, young Diefenbaker joined the ranks of the campus apprentice politicians who ran the debating society, heatedly argued national issues in a mock Parliament. He devoured political biographies (a special hero: Lincoln), won better-than-average marks and a forecast in the college magazine The Sheaf that he would some day lead the opposition in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
"It's His Birthday." In 1916 he was called to active duty, sent to France as a second lieutenant. Diefenbaker's military career was painfully anticlimactic. Soon after landing in France, he suffered a spinal injury in a back-of-the-lines accident that to this day he embarrassedly refuses to describe. He spent four months in a hospital, was sent home and discharged. Back at the University of Saskatchewan, he shot through law school in one year, and during the summer of 1919 he hung up his brand-new diploma in a 9-ft.-by-9-ft. office in a tin-fronted building in nearby Wakaw (pop. 400).
Wakaw was a town that drowsed six days a week, only to swarm on Saturdays with farmers in town to shop, socialize, swap drinks from common bottles, and sometimes blow smoldering feuds into bloody violence. Out of such a quarrel came the young lawyer's first case. The client: a farmer charged with shotgunning a neighbor to death. The trial came on John Diefenbaker's 24th birthday. The crown prosecutor made a solid case, and the judge issued a strong charge, all but directing the jury to convict. Instead, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Later, Diefenbaker met the foreman and asked how the jury reached its decision. "We talked it over," said the foreman, "and somebody said: 'After all, it's the kid's first case.' Then somebody else said: 'And it's his birthday.' That settled it. We all voted for acquittal."
But if Diefenbaker won his first case on a fluke, he quickly picked up the knack of winning others on his merits. Of 20 murder cases that he tried, only two clients went to the hangman. "He's a spellbinder before a jury," says an associate. "He would start his defense by working on one member of the jury, pitching to him exclusively. When he had him, he would start on the second and so on until he had the whole jury won." Says Diefenbaker: "I just chat with the jury."